Postmortem: Launching the War Z | Hacker News Reader

Postmortem: Launching the War Z

gamasutra.com

34 pointsdanso12 comments

Although this is interesting, I feel like Sergey is glossing over the thing that hurt their reputation the most — the way they handled the negative response to the game. Reading here, you'd think they were sort of oblivious to the negativity, but instead they developed a reputation for being overly defensive. Criticizing the game would reportedly get you banned on The War Z's Steam forum. And when people started calling attention to the inaccurate description, rather than saying, "Oh, shoot, we messed up," Sergey went and did an interview with GameSpy where he basically defended many of the inaccurate statements, said that people "imagined" and "misread" the description, and kept trying to argue with the interviewer over things like whether "up to 50" is the same as "up to 100." Most likely he was just stressed and didn't really know what to say, but it really came across badly.

If they'd responded with the maturity shown in this piece, I think things would have gone very differently for The War Z. The game already had its troubles, but it probably could have gotten past that. But nobody wants to buy a troubled game from a developer with a reputation like that.

the entire article is one minimizing gloss after another.

Yeah when this game came up before someone pointed out one of his other games was:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rigs:_Over_the_Road_Racing

The biggest thing that's missing from this article to me is there's no explanation at all why the game was rebranded to Infestation. He wrote the article out as "we made mistakes, we learned" but if you learned and adopted why did the name have to change?

Dunno, seems pretty clear to me:

That said, The War Z was a terrible choice of name, as it naturally invited comparisons between our game and DayZ. In the run-up to launch, we thought we hit all of the important PR milestones: early demos, a press tour, regular asset reveals, hands-on previews, etc. Even so, we made a big mistake in not listening to the vocal minority of our community who thought the name was terrible. Handling our community communications differently would have alerted us to the major mistake we were making in choosing a name that was so close to our main competitor’s game.

It's a very sad story behind this. How they marketed directly to the DayZ community claiming that their game would be 10 times better then DayZ. Basically trying to over-run Dean Hall, the one man developer of DayZ, who had it very though at the time, with a horde of angry gamers demanding updates.

Dean was basically making nothing developing DayZ because he wasn't allowed to monetize it (because it was a Arma2 mod). While the War-Z team made tons of cache on pre-purchases even before their game had been released.

The War-Z totally deserved the shit-storm when players discovered they didn't even live up to half of all the promises and hype.

Would love someone's take on this game as it stands.

Not sure what the policy on linking to reddit is, but there was a recent discussion in /r/games (this is a subreddit for game discussion only. no memes).

http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/2qr7ra/i_know_its_bee...

With the start the game had, there was some surprise there were almost 4000 players at the time.

The gist of the comments are that it is still an awful buggy game, but apparently some people enjoy it (and some even stream it on twitch).

Review on Steam by azid2k9 with the most upvote:

From someone who has over 500 hours in this game, I can tell you that this game is not worth $1.

It used to be fun in alpha, before they started tweaking everything, and giving streamers special treatment, and hiring people who bashed the game constantly.

There's bugs everywhere, there's always been bugs, and there will always be bugs because the developers are idiots and didn't take one small thing from all the other MMO's.. A Public Testing Server.. As obvious as it might seem, that's something these money hungry developer's either didn't consider or just plain over looked due to costs.

There's been a cheating problem since the beginning and there will always be a cheater problem because instead of investing in an actual anti-cheat (Their current one is FairFight and it records statistics, all in-game bans are done by hand.) I seriously recommend you not play this unless you plan on cheating yourself because that is the only way you'll ever survive, unless you're actually somewhat decent at FPS's, which, in that case, be prepared to be banned at random times because a streamer or someone well known in the community said you cheated.

In the beginning, the developers stole their terms of service from League of Legends, banned people at random times to scare off cheaters (their version of an anti-cheat), and used fake screenshots which resulted in the game originally being pulled from steam. (Seriously.) It's for some reason been allowed back onto steam, and I believe everyone should know of this games terrible past and know that it's not changed one bit. Sergey Titov "OP Productions, LLC. CEO" (Previously known as Hammerpoint Productions) even went as far as to lie in interviews about this game, and delete any comments or reviews that said otherwise.

Players who requested a refund originally were reported and blacklisted from the website which then caused them to have international troubles making any further purchases for anything, even things not involved with online games, I.E. General online shopping..

Taken directly from a mod who previously worked for Hammerpoint / OP Productions

http://leviathyn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/t6F9c.jpg (Source - http://www.leviathyn.com/news/2012/11/29/the-warz-team-black... )

Avoid this game at all costs.

I think 500 hours of gameplay is a great deal. I don't play many games any more because most of the talent and budgets go to multiplayer games, but I don't relate to the people who play/talk loudly about these high-production-cost multiplayer games. They're interests and concerns are different than mine.

The social nature of gaming has alienated me.

This game is terrible, but I played it around 200 hours with some friends. It's quite fun when you do it social, but we defined some rules:

- Never get into servers with more than 40% of the slots occupied (resulting in a lesser chance of stumbling over hackers) - Keep always a low profile and avoid the big cities - Go for a safe zone at least one time per hour

It was fun, and I miss those days. Too bad the game doesn't kept us interested on playing it because of the lack of good news. Still I'm pretty sure Sergei made a buckload of money with it.

> Hours crunched before launch: Around 20 hours total

They didn't crunch much. that's pretty good! I didn't expect this.

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