F13.net reports of mass-firings at Sigil, Grouchy Gamer corroborates it. Ugly businiss, especially the fact that the people who busted their asses for Sigil and Vanguard are treated in such a manner. It’s not awfully surprising in a socio-economic climate in which employees aren’t seen as human beings but as resources to be used (up) and discarded on a whim.
An interesting bit from Grouchy Gamer:
I have heard that Brad is worthless for anything important, and a lot of people probably found him an irritant.
Sounds awfully like that anonymous forum posting that appeared back when Brad quit SOE:
Kelly Flock spins off redeye/verant basically to give Smedley an object lesson– surrounding yourself with talentless friends leads to ruin. Brad McQuaid was, and is, one of Smedley’s talentless friends.
[...]
Brad himself had basically done no work whatsoever since Everquest’s release, and many (including Kelly Flock) think he didn’t do anything *before* its release.
[...]
Some were “promoted” off the team. Like Brad McQuaid. He was moved because they were “borderline ready to revolt”. They “hated Brad so much they wanted to puke and constantly bitched about him.” Now the EQ Live team is “busy hating Jeff Butler with a passion”. Butler is a “major Brad lackey”. The factions are split “more like 90:10 on the hate Brad/Jeff vs. like Brad/Jeff side. It was BAD.” He is “so hated at Verant that out of a team of 60 people less than 10 would go with him. Probably closer to 5.”
[...]
Brad and Smed get flustered, some words are thrown around, accusations are made of Brad being a no-talent weenie, and Brad decides on the spot to leave.
An ex-guild-mate of mine who used to work at Verant told me that the content of this posting was more or less accurate back in 2001. When McQuaid and Butler announced their new company he predicted that Sigil would turn out to be a failure because Brad supposedly was too incompetent at managing teams and that Brad’s good reputation was largely undeserved. I didn’t lend it all that much credence back then, but turns out he was right.
Vanguard’s failure carries all the hallmarks of bad management. Over-optimistic goals, faulty planning, bad resource management, wrong priorities, abysmal execution… you name it. Add the various game design atrocities and you have an epic failure.
Brad thought he could take a bunch of experienced developers, license a shitload of middleware and developement tools and then churn out a massive amount of quality content, completely skipping the process of building a technological base for his product. Evidently, content creation never worked as efficiently as planned, the licensed middleware had to be customized heavily and a lot of their kooky game concepts didn’t work out (like the ill-fated original combat system).
I hope this debacle doesn’t spell the end of Vanguard. The most likely scenario is probably that Vanguard will be maintained by a skeleton crew and developement will slow down. Maybe SOE can turn things around. They did a decent enough job with EQ2 lately. Hope may spring eternal but right now, I don’t think that Vanguard has much of a future.