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Posted February 16th, 2009 by Ethec

#1,016 - Fun with upper management at an MMO development studio.

Welcome to the 1,016th Edition of Loading...

If you aren't reading this in your e-mail, you could be. Sign up! Are you looking for gaming news? Look no further for all of the headlines. General industry news and Ten Ton Hammer excusives are all yours as part of Ten Ton Hammer's RSS Feed . Enjoy!

The Pulse

You vote with what you view at Ten Ton Hammer, and the result is the Ten Ton Pulse (What is Pulse?). After an impressive (nearly) weeklong run at the top with the Choppa, Slayer, and Call to Arms article and interview, WAR has settled back into its number 2 spot.

Here's today's top 5 Pulse results:

Biggest Movers in the Top 20 today :

Requiem: Bloodymare (UP 8 to #17)
Guild Wars (UP 4 to #14)
EverQuest 2 (UP 2 to #7)

Loading... Daily

Loading... a counterculture revolution without a clue.

After a coaching change , you sometimes hear that the pro athletic team had "tuned out" the former head coach. More often than not, he or she is either failing to motivate and inspire or is just plain selling a system that the team and front office are no longer buying. Such was the case this morning, when I awoke to the news that my beloved Pittsburgh Penguins had fired their head coach. Time will tell if changing horses midstream is a good idea, as Therrien had more longevity than notable former Penguins coaches like Herb Broooks and Bob Johnson, but I'll save discussion of that point for my nonexistent hockey newsletter.

But I imagine the same thing can happen in any professional organization, where a leader's role is less to instruct than to facilitate and inspire cooperation on every level. Think about it: if someone gave you rein of 200-300 highly skilled and very creative people and a budget in the tens of millions, then gave you 3-4 years to build a /cough "WoW-beater." If the thought doesn't scare you, you probably haven't come to terms with how many of the game design ideas you've bantered back and forth with your DnD buddies just plain don't work.

And that's just the game design side of the job, there's no school to go to to teach you how to deal with 300 differing ideas and philosophies on how to build a killer MMO; there's no doctorate in ego management. Most often the top dogs of MMO studios are battlefield promotions from within, this being such a high stakes, high turnover industry. I won't say that most don't seem to do a good job, only that a fair number don't strike me as... well, people-people. You have to have a ton of confidence to get folks to buy into your plans and forsake their own, and a glut of confidence, unlike what Charlton Heston used to say, is very irritating, especially to those who are similarly confident in differing ideas. Is it any surprise, therefore, that just about every studio has its skeletons in the closet - that subcutaneous layer of intrigue and drama that occasionally boils up to the surface.

Whether due to good management, star power, or both, we've never gotten that Clash of the Egos feel from is 38 Studios, yet. Today we air the 38 Studios, Year 2 panel video from NY Comic-Con. Depending on your perspective, it's either the most boring or maybe the most interesting panel we did at NYCC, because since they won't talk about Copernicus and haven't for two years running (aside from some concept art), they're forced to offer this real-time picture of a studio (and not just a game) in-development. If you're a fan of the MMORPG category and hope to gauge a game's hype-worthiness by the quality of the studio (something Blizzard, and only Blizzard, has made easy), you might find it fascinating.

Tomorrow and Wednesday we'll have two fan favorite panels - Champions Online / Star Trek Online and DC Universe Online, along with the MMO Roundtable to close out our NYCC offerings later this week.

As always, our aim is to put you in our shoes as much as possible at events, but because these panel videos are extremely long (each one takes a full night to render, hence the delay in getting them out to you), I've been flirting with the idea of turning them into video podcasts for premium members. If your preferred way to watch is on an iPod in-transit rather than as a streaming video on site, please post feedback or else I'm not going to mess with it.. We should have the audio-only MP3s ready for download in the next day or so.

In other news, congratulations are in order for the longest continuously running guild in MMO gaming (or any gaming) and good friends of Ten Ton Hammer, The Syndicate, who just celebrated their 13th anniversary. Long live the Syndicate, indeed!

Also, you still have plenty of opportunity to hit the jackpot with our Tales Runner "Dress for Success" giveaway, featuring over $20k in prizes. Everyone gets some in-game swag just for entering too, click here for details.

Your comments and questions always welcome in the Loading... forum, or feel free to email me.

Shayalyn's Epic Thread of the Day

From our Ten Ton Torched Forum

This is the post that never ends...

It's a mad Monday, and the perfect day to toss up a thread from our Torched forum. The forum is supposed to be for our too-hot-to-handle, no-holds-barred threads, but I've found that, on the whole, Hammer Heads are pretty lousy flamers. So, instead of trolling, baiting and hating, our flames forum contains only a few controversial threads, and a whole lot of threads like this one, in which we take an innocent little song by Sherry Lewis and Lambchop and corrupt it horribly with stuff like band camp stories and some things involving sheep that are probably better left to the imagination. We apologize to Lambchop, and to anyone whose childhood memories we've forever stained. (You might say Lambchop had it coming, but we're giving her the benefit of a doubt, 'cuz that's how we roll.)

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Awesome Quotes from the Epic Thread:

Quote: Cody Bye
I think the correct term is "bleeted." Horses "neigh" and "whinny" but goats and sheep "bleet."

My, you know a lot about sheep. And those are lovely velcro mittens you're wearing, by the way.

- Vaebn
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Do you have a favorite Epic Thread? Let us know!

5 new MMOG hand-crafted articles today! 67 in February! 203 in 2009!

New MMOG Articles At Ten Ton Hammer Today [Thanks Phil Comeau for links and Real World News]

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