Former WildStar Employees Share Their Horrible Experiences at Carbine

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As we reported last week, all is not well at WildStar financially. Despite its free to play conversion, Korea's largest investment bank predicts NCSoft's revenue from the Western developed sci-fi MMORPG will drop to $0, zero, zilch by the end of 2016. Its a grim appraisal, shared by popular MMORPG blogger The Ancient Gaming Noob in his 2016 predictions.

To add to the misery, it seems that Carbine has been a pretty awful place to work, not surprising for a company that's going through rough financial times. Reddit user quicktails has compiled a list of alleged employee experiences and it doesn't look good. Many ex developers have called out their bosses by name and accused upper management of lacking industry experience:

Lmao, funny thing is that I can't tell if you're talking about Donatelli, Craig, Chauncey, or Jelinek. Whole place was run by imbeciles. [NeoFAF user NHL94]

It's not surprising when you consider that most of people running the company had significantly less experience - not just at their current job title, but in development as a whole - than nearly all of their subordinates.

I mean, when your Game Director's last job was staff designer, your Executive Producer was just a staff artist, and your Director of Operations came out of QA ... its not entirely their fault for being completely out of their depth. [NeoGAF forum user ScatheZombie]

WildStar isn't NCSoft's first Western developed sci-fi MMORPG disaster. Tabula Rasa crashed and burned less than two years after its 2007 release. But while that project was marked by bad blood between NCSoft and lead designer Richard Garriott, it seems the WildStar developers largely blame Carbine for their current predicament.

Do you think it had anything to do with NCSOFT or was it just plain fucking awful in general at Carbine? [NeoGAF user Enter the Dragon Punch]

I know there are horror stories about NCSoft, but I cannot blame them for what happened to Wildstar too much. Carbine was just TERRIBLY run from the top down. Egomaniacs abound. Different teams thinking it was a competition between each other trying to make their own shit shine instead of working at a game as a.....fucking team. Management not knowing wtf to do, nepotism putting people in positions they had no business being in, people talking to the public who had NO FUCKING BUSINESS talking to people(Donatelli). Just shit all around.[NEOGAF user NHL94]

There's no way to prove the comments posted on reddit and NEOGaf are legit, but there is a place for more accurate employee comments about their employers: Glassdoor. On this front, things don't get much better for Carbine. There are a flurry of 1 and 2 star reviews accusing the studio of cronyism, unqualified leadership, and poor management overall.

WildStar did experience a boost in players after going free to play late last year, but it was short lived. Recent scouting reveals the PvE servers are still fairly popular, but the PvP servers are starting the have the same deserted feeling they had during the subscription days.

Wildstar Gameplay - Sunday Funday Round 24