Re: apotheosys video drama

[Ahovv]

Since this Apotheosys video drama is coming to light, I'd like to comment on what a fucking liar Ocho is and some other related factoids.

I'm not going to throw any specific developers under the bus, but I can say truthfully that almost every Trion employee I've talked to has had negative opinions about management decisions and the culture at Trion.

Cost of living in the SF area goes up substantially over the past five years. Trion does not increase wages.

Rift goes F2P and Trion discovers raid gear can make huge income. From that point they adopted a policy of pumping out new raid tiers at a set rate, even if it meant rehashing the old ones. Thus, they could market the previous tier's gear for massive credit amounts without anyone able to claim it's "Pay to win." This is why you see constant rehashes on content instead of brand new content. Devs had to spend extra time making sure Intrepid: Hammerknell would be tuned reasonably enough and change a few fights so everything isn't exactly the same. Ocho outright denied this on the forums, claiming content wasn't pushed out just to sell gear. However, I have direct quotes from multiple developers stating otherwise. I will not put their position in jeopardy, but it's worth pointing this information out. Ocho is a goddamned liar, and he gets paid precisely to be one.

Most of the actual content designers disagreed with the gates/grinds of 3.0. Simply put, gating necessary content behind weeks of grinding or whipping out your credit card is unethical. Every developer I talked to about these issues agreed and protested these implementations, but they were overruled by people like Daglar. By the way, every employee also fucking hated Daglar. This is the guy who thought the Sparkle Troves dropping current-tier raid items was acceptable because "this will help hype up players to buy raid gear when the next tier launches."

I've known many employees at Trion who now work for more ethical companies. While some of them were tactful in their stated reasons for no longer working there, many had horror stories which back each other up. For example, there was a certain forum moderator (yes, one employed and paid for by Trion.) His name isn't important, but I will call out the piece of shit who got him fired. Dahanese (former member of the community team for both Rift and Defiance) claimed he was sexually harassing her. After threatening legal action, Trion decided it would be easier (and less publicly damning) to fire the moderator. Multiple perspectives back up the fact that he did not harass her, but she did not like him.

They would literally destroy an employee's livelihood over allegations, but go to such bizarre attempts to censor harmless criticism from outside sources. Many forum bans have resulted because players asked for someone to replace Josh York for itemization duties. The irony? He eventually got fired.

Finally, it's worth mentioning that with such flux in their employee roster, each piece of new content is being designed by either new employees or existing employees shifting roles because they were forced to. This causes great disinterest in their job, forcing many of them over to other games within Trion where they have more freedom, such as Trove of Atlas Reactor. The Trion QA team (along with many other job titles) work on all games. It is extremely rare for them to have any QA member working solely on Rift. This results in feedback which, while I am sure they are trying, will not be as successful as someone who could be considered an expert on the game.

Trion deserves the failures their game is experiencing at the moment. They have many talented engineers and designers, but those who lead the direction of Rift are holding it back in many ways. The culture of cash-grabbing and not listening to their veteran designers has resulted in most of the original team to quit the company, with many currently just waiting for a good offer.

[Fencers]

I don't know about this type of post. Honesty, one could just be making it all up. There is no source, there is no proof, a lot of the post is written under the assumption are as outraged over X or Y as the author, etc, etc.

Seem specious at best.

[Edge-]

Yeah, there's really not much to discuss here, especially since the majority of the claims are provided with zero supporting evidence. Criticism and critique is fine, but drama for drama's sake is not. Closing this down.