Sure, it's possible. People in the game industry are known to do 100 hour weeks. It's also a good way to produce low quality code, and burn your staff out.
In your case, the hours are doable for a while. But it's important to use a carrot. Will there be bonuses when the company is profitable? Stock? Profit sharing? Extra vacation time? Do people feel invested in wanting the company to succeed?
So yes, it's doable. But you have to give people a reason to want to do it beyond "or else." That one will just send your best people elsewhere.
Same thing with the provinces. Microsoft keeps asking us to try their cloud stuff, and we can't find something that we can legally put there due to poor US laws.
If the $300 million development cost is true, then they're going to actually take a lot of subscribers away from WoW to make money. The rest of the pool isn't deep enough to make up that kind of budget.
Lots of people seem to try to do console MMOs, and it rarely goes well. Part of the problem is the "massively" part on a horribly memory starved system like the Xbox... and where do you put those 30GB of patches when Xbox Live limits your patch size and so many people don't have hard drives in their console at all?
Square managed to do it once, before WoW. Their more recent attempt has been such a disaster that they still aren't charging people the monthly fee to play it.
The wait time is so long because bad DPS in PUGs like to screw up then blame the tank and healer. Being in demand because of their much harder jobs, tanks and healers go find guilds and run guild groups instead.
Seriously, I've had moron DPS die from standing in bad stuff in a heroic for over 10 seconds, then try to blame me (the healer) for it. Those people are the reason why the queue is so long, because there's no reason for me ever to PUG when I can grab some guildies who won't do that and go instead.
This actually hilights one of the few things I don't like about Cataclysm. They've really gone back to the Horde as the "evil" faction. Forsaken dropping plague on everything (despite being told not to, Garrosh doesn't enforce that any better then Thrall did), wars of aggression all over the place, etc.
Sure that Deathwing guy is up and out and destroying the world, but hey lets go attack Gilneas with plague weapons because we're cool!
There's an awful lot of people playing WoW because its fun. Your problem seems to be that you think what you consider "fun" is the universal definition.
The whole point of this "cloud" thing is that nobody knows. It means precisely nothing. Microsoft's "cloud" commercial is a great example, because most of what she's doing has exactly nothing to do with "the cloud" at all.
The important thing is that making sure "cloud" appears in the ad at least five times provides Buzzword Compliance. In the case of this Apple whatever it is, "cloud" features even more prominently and thus provides more Buzzword Compliance.
Now if they can create a special iCloud(TM) inside the Steve Jobs reality distortion field, they'll be set.
There are in fact a ton of people who prefer questing and levelling to endgame, and will make an alt rather then do endgame stuff. The problem is that most MMO forumgoers think these people don't exist, because they don't post on forums.
But they do, and in very large numbers. Blizzard has done so well in part because it caters to them in addition to the vocal minority.
"because EVERY other thing I've read about STORO has been how about amazing the initial impression is once you have a couple hours to play it"
You must be new to game previews. EVERY game preview about EVERY game ever previewed is positive. Always. Something this negative this far before release is almost unheard of from a major site.
Publishers control access to previews. If you don't say nice things when doing your preview, you won't get previews in the future. As that kind of content is the lifeblood of gaming websites and required to stay in business, they pretty much do whatever they're told.
1) PvP is a thing that is loathed by one segment of the audience, and required by another. Not easy to make money without it in some form.
2) Lots of people love levelling and questing, and hate endgame. For them, the game *ends* when they level cap. You see this all the time in games like WoW where someone gets to the point of being raid-ready, then immediately starts an alt. They just don't care about endgame. Almost none of these people post on MMO forums, so most people who do frequent said forums think they don't exist.
3) Very expensive to make, and hard to keep at high quality because players will always chew through story faster then anybody can make it.
4) The trend is away from this because as soon as you start requiring groups to do stuff, you've locked out a lot of people entirely and told others not to play until their friends are online. PUGs suck, and always will. (Running a PUG heroic in WoW right now has a 45 minute queue time as DPS, because the tanks and healers won't go anywhere near it due to the disproportionate blame they get for group failure when it's usually the fault of bad DPS.)
"Fully voiced" is not innovation, it's simply having a larger voice acting budget. It's also going to cause a lot problems later. MMOs live on new content. Story driven ones are even more dependent on new content, because story dries up faster then running raids for loot. Voice acting everything is going to create the expectation that new content also be voice acted, which dramatically increases the cost of creating new content.
Other countries have a process where candidates are chosen by party members only (which you have to pay to do), and it seems to work fine. There's no need for an open free for all like this unless you want to invite people to screw with it.
The postal service is going insolvent because they're forced by law to deliver to remote, unprofitable locations at highly subsidized (ie: below cost) prices. Not a new story, really.
You're running Windows, so you're already a big target. Do you really want to try to find something that will go below the radar, or do you want to use what works? MSE is quite good at what it does.
It's nice to see a bit of karmic justice after Gawker falsely accused EasyDNS of cutting off Wikileaks (it was EveryDNS), then acted like jackasses when called on it.
Having people reinvent it constantly is counterproductive to your goal. What we need are a few people who actually know what they're doing to design it, and for everybody else to use that.
Every CMS doing passwords their own way is a great way to ensure most of them are doing it wrong.
I was expecting a MMO on the PC to have a UI that's reasonably playable with a keyboard and mouse.
Guess that expectation was off too. They should include a free Xbox 360 gamepad with every copy, since that raises the UI from "sucks donkey ass" to "sucks balls".
No, this isn't an unrealistic ship date problem. This is a fundamental design flaw problem. This game has the worst UI of any MMO post-WoW, and even most ones pre-WoW (the exception being FF XI). It was clearly designed for consoles with a very bad PC port.
The game was shipped with no AH and no mail, and a completely awful player store system instead that makes it a giant timesink just to *find* things that are for sale, let alone do price comparison and things that any modern game should allow.
A post documenting all the flaws in this game would be about five pages long, so I'll stop now. Suffice to say that the problems are much worse then simple lack of time.
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Sure, it's possible. People in the game industry are known to do 100 hour weeks. It's also a good way to produce low quality code, and burn your staff out.
In your case, the hours are doable for a while. But it's important to use a carrot. Will there be bonuses when the company is profitable? Stock? Profit sharing? Extra vacation time? Do people feel invested in wanting the company to succeed?
So yes, it's doable. But you have to give people a reason to want to do it beyond "or else." That one will just send your best people elsewhere.
PC users don't like that. Mac users will like whatever Steve Jobs tells them to like.
Thats the biggest problem here. The "heretic" is most dangerous when he's right and the place IS run by morons.
Nothing hurts more then the truth when you're a MBA with no idea what you're doing. If people catch on, you're in real trouble.
Same thing with the provinces. Microsoft keeps asking us to try their cloud stuff, and we can't find something that we can legally put there due to poor US laws.
If the $300 million development cost is true, then they're going to actually take a lot of subscribers away from WoW to make money. The rest of the pool isn't deep enough to make up that kind of budget.
Its also by the same people who did Age of Conan, which is terrible.
Lots of people seem to try to do console MMOs, and it rarely goes well. Part of the problem is the "massively" part on a horribly memory starved system like the Xbox... and where do you put those 30GB of patches when Xbox Live limits your patch size and so many people don't have hard drives in their console at all?
Square managed to do it once, before WoW. Their more recent attempt has been such a disaster that they still aren't charging people the monthly fee to play it.
The wait time is so long because bad DPS in PUGs like to screw up then blame the tank and healer. Being in demand because of their much harder jobs, tanks and healers go find guilds and run guild groups instead.
Seriously, I've had moron DPS die from standing in bad stuff in a heroic for over 10 seconds, then try to blame me (the healer) for it. Those people are the reason why the queue is so long, because there's no reason for me ever to PUG when I can grab some guildies who won't do that and go instead.
This actually hilights one of the few things I don't like about Cataclysm. They've really gone back to the Horde as the "evil" faction. Forsaken dropping plague on everything (despite being told not to, Garrosh doesn't enforce that any better then Thrall did), wars of aggression all over the place, etc.
Sure that Deathwing guy is up and out and destroying the world, but hey lets go attack Gilneas with plague weapons because we're cool!
There's an awful lot of people playing WoW because its fun. Your problem seems to be that you think what you consider "fun" is the universal definition.
The whole point of this "cloud" thing is that nobody knows. It means precisely nothing. Microsoft's "cloud" commercial is a great example, because most of what she's doing has exactly nothing to do with "the cloud" at all.
The important thing is that making sure "cloud" appears in the ad at least five times provides Buzzword Compliance. In the case of this Apple whatever it is, "cloud" features even more prominently and thus provides more Buzzword Compliance.
Now if they can create a special iCloud(TM) inside the Steve Jobs reality distortion field, they'll be set.
There are in fact a ton of people who prefer questing and levelling to endgame, and will make an alt rather then do endgame stuff. The problem is that most MMO forumgoers think these people don't exist, because they don't post on forums.
But they do, and in very large numbers. Blizzard has done so well in part because it caters to them in addition to the vocal minority.
"because EVERY other thing I've read about STORO has been how about amazing the initial impression is once you have a couple hours to play it"
You must be new to game previews. EVERY game preview about EVERY game ever previewed is positive. Always. Something this negative this far before release is almost unheard of from a major site.
Publishers control access to previews. If you don't say nice things when doing your preview, you won't get previews in the future. As that kind of content is the lifeblood of gaming websites and required to stay in business, they pretty much do whatever they're told.
You want a lot.
1) PvP is a thing that is loathed by one segment of the audience, and required by another. Not easy to make money without it in some form.
2) Lots of people love levelling and questing, and hate endgame. For them, the game *ends* when they level cap. You see this all the time in games like WoW where someone gets to the point of being raid-ready, then immediately starts an alt. They just don't care about endgame. Almost none of these people post on MMO forums, so most people who do frequent said forums think they don't exist.
3) Very expensive to make, and hard to keep at high quality because players will always chew through story faster then anybody can make it.
4) The trend is away from this because as soon as you start requiring groups to do stuff, you've locked out a lot of people entirely and told others not to play until their friends are online. PUGs suck, and always will. (Running a PUG heroic in WoW right now has a 45 minute queue time as DPS, because the tanks and healers won't go anywhere near it due to the disproportionate blame they get for group failure when it's usually the fault of bad DPS.)
"Fully voiced" is not innovation, it's simply having a larger voice acting budget. It's also going to cause a lot problems later. MMOs live on new content. Story driven ones are even more dependent on new content, because story dries up faster then running raids for loot. Voice acting everything is going to create the expectation that new content also be voice acted, which dramatically increases the cost of creating new content.
Other countries have a process where candidates are chosen by party members only (which you have to pay to do), and it seems to work fine. There's no need for an open free for all like this unless you want to invite people to screw with it.
Fox "News" viewers are the most misinformed people when it comes to pretty much everything, so it's hardly surprising that they have no fucking clue what they're talking about on this either.
The postal service is going insolvent because they're forced by law to deliver to remote, unprofitable locations at highly subsidized (ie: below cost) prices. Not a new story, really.
You're running Windows, so you're already a big target. Do you really want to try to find something that will go below the radar, or do you want to use what works? MSE is quite good at what it does.
MSE is the best I've ever used in terms of resource usage. If you don't know its there, it's honestly hard to notice.
It's nice to see a bit of karmic justice after Gawker falsely accused EasyDNS of cutting off Wikileaks (it was EveryDNS), then acted like jackasses when called on it.
http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2010/12/gawker_refuses.php
Having people reinvent it constantly is counterproductive to your goal. What we need are a few people who actually know what they're doing to design it, and for everybody else to use that.
Every CMS doing passwords their own way is a great way to ensure most of them are doing it wrong.
I was expecting a MMO on the PC to have a UI that's reasonably playable with a keyboard and mouse.
Guess that expectation was off too. They should include a free Xbox 360 gamepad with every copy, since that raises the UI from "sucks donkey ass" to "sucks balls".
No, this isn't an unrealistic ship date problem. This is a fundamental design flaw problem. This game has the worst UI of any MMO post-WoW, and even most ones pre-WoW (the exception being FF XI). It was clearly designed for consoles with a very bad PC port.
The game was shipped with no AH and no mail, and a completely awful player store system instead that makes it a giant timesink just to *find* things that are for sale, let alone do price comparison and things that any modern game should allow.
A post documenting all the flaws in this game would be about five pages long, so I'll stop now. Suffice to say that the problems are much worse then simple lack of time.