Star Wars Galaxies

One part of Rubenfield's blog that caught my attention was where he talked about the time lines for the development of the NGE.  He said that it was in development for 2 or 3 months.  This happens to be the exact period of time during which SOE and LEC had two dev chats marketting the game.  During these dev chats, there was no mention of the NGE, not even once.  In fact, people were led to believe that the role-playing game with 30 plus professions would continue, complete with profession revamps and a nice new expansion with loot and features for the original professions.

Of course this was highlighted after Rubenfield's blog hit the internet.  Now, he's saying that the decision to go with the NGE wasn't actually made until Nov. 2, the day it was announced.  In fact Rubenfield says that we found out about the NGE when he found out about it.

That strikes me as hard to believe, in that earlier in his blog he talks about having a fixed deadline for completion of the NGE.  If a decision had not been made to implement it, what in the world is he talking about regarding his fixed deadline?

What do you think, do you believe Dan when he says regarding the NGE, "You basically found out when we found out."?

Here's what he said in the original version of his blog (he's revised it a number of times now, after the initial backlash):

"We told them. ?If you do this, you will lose all 200k subscribers. It is that significant.?

It was explained that we would gain more due to the marketing push and relaunch.

So, we pushed forward.

If I remember the dates correctly, we did our NGE conversion in 2-3 months of solid crunch. It was some of the heaviest crunch I?ve ever done.

We had an immovable date, and an insane set of features.

We were working in parallel, maintaining old code on the off chance that we would pull the plug on the implementation." (Rubenfield, 2008) 

I highlighted sections of the original blog in red that seem to speak to the issue of when the decision to go forward with the NGE was actually made. 

No I don't believe him and he's still trying to sell that the NGE would have worked if they had more development time (yes I read that blog when he posted it).  Yet at the same time claims that they said doing it would lose customers... it has to be either or.. it can't be both.

So I guess its basicly when you have so many inconsistent statements you really just don't believe any of them.

Altho I wouldn't be suprised that who ever actually authorized the changes and when it went live.. might not have communicated this very well to the people asked to create it.

Obviously the NGE wasn't ready to be a live product... and still isn't imho.

rollback ftw.. oh wait nm.. ya I was just kidding.. really.

Rubenfield's explanation frankly makes little sense.  He's leaving out critical details.

For example, the revamps of CH, Squad Leader, and BH took place during the 2-3 month "crunch" period.  While BH was a pretty minor revision (the loot tables were modified) those revisions resulted in BH becoming PvE FOTM because the loot was made so much better.  My marks dropped some seriously desirable stuff, even when I was still a fairly lowbie MBH (50s-60s) slowly grinding up the CH side of my toon's template.

It was fairly obvious that some of the devs had no clue about the NGE from what I recall from the time.  The decision to "go NGE" might have been made on 31 Ocotber and announced two days later, but surely he could not have been so naive as to think that all that "crunch time" would have been very casually discarded.

Or not, given what SOE tossed away in revisions for a profession they put out Order 66 on.

The whole thing made so little sense at the time, or in retrospect.  Particularly the part where they pushed ToOW features for professions they had to know would be removed from the game with the NGE,creating legal exposure that forced SOE to offer refunds for ToOW, violating longstanding SOE policy in doing so.

Since he's still trying to convince people that the changes were both necessary and succesful (so that he doesn't come off looking like the horrible game developer he is) I wouldn't believe much of anything he has to say at this point.

He didn' say he didn't know about the NGE.  He said that he found out the NGE was going live about the same time we did.  Knowing it's being worked on and knowing if it's going live are different things.

Either way, at least he's filling in some gaps, not all the gaps mind you but some of them.

Coming from a guy that starts off his NGE thread with "OM NOM NOM NOM" I think he can hardly be taken seriously after revisioning his blog several times.

"OM NOM NOM NOM!"

in some back room somewhere they probably made a final decision to go with the NGE months before it went live when it was still being coded. But they probably also decided to say that they weren't sure until the day it launched, to cover their tracks, obviously.

we got nothing on them here, I'm sorry to say. And the deadline doesn't imply that they decided to go with the NGE either.

Jeff Freeman was good enough to dialogue with many of us right here on these very forums back in February of 07 about the way the NGE came about.  Here are some excerpts from those conversations.  After reading these, I think anyone would be in a position to form a conclusion about Rubenfield's latest claim.  Here's what Jeff had to say: