78 replies to this topic

[Nightbird]

Yes, for just the WC at Mechcon, 100k is reasonable costs. Over the course of the year though, the WC likely cost 500k-1mil $ because off the staff and dev support for mode. Basically the same cost as a time skip.

[justcallme A S H]

65k, not 100k.

You really believe/think there was 6-8 devs & 2-4 admin people working specifically on World Champs - FULL TIME for a year - which would result in 500k-1Mil in costs?

All for CompQ?

lol...

[Nightbird]

justcallme A S H, on 06 June 2019 - 03:47 PM, said:

65k, not 100k.

You really believe/think there was 6-8 devs & 2-4 admin people working specifically on World Champs - FULL TIME for a year - which would result in 500k-1Mil in costs?

All for CompQ?

lol...

Umm, 500k would only cover 4 people full time, and also would exclude the cost of the finals at Mechcon (prizes, travel, etc). Salary plus benefits plus the office is 100k per person, then cost of oversight by management will usually add another 30% on top.

I thought you knew this stuff?

[Nightbird]

justcallme A S H, on 06 June 2019 - 03:32 PM, said:

• Venue Rental / Catering packages
  
• Production / Lighting / Sound / Stage
  
• PGI Staff costs
  
• MW5 Pods
  
• MWO Solaris Section (14 spots IIRC)
  
• Booths for each area/stand

Depends on the hotel, usually you can get the venue rental for free along with item 2 for free unless you go crazy and don't want what's provided by the hotel. (What they have is usually good enough for major presentations though)

[justcallme A S H]

Nightbird, on 06 June 2019 - 03:51 PM, said:

Umm, 500k would only cover 4 people full time, and also would exclude the cost of the finals at Mechcon (prizes, travel, etc). Salary plus benefits plus the office is 100k per person, then cost of oversight by management will usually add another 30% on top.

I thought you knew this stuff?

You think a Dev/Coder is getting paid 120k a year and there are legit, 4 of them, sitting there inb a room working full time on World Champs each year? What on earth are they doing exactly? Let alone the fact that for 8 months of the year when CompQ is disabled!!!!

CompQ, functionally, was basically identical to '17 CompQ. Only major difference was locking stock mode/set patch date. If that takes 4 devs a full year of work, 2 years in a row, at a cost of 1MIL-2MIL then PGI is the most inefficient company on the planet.

Prizes - donated.

Travel / Accomm - for teams is easy to work out as rooms were ~$220-$230 CAD/night (3 nights). Times that by 24 rooms provided (8 per team). Then the flights (8 per team) - average that out at ~1k/pp. You're looking at ~40k.

So yeah I do know this stuff. Very well. Well enough to know that it wasn't even remotely close to costing 500k to 1 MILLION DOLLARS in DEV STAFF time to manage/run CompQ which was the same Q used / developed and paid for in 2017.

[LTC Kilgore]

justcallme A S H, on 06 June 2019 - 04:28 PM, said:

You think a Dev/Coder is getting paid 120k a year and there are legit, 4 of them, sitting there inb a room working full time on World Champs each year? What on earth are they doing exactly? Let alone the fact that for 8 months of the year when CompQ is disabled!!!!

CompQ, functionally, was basically identical to '17 CompQ. Only major difference was locking stock mode/set patch date. If that takes 4 devs a full year of work, 2 years in a row, at a cost of 1MIL-2MIL then PGI is the most inefficient company on the planet.

Prizes - donated.

Travel / Accomm - for teams is easy to work out as rooms were ~$220-$230 CAD/night (3 nights). Times that by 24 rooms provided (8 per team). Then the flights (8 per team) - average that out at ~1k/pp. You're looking at ~40k.

So yeah I do know this stuff. Very well. Well enough to know that it wasn't even remotely close to costing 500k to 1 MILLION DOLLARS in DEV STAFF time to manage/run CompQ which was the same Q used / developed and paid for in 2017.

Nope, but they could be making $60k a year, and then when you add in the costs of their benefits it could easily add up to $100k per person...

Edited by LTC Kilgore, 06 June 2019 - 04:31 PM.

[Nightbird]

justcallme A S H, on 06 June 2019 - 04:28 PM, said:

You think a Dev/Coder is getting paid 120k a year and there are legit, 4 of them, sitting there inb a room working full time on World Champs each year? What on earth are they doing exactly? Let alone the fact that for 8 months of the year when CompQ is disabled!!!!

CompQ, functionally, was basically identical to '17 CompQ. Only major difference was locking stock mode/set patch date. If that takes 4 devs a full year of work, 2 years in a row, at a cost of 1MIL-2MIL then PGI is the most inefficient company on the planet.

Prizes - donated.

Travel / Accomm - for teams is easy to work out as rooms were ~$220-$230 CAD/night (3 nights). Times that by 24 rooms provided (8 per team). Then the flights (8 per team) - average that out at ~1k/pp. You're looking at ~40k.

So yeah I do know this stuff. Very well. Well enough to know that it wasn't even remotely close to costing 500k to 1 MILLION DOLLARS in DEV STAFF time to manage/run CompQ which was the same Q used / developed and paid for in 2017.

50k salary + 25k in Canadian benefits/hr costs + 25k in office space/logistic costs = 100k, +30% project management overhead = 130k per dev or admin ( and no you can't hire them when the 4 months comp queue starts, you start the hiring process 6 months earlier to train them or divert more valuable experienced workers, the last few weeks of prelims also had many match referees)
CompQ, we had patches to rebalance the entire game for compq
Prizes are donated LOL come on opportunity cost mate
Travel ~ 40k agreed
Already we're at 600k minimum from this list, and that's for an efficient company. Factoring in PGI efficiency is where I got 1 mil.

Edited by Nightbird, 06 June 2019 - 04:40 PM.

[Liveish]

Nightbird, on 06 June 2019 - 03:35 PM, said:

Yes, for just the WC at Mechcon, 100k is reasonable costs. Over the course of the year though, the WC likely cost 500k-1mil $ because off the staff and dev support for mode. Basically the same cost as a time skip.

LOL

Can we not troll or try and bait this chat and keep on topic, Unless you have the facts and post them... let's keep on topic and maybe stop doing drugs before we reply.

I guess you have never ran a business or a project.

You may have 100 Staff doing 100 things all at once, but that time is all not booked out to one project ( in your case the MWO WC)

Buffing **** mechs as the comp went stock mode is not a 100% cost to the MWOWC as it also brings value to the QP/FW side of the game, these staff would have buffed or nerfed something in that time... PGI does not hire people to stand around and do nothing.

Work that add value to MWO WC and the core game is win/win and the cost would not be booked to the MWO WC.

LTC Kilgore, on 06 June 2019 - 04:30 PM, said:

Nope, but they could be making $60k a year, and then when you add in the costs of their benefits it could easily add up to $100k per person...

LOL and they worked full time for a whole year on MWO WC ???? LOL

Nightbird, on 06 June 2019 - 04:32 PM, said:

50k salary + 25k in Canadian benefits/hr costs + 25k in office space/logistic costs = 100k, +30% project management overhead = 130k per dev or admin ( and no you can't hire them when the 4 months comp queue starts, you start the hiring process 6 months earlier to train them or divert more valuable experienced workers, the last few weeks of prelims also had many match referees)
CompQ, we had patches to rebalance the entire game for compq
Prizes are donated LOL come on opportunity cost mate
Travel ~ 40k agreed
Already we're at 600k minimum from this list, and that's for an efficient company. Factoring in PGI efficiency is where I got 1 mil.

Unsure if you are a good troll or 100% believe your own words

I have to go with Troll, and hats off to your for the good bait

Edited by live1991, 06 June 2019 - 05:19 PM.

[Nightbird]

If you don't know that allocating 4 FTEs to a project doesn't mean 4 people, but 4 people's worth of resources, that tells me plenty about what you know

[Liveish]

Nightbird, on 06 June 2019 - 05:25 PM, said:

If you don't know that allocating 4 FTEs to a project doesn't mean 4 people, but 4 people's worth of resources, that tells me plenty about what you know

Correct, but it came across as you said 4 FTE over a year, with not providing anything to back that up.

Also can post the job ads, they used to hire there people ?

Edited by live1991, 06 June 2019 - 05:29 PM.

[Nightbird]

It's a internet forum, not a thesis. I don't need to break down cost estimates to enable a feature, like dev, UAT, live-test, feedback cycles, management, all to roll out a simple ammo patch update. Many things are needed to perform a WC, for them to claim that it cost 60 grand is such a outlandish lie.

[Liveish]

Nightbird, on 06 June 2019 - 05:34 PM, said:

It's a internet forum, not a thesis. I don't need to break down cost estimates to enable a feature, like dev, UAT, live-test, feedback cycles, management, all to roll out a simple ammo patch update. Many things are needed to perform a WC, for them to claim that it cost 60 grand is such a outlandish lie.

Most esport events which is normally bigger over 2 days cost 50K to 80K to Run ( not talking ESL, but same level as MWO)
Flights, Hotel and Venue being the biggest cost.

Check out Natural Selection II event and the CSGO event in Portorož ( this was a funny event)




But I do agree a significant amount of esports are actually run at a loss and the cost is eaten by the game producer as a marketing budget.

Edited by live1991, 06 June 2019 - 05:57 PM.

[Nightbird]

live1991, on 06 June 2019 - 05:40 PM, said:

Most esport events which is normally bigger over 2 days cost 50K to 80K to Run ( not talking ESL, but same level as MWO)
Flights, Hotel and Venue being the biggest cost.

live1991, on 06 June 2019 - 05:18 PM, said:

Can we not troll or try and bait this chat and keep on topic, Unless you have the facts and post them... let's keep on topic and maybe stop doing drugs before we reply.

I guess you have never ran a business or a project.

I have to go with Troll, and hats off to your for the good bait

[Liveish]

On Topic, You had all these streamers the last few years, why don't you put them up in a hotel or something and get them to work the event, get some value out of having all these streamers there.

[RJF Volkodav]

Laughing about all that expences for World Champ. There were no personal dedicated specially for it for even couple of months. No real works done to improve. No work done to generate any hype and make profit of it. Off course with that approach it generates nothing at the output aside of comp community interest.

If it would be managed correctly the high end play can be a used to promote this game. For many players of many games comp play is something that is interesting to watch/analyze/learn. That works for each game i play. But doesnt works for MWO as it lacks comp play hype and content.

To generate content (=profit) out of comp play you need interesting gameplay, a tools to review matches and streamers/commentators with deep game understanding to analyze and the ability to those who are interested in trying comp to join after they see high end play.
To get gameplay interesting to watch you need to make matches tense and having more than 5 min play 10 min wait. Need to thik of competetive gammode instead of putting everyone in a slow stock to slow it down and loose any connection with actual gameplay/meta.
To get reviews, analytics and educate streamers/commentators you need a replay tool so top players could make their reviews for a matches and share their point of view on how comp is played. The same tool needed to get any of media content about a gameplay out of match streaming. But all we have today is live spectator record which cannot cover even a 10% of what happening during a match.
We have a great community streamers and commentators but they lack of content to generate their media. Also during a short games we have today it is quite impossible to speak/analyze the game with viewers. The third thing is that they never had an opportunity to make deep match analysis as we have no tools for it so it leads to game core moment misundestanding on live streams. If PGI could give them a content they can do hundreds time more than now to promote this game.

Making game friendly to join comp is one of the most important things to do. The reason for company to promote comp play is to get players involved into it. No real sense to do any promotion if you are not giving it as a high end play content for other players. MWO is a team based game after all so you need to promote team play first to get players closer to comp play. Make group play more popular. Make comp play accessible to lower skilled teams. Make this modes quite similar to each other by players count and mech limitations. Make CompQ running all the year with some ads for ppl to join. Make a matchmaking/elo system for compQ so it wouldnt be a sealclubbing.

With that after having content for hype generation and an ability for people to join you can use comp as a place to attract people for. Otherwise it have no sense. Yes, for me and many others i know comp play is now the most interesting part of MWO. But comp play is intended not only to make top players happy. It is important to utilize it to make game better and more interesting for others. But even today, in the last comp league season there were more than 30 teams involved so there are lots of pilots who are interested in comp play even outside of ingame mode.

[LTC Kilgore]

live1991, on 06 June 2019 - 05:18 PM, said:

.




LOL and they worked full time for a whole year on MWO WC ???? LOL

I never made that claim. I was showing how a full time employee could easily cost a company $100k/year even though the employee doesn't make that entire amount.

[Nightbird]

live1991, on 06 June 2019 - 05:40 PM, said:

Most esport events which is normally bigger over 2 days cost 50K to 80K to Run ( not talking ESL, but same level as MWO)
Flights, Hotel and Venue being the biggest cost.

Check out Natural Selection II event and the CSGO event in Portorož ( this was a funny event)




But I do agree a significant amount of esports are actually run at a loss and the cost is eaten by the game producer as a marketing budget.

According to that breakdown, they incurred 2000$ in labor for the entire event. At 50$ per hour, that's 40 hours. Right. I'd like to build you a bridge in Alaska now.

That means that over 2 days (16 hours) they only had 2.5 employees at the event.

[VonBruinwald]

live1991, on 06 June 2019 - 05:40 PM, said:

Total cost of entire event: $67,443

Well, that's been covered by the Tournament Supporter Packs.

Use the TSP's to fund a live MWO:WC

Everyone's happy and PGI only has to cover the excess if we run short; which would be a fraction of the costs if previous years TSP sales are anything to go by.

[NocturnalBeast]

Khobai, on 05 June 2019 - 12:40 AM, said:

it was all part of Russ' misguided attempt to push MWO as an esport. PGI literally had to create their own venue to showcase the game as an esport, at great personal expense.

The majority of "grognards" like myself are older BattleTech / Mechwarrior fans who could not care less about e-sports. Really e-sports just lead to balancing around a competitive "META" which makes the game worse for the majority of players who do not take part in the comp scene.

PGI needs to shift to a more modern FTP model and focus on mostly cosmetic items for sale and release MECHS for free. Instead of a $60 hero Mech, they could sell a "Hero" camo pack for about $10 that includes a camo pattern that can be applied to one MECH which comes with the colors and gives a 30% C-Bill bonus to whatever MECH you put it on. PGI could also sell discounted color packs and themed decal packs for $5 to $10. Finally PGI should implement a "season pass" system similar to what is in Fortnite or Dauntless where there are free rewards at each tier for everyone and then additional rewards for people who pay the $5 or $10 for "Elite" status.

Edited by Ed Steele, 21 June 2019 - 02:15 PM.