Gleemax is Dead

[gargoyle2k7]

EDIT: oops. Somehow this posted twice. Sorry.

Goodbye, Gleemax, and good riddance. It was unimpressive as it was, and once WotC announced that anything posted on Gleemax was thenceforth owned by them, I divorced myself from that fetid morass. I am not against a public forum that is >the< center for all gaming, but not when it is in a non-user friendly site, and anything I write becomes another's property. Gleemax is dead; long live the gamers!

 

[rounser]

I find myself asking 'Would you rather have a company run by gamers with a great love of D&D, or by a bunch of uber-business people?', and I don't know the answer.

If you're talking in particular about software development, don't think it's very relevant. Even programmers with experience in making the type of application cannot be trusted to make a realistic estimate. If anything, because they've done it before, they'll be too optimistic and confident about the time and resources it will take.

I think it has little to do with whether you're a cat person or a dog person, suit or geek, but whatever person you are just take that estimate of the amount of time you think it will take and triple or quadruple it. It may help to have a background in other software projects when pulling this initial figure out of one's behind.

Even though it seems unscientific ("take your figure and triple it/raise it to the power of 2/add an extra zero etc.") I've seen that recommended both in academia, and in the real world, and seen the reasons for it pan out - programming has this insidious tendency towards underestimation of the time it will take, in everybody....and to overlook or underestimate critical details like testing, backup, migration, training or maintenance. You just need to know that, and act accordingly.

Of course, there's always the possibility that they already did this, and it still ran out of time and resources. That's just software projects for you. (Man I'm glad I'll never have to be part of another death march.)

 

[drothgery]

It doesn't really speak well for their technology vision though. I've worked at several companies doing ASP. I've also worked doing PHP and JSP. Without a doubt, the PHP and JSP sites running on Apache are far more stable and robust than any site I've run using ASP and IIS. Every company I've worked at using IIS has had to reboot it's webservers on an almost daily basis.

ASP.NET is not ASP. IIS5 (Win2K), IIS6 (Win2K3), and IIS7 (Win2K8) are not IIS4 (WinNT). In 7 years of building and maintianing an ASP.NET-based web site, I've had exactly one outage that required the web server to be rebooted for anything other than regularly installing OS updates or server/network migration.

 

[JohnRTroy]

Yeah, "classic" ASP is an interpreted system limited to scripting languages, while ASP.NET is a full-functioned compiled framework. I would be wary of using Classic ASP for high-profile sites, but the .NET framework is just as good as the various LAMP packages (along with the latest Windows 2003 server).

One of the actual problems with Wizards site is that it appears they still use "Classic ASP" for their CMS, along with the Microsoft XML SDK. They really should move that to .NET.

 

[GVDammerung]

Consider it a sad commentary on just how poorly WotC handled Gleemax. They managed to turn-off nearly everyone with their lousy implementation of an idea that many here have stated they loved (in theory).

In broad theory, Gleemax was a terrific idea. However, I was always somewhat suspicious when the idea was parsed.

As I understand it, Magic and D&D are both Wotc but they have seperate management structures within Wotc. In other words, the D&D guys can't tell the Magic guys what to do and vis a versa.

So, here comes Gleemax. And it is supposed to serve BOTH Magic players and D&D players. Right there, I smell a number of cooks in the kitchen that does not bode well for the broth.

Then, when I look at what Magic players and D&D players have in common, I see more differences on large scales of magnitude than sames. No offense to Magic but it does not call for nor generate the discussion that D&D world building (even if Magic can generate as much talk of deck strategies as D&D can "builds") does. Then there is the whole "let me tell you about my PC" thing where D&D again outpaces Magic in sheer volume of chatter. D&D players (to include DMs) just generally seem more voluable. I can't imagine that something of this was not percieved when the D&D and Magic teams were called into a room to discuss Gleemax.

While both the D&D and Magic teams probably saw utility in a Gleemax product, I'll bet the D&D team saw more utility for its brand. I'll take that one step further and guess that the Magic team had to (worse case) be persuaded to support what was seen internally as more a D&D thing, or (best case) passively went along as long as it did not require much of the Magic team. Then things started to go off-plan with Gleemax.

At such point, I can imagine that whatever "support" Gleemax had from the Magic team - all but vanished - leaving Gleemax to twist in the wind with support (or at least not outright rejection) from only the D&D team. The final end of Gleemax was then a foregone conclusion.

I think it was a poor decision to try to partner Magic and D&D on Gleemax given that it served Magic much less than D&D. That it attempted serve both suggests to me a corporate compromise that came undone when the Magic team, who got less from Gleemax, would not support Gleemax through its growing pains.

Gleemax would have had a better chance of success IMO if it had attempted to serve only the D&D community - at least at first. That it did not says to me that the D&D team didn't have the stoke to get that done or that Hasbro was not sufficiently sanguine on the idea unless Magic was included. Magic not D&D makes Hasbro smile, I think, but Gleemax was more a D&D thing. That was trouble brewing from the start.

 

[smootrk]

I just think that somebody up the ladder at Hasbro finally got around to investigating what WotC was doing with this. He/They took a look and said, "What the F*** is this?!", and followed it up with, "SH** CAN THIS PROJECT, get your heads out of your Arses, and get back to doing game books!"

I mean, honestly, how could any rational upper management person come to any other conclusion upon seeing the mess that it was - and continues to be??

 

[Scribble]

The problem is that we now have DDI coming along, with a lot of the same promises being made, and, once again, little to show for it. Could it simply be that the people who are managing these lines, as good gamers and great people as they are, don't have the experience and talent to design and implement a project like this?

It's not too late, but remember that continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting different outcomes is unlikely to meet with success.

--Steve

It's the same people (or so it seems) that are working on the WoTC digital project as a whole. Killing Gleemax amounts to lightening their workload, so I see it as a sign that DDI will benefit.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Gleemax remains the dumbest name I have heard for anything in the last few years. Its collapse does not bode well for the company. I suspect 4e is not too far behind.

[OFF TOPIC]Ironically, I know the guy who came up with the name Gleemax. He was my boss for a while. It was meant to be ironic and mocking of WOTC, but they adopted it as their mascot a LONG time ago.

For those people who didn't hear the story, though it is slightly off topic, the deal was that way back in the day there was a discussion about R&D for Magic at WOTC. Someone was irate that R&D wasn't showing up at major tournaments to see what cards were winning and what strategies were useful. The person asked if there was actually a brain in charge of Magic.

The response was:
"Yes, there is. It's kept in a large jar of formeldahyde in one of the
unused sections of the WotC office complex. Every so often, according to
tradition, new members of the WotC R&D team are brought before Gleemax
(as the brain is called) and have their thoughts assimilated into the
hive mind.

I could be wrong though "

And thus was born the name Gleemax. Some people from WOTC saw the post and thought the idea that there was a brain secretly controlling R&D to be the funniest thing ever, they took him as a mascot and got artists to draw pictures of him to post on cubicle walls. Memos were apparently sent around blaming Gleemax for things that went wrong. I've heard stories that one of the high ups in R&D would go into their software for tracking cards they were working on and put in comments like "GLEEMAX DISLIKES THIS CARD".[/OFF TOPIC]


As for the site. I liked the concept. For those people who don't know, Gleemax was supposed to be a social networking site for gamers in general. The idea was that each person could make a profile, have their own blog, and be able to easily search for other gamers. You'd search for people in your area who liked the same games as you, form gaming groups and use the built in blogging features to post information about your campaign for all your players to read. You'd have all of your players post their characters so you can easily see everyone's stats. All your players could make in character posts about the game. You could control access to the information to just your group or make it public if you want the rest of your friends to be able to read about the campaign.

The point was to have a one stop shop for everything gaming for all games.

I do have it on good authority that a bunch of those features will make their way into DDI, but instead of being free and generic for all games, they will instead cost a monthly fee and be only for WOTC games.

 

[ThirdWizard]

Even though it seems unscientific ("take your figure and triple it/raise it to the power of 2/add an extra zero etc.") I've seen that recommended both in academia, and in the real world, and seen the reasons for it pan out - programming has this insidious tendency towards underestimation of the time it will take, in everybody....and to overlook or underestimate critical details like testing, backup, migration, training or maintenance. You just need to know that, and act accordingly.

The book [ame=http://www.amazon.com/Waltzing-Bears-Managing-Software-Projects/dp/0932633609/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217440604&sr=8-1]Walzing With Bears[/ame] should be required reading for anyone near the business of software development. If you want to know about how to get accurate projections, of which risk management is key, with realistic projections, this is your book.

If you work in a business like mine where the guy who does the realistic projection and delivers on time is looked down on and fired while the guy who gives the great projections and is always late is lauded as a go getter and moves up the corporate ladder, probably not the book to read. I'm betting the developers gave a great estimate at a low cost, got the job, and then promptly took their money to the bank while WotC floundered over their trust of a group who gave an impossible estimate.

Note: If an estimate looks impossible, then it is! Go with the honest programming contractors, people! They might not tell you what you want to hear, but maybe what you want to hear isn't going to happen no matter how much optimism you have! Rushed projects not only have more bugs, but they also take longer! Nobody wants to hear it, but thems the facts.

People keep saying in this very thread that Gleemax was a great idea with poor implementation. I totally disagree with that sentiment. The idea was made up almost entirely of scope creep. It was, by definition, in software terms a Bad Idea (tm). There were no clear cut goals, no realistic timetables for those goals, and no single driving force behind the development process. You can't go into a software project with a malleable, nebulous, undefined project scope. You. Will. Fail.

Gleemax was doomed from the beginning because they wanted it to be all things to all gamers. They should have started with a few key features, which they would work toward before anything else, with a very clear timetable for when each part would be rolled out based on factors which are totally predictable if one does the research.

Anyway, it saddens me that this could fail so badly when it didn't have to. Managing a software project is different than any other managerial task, with its own set of rules. Too many software projects fail. They don't have to. There's no reason they have to fail.

 

[Serendipity]

Wizards of the Coast has made the decision to pull down its Gleemax social networking site

Oh, is that what it was?
Really, that makes it sound like a dating site. (d20Cupid? ** runs ** )