Don't you think it's a little tasteless to make jokes about the fact that a load of people are now out of work, that their families are now suffering and that these people's lives have been turned upside down?

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Well, good thing DAOC is still awesome.

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It's always sad to hear about layoffs, even in a fairly unpredictable field such as game design. Hope we hear an official word soon.

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All this while Mark Jacobs sleeps on a bed made out of gold.........

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Not good for the people being laid off, and also not good for the MMO industry.

If the 300,000 subscriber number is not deemed "worth it" by EA, then yes, there is no way to have a successful MMO if only compared to WoW.

I personally thought Warhammer sucked, but the effort and passion was clearly there by developers. Apparently that's not enough.

Will be interesting to see what Jacobs spews about this.

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This is very bad news. As much as I think WAR isn't very good, it's sad to see people effected like this.

I hope they take a long hard look at the people running the show here and determine how their leadership has contributed to the success of this game, and then see how they can best use the staff who have committed long hours of effort towards this project.

I just don't know how WAR can live up to it's potential now this has happened, i can't think of a game that turned the corner after this type of thing occurred. I did have an account for WAR to keep my hand in, given this news, it definitely tempers my enthusiasm for the forthcoming changes and the future for the game as a whole.

I hope the staff manage to find employment quickly in the industry.

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Is it sad when someone loses their job? Yes. But someone had to go and we all saw it coming. EA is the second largest video game publisher on the planet and they have invenstors they must report to. And when the largest video game publisher on the planet (activision) has 11 million subs for it's fantasy mmo and you are touting 300k when you expected to have at least 500k, I could see a whole board room full of angry people. Hopefully this shake up will get new blood into Mythic to make it the great game it can be.

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It's deeper than MJ is letting on. A good friend of mine who was a programmer there got laid off. It's sad - the grunts who slave to implement the ideas and demands of the higher ups are the ones who get laid off, yet the higher ups who made the bad decisions (and who get paid a lot more) still get to keep their jobs. That is, unless EA decides to move all the Mythic games IPs to Bioware in Austin, TX, which wouldn't surprise me since EA is going to shutter 12 studios.

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Aww - I hope they all land on their feet.

Being an out-of-work IT developer is not much fun, as I'm acutely aware.

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This is really sad news. What a bad time to loose a job. Jacobs has a plausable explanation up on the Herald. But there seems to be so much more QA could do for this game; long-term bugs abound.

Recent bad news for many MMO's call into question whether publically traded companies have any business publishing this kind of product. Stock holders and board members and the MBA's in the corner offices demand results in the short-term and lack patience. Those expectations conflict with the reality of the genre.

Another problem is over-hype. All but a handful of WAR's servers are dead, which is driving current subscribers away. Mythic sold many, many boxes. But now that's hurting the game because the population is too spread out.

Time will tell what kind of marketing campain Aion will get. I hope NC Soft is learning from others' mistakes.

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EA is burning jobs right and left to do anything to make the shareholders happy after having to publish a large loss on the annual report. What most companies don't want known is that who gets cut has nothing to do with the companies future and more to do with who you go drinking with on Friday night. I know people at several of EA's studios and lets just say hypothetically that the guy slacking off but goes drinking with the boss is probably not on the cutting block, while the guys doing their best to make game work are getting dropped en mass to save the bosses from taking pay cuts. The worst part is that if some of the higher ups were willing to tighten their belts a little say 120k instead of 150k far less jobs would need to be cut.

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City of Heroes survived for about a year and a half on 15 staff. Not 15 developers, 15 staff total, including receptionist.

It put out a free expansion every... four months or so, with just 15 people.

It's amazing what you can do when you have no choice.

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"Update: Mark Jacobs, in a post to the Warhammer Herald, attempts to assuage possible player anxiety over today's layoffs. He describes the layoffs as a part of moving from the pre-launch to post-launch footing,"

I wouldn't expect him to say anything less...

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Bah.

I hope not. I am tired of WoW, bored of CoX, falling asleep flying my EVE ship, etc...

At least WAR feels new and I, at least, feel as though the Mythic team was trying to fix their problems and grow their game. Compared to many other games, I feel as though they have been quite responsive.

Of course, like all developers, they have their vision which is always not what us players want individually. Like myself, I feel scenarios are killing WAR due to the fact that it is removing players from the world and shuttling them into instances. I doubt any post by me will convince Mythic otherwise.

I hope that WAR keeps growing and brings back players. It needs more dynamic RvR, but they are close. I hope they have stuff in there.

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One would think EA has the money to avoid this. Or maybe they do and don't feel that WAR/Mythic is worthy of a "bailout"?

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