[Utnayan]

Originally Posted by Oloh

First and foremost, all the posts above by beta testers break the NDA. I know because I wrote it.

Good for you.

Aside from the legal aspect, I strongly advise that you consider the effects of your actions on your reputation. The gaming industry, and the MMOG industry in particular, is quite small. As a general rule, if you can't keep your mouth shut, you will quickly find yourself without information and without a forum in which to speak. In short, don't be a jackass or it will come back to haunt you, in more than one way.

I never signed an NDA. I'm not in beta. So here is what I was told by people in the beta who did sign, and were in.

The game as it was in beta sucked ass, no one was playing, is still getting features cut in lieu of bad design calls, and will be banking on subscription revenue to finish what was already hyped. I call that an NDA not protecting the secrets of the game, but an NDA protecting false misleading hype so that more suckers get lured into buying a misrepresented product. A practice that has been, for whatever God knows reason, justified by you as an acceptable business practice.

From here on out, how about you put out an NDA on people working at Sigil to not hype any features until they meet milestone on those features, or a very simple statement stating that these features may or may not make release. A nice little "*" next to every feature you have not made milestone on yet would be nice eh? Of course I will expect that to happen around the same time Molyneux ships a game with 65% of his hyped features actually making it into the game.

I would normally just let this slide, but I have seen a few pot shots like this and want to unofficially represent the players that would like to speak up but can't.

Then grow a pair of balls and lift the NDA that is only protecting your hype machine at this point so we can hear from all of them. Afraid of what they will say? You're damn fucking right you are.

Vanguard has bugs. I have seen them myself. Most are petty annoyances. The gamebreaking ones get fixed very quickly and the annoying ones get fixed with regularly scheduled patches. This is common stuff that anyone that has tested a MMOG before should know.

Bugs are one thing. Allocating resources to tackle fundamental game design while hyped features that you know full damn well will sell the game, being put on the back burner without telling anyone under the guise of an NDA, is another. I'll shit my pants if you actually post something on the official home page of the features that will NOT make release of Vanguard a month before retail. Which is why that precious NDA of yours will stick until the day of release. As well as God only knows how many review restrictions.

The game has not radically changed. I have been playing it since day one and it just hasn't. Things like the March Newsletter that scream "re-design" should be ignored for the most part for those not playing because they can't put it in proper context.

Oh ok. Please tell me what the legal term is then for a redesign.

I will give you an example of what can seem like a complete redesign on paper, but really was not a big deal.... (Words) Sounds like a lot of work, but it isn't.

That's called editing a spreadsheet. Not adjusting combat mechanics and revamping combat classes.

(It took NCSoft a few months of solid dev time to get English word wrapping to work in their Korean-based chat box.)

Sounds like they need to hire someone who has passed remedial programming.

I see this a lot, but when you know how MMOGs are made, the "cutting" of features start to make more sense. Basically, a good company will take the first several years of dev time and schedule what all needs to be done in rough form. As you finish with stuff, you fill in details about the next thing. As you start allocate resources to something, it gets fleshed out into final form, and completed.

Or in most cases, cut, even though it is hyped, while people like you stand by and watch people buy it anyway knowing you can charge 6 months of subscriptions to finish something a lot of people may have thought was already in the game. But, hell, you're a legal guru. Let the buyer beware right? Or maybe you can tell me how powerful that EULA you have people agree to in the game will actually hold up in court once someone finally gets off their ass and starts a class action against companies that pull this type of nonsense.

The day after the game is released...well, the whole team is coming back into the office, picking up that exact same schedule you were working on the day before release, and tackling the next thing on the "to do" list.

That isn't a problem as long as things on the "to do" list aren't features that were hyped to be in the game completely leading the customer to buy the package, only to see that nothing was said about the cuts of those features because of an NDA and now they get stuck paying the bill for something they already thought was going to be a feature.

So when you hear things getting "cut," in a MMOG you are really hearing an estimation of what the company thinks it can do and can do right, before the release date.

No problem. Just make sure people know, other than beta testers, what features are being cut so your consumers can make an informed decision on whether or not they would like to purchase said game. And don't hide under the veil of an NDA to make sure nothing slips out because it may hurt sales.