Chief Technical Officer
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Don't forget that he killed D&D with the OGL. Yes, he's one of the most hated men in gaming. And also one of the most beloved.
And, by the way, what happened to White Wolf would have happened whether he was hired at CCP or not.
As for the other thing, I'm wondering if you're talking about the decisions that CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson has claimed full responsibility for?
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Don't forget that he killed D&D with the OGL. Yes, he's one of the most hated men in gaming. And also one of the most beloved.
And, by the way, what happened to White Wolf would have happened whether he was hired at CCP or not.
As for the other thing, I'm wondering if you're talking about the decisions that CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson has claimed full responsibility for?
Well, from my perspective, that of a customer, player, and DM, Ryan is a Hero.. nay a Super Hero. The OGL was the best thing to come out of the 3e/3.5e era. I love that there are third party publisher and other sources that I can glean ideas from. It's also one of the reasons I am into Pathfinder and not anywhere else.
...from my perspective, that of a customer, player, and DM, Ryan is a Hero.. nay a Super Hero.
Yeah, I think that one thing the OP has forgotten (or not; if you look at the profile page, there's no info and 2 posts, kinda like someone who came in to rabblerouse): no Ryan Dancey, no OGL; no OGL, no Pathfinder. Aside from which, even if I didn't know the guy from Adam, I trust the Paizo staff enough that if they're willing to vouch for him, it's good enough for me.
As for the other thing, I'm wondering if you're talking about the decisions that CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson has claimed full responsibility for?
...That's his job. That is literally the job of the CEO, to take responsibility for things that the company does regardless of what actually occurs.
Part of accepting responsibility involved FIRING DANCEY. That conveys the message clear enough.
I removed a post. Please don't harass other posters.
|
Chief Technical Officer
|
As for the other thing, I'm wondering if you're talking about the decisions that CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson has claimed full responsibility for?...That's his job. That is literally the job of the CEO, to take responsibility for things that the company does regardless of what actually occurs.
Part of accepting responsibility involved FIRING DANCEY. That conveys the message clear enough.
Except that Ryan's position at CCP ended not last month when the CEO was accepting responsibility, but some time ago, during the very period when Pétursson says he began making mistakes and stopped listening to smart people giving him good advice. You should be taking away a very different message from that.
I hope Ryan does for this MMO what the OGL did for D&D.
I would LOVE an MMO of Erotic Fantasy.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
My predilection is to side with people who aren't being smarmy and inconsiderate, even to people they may not respect.
My predilection is to side with people who aren't being smarmy and inconsiderate, even to people they may not respect.
It's interesting how people react to polarizing figures. I think he has some innovative ideas about the industry that sometines pushes people out their comfort zone, especially when it comes to their favorite games. I worked for WotC back in the late 90's in their short-lived retail division as a store manager. When WotC was considering the impact of roleplaying games being actually played in a retail setting he wanted to fully understand its ramifications on the retail side of the business. He actually came to my store to meet with me and get my perspective on business and the game. Throughout my time there, and when he was in charge, I saw changes in product cycles, backstock management and marketing. OGL is perhaps what he is best known for, but he had his hands in a lot of business features. Many of which were established RPG practices. Those practices upset some gamers who liked their hobby the way it used to be, whether it was product or delivery. I don't know how many times I heard a customer gripe about not having the old 2nd edition product for them to buy.
My hope is that Ryan will bring a fresh perspective to this genre. People are debating factions and guilds and crafting and whether the game will be free or not. All of this stuff has been done before. I am hoping for a game that doesn't conform to the accepted MMO norms. I worry a little with the scope they mention where "everyone can do whatever they want". It would be a mistake in my mind to try and just use all the tried and true MMO crutches to put out a game that will actually only appeal to a few. there is a saying in the teaching profession: A mile wide and an inch deep. It refers to a method of learning a subject. It is very popular with big companies who put out curriculum. What it means is that you cover huge amounts of information, but spend very little time on it. The thought is that by exposure to it, the kids will pick it up...eventually. I don't want a game that throws everything at me and expects me to pick it up. I have faith that Ryan can provide the direction to a new MMO experience, no matter how painful it might be to some of us.
My predilection is to side with people who aren't being smarmy and inconsiderate, even to people they may not respect.
I agree. Facts are WAY less important than whether someone's being a meanypants.
I'm so stoked you guys have Ryan Dancey on board! I mean, look at everything he did for White Wolf and CCP. Without him, White Wolf might still be publishing books, and CCP might have thousands of players and dev hours that lost because he likes to introduce ideas without actually doing any market research.
Can't wait for the preorder!
Well if he is the "Steve Jobs" of RPGs I'm going to stop playing Pathfinder and get rid of all my books and view Paizo with a well deserved distain.
I love Paizo and it's products mainly because we the players actually have some say in the final product. I do not want an end user only experience with my RPGs which is what you will get with a "Steve Jobs".
I hope Ryan does for this MMO what the OGL did for D&D.
I would LOVE an MMO of Erotic Fantasy.
But would it be real love? Or just sex?
Goblin Squad Member
|
Way back in the days leading up to, and shortly following, the launch of 3E, I was a very active participant on the EN Boards. Some of you may remember me from there, some of you may not. Among the things that I was very passionate about was the wording and implementation of the OGL. I won't go into the full arguments, but the gist of it is that at the time I was much more active in small-press and freelance RPG writing than I am today, and as such, I had a lawyer go over the earlier (then current) versions of the OGL, and found that as it was written at the time it was not in the best interest of the little guys to work with the OGL.
I argued this until I was blue in the face, and my threads sometimes got the attention of Mr. Dancey. At the time, he did not come across as sympathetic to my concerns, and in fact more than once came off as outright flippant in his replies. Did I label him as a bad person because of it, or decide "This guy is the Anti-Gygax?" Nope. The man was pitching his brand, and he was trying to get other people to see his vision. Did I like his delivery? Not really, I thought it was out of line in many cases and could have been more tactful... but I'm sure at times he didn't like mine, either. Goes both ways. Part of having an argument is trying to get the other person to see and understand your position.
Eventually, the OGL wording was massaged as such as to no longer make my lawyer reach for a red pen, and no matter what you may think of the OGL, it revitalized the tabletop RPG industry. While Mr. Dancey may not be solely responsible for that, he was a vocal and visible part of it. His contribution cannot be denied.
I've never met the guy personally, face to face. The folks at Paizo have. They've worked with him extensively, and as they all seem to have thought this through, and are excited to work with him, I'm willing to trust their judgement. My interactions with him were electronic, over a decade ago, and limited to a forum populated by hundreds of thousands of users, where attention spans were less than the lifespan of some elemental compounds. Time changes people.
I guess all of this boils down to:
If you believe that Paizo has been successful because of the fact that they think their actions through for a good long while before taking them, and that they have developed a culture of "Saying No" to things that will ultimately hurt them, then you should have nothing to worry about - whether or not Mr. Dancey is involved. Even if you don't trust him, trust Paizo.
|
My uneducated guess:
The OGL proves he's capable of changing the whole playing field of the industry for the better, and a revitalization of a then-dying hobby doesn't seem like it can be attributed to blind squirrels finding nuts. He can't be a completely lame duck, and Pathfinder does, in part, owe its existence to him.
I don't really agree with the Steve Jobs comparison though. Dancey, through the OGL, made RPGs more open and encouraged 3rd party support. Jobs' company has a reputation for discouraging 3rd party anything, or only allowing it when it can go through a draconian approval process. Jobs *did* revive a dying company and Dancey *did* revive a dying hobby, but through two completely different strategies. I like Dancey's strategy a whole lot more.
Personally, I bet that this is happening because PFRPG is doing so well that a few big "swing for the fences" risks are affordable because if they crash, the company and it's most successful product will pull through. I'll only worry if we end up with cheap 80s & 90s style tie ins, where playing the MMO is the only way to get the most out of the tabletop experience (i.e., major PFS power boosts for your PC by playing the MMO). If PF Online remains "PF: The Video Game" it will be a fantastic way to expand the visibility of the PF brand. I'm guessing that's the biggest challenge at this point - expanding the brand beyond the core customer base of internet edition warriors. Just like the beginner box, but reaching out to video gamers instead of the families and friends of already-existing PF fans.
Bringing Dancey in and making a video game looks to me like the sort of all or nothing gambit the company can afford to take when Pathfinder just became the pack leader. If Dancey succeeds, he'll succeed beyond all expectations, and if not, Paizo is not in the same vulnerable position that White Wolf was in. The edition warriors' money isn't going into very many other classic high fantasy games. The only other successful fantasy games on the market are successful because they are not standard fantasy and therefore don't have to compete with D&D, like Exalted. The only other big name alternative is Dragon Age, and they already have the advantage of having their own triple A video game(s). PF needs to catch up, and Dancey's industry futurism (even if sometimes pessimistic for us dice-rollers) might be the perspective needed to get PF into a position to keep tabletop games afloat.
We're not dealing with WotC's digital strategies here.
|
Chief Creative Officer, Publisher
|
Speaking as someone who was a member of the RPGA staff at the time, if Ryan had not stepped in and licensed the Living City campaign, Wizards would have killed it outright.
I think Ryan's company tried their best to save a mortally wounded campaign, and it didn't work out. Looking back I can see a lot of reasons why it didn't work, and a lot of blame to go around, but you should know that if Ryan hadn't stepped in, the campaign would have been cancelled outright.
The conversion between second and third edition (managed in-house by the RPGA) was an utter debacle, and systematic "grandfathering" of an elite cadre of long-term players (of which I was one, so I know what I'm talking about) had already filled the body with inoperable tumors by the time Ryan's company came along and tried to save it.
I'm not saying he didn't make mistakes. Truth be told, I was transferred away from the RPGA and into the proto-Paizo of the Periodicals Department at about this time and I really don't know many of the details, but Ryan's heart was definitely in the right place, even if the execution didn't go off as well as anyone hoped or expected.
I can understand being frustrated or upset about the way things turned out, but I don't think it's fair to paint Ryan as a villain in this affair.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
This is going to be my only post in this thread. I would not have posted anything, but I think I have to say a few things about OrganizedPlay and Living City just to set the record straight.
I negotiated with Wizards to take over the whole RPGA on my exit. There was a good chance they were going to close it down or outsource it, just like they did with GenCon and Dragon & Dungeon magazines. We were unable to come to terms. As a fall-back position, I was able to license the Living City campaign.
Unfortunately, as I learned after the fact, Living City was probably unsavable by the time I got it. Living Greyhawk was a superior product in every way - and one of the ways it was vastly superior was the freedom it allowed in scenario design. Effectively overnight the people interested in writing scenarios for the RPGA switched from Living City to Living Greyhawk.
When I got the Living City campaign, the hopper of scenarios was already empty. There were a handful of submissions in the queue and they had already been flagged by the RPGA as unsuitable. I reached out directly to the authors of the "best" Living City and Living Greyhawk scenarios to ask them to write for Living City and every person turned us down due to the workload they'd taken on supporting the Living Greyhawk campaign.
At that point we went to a series of Plans B, C, D, etc.
We tried to contract the scenario design to Bastion, run by my friend and former coworker Jim Butler. That plan didn't work out.
We tried to license adventure content from AEG, who had just finished producing several dozen short adventures for D20. The time required to convert these adventures to Living City's unique rules ended up being almost as long as the time to write a scenario from scratch.
We tried to pay a small group of professional tabletop designers to do the work, and none of them were able to rise to the challenge. Living City scenarios require an extensive knowledge of the characters in the campaign and the unique conditions that exist in it, and without that knowledge the scenarios we were getting were simply unusable.
Then we tried to re-boot the campaign, with the idea that we'd strip out all the stuff that was making it nearly impossible to get scenarios written, and get rid of all the legacy power inflation that had made a lot of common D&D rules nearly unusable. I personally wrote the entire first "season" of the rebooted campaign to ensure there would be enough content (instead of doing what I should have been doing, which was raising investment capital for the business).
Then we decided the only way forward was to self-publish the Living City modules so that the campaign could have a business model that would support their development. To make that happen I had to put the squeeze to Wizards of the Coast, which transformed a formerly friendly relationship to one that was not so friendly.
Finally, after more than a year of struggling to roll that rock uphill, I took a long look in the mirror and realized that the Living City project had become a distraction and a time & money sink and that it was time to cut my losses and move on.
For the record, I invested hundreds of thousands of dollars of my own money into OrganizedPlay, most of which was sunk into Living City. I did everything in my power to keep the campaign operating, and I ascribe its death primarily to the fact that Wizards just had a better product in Living Greyhawk, and the world wasn't big enough for two D&D Living Campaigns to run side-by-side.
It is unfortunate that there are still people out there who hold a grudge about Living City, but I'll stand behind all the labour and love I poured into the project and don't believe there was anything else we could have done that would have led to a better outcome.
RyanD
:words:
Stay classy.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
This is going to be my only post in this thread. I would not have posted anything, but I think I have to say a few things about OrganizedPlay and Living City just to set the record straight.
I negotiated with Wizards to take over the whole RPGA on my exit. There was a good chance they were going to close it down or outsource it, just like they did with GenCon and Dragon & Dungeon magazines. We were unable to come to terms. As a fall-back position, I was able to license the Living City campaign.
Unfortunately, as I learned after the fact, Living City was probably unsavable by the time I got it. Living Greyhawk was a superior product in every way - and one of the ways it was vastly superior was the freedom it allowed in scenario design. Effectively overnight the people interested in writing scenarios for the RPGA switched from Living City to Living Greyhawk.
When I got the Living City campaign, the hopper of scenarios was already empty. There were a handful of submissions in the queue and they had already been flagged by the RPGA as unsuitable. I reached out directly to the authors of the "best" Living City and Living Greyhawk scenarios to ask them to write for Living City and every person turned us down due to the workload they'd taken on supporting the Living Greyhawk campaign.
At that point we went to a series of Plans B, C, D, etc.
We tried to contract the scenario design to Bastion, run by my friend and former coworker Jim Butler. That plan didn't work out.
We tried to license adventure content from AEG, who had just finished producing several dozen short adventures for D20. The time required to convert these adventures to Living City's unique rules ended up being almost as long as the time to write a scenario from scratch.
We tried to pay a small group of professional tabletop designers to do the work, and none of them were able to rise to the challenge. Living City scenarios require an extensive knowledge of the characters in the campaign and the unique conditions that exist...
You guys realize this guy took time out of Thanksgiving Day to come read the forums and respond to stuff this serious?
I think that's a pretty good sign of a guy I like seeing leading the company.
I third that statement. Reading and posting on the internet = a herculean effort. Takes for ever.
Seriously though, good luck with the new project!
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I think it's interesting that someone felt it necessary to dedicate an entire thread to insulting an individual involved in bringing us a PFMMO. Not a critique on the game outlines themselves, or any constructive criticism on the project.
When did ad hominem become a publicly acceptable form of debate among critical thinkers?
When did ad hominem become a publicly acceptable form of debate among critical thinkers?
At what point did we assume the internet had any critical thinkers debating on it? Sniping baselessly at things you hate for no reason is about 70% of the internet. After the 20% pictures of cats, this leaves about 10% for everything else.
|
Goblin Squad Member
|
Ryan, thank you for that insight from behind the curtain into a time of great changes at the RPGA. I saw the mass migration of authors from Living City to Living Greyhawk as part of the Living Greyhawk regional campaign staff, and never considered the impact that would have on the other side of the table.
|
|
Ryan you seem like an awesome guy, but as someone with a bit of experience in the MMO industry (unpaid b%~%$ at artifact entertainment) you're not diving into the deep end, it's the marianas trench. I don't believe any company should come out of the gate with an MMO; what Verant and Mythic pulled off in 1999/2000 isn't going to happen again. It's Blizzard/Bioware/Sony who rule the future and frankly the only ones I can see jumping in with a chance are Bethesda.
Seriously, do a small-scale multiplayer game first. 4 player co-op, hell make it Pathfinder Society online with DLC scenarios. At $5 a scenario and 5 hours of gameplay each you could make a ton more money than an MMO with a lot less overhead.
Goblinworks Founder
|
Ryan you seem like an awesome guy, but as someone with a bit of experience in the MMO industry (unpaid b!++~ at artifact entertainment) you're not diving into the deep end, it's the marianas trench. I don't believe any company should come out of the gate with an MMO; what Verant and Mythic pulled off in 1999/2000 isn't going to happen again. It's Blizzard/Bioware/Sony who rule the future and frankly the only ones I can see jumping in with a chance are Bethesda.
Seriously, do a small-scale multiplayer game first. 4 player co-op, hell make it Pathfinder Society online with DLC scenarios. At $5 a scenario and 5 hours of gameplay each you could make a ton more money than an MMO with a lot less overhead.
The products that Blizzard Bioware and Sony offer are all Themepark MMO's. You are forgetting quite a lot of F2P/P2P games that are doing just as well. Heck, Bioware are only just getting into the market with TOR and as someone who's beta testing it, I don't think it has the staying power considering how much it cost to get it this far.
Lisa, Ryan and Mark are all extremely knowledgeable in the Industry of both RPGs and MMO's.
Besides, the people that made Bioware famous no longer work there, the people that made Blizzard famous no longer work there, and Sony Online Entertainment is a black hole for all the MMO's nobody plays anymore.
I don't know what MMO you expect Bethesda to produce, The Elder Scrolls Online has been a dead rumor since 2009 *(And Zenimax are the developers, not Bethesda).
On the dominating MMO's you forgot Arenanet (NCSoft), Trion Worlds, Frogster (ROM has more than 5 million players), Jagex (Runescape).
I'm not disagreeing on the concept of a coop/MP Pathfinder game though. It could be a very good marketing setup for an MMO.