Jack Emmert?

I've heard a lot of bile about former lead dev statesman. what made him such a hated individual? I can't find anything specific anywhere.

Most of it is exaggerated

It's become a sort of CoH meme though - that anything wrong with the game can always be traced back to him

EDIT: Mostly, he just seemd to have a very personal take on what was fun in a game, and was quite determined to force it onto the players.
For example, he thought the idea of dying twenty times trying to get to a stupidly placed mission door in the Hollows was fun, because once you finally managed to get there, it gave a real sense of achievement.
Which is sort of right - but during the twenty hospital trips you got more of a sense of real sense of not-fun
Apparently, he also wasn't too hot on listening to feedback

I wasn't here (You had to be there, man!)

But what it ammounts to, it seems, was how little he listened to the player base, how he threw out promises like gold, which turned out to me made by leprechauns (i.e. it fizzled into dirt a few days later) and refused to compromise on his 'vision' of the game.

Basically, just take a look at the bad things in Champions. That'll be Emmert Grade fail. We still, sadly, have a few things left over from him, such as most of the Freedom Phalanx TFs. Thankfully, the current (superior) Devs seem to have finally gotten around to taking out the trash, starting with the Posi TF.

So, yeah. If its in CoX, and you really hate it...odds are its an Emmert

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Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

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Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

Basically it was his mindset that it was "his game, his vision, his rules, like it or leave it!"

At one point he said there would be no more major nerfs to the game, and shortly after he announced ED (no more 1acc/5dam slotting), which many called the biggest nerf ever. It's been debated many times if ED caused a mass exodus or no impact in player base at all.

He also made a nice post-ED state-of-the-game speech where he talked about his vision and how it was aimed at 1 hero against 3 minions = balance, and that he based that on iirc nintendo hand helds from way back.

Pretty much what's been said already. Unfortunately it didn't help that he's aimed some very snooty comments at CoX since he began work on Champions Online, which have been somewhat undermined by him making the very same mistakes on that project as well.

He had a tendency to listen to nobody but himself, and learn very little as a result.

Look at what he did with Champions Online, and you'll have a pretty good idea of his idea of fun.

Which was not shared by the majority of CoH players.

The problem with Jack is two-fold.

One the one hand, a lot of people felt that he lied to them. I never quite understood how and why, as apparently I missed something, but that was a large part of it. There was something about how he promised no more major changes shortly before instituting ED that had people in a furor, but I'm not as easily excitable, so I honestly don't know. There's a LOT of that.

The other problem is the man's general attitude. It's less about his "vision" as much as it is about his approach to making the game how he reasoned would be good, disregarding player feedback on the kind of changes we wanted. Sometimes he was even technically right, but it didn't change the fact that what he was giving us wasn't what we were asking for. I didn't actually spot this while it was going on, but when Positron took over and I started getting things that had been said would never happened is what finally clued me in. It's not really so much what Jack did, it's what he DIDN'T do. He spent far too much time making his game his way and ignored what we actually wanted.

And his bad attitude went farther than this. He would basically play down problems that, while they may have been technically minor, nevertheless mattered a lot to people. The man had absolutely no tact. The worst example that I remember is when he posted in the mile long "Capes at 20" thread to basically say "Are you guys still arguing about this dead horse?" Yes, we're still arguing about the dead horse, *******! You put it in our laps, it's your games, YOU fix it, instead of snickering like a cheeky little kid! The gall of that man! The more time passes, the more I realise that he just had absolutely no respect for his own customers. Oh, I've had Positron tell me to my face that if I don't like red electricity, I can just not use Electrical Melee/Armour (I have an evil memory like that), but that was once and he kind of had a point. But when a lead developer basically drops by to inform you that your concerns and desires are irrelevant to him other than something to giggle at, that makes people mad.

And, really, look at the history of the game. Maybe it's coincidence, maybe it isn't, but things got a LOT better when PlayNC bought City of Heroes over from Cryptic. And it's not just down to money and staffing. They were understaffed for a long time after that still, but it was the shift in terms of WHAT they were developing that mattered the most. This attitude remains to this day, and it's what continually reminds me I'm with the best game I can pick - almost everything we get is something that we've asked for. That makes a BIG difference.

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Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Other things were also part of his 'vision' and he wouldn't budge one iota about it.

One being the Real Numbers we now have; under Jack he refused to release anything going near Real Numbers, because as he said he wanted the game to be friendly to everyone, number crunching Min/Maxers and Casual Players alike, and the addition of Real Numbers would exclude the Casual Player by making him feel inferior and/or confused, and thus leave the game.

One of the first things we got once he left was our beloved Combat Attributes, allowing us to see just how much To-Hit Debuffing those danged Spectral Demon Lords did to us (and the weeping could be heard across the world).

[QUOTE=poptart_fairy;2663530]Pretty much what's been said already. Unfortunately it didn't help that he's aimed some very snooty comments at CoX since he began work on Champions Online, which have been somewhat undermined by him making the very same mistakes on that project as well.
[QUOTE]

This more than anything else for me. I didn't pay too much attention when I first started playing, heard some comments here and there on the forums, but then when he left and started CO, EVERY interview I saw from him there was some sort of backhanded slap at CoX and how he wasn't going to make the same mistakes.

That made ME dislike him...

Let me also add that he was the worst when it comes to communication. Whether ED of the GDN was a bad thing or not is debatable, but what's not debatable was the terrible way they were handled.

Speaking of communication, he also had a knack for hinting to things that never came to pass, such as Avilians, Coralax, Blood of The Black Steam, SSOCS (Some may say that is day jobs) and a host of others all the while refusing to do something as simple and widely requested as giving us "real" numbers.

Jack wasn't a bad guy. He was very passionate about the game and was always willing to talk to players. He even owned up to some things that must have been mistakes of other devs.

So all that said. Jack didn't listen. Like many of the people here have stated, he had his own vision and he just didn't understand that many of us did not share that vision. I think because Jack was lauded so much when CoH launched that he felt vindicated by the people that told him that City of Heroes wouldn't work. So when the players were telling him things that he disagreed with, I think he felt that here was another case where he should follow his own counsel.

That would have been OK, except that Jack didn't realize how, in so many ways, actual mistakes on their part led to CoH being the success that it is. When the game launched you were able to make obnoxiously powerful characters. People liked that. When the game launched, it was a very fun for min/maxers and people who liked to pour over the effectiveness of their characters. Jack didn't understand that. He didn't understand the mindset of people who liked pouring over spreadsheets and tweaking their characters. He actively opposed it for most of 2005. It's one of the stated reasons for ED (to narrow and tame min-maxing).

Now, years later, I have nothing but fond memories of Jack and his crazy antics. But at the time, I thought he was the main impediment to this game going forward. That that seems to have been correct just makes me happy things turned out for Cryptic like they did.

A simple example. Mind you, this was all before the Real Numbers were introduced to the game.

Nerf's for Regen were proposed (on top of those that had already happened) and a video was posted proving WHY those nerfs were necessary. Several experienced and knowledgeable Regen players claimed that the what we were shown in the video was not possible in the Live game. Several less knowledgeable players joined in, but we'll leave their comments aside. Jack insisted that the video was accurate. The players continued to argue against the nerfs and posted what numbers we could glean from the game at the time to prove that the video wasn't accurate.

It was finally revealed that the video test took place on an internal server that ... OOPS ... was on a different revision of game code than what was on Live. Jack's response was basically as follows (paraphrased heavily, but the the general tone is there):

Oh well, it doesn't matter that the video is inaccurate and our conclusions based on it are inaccurate, we are still making these changes to Regen. Deal with it or leave. It's my game, I'll be the one to determine what is and isn't a fun play style.

And contrary to what Dr. Mechano posted above, Cryptic still had long time employees after NCSoft bought the CoH IP. Some of them had worked on CoH early in the game's development but were no longer involved with the game as they had moved on to other projects. The one that I recall the easiest would be Shannon (poz) Posniewski, the current Director of Game Programming at Cryptic. Also still with the company in leadership positions are Craig Zinkievich and Bruce Rogers. I believe there were others that stayed with Cryptic that had experience both with CoH as well as other games (some that were cancelled, some that were ... redirected), they just weren't actively working on the day-to-day business of CoH.

EDIT: Excellent link there Obsidius. It sums up much of the problem with Jack. I'll have to bookmark that when I get home.