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Originally written by Shalidor:

Well there are certainly two notable sides to this coin...

Firstly, look at my post count if you haven't already. Yes, I'm just visiting.

Now onto what I want to say.

I've enjoyed Spiderweb games since shortly after Nethergate was released for Windows and I read about it on a website, I forget where. Every one of them has been well made, well written, and intelligently crafted. As I'm a kind of aspiring indie developer myself, I naturally look up to Jeff for consistently making such good games.
You came in at NG? How conveeeeenient. So you don't have, say, the odd sinking feeling that those of us who were here before you got when Jeff announced his next series of games would be Exile remakes? And you have no personal connection to BoE? No wonder...

Of course, there's a lot of evidence here that he hasn't been treating his community so good. I think a few people are definatly overstating their case, having read all the links posted here, but mostly I understand the anger and feelings of betrayal (and tell me about your mother).

Now the first thing I'd like to address is the attacks claiming he puts no heart into his games and just makes them to sell. Two things here-

-Anyone who makes games for anything but the money as a primary reason is not a professional, they are a hobbyist. You will not find them making games the quality of Spiderweb's.
Just a hobbyist? I've given previous examples -- Calling Firaxis several hundred hobbyists would be pretty far off, and yet they've consistently given a level of community recognition that has little or nothing to do with profit. All of the old companies or designers whose games are now free as a gesture of goodwill -- I suppose they're 'hobbyists' too? XEvil is free, and while it isn't made by self-described 'professionals', it's certainly more 'professional' than SW's.
Go back 10 years and make this kind of statement and people would seriously look at you funny. Gaming as a capitalist playground is the bastard child of the EA/Microsoft/Square business models, and some people are still doing it with fun in mind. Calling them 'hobbyists' and the people behind such lovely things as Final Fantasy XI and Madden 2004 'professionals' is a travesty.

-If a game has a great story, good plot, good characters and good gameplay, I think it has some heart behind it, period. If Jeff really only wanted money he could have made his games far, far deeper.
I don't get it -- 'if he only wanted money, he could have made them deeper'? Was that a thinko? It doesn't make any sense. And 'great story + good plot + good characters + good gameplay = heart' isn't true. As I said, Avernum was a turning point -- it showed pretty conclusively that Jeff wasn't in it for the fun any more. The heart ISN'T there, and he's just become an indie developer in a big-game coat.

The reviews that direct people to his site generally don't even scratch the surface of the things you can do. He could get away with it. But he consistently makes quality titles.

Oh yes, and the mail fraud thing. I really tried to look at this both ways but I simply can not within me find a shred of sympathy for 'the community' on this one; if Spiderweb really did miss an obscure legal note when they set up their mail system, well boo-hoo. I hardly think anyone has suffered because of this horrible fraud that hurt nobody and was completely morally sound. Best I can see it's just being used as a different tack of argument against him because he's already disliked for more serious and founded reasons, which leads me to:
The 'mail fraud' was a ha-ha-only-serious joke. No one got hurt by it, though? Au contraire: the design community did. They wanted serious bugs that hurt BoE functionality to be fixed, AS HIS AGREEMENT STATED HE WOULD, and he told them to bugger off.
If he were a big company, he would have been looking at a lawsuit over that one.

The issue of how he treated the BoE community. I never really used the editor and I suppose that makes me one of the many customers who merrily played through the game and many additional scenarios never knowing anything was wrong with the development community. It did strike me as a powerful and user-friendly tool the few times I looked it over. I can't really see any good reason for how he treated the community on this one, and I do find it rather disturbing. Most of all the issues I'm discussing actually.
BoE is his best work, easily. That he not only refuses to acknowledge this but goes on to treat the BoE community, his largest and (formerly -- if there are still ca. 2000 archives around, look there...) most loyal, like a non-entity...

Then there's the way he made Blades of Avernum 'against' what 'the community' wanted. Allow me to say first off that any indie game developer would have to be not only idealistic but plain dumb to not cater their game to the majority of their paying customers. Some of the things he left out because they would have made it too easy to screw up players' parties or frustrate players, I think he had very good reasons for.
Crippling an editor to prevent a bad designer from screwing up someone's gaming experience is not moral, it's absurd. No one is going to come out of 'kaBOOM! NEPHARS' having fun, whether or not it is cussed difficult, and that's where a lot of his decisions amounted to.

The unique selling point of BoA was the scenario designer and community, so unlike tools that are only partially modular like Neverwinter Nights and Morrowind (full games in their own rights, though they also have complete editing toolsets), so he can't really leave the average user with a note saying 'Caveat Emptor' and a link to a scenario download site. Making the scenarios safe is important.
'Making the scenarios safe is important' is a nonsensical argument -- stuff he rejected, e.g. custom spells, temporary spell modification, engine functionality changes within the scenario, and so on -- were not for any reason besides his belief in the 8-year-old demographic. Just because he created all of his works with the numbnuts player in mind doesn't mean a BoX designer has to. Look at some of BoE's best works -- On A Ship To Algiers, Nebulous Times Hence, Quintessence, Tatterdemalion -- and you'll find works which can't be won in every way, and in fact can only be won in certain ways.
That's not safety, it's demographic-diddling.


Of course, that only covers part of the big issue, and there are other ways of keeping public scenarios safe than completely restricting designer power (though it is probably the most brutally effective way). It does strike me as rather odd he ignored a lot of the community requests.

But ultimatly, was it a crime to do so? I'll finish addressing this right after I finish the other topic that leads up to it--
He made a promise he would support the community, and he neglected it. That is called immoral, generally, and the community was certainly irritated by it.

Major game development houses can afford to actively support their community more than indie devs.
Untrue! Indie devs have a smaller fanbase, a smaller devoted fanbase, and usually a more devoted smaller devoted fanbase. When he asked for suggestions on BoA, he was dealing with people who knew EXACTLY WHAT THEY WANTED AND WHY, AND WHY OTHER PEOPLE WOULD WANT IT. He ignored them -- these people who have, in essence, made his product worthwhile -- to cater to the hypothetical eight-year-old.
That's typical practices for big development houses, sure. And you can't exactly blame someone like EA or Blizzard for catering to the hypothetical eight-year-old, but in this case it was absurd.

May be a shock to your sensibilities or a slap in the face, but it's a simple fact. I have no clue how much money Spiderweb makes but if these games are a primary source of income for Mr. Vogel, it's almost certain that he needs to keep making them.
Spidweb is big as indie houses go. Let's put it this way: if he weren't making money doing it, he wouldn't have hired a secretary (an astoundingly incompetent and hostile one, at that), had a kid, or maintained a site like Irony Central. He's not a starving artist, I'm sorry.

He's not getting a continous flow of income from Blades of Avernum; it's not an MMO.
Sales are international and continuous, and he doesn't have server costs to worry about, so it's a tradeoff.
Once it's done, he has got to move on and start making a new game to keep the company alive. Major development groups, especially incredibly successful ones like Bioware, can afford, and I mean this literaly, to rest on their laurels with their next game while they patch every little glitch and add in every little feature their community wants.
It's called 'acknowledging bug reports'. Other indie gaming houses do this. Paradox not only fixes bugs in programs that don't sell well any more, but they continue to tweak gameplay. This is because Johann, head of the company, actually likes doing what he does and, get this, plays his own games. That's an indie developer. To get the sort of community apathy Jeff has displayed, you'd have to move into a MUCH bigger crowd.[/qb]

They are not in a constant struggle to stay alive. It's a completely different situation, and it's totally unfair to compare Bioware's support to Spiderweb's for this reason.
I made no such comparison. And again, I don't think Jeff is a starving artist, given the evidence we have to the contrary. He's probably at least comfortable on what he makes; even Exile 1 is probably still selling.

Related to this, I'll go back to Morrowind again. Bethesda Softworks is a self-publishing company. They do not have the budget that huge game developers do (for a perspective on how much money developers can be given for absolutely nothing, take a walk down memory lane to the ION Storm debacle); on the other hand, they are a subsidiary of a major media company, which keeps them alive through the hard times and means their budget is, oh, five thousand times more than Spiderweb's is. I don't have any statistics on how much money they rake in and fork into their games, but I'm fairly certain they're somewhere inbetween Spiderweb and Bioware (obviously on the Bioware side of things).

Bethesda has been supporting the Morrowind mod community a good deal. They've patched a lot of bugs long after the release and added a couple of requested features. But they're busy on their next game and they can't really afford to fix all the problems that are there. Ask any veteran of the Elder Scrolls Construction Set and he will gladly point out a bazillion flaws in the scripting engine, commands that don't work at all, weird errors when you make your game worlds too large, holes in the dialogue system, etc. It's not because it's a poorly designed game or a completely unsupported one, but these things simply will be found with an active community, and unless you're a really heavily funded development group with a load of money, you can not afford to fix them.
Why the hell not? It's his job. That's like me starting a pizzeria, promising customers generous toppings, and when they complain about getting two pepperonis on an extra-pepperoni pizza, me saying that I can't afford any more and if they don't like it they're hosed.

It was almost funny, in fact, reading some of these rants. They're almost identical to some of them from the spats that broke out in the Elder Scrolls forums sometimes. The soap opera drama element is all there. People feel betrayed by the company they've been loyal too. What's missing, I think, is a sense of perspective.
Sense of perspective: Several people offered to fix BoE for Jeff, and he refused. That's not an affordability issue, is it?

Bringing me back to the major point. Was it a crime to leave out so many of the much-wanted features in BoA, 'ignoring' the community? I don't think so. He's trying to make an enjoyable game,
No. He is trying to make a PROFITABLE game.
keep his company alive
His company clearly has not got much to worry about...

and make a profit for himself. That's good.
Anyone who's in it for personal profit isn't what the gaming market needs. We have too goddamn many football and golf games and shooters and Japanese RPGs on the market that exist for no reason besides profit. It isn't good. It's perverse and wrong, and it needs to be stopped.

Looking at it from the point of view of an indie developer, I'd love my community and try to work with them as much as possible (which is Jeff's sole loss in this little debate I've been having with myself), but the community's requests, if it was not indicative of the majority of paying customers, would simply have to come second (fourth) to the above three issues.
Jeff once said in an interview, 'For all I know, most of my fans could be septagenarian eskimos'. It's called 'the community' not because these are critics of his games, but people who will buy them whenever they come out. I bought every one of his games up until Avernum 2, for instance, and I've made several scenarios (albeit not good ones) -- why do I mean less than the hypothetical 8-year-old? Why does Stareye, who has been a beta-tester for Jeff many times, who has also bought many of his titles, and who has designed many GOOD scenarios -- why does his opinion matter less than that of the hypothetical 8-year-old's?
It doesn't even make good business sense, to say nothing of being the right thing. I find the fact people find these practices, on review, to be completely acceptable completely befuddling.

Rant over... feel free to flame me. I'd be more interested in a friendly discussion however :) .
I tried to be friendly, but frankly at times it seems you were more interested in defending Jeff than being reasonable about things. Look over the facts here -- yes, there have been deranged rants, but some real good points have been made, and Jeff's name isn't mud for no good reason.

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Originally written by Shalidor:

You might want to read a history book. Capatalism is a naturally occuring form of society; not the only one, but the only one that lasts when one society is exposed to another. It's also a wonderful concept in its simple ingenuity: Live and let live; practice liberty; reap the rewards of your efforts and answer for your own actions. It is a very odd coincidence that Jeff and I are both libertarians (though I'm sometimes more of a Whig) but it may explain why I like his games so much. But apparently I'm only going to get flamed more because this forum is largely socialist, or at least extremely leftist, based on the satirical nature of your comment. Oh well.

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The Iroquois are certainly responsible for a lot less in the way of mass murder than the Greco-Europeans.

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Now that I may or may not have been trounced on every subject I originally came in to discuss, I'll sit back and wait for a mod to drop by and prove to me that I am in fact only hallucinating that I live in New Hampshire, and am really Jeff Vogel's alter-ego

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