War Z Creator Apologizes: ‘I Became Arrogant And Blinded By The Early Success And Quick Growth’

By KiddMischief - 12-27-2012, 07:22 PM - Boxden > BX GameSpot

The man behind The War Z has apologized to his fans for some of the controversies that have entangled the much-maligned survival horror game over the past couple of weeks.

In an extensive letter that tackles some of the game's well-publicized issues—like misleading Steam descriptions and community mismanagement—War Z boss Sergey Titov says he'll be hiring new staff, changing the War Z forum's policies, and "[providing] better communication" in the future. He also apologizes for his missteps.

Here's the full letter he sent to War Z players today:


		Dear fellow Survivors, It has now been more than two months since we launched public access to The War Z. We've definitely had our ups and downs, and I thought that this Holiday break was the right time for me to try to step back a little and think about our journey since it started. This may be a little long, but I would appreciate if you could stay with me for a few minutes as I try to go over the highlights of the game as well as some of the hurdles and controversies, how we have addressed that and what our plans are. First of all a very big and sincere "Thank You!" to all of you. We are really proud of the community we have formed with you guys. Every day we have hundreds of thousands of players on our servers, and this is a life-changing event for the team and me. We are blessed to have you as members of the community and we are well aware that without you the game would be nothing. Along with that thanks, though, I need to admit that we failed to effectively communicate some of our plans and actions to both our existing players and to our new prospective players. This failure to communicate resulted in some very negative feedback from some members of our community, but while it might be easy to label them as "haters" or some other dismissive term, in all honesty this is my fault. I became arrogant and blinded by the early success and quick growth of The War Z, our increasing number of players, numbers we were getting from surveys, etc., and I chose not to notice the concerns and questions raised by these members of the game community as well as others. This failure is entirely on my shoulders and if anything I owe thanks to that vocal minority and admit that I should have paid attention sooner. I chose instead to concentrate on the bigger picture – my dream of turning The War Z from being a game developed by a small indie team into a large online venture, instead of addressing small things first and staying focused on the game issues. At the end my arrogance led us to the moment, when all those small things finally caught up and created a "perfect storm" that affected all of our community members. For that I'm truly sorry and apologize to all of our community as well as the larger PC gaming community that is not yet playing The War Z. I do not take this situation lightly, and last week events were especially humbling for me. I've experienced a range of emotions, most of which centered on regret for not having addressed some of the issues differently than we did, but we can't change the past. The only thing we can do is to be sure that we won't repeat the same mistakes in the future. I have realized that as the leader of this ship, I missed all early warnings that were saying, "Your community is not as happy as you think they are, you need to alter course." I was too focused on how great we are and how a small independent team got their first game to over 700,000 users in a two-month period. Though that is something to be very proud of, allowing that to overshadow the existing community and their satisfaction was poor judgment. I want to give you some insight into what our plans are for the future, but before we get to that, I'd like to clear the air with you on several important topics. Community management and moderation – the problem Even since the early Alpha launch, this game has always cultivated a large and loyal player base that is very active in the game. Again, thank you for this. Unfortunately, we weren't prepared for this large success and the way we managed the community was not the way it should've been. We relied too much on forum moderators, whose primary role was to punish those who break rules, not to engage the community and guide conversations into productive discussions about problems. There wasn't enough presence of the development team on forums, there wasn't enough updates on development of UPCOMING features. We failed to communicate our position and messaging on the outside platforms such as Facebook, twitter and various online websites, and when we did this we chose to rely more on arrogance rather than being humble and trying to understand why people were saying negative things. We chose to tune out negative reactions to the game, not paying enough attention to them – and this, again, is my fault. We chose to rely too much on numbers – percentage of refund requests, number and dynamic of our daily and monthly active users, etc. Well, in hindsight – those things probably work well for more casual games, but the hardcore PC gaming community is much different and can be very vocal about what they feel. Even when the percentage of players with negative comments is small, as the community grows, even a small percentage can add up to be a very significant absolute number. And it's not just a number – those are real people with real issues they are having with the game. OP Productions (publisher for War Z) and me personally have failed to address those issues effectively.

> War Z Creator Apologizes: ‘I Became Arrogant And Blinded By The Early Success And Quick Growth’ - Photo posted in BX GameSpot | Sign in and leave a comment below!

Read the the letter in it's entirety here:
War Z Creator Apologizes: 'I Became Arrogant And Blinded By The Early Success And Quick Growth'

12-27-2012, 07:31 PM

Did he apologize for Big Rigs

12-27-2012, 08:28 PM

Takes guts to do what he did here..

Respect.

[pic]

12-27-2012, 08:58 PM

!! him and his !!ty game.

Once Day Z officially releases it's standalone this game won't even be remembered.

12-27-2012, 09:03 PM

Originally Posted by IronMaiden

!! him and his !!ty game.

Once Day Z officially releases it's standalone this game won't even be remembered.

Ehhhhh, he tried.

Greedy, yes... but I can bet 99% of people on here woulda done the same in his situation.

12-27-2012, 09:37 PM

Originally Posted by D.IrIsH

Ehhhhh, he tried.

Greedy, yes... but I can bet 99% of people on here woulda done the same in his situation.

The guy is a piece of !! that ran a piece of !! practice and got called out every single day, he even STOLE another games TOS.. The guy is a scum bag.

12-28-2012, 02:17 AM

Goobers gon goob.

10:49 AM

This dude is a piece of !!, the low of the low in the games industry.

Game is beyond horrible and this guy is a !!ing !!.

Never have ever wished [rip] on someone in all my years, but if this idiot died I would not be sad one bit.

If you check his previous interviews or videos of him gaming on youtube this !! hes saying here is way different they in the past. Look at how much better his english is n !!. Dude is a grade A !! and tried to get as much money as possible before his scam got found out.

In my 25+ years of gaming I have not witnessed so much bull!! around a game. From how bad the game actually plays to the lying and false advertisement that this [!] does, straight scum bag who is trying to cash in on DayZ fame.

12-28-2012, 06:34 PM

Originally Posted by katalist

This dude is a piece of !!, the low of the low in the games industry.

Game is beyond horrible and this guy is a !!ing !!.

Never have ever wished [rip] on someone in all my years, but if this idiot died I would not be sad one bit.

word? over a game? [pic]

u sound like a nerd raging maggot of an individual, dog.

12-28-2012, 08:20 PM

Originally Posted by UniVersaceDaGr8

word? over a game? [pic]

u sound like a nerd raging maggot of an individual, dog.

[pic][pic][pic][pic][pic]

12-28-2012, 10:42 PM

War Z will only be remembered as how not to make/release a game.

12-28-2012, 11:15 PM

Originally Posted by UniVersaceDaGr8

word? over a game? [pic]

u sound like a nerd raging maggot of an individual, dog.

this [pic]

12-29-2012, 12:49 AM

Originally Posted by UniVersaceDaGr8

word? over a game? [pic]

u sound like a nerd raging maggot of an individual, dog.

[pic][pic]

12-29-2012, 01:48 AM

this game has potential... maybe after pulling in some actual developers and implementing what they have said in the past, it will be a great game. I started playing it whenever they released the alpha version and it was pretty intense and fun until they got greedy and the hackers were every where.

12-29-2012, 01:52 AM

Originally Posted by UniVersaceDaGr8

word? over a game? [pic]

u sound like a nerd raging maggot of an individual, dog.

He's just PMS'ing cause the Broncos are doing really good this year and he can't say anything about them in the BXSC. [pic] How you enjoying your lifelong banishment from the BXSC, Kat? [pic]

12-29-2012, 04:48 PM

Originally Posted by Zaosyn

Did he apologize for Big Rigs

No he actually laughed at any1 wanted to play a game where you drive a big rig around...

[pic] at ppl wanting to be a truck driver when they grow up

12-29-2012, 05:03 PM

Originally Posted by katalist

This dude is a piece of !!, the low of the low in the games industry.

Game is beyond horrible and this guy is a !!ing !!.

Never have ever wished [rip] on someone in all my years, but if this idiot died I would not be sad one bit.

If you check his previous interviews or videos of him gaming on youtube this !! hes saying here is way different they in the past. Look at how much better his english is n !!. Dude is a grade A !! and tried to get as much money as possible before his scam got found out.

In my 25+ years of gaming I have not witnessed so much bull!! around a game. From how bad the game actually plays to the lying and false advertisement that this [!] does, straight scum bag who is trying to cash in on DayZ fame.

what exactly did this guy do?

12-29-2012, 05:26 PM

Originally Posted by r.burgundy

what exactly did this guy do?

too be honest, he put out a game that i think was $15 bucks or lower.

The game was still in early stages of development from what i have seen from the 2 youtube clips i watched.

It hit steam (when i guess it should have not) with a bunch of features it was suppose to have, but slim to non was actually offered.

People expected the best game in the world and when duked out their 15 or 10 dollars they earned from doing their mothers laundry for a month they had a hissy fit and wanted to cyber k!ll this guy.

BUt i only saw 2 youtubes and one was a guy !!ing the entire time and the other was a common sense individual talking about all the stuff that so far has been added and for 10-15 bucks the game did not look all that bad [pic]

12-29-2012, 05:42 PM

As much hate as War Z gets I do wanna play it and see what the PVP is about. I like the looting system better than Day Z atleast and wanna atleast try it. But I don't wanna buy it [pic]

12-29-2012, 05:52 PM

Didn't look that bad?

[pic] The Bore Z - YouTube

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