Some of its pretty obvious.  A dev finishes playing the newest Silent Hill installment, we get Harbinger of Madness.  They finish Risen, six months later we get shadowfall.

Others, I'd love to see through their brainstorming sessions.

"How about a quest where the players drown kittens for 20 minutes?"  The result - Lines of Supply.

Or "God I hate those whiny bastards on the forums."  The result - Restless Isles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqyDqf8hKxc

i suck at the fancy linking

Barkabout wrote on Aug 15^th, 2014 at 3:01pm:


That's a lot more involved than I envisioned....   

1: Brainstorming session in which a surprising number of good ideas are generated.
2: Devs become excited. Maybe this time will be different.
3: Management sifts through the ideas and prioritizes them in order from best to worst.
4: Management sets agenda, which includes nothing from steps 1-3.
5: Questions from staff. Management reveals that steps 1-3 were a "team building" exercise.
6: Someone trolls The Vault for exploits, gets promoted off of the hellhole toxic DDO work environment, and pretends to be competent at LOTRO.

1.) Hairbrained scheme from Marketing.
2.) Developer wanting to build resume builds new system to monetize hair brained scheme.
3.) Preview / PC people tell them how much of a stupid idea the initial idea is.
4.) THey say they are too far into designing it.
5.) they dump idea on live.  Player base tells them how stupid it is.
6.) they scale it *slightly* to what they originally intended to make removing the worst parts.
6a.) Fanbois gush about how they are listened to and how version 2 is much better (even when worse)
7.) DUmp on lamania with nearly no changes.
8.) Dump on live with no changes.
9.) Patch 3 days after update to fix an exploit. (but leave the rest)
10.)  Continue patching on a weekly basis.


or judging by Severlin
Give initial thoughts.
2.) vocal minority bitches that something is too good.
3.) Cry because he has no balls and change it.
4.) Make other changes that no one but a very few idiots asked for which are actually nerfs.
5.) Act like that was his plan the whole time, while giving away how little he knows about the game.

So where do the darts, hamsters with lasers on their heads, and spinning wheels of insight come in?

Revaulting wrote on Aug 15^th, 2014 at 7:04pm:


Maj asked for help. Once he learned that the database exploiting could not be fixed he moved on. Can you really blame him? DDO is now a dead end.

I will concede that he didn't help much on his rise through the ranks. In fact, I have other thoughts as to why he failed his way up the ladder that will never be uttered.

devs come up with a great idea:

"lets create a quest in which the party must divide into three equal groups, which lead to diverse and unique puzzles, gathering along the way amulets that will allow them to bypass specifically attuned barriers"

then they translate it to a bunch of awful languages to email it to their hired third world coders, who interpret it as

"Solve the puzzle, and this is just to clarify, is responsible for the development of education, but it only has three equal groups. GED."

the confused third world coders do their best to create what they were hired to do, so they dont lose their awesome contract with this great american software company

translation courtesy of http://ackuna.com/badtranslator

Barkabout wrote on Aug 15^th, 2014 at 6:46pm:



something tells me the next one will have a five-pound gummi bear head in it.

Shadehater wrote on Aug 15^th, 2014 at 11:09pm:

mystafyi wrote on Aug 16^th, 2014 at 8:22am:

Whatever bullshit you want to tell yourself, man.

mystafyi wrote on Aug 16^th, 2014 at 8:22am:


Yes!!

mystafyi wrote on Aug 16^th, 2014 at 8:22am:



Hmm! that sounds like I know what you don't know mumbo jumbo!!! with a dash of Dramatic!! vocabulary

Oh well! if you are going to be full of poop you might as well be a showman about it I guess!!!

Oh! I cannont believe the words I uttered!!!