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America's Army 3 Has Rough Launch, Development Team Canned
incognito84 writes "The development team responsible for the creation of the freeware game America's Army 3 has been canned, days after the launch of the highly flawed game, which was distributed mostly via Steam. 'The anonymous America's Army 3 developers in touch with Kotaku unsurprisingly didn't sound too pleased with the current situation, venting that "a lot of good people [worked] insanely long hours on this game that was butchered by outside sources.' The game's launch was plagued by massive server authentication issues which inhibited most players from playing it even two days afterward. One of the developers made a post on the official forums saying they were 'effectively stabbed in the back,' and that much of the funding was filtered to the bureaucracy. A patch has been released to address some of the game's issues."
"...much of the funding was filtered to the bureaucracy."
I've noticed a pattern in a lot of talent-based industries. On a small scale, or with an upstart CEO you can have talent-driven companies. But, as soon as they hit a critical mass, the bureaucracy becomes the dominate force and turns the talent into powerless labor. Every company I ever interacted with in the corporate world was like this. And, once you've got suits in charge, they make sure that they're well compensated.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
Doesn't help that the game is basically plagued by its "Honor" system which rewards just about everything bad and wrong a player can do. I don't expect the new version to be much better.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
A couple of ways to deal with their firings a)Take their skills and go elsewhere. If they're actually any decent, they can make an impressive game to knock the socks off AA3 b)Complain.. c)(and only if it's true ) realize they suck at programming and find a new career. I make no defense of the Army, I'm sure it's a bunch of bureaucratic bullshit, even more then normal(yay for government!), but c'mon. Basic things like not being able to handle auth servers? Something that is at the VERY CORE of the game, that without *the best* you can do is a plain m16 is crap. There was a pretty massive user base for AA2.x and they did a fair amount of hyping for it(hell, I heard about it and I don't even check gaming news websites.) That's one of the more *important* things to handle. Now, if it was crappy funding issues(god knows I don't know what happened), that's another story. If it was programming/design related....that's something *important* to get working right. Who knows? Maybe they are staying truth to the authenticate Army lifestyle, bullshit and all?
'Number-memorizing Chinese people.'-Anon
And that sounds much like parts of corporate America and the "rank" system, where those best able to manipulate their managers and stab their co-workers in the back successfully are best enabled for advancement, leading to pure sociopaths at the top tier. Corporations like Microsoft in particular use the rank system...
"Obama would never offend his oil-buddies from the House of Sa'ud."
Considering the criticism other games with similar premises get. I find it quite reasonable that this project would be in need of, at the very least an overhaul.
Other things wrong with it include the idea that a government would provide free games to further recruitment or it's agenda.
I think if Obama has anything to do with the end of the game as it is, it would be over the social implications of the game rather than angry Saudi Arabians.
Sounds more like Slashdot's mod system, where Linux Zealots can pat themselves on the back with +5 Insightful "Linux is awesome" posts, thereby gaining the power to squash anyone who might be "Pro-Microsoft".
As a member of the beta team , I can tell you everyone was pretty damn concerned about the state of the game so close to its release.
It was obvious SOMETHING was wrong given the alpha state of the builds they were giving us.
As it is, you load, hit a button and crash, repeat. I tried to withhold my judgement until they released into open beta, but its just horrible.
Strangely, I rarely hear talk of it. For reference, see something called the Dunbar Number.
Any organization that grows over 150 (or so) people either fails or forms a personality-stomping bureaucracy to survive. It doesn't happen right away, but it always seems to happen. And, ahem, the U.S. Army has way way more than 150 people :).
I used to avidly play the game but stopped when they stopped updating the Mac client. A lot of honest (the cheats didn't work on the Mac anyway) and fun players left then, too. Despite having a tiny market share it did seem to have a disproportionate effect on the game.
So... maybe.
E pluribus unum
The American army has a long history of killing their own allies.
I spent four years in the Army myself. I was a "Network Swtiching System Operator/Maintainer." Sounds a lot cooler than it is, trust me. I've got two deployments to Iraq under my belt. Really, I have to tell you, every other iteration of the America's Army "game" I played blew ass. I had more fun going to work. Seriously, they gave you "Task, Condition and Standard" in a video game?!?! Jeeze, I'd rather shine my boots and clean my weapon. Not to mention that they just happened to leave out the whole screaming-in-horrendous-agony part of war. People usually don't just fall down and play dead when shot or hit with shrapnel from one source or another, you can trust me on that too. So, I'm kind of glad this game ate shit. The only "realistic" part of it was how outrageously boring training in the Army can be. Other than that, the only purpose it served was to give children a false impression of war, and how god-forsaken horrible it is. Usually that wouldn't matter in a video game, but it certainly does matter when that video game is really a recruitment tool for the US Army. -Reed
Score one for Darwin!
Life is not for the lazy.
unfortunately the patch can't be said to have really helped. All the auth servers are still down, meaning no official servers currently work. the game still freezes for several people. I'm optimistic however that eventually the game servers will be functional and people will forget about the horrible launch.
Long hours unpaid, shortage of personnel, impossible deadlines, sounds like my time in the real US Army.
Half of writing history is hiding the truth.
I managed to get in a few servers and get a half hour of combat in. It's very intense and really a good tactical shooter. If the auth server had any stability or capacity there would be no story here aside from a few bugs that can be eliminated quickly. (Such as having two main menus up at the same time in-game, a few minor animation bugs, etc.)
The chance that the entire team was incompetent is very small. When a project fails, look to its management, not to every single engineer on the team. Also keep in mind that half of software projects in general fail; it's a very immature industry.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
What about Valve? They have roughly 200 employees and they seem to be very much "talent based". Their methodology for making games has worked pretty damn well for them IMO.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I think an argument could be made that those organizations tend to split development drivers (groups of designers, etc) into sub-150 person groups which are, at least to some extent, autonomous within their given mandate.
For example, look at DARPA, which is basically designed along exactly this principle.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Having never played the game, how does the Honor system end up actually rewarding "everything bad and wrong"? The idea sounds good, in theory of course...
The situation is not quite that bad, though the summary makes it seem so. From what I gather, it wasn't a major part of the development team that was released, but rather 3-4 people in a small satellite team. Of course, there would definitely be bitterness about this, especially in this economic climate, but the job cut definitely wasn't extensive.
As for AA3 being flawed, the only major issue it's had is that the authentication servers have been overloaded by the hoards of new players trying to log in and play the game all at once. Obviously something like this can't be predicted, so no one is to blame. (I'm sure many of us recall Quake Live being hammered when it was released in open beta for similar reasons. And Demigod as well.)
The game itself is a LOT smoother and cleaner than any of its previous iterations. There are some occasional bugs and glitches that need ironing out, but thus far I haven't seen anything drastic.
(Yes, I am an AA player, and I have enjoyed for quite a long time. No, I'm not at all interested in joining the US Army. I realize it's a recruitment tool, but that doesn't mean there's any reason for me to shun it as a game.)
I've heard that 3M corporation does this to an even greater degree. Each time a division is successful enough that it grows past 200, they break up that division's product lines into two subsets, so that they can break up the division into two sub-150 groups. The idea is that for the great majority of human evolution, we've lived in groups smaller than 150, so our brains are pretty well equipped to know and trust and work with that volume of people.
Get much larger than that and you'll start getting weird political BS. Not because people are bad, but because they need short cuts to help them deal with the overwhelming number of personalities they have to interact with to get their jobs done.
The CB App. What's your 20?
This doesn't come as a surprise to me... sometime around the version 1.6/1.7 release, a bunch of the DEVs were let go/fired/left (I don't remember specifics) and the game hasn't been the same since. I participated in the beta testing process at one point, and there were a bunch of great guys doing the testing and lots of reports of issues were being relayed to the developers. But it seemed that there were always issues slipping through the cracks because the Army was more interested in phasing in the overall "experience" or storyline of the game, rather than gameplay. I haven't been following the development of the game since a few years ago when the gameplay went south, and I imagine they've been losing lots of veteran players since then. Being the army, it should be easy to assume the DEV team was pressured with unrealistic goals and an unrealistic deadline for launch. Since the game is (obviously) targeted at young adults and they failed big-time on first impressions for many new players coming on board with this release, it's easy to see why someone's head was required on a platter even though the blame really lies with the Army officials. Typical bureaucracy at its finest. I hope the fired DEVs find good paying jobs with companies who don't require treading manure on a daily basis.
That said, I do hope that moving development into the military sector instead of the private sector ends up saving taxpayer money in the long run, IMHO the game as a whole isn't really an effective recruiting tool anyway. The only thing that's really useful is the virtual-reality training for our soldiers, and that should be the main focus of the development.
True, I'd like to believe that a world where common sense and morality prevail can exist but I know that's not going to happen. Whenever an environment gathers enough individuals that rely on cooperation and mutual compromise there will appear individuals that will have a lot to gain by betraying all those "values" (read: social contracts).
Still, that doesn't mean people that do have principles and high moral standards shouldn't uphold them, just that they shouldn't expect the world to be fair and good if they do.
ics
Lets put it this way: the worst and most common insult in AA was to call someone an "Obj nub", which stands for "Objective nub".
The honor system heavily favored deathmatching and just plain surviving a round despite your team losing to the point that the easiest way to be successful in the game was to just run off and camp somewhere and try to get a few kills before the timer ran out.
It didnt help that there were literally no controls on honor servers. They could and often did have all sorts of wierd mods running on them.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
And that sounds much like parts of corporate America and the "rank" system, where those best able to manipulate their managers and stab their co-workers in the back successfully are best enabled for advancement
Phew, wow... I'm sure glad that doesn't happen anywhere else... I was worried it might be like that in other places too.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
In my experience it generally seem that most people sitting in the break room or god forbid rant in their off hours about how "the managers don't know what we do" or that their managers are "no-talent hacks" or some other random criticism are also the employees least likely to stand out in any positive capacity to offer solutions to a broken situation and are content to merely whine about it.
Secondly managers don't as a rule have to know what it is their people do as long as they know how to manage their resources and people to meet goals set by their own bosses.
Most people when they think of management are referring to low level management (AKA Middle Management) who are little more than grunts themselves, have very little to offer as far as actual skills are concerned and are paid to make sure all their people show up on time, take their breaks on time and micromanage their people as if they are five years old and serve very little real function.
If these guy's had use the Imperial handbook, they wouldn't be in this situation.
"The Emperor is most displeased with your apparent lack of effort" - Vader
"He asks the impossible, we need more men, we need more time" - Commander
"Then perhaps you can tell him yourself when he arrives" - Vader
"The Emperor is coming here?" - Commander
"That is correct Commander" - Vader
"We shall redouble our efforts" - Commander
"I hope so Commander for your sake, the Emperor is not as forgiving as I am" - Vader
But, as soon as they hit a critical mass, the bureaucracy becomes the dominate force and turns the talent into powerless labor.
When companies *have* to be large, I believe keeping small, relatively autonomous groups of talented employees is the cure. Once a group becomes too large or the group is stripped of its autonomy to enforce mono-culture, innovation takes a back seat to sweeping, generic, stuffy rules that attempt to keep things 'safe' and 'organized'.
Just about every company wants complete control from the top -- The problem is it's dangerous to assume people from the 'top' have enough insight and knowledge to make good decisions for the 'bottom'. Letting groups of people do their own thing is chaotic, but it's probably good for incubating fresh material and novel ideas.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
Two Words. Socialized Healthcare.
Yes, I much prefer the warm, caring bureaucracy of a private insurance agency over the cold, sterile bureaucracy of a government agency...
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
Linux is awesome and when I get mod points and coming back to mod you, your wife and that dumb dog of yours.
> the "rank" system, where those best able to manipulate their managers and stab their co-workers in the back successfully are best enabled for advancement
Funny thing is, that's how the system is supposed to be. There has always been a minority who, having more brains, or desire of control, or means, ruled over the majority of people. Nowadays their preferred medium of control is through money. The rank system ensure that the guys at the top respond to money. Scruples, ideals, would get in the way. If it's also possible to blackmail them for some bad things did in the past, that's perfect.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
The Wikipedia article you cite says no such thing.
200 employees does not necessarily mean 200 programming dudes. Remember that there's legal, marketing, and P.R. to consider.
Keep in mind that Valve doesn't just make games - they also work with Steam.
There's probably at least half a dozen guys dedicated solely towards bringing new games onto Steam. Not getting the licensing, but setting them up so they work with Steam and its interface (like the in-game stuff.)
There's also likely a dedicated team for updating content for certain games, like TF2. I'm sure that they have a few guys who job it is to do just that.
The Source Engine is a beast unto itself, and one of the reasons the Episodes come out so many years in-between is because Valve elects to improve the engine every time. If they did not go with the engine upgrades (HDR, particle physics, L4D engine's improvements, and who knows what is coming with EP3), they probably could have cranked out games a lot faster. The thing is, they make them so damn good that they have enough staying power where they don't have to worry about cranking out a shit-ton of games every year.
I still occasionally play through the entire Half Life 2 series up to this point because the gameplay and story is so damn good. I think that I'm getting to the point, though, where I want to drop in SMOD and have some real fun. :3
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
What are you talking about? What do you mean when you say the system "rewards just about everything bad and wrong"? I've been playing AA since 2003. The only way to get Honor points is by doing what you're supposed to be doing during the matches. You're penalized for doing things that mess up the mission (shooting your team mates and shooting civilians).
Any organization that grows over 150 (or so) people either fails or forms a personality-stomping bureaucracy to survive. It doesn't happen right away, but it always seems to happen. And, ahem, the U.S. Army has way way more than 150 people :).
The question then becomes whether a larger organization must necessarily stomp your soul more than a smaller one. Anecdotally, the federal government is the U.S.' largest employer.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
That doesn't really say much unless you describe if and how they then become more autonomous. Take for example the military, they divide units into squads, platoons, companys etc. based on numbers but it's all top-down management. Splitting on numbers doesn't really say much more than that you've realized that there's a human limit on how many subordinates one manager can handle.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Sounds more like Slashdot's mod system, where Linux Zealots can pat themselves on the back with +5 Insightful "Linux is awesome" posts, thereby gaining the power to squash anyone who might be "Pro-Microsoft".
And the windows retards can do the same for windows posts. But you see, the windows retards know not to hang round here, because we'll drown them in all the money we save. Also, they are retards, and can't figure out the UI/read/etc.
And, ahem, the U.S. Army has way way more than 150 people :).
However... the typical company (or troop or battery) has approximately 100 people. You can spend as much as 10 years working at the company level before you reach Sergeant Major or Major. Some jobs, e.g. Adjutant General (which is essentially HR) are tied more closely to Big Army, but others, e.g. combat arms, are more insulated. Even now the traditional terms "troop" and "battery" are retained, even though there's some OCD bureaucrat who is waiting for the chance to wipe them out and call everything a "company."
I was a Cavalry Scout and we were aware that they were trying to wipe out personality and make us all fit neatly in to their org charts. All the (arguably stupid looking) emblems the units had painted on their HQs were painted over, they banned profanity, and of course our various alcohol sodden rituals were always causing problems for our CO, but for the most part we just ignored them and did whatever we wanted. The flip side of "don't be an individual" is that the Army also demands that you take pride in your unit.
a lot of good people [worked] insanely long hours on this game that was butchered by outside sources.
I kills me to see this pattern repeated over and over in the technology industry. Smart managers/leads/companies know that pushing too hard will always hurt you in the long run. Of course there are times where you push hard as a team. But when 12 hour days become the rule not the exception you are establishing an unsustainable habit and company/team culture. Attrition rates will increase (draining you of talent), word will spread into the industry about the negative work atmosphere (making it hard to hire/replace lost or new talent), those still working will lose their passion and the quality of work will fall (killing your competitive edge).
I've been lucky/blessed that so far in my career I haven't been in a situation where I had to constantly choose between my life/family and my work. Part of it is setting expectations/boundaries both personally and as a team. When I was interviewed for the former company I worked for (which no longer exists since we were acquired by a big one recently), I expressed excitement and passion for my work and the technologies they were developing, but I flat-out told them that when push comes to shove when it comes to work and family that I will always chose time with my family. When I go home for the weekend, unless I've agreed otherwise or we're really down to the wire, I do not work. No email checking, no extra hours, nothing. Setting this boundary, people make sure things are squared away BEFORE the weekend comes. And if it is an emergency they know they have to call me on my personal phone (which causes people to make sure it really is an emergency before contacting me).
Again, I consider myself lucky/blessed because I know of companies or situations where setting this kind of boundary will get you fired. Honestly, I think that getting fired for standing up for your rights (and I use that word deliberately) isn't the worst thing that can happen in life. The way to handle this type of situation is to talk to HR. Confidentially show HR a well documented pattern of abusing employees by management demanding/coersing salaried (and even hourly) workers continually work extra hours and ask for their help to change the company culture. If nothing happens, then you can look for another job. If you get fired, you can sue the company since HR broke their confidentiality.
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
I guess I have been around long enough to understand when it is release time get the resume ready. The budget
is gone everything switches to maintenance mode and the team size dwindles end of the road. As for the game
problem freezing or crashing by the client now that is a solid programing issue. The authentication servers now
that is a problem that can be fixed and fixed extremely fast. If the authentication servers are still down it is
a good indication that the project is completely out of cash and no one is willing to spend anything to fix it. The other
possibility is that the game was not developed with scale in mind from the start(every byte counts).
Got Code?
Mod points? What are those? I know I've been the black sheep on a here a few times and I haven't seen mod points since, been a good 5-7 years.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
The game itself had a few glitches and flaws, but the real problems lied with the server infrastructure and poor planning. With the launch of a FREE first person shooter on a huge platform like Steam, no one bothered to improve the server infrastructure the game uses for online play, which resulted in most of the issues players see.
One of the problems I've heard the most about is the inability to get past the Training missions because the game does not properly save your progress when you've beat a Training mission. Again, this is due to the overloading of the servers, not an issue in the game itself.
"a lot of good people [worked] insanely long hours [on this game] that was butchered by outside sources.' .... One of the [developers] made a post on the official forums saying they were 'effectively stabbed in the back,' and that much of the funding was filtered to the bureaucracy"
wow, if this wasn't talking about a video game, I would almost think they were talking about the real Army!
like a man without arms, you can't hang......
Actually, I'm not sure that's true, but even if it was, it makes a pretty bad example.
Firstly, military units are somewhat autonomous within their mandate. Top-down control simply means that the very top decides what they want, and lower levels decide on an increasing level of specificity how to achieve that goal until you go from the President deciding he wants to invade a middle-eastern nation to a squad-leader deciding how his squad will attack a specific house. The military is not top down in the sense that the commander in chief is deciding how to knock down doors.
That said, unlike companies where the only really overriding mandate is to make profit, the military tends to be organized into very much more specific overriding goals. You can't have random battalions deciding they'd rather attack Pakistan, for example. This is not necessarily true in either R&D or the private sector; in both those cases it's perfectly possible to basically split off groups.
For example, say your company makes widgets. You hire more and more people, until eventually you have 200 people. So you decide to make two lines of product, Widget A and Widget B. Both teams need only a very little communication- they essentially work autonomously. Eventually, they both grow large as the demand for widgets increases that you split off two more groups- and now you have Widget A, Widget B, Widget C, and Widget D. You're working more efficiently and making things better for your customers (because you can make a solution closer to what they want) with each increase in specificity.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Why did they work long hours? Against whom is the U.S. Army competing? The game, like its previous 2 incarnations, was to be free-as-in-beer.
And why is programmer psychosis so prevalent among game developers? Is it because so many developers (like me) got their start wanting to write games, hence strong competition for jobs as game developers?
Any time long hours are involved, you can be sure it is the result of one or more of at least 3 things:
* market competition forcing businesses to make promises that cannot be kept except by unreasonable behaviors, such as overtime
* lousy project management (is there such thing as competent project management? Even at firms praised by clients for having "great" PMs, I've found PMs to be lousy)
* developers with mental issues of sanity and pushback willpower
Fuck long hours - especially if they are unpaid (as is almost always the case. It is time for developers to fight-back against being taken advantage-of; we need to demonstrate that we are worthy of respect and reasonable lives too!
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
http://jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2mail/mail408.html#Iron is not just for governments. It applies to any organized group of people above a certain size.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Even today things are still going badly. I was able to get through a lot of the training missions, then the auth server went away again.
Basically, when you do a training mission, it's a crap shoot whether the auth server will register the results which will allow you to advance in the game.
Apparently there was a server side patch done today, and things do seem to work a bit faster when the auth server is up.
There are also still plenty of little bugs in the game itself, and who knows how/when they'll be fixed since they shut down the dev studio.
Apparently, development is moving to Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. I'm not sure who's going to be working on it though. They assure us that the game will go on, so I guess they have a team or will hire one.
Even with all the problems, I think it still may have potential. But I'm looking at this as still in beta phase. I'm hoping that by next weekend we'll actually be able to play "normally". :P
Hate to sound rash, but when are people in the game industry going to understand they are contract workers getting paid salary? Meaning: when the project is done, your job is done. There is very little tech re-use between game projects, so there is usually no reason to keep staff. This is different than most major corporations that build upon the same product with new releases, and very rarely re-tool. But really, there isn't job security anywhere. However, for the game industry, and the nature of its projects, it should just be a given you will be let go when your game is done.
Half Life 2: Lost Coast does not count as a full game by any measure ever... not even an expansion pack. It's 20 minutes of game play, tops, with about a half hour-ish of commentary on the graphics system. It is, at best, a glorified tech demo.
Point still stands, but it's more than worth clarifying.