I also recently started using Twitter more actively. Their recent site design upgrade definitely made it a lot more usable even though I still find the user experience much sub par compared to e.g. Facebook or Linkedin.
https://twitter.com/#!/Michael_Zacker
I tweet about anything game development: programming, usability, level design, running a startup, etc. Mostly related to Pirates of New Horizons.
It does say in the article it IS 90% of support staff
I can see my interpretation of their statement is quite conservative 
But no, what what I was really hinting at was the game in question and my guess of department compared to their statement which was a bit more general (ie. non-dev can mean everything from administration over BI to marketing).
I certainly hope it gets to be better than SimCity 4. I played that game just recently and it is bug riddled UX disaster.
Along the lines of Izuno, I am fairly sure that this is like 90% related to WoW support personnel. Considering the significant reductions in userbase and the fact that WoW is now quite mature, it is not unexpected. They are still actively hiring people as much as always so I see no reason to take this as a general fear of Blizzard going down or anything like that.
Any kind of feedback is very welcome!
Great work man, really looking forward to seeing the updates roll out.
Anyone who have any kind of estimate of how much work BMS still needs to be releasable in a satisfactory state?
Quote from Jake GillaI'm curious how many of you LDs, or people just working in the industry, find some modeling skills essential in landing an entry level LD job?On one end I hear modeling isn't the LDs job, but I also notice a lot of LDs know how to do it none the less.
Modelling skills are not really needed. Being a skilled user of 3d modelling programs however can be very useful. Thing is that you will rarely if ever be doing actual modelling, but you will very often be fixing whatever technical shortcomings that some artists introduce in their models. A good example of this would be fixing up the collision of some prop as a lot of artists just don't have the feel for how get this right.
A personal recommendation: If you have an iPad this is the perfect game for that device, particularly when played with two or more persons
That cinematic was, as always with Blizz, totally awesome!
Are you calling an MMO with 65 million users for "relatively unknown"? Also, within micro payment space it is relatively common to rely on 0.01% of your users as main source of revenue, the so called 'whales'.
Quote from AlexMJust played it for a while this morning. Fun game, I got some pretty nuts chain reactions. The girlfriend became the passenger seat driver after about 10 mins of watching though
If you don't mind my asking how long was the development time on this game?
Thanks for the feedback! The game has quite a history behind it and was started several years back. Originally it was made by Warby and then some dude I who I don't even know who coded it in Java. Early this year Soenke decided to have the game ported to Unity and he got another friend to start working on that. When we reached September this year the game was still far from done, the 'new' coder was not really interested in doing any further work on it and there were various features that we still wanted to add or change. So I took over the code side of things and together with Soenke finished up the game over something like 1-1½ month where we were mostly full time on this project.
Yay! Even if you don't play match-3 games yourself, then buy it as a gift to your mom or girlfriend. I have heard that they like these kind of games.
If there is as much Fragile Alliance in this as there looks to be, then it certainly is something I will consider buying. Also, pretty good job on remaking Warby's bridge map, it looks very close the original.
First production baby for Pirates of New Horizons 
Congrats man!
That is very cool Furyo, congrats man!
Seems like they are doing a Hitman: Contracts
I can really not see how anyone can be hyped by this, looks exactly like CS:S (with minor gfx upgrades ofc) to me. Also, the official trailer is so cheesy its unbelievable.
That live action trailer is frikkin amazing!
