

Postmortem: Launching the War Z - danso
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/SergeyTitov/20150113/234086/Postmortem_Launching_The_War_Z.php

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chc
Although this is interesting, I feel like Sergey is glossing over the thing
that hurt their reputation the most — the way they handled the negative
response to the game. Reading here, you'd think they were sort of oblivious to
the negativity, but instead they developed a reputation for being overly
defensive. Criticizing the game would reportedly get you banned on The War Z's
Steam forum. And when people started calling attention to the inaccurate
description, rather than saying, "Oh, shoot, we messed up," Sergey went and
did an interview with GameSpy where he basically defended many of the
inaccurate statements, said that people "imagined" and "misread" the
description, and kept trying to argue with the interviewer over things like
whether "up to 50" is the same as "up to 100." Most likely he was just
stressed and didn't really know what to say, but it really came across badly.

If they'd responded with the maturity shown in this piece, I think things
would have gone very differently for The War Z. The game already had its
troubles, but it probably could have gotten past that. But nobody wants to buy
a troubled game from a developer with a reputation like that.

~~~
ibelimb
The biggest thing that's missing from this article to me is there's no
explanation at all why the game was rebranded to Infestation. He wrote the
article out as "we made mistakes, we learned" but if you learned and adopted
why did the name have to change?

~~~
chris_wot
Dunno, seems pretty clear to me:

 _That said, The War Z was a terrible choice of name, as it naturally invited
comparisons between our game and DayZ. In the run-up to launch, we thought we
hit all of the important PR milestones: early demos, a press tour, regular
asset reveals, hands-on previews, etc. Even so, we made a big mistake in not
listening to the vocal minority of our community who thought the name was
terrible. Handling our community communications differently would have alerted
us to the major mistake we were making in choosing a name that was so close to
our main competitor’s game._

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z3t4
It's a very sad story behind this. How they marketed directly to the DayZ
community claiming that their game would be 10 times better then DayZ.
Basically trying to over-run Dean Hall, the one man developer of DayZ, who had
it very though at the time, with a horde of angry gamers demanding updates.

Dean was basically making nothing developing DayZ because he wasn't allowed to
monetize it (because it was a Arma2 mod). While the War-Z team made tons of
cache on pre-purchases even before their game had been released.

The War-Z totally deserved the shit-storm when players discovered they didn't
even live up to half of all the promises and hype.

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joshmn
Would love someone's take on this game as it stands.

~~~
zimbatm
Review on Steam by azid2k9 with the most upvote:

From someone who has over 500 hours in this game, I can tell you that this
game is not worth $1.

It used to be fun in alpha, before they started tweaking everything, and
giving streamers special treatment, and hiring people who bashed the game
constantly.

There's bugs everywhere, there's always been bugs, and there will always be
bugs because the developers are idiots and didn't take one small thing from
all the other MMO's.. A Public Testing Server.. As obvious as it might seem,
that's something these money hungry developer's either didn't consider or just
plain over looked due to costs.

There's been a cheating problem since the beginning and there will always be a
cheater problem because instead of investing in an actual anti-cheat (Their
current one is FairFight and it records statistics, all in-game bans are done
by hand.) I seriously recommend you not play this unless you plan on cheating
yourself because that is the only way you'll ever survive, unless you're
actually somewhat decent at FPS's, which, in that case, be prepared to be
banned at random times because a streamer or someone well known in the
community said you cheated.

In the beginning, the developers stole their terms of service from League of
Legends, banned people at random times to scare off cheaters (their version of
an anti-cheat), and used fake screenshots which resulted in the game
originally being pulled from steam. (Seriously.) It's for some reason been
allowed back onto steam, and I believe everyone should know of this games
terrible past and know that it's not changed one bit. Sergey Titov "OP
Productions, LLC. CEO" (Previously known as Hammerpoint Productions) even went
as far as to lie in interviews about this game, and delete any comments or
reviews that said otherwise.

Players who requested a refund originally were reported and blacklisted from
the website which then caused them to have international troubles making any
further purchases for anything, even things not involved with online games,
I.E. General online shopping..

Taken directly from a mod who previously worked for Hammerpoint / OP
Productions

[http://leviathyn.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/11/t6F9c.jpg](http://leviathyn.com/wp-
content/uploads/2012/11/t6F9c.jpg) (Source -
[http://www.leviathyn.com/news/2012/11/29/the-warz-team-
black...](http://www.leviathyn.com/news/2012/11/29/the-warz-team-blacklists-
customers-asking-for-refunds-and-gets-blasted-by-ex-mod/) )

Avoid this game at all costs.

~~~
snlacks
I think 500 hours of gameplay is a great deal. I don't play many games any
more because most of the talent and budgets go to multiplayer games, but I
don't relate to the people who play/talk loudly about these high-production-
cost multiplayer games. They're interests and concerns are different than
mine.

The social nature of gaming has alienated me.

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tiagocesar
This game is terrible, but I played it around 200 hours with some friends.
It's quite fun when you do it social, but we defined some rules:

\- Never get into servers with more than 40% of the slots occupied (resulting
in a lesser chance of stumbling over hackers) \- Keep always a low profile and
avoid the big cities \- Go for a safe zone at least one time per hour

It was fun, and I miss those days. Too bad the game doesn't kept us interested
on playing it because of the lack of good news. Still I'm pretty sure Sergei
made a buckload of money with it.

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je42
> Hours crunched before launch: Around 20 hours total

They didn't crunch much. that's pretty good! I didn't expect this.

