Brad Wardell - The Hard Truth

He is doing what any leader does, take the blame so his guys can do the work.  It's smart, its what leaders do in the military(mostly).  His staff cannot work if they are dealing with the crap.

He is doing the right thing.

Q: Brad Wardell – you have a martyr complex! You always take personal blame for everyone! Get off your cross! [yes, got this too]

A: That is my job. If you’re going to spend years railing about CEOs not taking responsibility when something goes wrong, it would be the height of hypocrisy for me not to take responsibility when things go badly on a launch.

In addition, some of the issues are directly related to my specific decisions.

https://forums.elementalgame.com/395485/page/1/

There's nothing wrong or time consuming with spending 45 seconds for a post so you can stand at the side of your boss... a good boss and then return to working.

I'm not saying he's immune from responsibility... I'm saying there was a TEAM of developers who created Elemental.  It's not like Brad is controlling every single action and decision from these developers.  I'm sure if an independent 3rd party team of researchers were to investigate what went wrong with Elemental I find it  "EXTREMELY" unlikely for them to place all the blame on one person.

I'm not sure what the issue is.  Of course other developers probably feel they dropped the ball.  Of course Brad feels like the buck stops with him.  I'd rather see suggestions, critiques, bug reports, and so on.  I don't wanna see a bunch of developers throwing themselves to the mercy of the masses.  They have jobs to do.  I want to see Boogie post about the 1.08 change-log; not that he feels sorry that he let everyone down. 

Look at professional sports teams.  How often to coaches and managers just straight up say that its their fault that the team wasn't prepared and they lost the game.  Or that its their fault etc. etc.  Sure it makes entertaining media if the players give a few sound bytes about there own lack of performance.  But the only purpose it serves is to feed the media frenzy. 

Brad is doing the right thing, irrespective of where the bulk of the so-called "blame" should actually fall.  Whether the bad decisions were really all on him; whether he feels sorrow and guilt for the games current state; whether he feels like he has to take the fall for his development team; whatever the reasons, Elemental will become a better game, and quicker, because of the man of the top is taking responsibility.

I've seen BoogieBac take responsibility.

It's besides the point though. A man does have to take responsibility for those working under him. If the end product isn't up to scratch it is ultimately he's fault for not noticing, not directing those under him to fix the problem and of course releasing the product before it's fixed. At least Brad has the courage to recognise this and accept that responsibility rather then taking it out on his staff who really have no 'final' word in how things turn out.

It's possibly also worth noting Brad did not display the best temperament towards anyone who told him the state of the game was terrible around the release week. I don't know what the working relationship between Brad and his employees is really like but I'm pretty sure the concern at your boss being pissed off at you for telling him his baby is a buggy unreleasable pile of frustration is pretty universal.

Any post of responsiblity needs only be a one sentence statement... not some big thread.  Standing in the pouring rain is rough, but it's worse standing in the pouring rain alone.  It's possible one or more developers did post accepting responsibility and I've missed it.

Yes I have high respect for Brad and just don't want him to place all the blame on himself if other sources of problems exist.  I've also recommended an internal anonymous voting system should be designed so none of the Stardock developers feel any pressure from Brad or another team member about blowing an emergency whistle.

Its just how things are done, man.  Is his ship.  It has some holes in it and water is flooding in, so let him do his job.  We don't need all the sailors crying over who was on watch when the hole appeared.  Not that I'm his psychologist or anything, but Brad seems more "Determined" than "Lonely" currently.

Erm.....Brad is the CEO of Stardock. While others on the development team may (or may not) have underperformed, the buck stops at Brad. He calls the shots, and it is on him that blame must be laid if stuff goes wrong.

He is only doing what any leader should do. And kudos for that.

Asmodean a.k.a. Morten

Boogie has shown himself to be a standup guy (I'm assuming a guy, and if wrong my apologies!), who's earned my respect with his posts here, especially since release.

He even used the "A" word: "As an employee of Stardock that worked on a product that many customers find sub-standard, I apologize."

Boogie is Aces in my book.

Hmm, I didn't mean to pick on Boogie (I hadn't seen that post, nor is it really the essence of what I was trying to say).  Forward-thinking is the directions I'd like to see things headed towards.  They've been bashed, bloodied, battered, and beaten.  While Brad stands at the top of the mountain accepting full responsibility, I expect that his team is furiously coding all the nice things we want to see in elemental.  Seriously, they're probably wearing out keyboards as we speak.

Responsibility is trickle up.  There's no need for anyone below the top to apologize as they simply did what was asked of them.  What purpose does it serve to have more than 1 person (with each subsequent person having less of 'their finger on the button') apologize?

I might have issues working for a guy who blames his underlings when things go badly.  That's just me.

This is probably unpopular, and maybe it's just me, but I feel it's time to move past this "blame" stage, because it does not matter. The situation is as it is, and there are two options here: 1) Stay here and keep on lamenting and dwelling, or 2) move on and contribute constructively.

That's actually hard to believe. Lots of beta testers even without seeing the 1.06 version (or whatever is the "release" version) understood that the game is rushed. I can not believe that Stardock employees did not rise this issue, unless Frogboy runs Stardock in such way that everyone is afraid to speak his own mind. But this is hard to believe, frankly, and even if it was true, then it is only more "fault" on Frogboy.

We don't know what happened.  That's the TRUTH.

What we do know is that the direction of the game changed.  Soveriegns and children show that.  We know that some systems that originally worked to some extent prior to the changes no longer functioned as intended,  such as the weak magic system.  We know there are bugs.

Someone made the decision to ship.

Someone didn't see the full extent of the weaknesses caused by the changes,  or didn't feel they were major,  which is *not* uncommon when you're close to a project.  It's *very* easy to lose objectivity,  just because something's better than it was doesn't mean it's right.  Someone felt the bugs could be squashed between RTM and Day 0,  and it wasn't possible.

So Brad's taking responsibility,  in the end,  he could've held it up.  Did someone tell him "Maybe we should wait 4 weeks"?  We'll never know,  we don't need to.  For whatever reason,  what was expected to happen didn't.  Brad's being a responsible CEO and acknowledging he could've changed things.

The TRUTH is that this makes a stronger company.  When the CEO says, "Hey,  it's partly my fault too,  I could've done...",  well,  that's a company I want to work for.  Much better than a CEO who says "It wasn't my fault!".

This is what happens when you redesign midstream and hold to schedule.  One little change has reprocussions all the way down the line.  Stardock learned a critical lesson,  this experience will make them a better company.

And the aftermath definitely makes sure I'll give them my money again.  I can support a company who says "It's our fault,  we're sorry", and busts butt to release fixes.  Not since Black Isle and Fallout 2 has a company shown such dedication.

Trivia time:

Master of Magic was released in a similiar state,  and is now a classic.

Fallout 2 was released in a similiar state,  and is now a classic.

Plancescape Torment was released in a similiar state,  yup,  also a classic.

Master of Orion to this day has a gamekilling bug (32k ship stacks,  murder without the black hole generator),  yup,  classic.

Diablo was released broken,  Starcraft and Red Alert 2 had critical imbalances,  TES: Daggerfall was released broken,  Magic the Gathering Online has had numerous instances of complete failure,  Diablo 2 was released hellishly broken,  so was Warcraft 3.

The TRUTH is,  it's not how it released that's remembered,  it's what you do on that critical day when you realize how bad things are,  and what you do the weeks after that are remembered.  Because the TRUTH is,  most of the classics released with problems just as bad.

Edit,  let's get this over with pre-emptively,  sorry for making a long post twice as long all,  quit reading here if you want,  the following is a list of how those games actually released.

MoM-  Crash bugs,  imbalances,  performance problems.

Fallout 2- Crash bugs,  incompletable quests,  broken car,  disappearing inventory.

Planescape-  Gamekilling memory leak that made it unplayable for more than a few minutes at a time.

Moo-  Imbalances,  32k ship bug.

Diablo- Imbalances,  crash bugs.

Starcraft/Red Alert 2-  Imbalances,  Unbeatable strategies(Zerg rush,  tank rush) due to imbalances.

Daggerfall-  Bugs,  crash bugs,  bugs with random dungeon generators,  game-stopping quest bugs.

MTGO-  Twice new versions killed the service for months,  frequent server crash bugs,  inability to handle volume.

Diablo 2- Copy protection prevented many CD drives from reading or installing properly causing fatal crashes,  servers weren't stable for months.

Warcraft 3- Bugs with DirectX and Nvidia cards causing crashes continuously,  when Nvidia was the only card to own.

they're all bros, alright. calm down. you know, life is pretty ok, deep breath, deep breath.

Leaders are responsible for the decisions of those under them, as well as their own.  I respect Brad for taking responsibility.  He didn't single-handedly cause all the problems, but he is doing his job and looking after his employees.  If you worked on the game NTJedi, would you be stepping forward to be torn apart by the rabid wolves on the forums?  No, it's not your job.

On another note it is very difficult for a developer to give "warnings" when the person with creative control is a high level manager.  You mention that an "internal anonymous voting system should be designed".  Guess what?  If such a thing doesn't exist, it is management's responsibly to set it up.

It's one thing to take the blame being the leader of a group, company, etc. However reading up on the issues Elemental has had and is still having (and improving it seems) I do have to question what was the QA team doing. Opinions from beta testers is one thing. However there had to be an internal team doing this. Exactly what were they doing that they didn't catch or even see some of these things. Isn't it a QA team's job to look at the state of a game? I fully expect PC games to be unfinished these days and that's just sad in general. However this is the big thing that confuses me in the end. Unless my understanding of what QA means is just wrong.

THE THRUTH IS Brad made Elemental alone in his spare time with nothing more then a C64 and a 1997 SQL for Dummies book!  He can't lay off any of the Elemental team because they are the voices in his head (he has tried!!).  Brad HAS TO take the blame because as he said out of context one time on another board, and I quoth: "Step on a crack and BREAK YOUR MOMMA's BACK!"

[Editor's Note:  Can EVERYONE please stop 'poking the fire' one way or the other, and let the good people at Stardock work this out?  I promise you, it will be OK.]

Why do I see this thread getting out of hand, locked, and closed by the end of the day when I wake up? LoL

Who's taking bets?

Unnecessary drama.

I also believe that the best "apology" from the team is to concentrate in making the patches the best they can. This is far better than any long thread in which every team member apologies