Why I Left OCN..

Hi guys

This has been a loong time coming..

A while ago I had a popular Blog on OCN, I am proud to say I brought a lot of new members to OCN via my articles. I was very happy there I was getting on with all but one staff and had even met one of the OC team in person, ..none of the staff (admins) really enjoyed admin'ing to the blog section, and I had been chatting to staff on and off for a while.. subtly hinting I would like to be staff, a position I would have called 'Editor'.. I didn't want to admin to the whole site, only the blog section. The other Admins were fed up doing it, and it got passed around regularly as I found out from chatting to each one on the clean up of the blogs to remove adverts. I now guess.. my subtle hints were too subtle..but no matter.. an awful thing happened that made the above a moot point.

Someone joined.. a person with gender issues. He started reporting my articles, taking his problems with the world out on me. First time he reported me, and the article was kept, which makes sense as it was a very popular article. He took offence at the line 'nightmare in drag' which was clearly in the context of how awful the Pentium D really was.

I had been wondering how much OCN readers got my little poetic subtleties, I had dismissed it at first, but then I wrote 'season of a system builder' and got very positive feedback for that article.. I started to think 'hey maybe these guy get emotions too'. So I started work on an article..

The article was my 'Jerry Maguire mission-statement', my hopes and dreams for the future of AI.. I didn't hold back, I poured my heart into that article, it was fluidly poetic and touched on many things I had wondered about AI up until that time. It included the conversation on AI and religion, religious talk being banned on OCN, however you cannot talk about the future of AI* without that conversation, and I don't excuse either my actions or love of God.

So.. I had had a rough day, I found out 45 mins before that the GF I had been financially supporting had been cheating on me, I sit down to eat my dinner, and I see that ONE member of staff who has a problem with me, he was the only one to EVER tell me off, I had nice chats with everyone else even the general manager (really nice guy).. and he's deleted my article.

I was in shock.

And yknow.. he didn't even have the common COURTESY to mail me it first before he deleted it.
He was a buffon.. no thats not fair. I am angry with him, even now, but he was a smart enough person, but acted like a TOTAL IDIOT. I had spent 10 HOURS on that article.. it just shows you how out of touch he was with the blog section and should NEVER have been given power over it!

I on the other hand know how *painful* it is to lose an article even before this (broken ZDNET spam filter), so if it was felt it had to be removed..OF COURSE I would mail it to him/her first!! OF COURSE give them the opportunity to post it elsewhere with different rules.

It was the last straw.. I felt ignored, underappreciated .. I mean flip, they wouldn't even give me a job no one else wanted?? o.O .. and finally insulted. He threw away 10 hours of my work.. for nothing. So I left.

Shortly after that, Rob started FTR on FB.

Dava


*it's written into the AI code that they must believe in God.

EA vs Pandemic or.. 'The Ballad of Pandemic studios'.. some opinions

Feedback to Origin Staff:


Hi. I was unable to get The Saboteur to launch in Windows 10, so I made a fresh install of Vista Ult. x64 on another drive, still it wouldn't launch til after many hours, I ran msconfig and set the startup CPU cores to (2.. then 4 also worked). It was funny when Origin told me in a comical way to 'pleeeasse upgrade your OS' hehe :) but also a little cheeky. The Saboteur, by Pandemic and EA, was your GTA meets AC, having read why Pandemic fell apart, it's really sad. What happened? Pandemic was under loads of pressure from EA, so much so that senior staff became terrified at every decision. EA senior staff was getting annoyed that they had to keep checking on their work at Pndmc. But whenever Pndmc senior staff would grow in confidence, some EA middle management would come over give them all a telling off. crazy! Ppl would reg. leave Pndmc, coz it was a weird environment to work in. EA was giving mixed signals, on one hand couldn't be bothered with Pndmc senior staff to check on their work, next day a EA guy would show up and tell them to scrap half their work. You just can't have that in a work enviro. that ppl in-charge.. aren't in-charge! @Pndmc.. I see where EA was coming from, but maan uz handled it badly, you needed to get on to HR, hire someone and then let them do their job. Even enable them to fight for the projects they felt the strongest as this is *part* of the job being senior staff of a studio. R*/Take Two just hand out projects then let the staff at those studios get on with their jobs, this was the opposite. As a gamer and blogger, it is one of the saddest tales I have yet to hear.. 'the ballad of Pandemic studios' its my number two, after Team Bondi with a dictator at the helm.Regardless.. whatever you do, you have a great day, and thanks for reading this mini-blog :) Dava