Nathan's Words Of Wisdom On Defiance

Those following Defiance, the new "PC-PS3-XBOX360-massively-online-tv-show-connected-third-person-open-world-shooter" from Trion that launched last Tuesday, know that the game, to put it kindly, has not experienced the smoothest of launches.  But the game has as a leader, Executive Producer Nathan Richardsson, who has some experience with rocky launches.  That's right, the same Nathan Richardsson whom Eve players knew as CCP Oveur for many years.  And in an effort to communicate with upset players he was deployed that popular weapon, the dev blog.  While some Defiance players may think of Nathan as "...you inbred viking trying to fool me with humor and shark," I've had a blast reading them and seeing some of the Eve and Iceland references in his dev blogs.  So I decided to pull out some of the gems that struck my interest.  I hope you like them.  Enjoy!



Day 1

"Sometimes you hear sayings like 'it takes 9 months to have a baby' and '9 women can’t make a baby in a month'. Those more familiar with the matter have pointed out to me that this was closer to '9 months of giving birth', hit me over the head and said I should stop using sayings I don’t really understand. It’s the Icelander in me, sorry."

"And by awesome, I mean we’re neck deep addressing all the issues that come up when you scale something up to a million people from a test environment of thousands."

"We’re on it like a shark during winter solstice."

"Chat and VOIP – This isn’t broken, we just believe people should use their psychic abilities more. Can you hear what I’m saying to you right now? Yes, exactly. We’re working on it."

"At the end of the day – which btw, our day never does, we’re here 24/7 – we reach around each other and are happy."

Day 2

"We try to be in a position to respond to change and react to feedback. That means we frequently re-prioritize and re-evaluate, we course-correct. Some of you might know this as being 'agile'. I prefer 'wtfisgoingonnowletsfixdatshiinao'."

"We do believe that if you can’t make fun of yourself, take yourself too seriously and everything is doomed, you will have no joy or passion for what you do anymore. And that will get reflected in the experience you receive. We hope you understands."

"No amount of whiskey, dances of tango or foxtrot can fully convey our (calm professinal) rage and frustration over this."


"FKN LAAAAG – Icelandic technical term which usually translates quite well to most other languages for some reason."

"I’m watching as we speak a large number of our operations team around the XBOX servers which just crashed again. That is no small feat, the XBOX cluster has more cores than an army of gold farming bot runners would know what to do with. But they will persevere, as they always have and won’t stop till they’re up again. The servers, not them, you pervert."

Day 3

"Lag and server crashes. Our server operations team is throwing everything and the sink at it. We even had to stop one of them from throwing a kitchen sink at a server. Yes, we’re frustrated."

"They [crashes] will result in you getting disconnected, you can usually reconnect but sometimes they don’t crash 'gracefully' and stay in a zombie mode. Now, I know we all like zombies. They can be good entertainment but not the best for deep conversations. The same happens to Game Server Zombies. You keep on getting directed to them and get messages that say the service is down etc. and then in a little while you’re fine again."

Day 4

"US XBOX – Our battle with this server cluster continues. I’d put swearwords here but I think you can hear me in your head right now."

"There’s just so many of you shooting so much. If you could just be nice and all get along. Hellbugs have feelings too you know."

"We all enjoy happy endings. Like in the Fifth Element. Always makes me cry."

"I hope I’m not still in your head swearing. That wouldn’t be very nice of me. Especially on a Friday. If it was Thursday, it would probably be fine."