[Suggestion] PS2 DEV- Distal DEV - Wrel Discussion

Distal sounds boring.

a farcry from being a lead designer in an mmofps thats for sure. Feels sad to see wrel move on to something like a tabletop rpg, maybe the mental beatdown he got for 7 years straight was enough to make him do a 180, he had a lot of pressure on him from the somewhat belligerent ps2 community. I would have liked to see him move up the ladder with a similar genre to ps2, putting all he learned to good use. hopefully he will after getting a well needed mental rest with his new project.

Wrel has very little legitimate experience or formal education to effectively contribute to the gaming community other than entertainment. It is an absolutely anomaly that they were hired in a critical position for this game, and has since proved a bad decision with rampant negative player feedbacks that Toadman Interactive is currently rushing to undo. With his nearly seven years as lead developer of this game, nearly every large release has been received poorly by the community, and an incredible failure to stem rampant cheating and toxic culture. His most positive influence to the Planet Side community was revamping part of the new player experience with an improved "basic training," however, it remained incomplete, much like many of the other developments released under his tenure.

From a business position - Any employee that has not performed for several releases with success should have been terminated long ago and replaced with a legitimate developer that insight into the user and gaming experience, in addition to the business side of development. The lead developer must be able to understand the needs of the users, how to effectively discern needs from wants, communicate with the community, deliver reasonable expectations, while also posturing for the long-term success of the project.

Exactly, I feel it was very weird they hired him and put him in such a significant position with little to no experience, and then kept him for so long despite the constant failures and community backlash.

It's sad because he was somewhat popular within the community when he did youtube, and after he got hired he quit youtube and turned the playerbase against him. I'm sure he came in with good intentions, but he had no idea how to lead or design anything. Plainly he just wasn't qualified for what he was hired to do. I feel he wasn't put in the right position, I'm not going to defend him as he's still this game's voldermort but since his specialty was youtube, he should've been hired for something related to that at least. Like a social media promoter, marketing or community manager or something. And even then he wasn't one of the game's best youtubers or the one with the most community support. Yet still they hired him, and they put him in a lead technical role when he had no managerial or technical background. Hearing some of the stories from the devs working with him it was insane how someone like that could exist in that position for so long.

If they really wanted him to be a dev, he should've at least done an internship or some sort of training before. Instead they threw him straight into a lead dev role and kept him for years despite all the game-breaking blunders. Obviously wrel played his part but the real issue here is how he was allowed to be hired and maintain his position for all these years. So I can't fully blame him since the game's been severely mismanaged since the start, but it's really mindboggling he was ever hired. Wish him the best but I don't think this was ever a suitable role for him.

It doesn't matter how qualified you are if you don't have the right vision.

True, however, it DOES matter how underqualified and inexperienced you are, even if you have the right vision.

Anyone can come up with good ideas, but what separates the can-do'ers from the can-sayers is the ability to execute.

The fact there's a series of unfinished projects, persistent bugs, and efforts in this game, says that the developers struggle(d) with both. Poor vision, poorly executed.

You could be a mediocre software developer or project manager that just knows how to listen to player feedback and outperform the former. Easily.