It is no secret, some of the FanFest attendees also head there with the hopes of causing a good impression and congratiate themselves with some good CCP Games reference which might serve as a way to land a job in the future.
Granted there has been a ton of criticism for “The GlassDoor” – a site with the purpose of providing insight on the working conditions – wether it could be used as a way to “Get back” at your former employer. Still here is a eye-opening read for you all ever played with the thought of applying for CCP Games.
The GlassDoor CCP Games Reviews.
I won’t post the pros/cons (you can read those at the GlassDoor site) and instead will put a compilation of the best “Advices to Senior Management” former and current employees has submitted to the website.
For those TL;DR afflicted, most of the reviewers mention a good working atmosphere plagued by bad management decision and a “job position title” culture.
It’s great that you’re so positive about things, but don’t forget about past mistakes and the harsh lessons learned. Remember to keep one eye on the big picture.
- Jul 21, 2012
Advice to Senior Management – Senior management usually react to negative feedback by flying the entire Human Resources department around the world a couple times with no practical results other than a couple of them get promoted
- 2 weeks ago
Advice to Senior Management – Listen to your customers. Realize you can’t do “3 impossible things” before breakfast. Realize that you should listen to non-icelandic staff at your offsite studio(s)
- 3 weeks ago
Advice to Senior Management – Please make sure you reward hard working people and really listen to them when they have advice on a position or can best communicate the needs of that position. They are the people who are performing the tasks daily, so they would know best the constraints and feasibility of requests. Also, allow your staff to progress within the company. If they shine, give them the opportunity to move up and take on more responsibilities.
- Jul 23, 2012
And finally:
Adverbially obsessed CCP,
You might try looking around at the amazing talent you’re wasting, and try not to waste it. People will eventually leave and find a studio at which their talents will be harnessed. You had to lay off industry-renowned veterans who pioneered many aspects of 3D art because of hubris and losing your vision for the future because you were blinded by the dollar signs when things were good.
Listen to your lowly artists and content developers, not just people with “Senior”, “Producer”, and “Director” in their titles. I have to see any of those big-titled people contribute much more than unnecessary meeting invites that interrupt production. With the amount of mid and high level management the studio has, you would think the products you’re developing would be well managed, on-time, and under budget. Nothing is ever really on time, budgets aren’t guaranteed, and quality can be lacking. You might want to examine the structure of the studio from the ground up to see how you can make it a true agile environment for talented people, and less of a rhetoric factory where brainwashing and false promises are the cattle prods of choice.
Stop with the meetings. Games would ship on time if not for the insane amount of meetings after meetings to discuss every single point to the point of exhaustion. At some point, you need to strap in and build something and just try it out. Less meetings, more doing. Action, not discussion.
Pay your employees industry averages. If you feel so honored to be hosting amazing industry talent, then paying them what they’re worth shouldn’t be a big deal. Time to put your money where your mouth is, CCP.
- Mar 29, 2012
Not sure what to make out of all this, to be honest. That “start-up smell” kind of wears off quickly and for a company like CCP Games, eager to diversify its current “all eggs in a single basket” business model it can be easy to overlook the hardships a low/mid level employer endures every day.
Anyhow, we’ll keep monitoring this GD thread just in case something out of the ordinary appears.
Discussion: The GlassDoor CCP Games Review.
What about you experiences as customer. What kind of real, tangible advice would you give CCP Games management should you had the chance to get one-on-one with them?
- R
This TBH is exactly what most of us think about CCP. Alot of talk of change and hype about content with very little. Take Tec moon problem going on 4 years now, and before it was 2 moons, for 3 years so essentially they have had 7 years to change the entire way it works, not just and some patch with alchemy.
Tons and tons of missed dates. Think about walking in stations they announced and talked in 2008 and it came out 2011.
Anyways I think they have good intentions but CCP is famous for buffing/Nerfing things that dont need to be touched, and not focusing on things that are breaking the game and changing it for the worst.
Also from all the CSM statements I have read they say CCP basically takes there ideas and only implements the ones that were already inline, so really they are just guys who get to fly here and be seen as a "Leader"
I think this summarizes it very well, there Eyes are bigger than there stomachs, they dont do much as they talk 10x more, and they dont listen to lower staffers…..Sounds very very corporate but when CCP started it was great because they went against the grain, more and more they are becoming a blob themselves with only $$ signs as there goal rather than caring what they output.
I took a year off for my Service, and what changed really? Not Tech, Not massive Blobs, Not super easy exploits to make ISK and CCP refusing to change it. None of the important things IMO but they Nerfed SC`s, and added T3 BC`s and fixed hybrids[there only real solid fix/not waste f time]….All that is 1 whole year IMO is very very lacking. I still use 85% of my old fits but the global problems are still there. Tec/Bottleneck, Numbers=Power, and many many more. And why start with Frigs to balance maye they should have started with BS`s down to T3`s then HAC`s and all the other Mostly used PVP and PVE ships? Just more bad planning, 1 year they fixed Frigs thats it.
Good intentions, bad actual results IMO.
The Frig fix was so that the new players can get better game expirience….
I personaly, dont see where are all this new players are coming from ?
To have game progression, based on time and to make changes based on new player expirience… This is just stupid.
noobs can be in a battleship in less then a week, guns and all. Its not like every noob starts at a frig and STAYS there for a month training everything up. If your just starting out and trying to mission run, you get into a battleship and there guns as soon as you can. T1 fit still works, as Meta 4 or even cheap faction stuff is same or even better then certain T2's. So starting a re-balance would of been the best for the game starting at battleships or the entire cruiser line as that would effect more people. Frigs no one really cares about, even the "light tackle" are just that, LIGHT, the big brothers of them are what get the real job done. Your only in a light tackle, if you don't have the real ship for the fleet.
faction warfare flies mostly in frigs/dessies…..
I am not at all surprised that this is the way things are.
I do not know the structure of CCP but this tells me there should be a cut of at least two levels.
Also the way these things develop looks to me like a bunch of university graduates pretending to work like professionals.
If you herd in all that money, the least you could do is to make the AGILE development worth it's name!
Glassdoor: where people meet to whine.
Well, Seniors/Producers/Directors from EA/BioWare did made sucha "great" job on swotr, why do you think that ccptards will learn from their mistakes.
Been reading alot of those and its mostly x employee's that are butthurt .. in terms of ccp its complains that if you ain't icelandic you wont get far up the ladder …and that people speak icelandic there around the water cooler … and always management fault … well to start with … its a ICELANDIC company .. so not surprising they won't just give the company away to someone who's been there for a year .. and yes icelandic people working there probably don't like speaking english 24/7 because they are in ICELAND .. so if you are working there for years .. maybe pick it up? .. it might even get you higher up
Sure does not sound as if CCP is "industry leading" or just being a good example.
Some people just need to grow up. This is the worst whinning ever.
CCP, I play your game for years, and i like it. Seems you're terrible, so continue being terrible because i seem to like it and it seems a lot of others do also.
Also, some people should get fired just to show who's boss.
So, it sounds like CCP is just like every other corporation. No big news here.
BTW, creative types are always complaining about meetings. They are always complaining about thier ideas not being listened to. But, they fail to realize that not all ideas are good ideas, and sometimes the best ideas cannot be implemented… despite everyone agreeing that it would be the proper way to go.
Do they think that apple is immune from this problem? Do they think that Aerospace is immune? They arent, and neither is CCP. Their is a meeting about everything. I guarantee you that Apple did not just let their designers develope a GUI for the Iphone, and send it out to the customer. Nope, every aspect of it was criticized, adnausium, in *gasp* meetings. And guess what? I also guarantee that many ideas were shot down, making an angry developer.
I am not seeing anything different here. This is how things are done.
I have been in Eve since 2005, seen a lot of crap done by CCP.
To this day some obvious things not balanced correctly, roll a change out, then nert it, nerfed too much, rebalance again, and so on.
We waited for years for anyone to take a look at hybrids, same thing with POSes, now they panic nerf stuff couse its easier to nerf one thing then to balance 3 others.
I worked in a similar situation, managment was so disconnected from reality, they always spit out projected numbers without any understanding what a change would do. Advices from junior members? What do they know… Asskissing was the only way to get promoted….and any vision for the product was lost along the way.
They would rather spend hours in meetings patting each other on the back than do anything, if anyone has a good idea, they take it for their own since its all a big team and then fuck it up by not understanding anything and taking it into a completly different direction.
People "whining" in GlassDoors had ther hopes crashed by people leading the company to disaster.
Eve has a lot of things to fix, not spend a fuckload of monex on WoD and Dust and put Eve in background. They got burned once already, and I doubt they learned anything from it.
websites like glassdoor (there are more) live from bitter ex employes writing stuff.
someone who's happy, if he even leaves, has no reason to post there much.