Welcome to Drakken Hallows
In 2003 I got invited to test world of warcraft before it was live. It might have been since I had a battle net account from the original Diablo game. I was a known tester of games among a group of developers that pulled me in because I wrote detailed bug reports on stuff I could verify. No verify I'd note it down in note pad and if I could replicate then bug it. I was also re-writing epic unreal engine to help learn object-oriented code at this time. I wanted to work with real working code because examples tend to not reflect real issues and things you do on live code that don't matter when writing the pseudo code. It took about six months to go through the code and pull the functions out and get them working as black box code. That way the function does not care what is passed to it and it returns a result totally separate with what variables the main branch of the code has. Basic object-oriented code. It was just a new thing in 2003. Anyway, so I take the code and eliminate about 60 percent of the code because when you pull the function out you can reuse the same function for more than one thing. I had forked it like the GitHub article said and I go to show my professor and I can't find my fork. Epic decided that my fork was better than the main trunk, so they made it the main trunk of the code path. What was crazy is it was faster to redo the updated they had come up with while I was streamlining the code than rewriting the code with the object-oriented code. I have been listed as an Epic dev on GitHub ever since. There are a lot of professionals that contribute to unreal these days and about nine years ago they moved to newer code.
I was at Ocean College working on my Computer Science and Information Technology Degree. The state of New Jersey allows students to plan their own degrees in the state college system as long as they take all the required courses even if the courses change while completing the degree. So, I ended up with a finance degree I don't use alongside my CSIT degree. Being that I am right brain left brain, meaning I take to art side as well as the science side, I looked at having to get a bachelor's degree to do the IT work I was doing to pay my living and gaming expenses. Having paid for the GI Bill while in the USAF, it paid for my degrees at Ocean College, but when I went down to Full Sail University in Orlando, it paid nothing. So, I was looking for work out of school, Funcom tried to hire me as an environmental artist for Age of Conan, but the anarchy online team said Funcom should be hiring internally despite the fact they were hiring for Norway not Canada. We all saw how that worked out. They should have hired me and they others like they wanted we could have hammered out the assets the game never got.
So, while I'm doing all this, I am playing wow in the time I can steal from my busy life. While at Ocean I was in the beta test through Launch and I remember thinking this game is vast. I was testing mostly Paladin and Warrior because I liked the play style. I almost got banned because my 1 megabit connection was polling about 11 times a second and the players on dial up were polling every two minutes. So, I would see a player just standing there afk and hit charge on my warrior. By the time the player saw me they were dead, with no replay function. I was not the only one on a fast connection, so it took about two months for the developers to figure out what was going on because when the Game Masters looked at the logs, they saw the same thing I saw an AFK player not reacting in time. The game goes live and the severs are setup for the million beta testers they had about two weeks before the game went live. Some one had decided because Everquest only had 200,000 players wow would have less. The servers melted by the time I got my collectors box in the mail they had stable servers which I created Vlor on Earthen Ring. I still have that character. My buddy Paul wanted me to play on Dalaran US East with some friends of his. That lead to my joining a raiding guild while working for five staffing agencies and completing a 180 credit applied science associate degree. I got achievement and saw really cool stuff I burned out I missed a lot of burning crusade I was too busy. Then Wrath came and I made my Death Knight Amortis. Still my main to this day.
Fast forward to 2011. I am working in Los Angles as IT and Post Production depending on what week it is. I get a call from Volt and they want to hire me but won't tell me anything over the phone. I have never heard of them but they were well known in the area. So I go in and after a really weird interview I am told I am being hired as a focus tester for a call of duty game. I had to pretend to be a qa tester reporting bugs but the surveys as to if the game is fun is the important part. So I go to work at 1000 pacific coast towers in el Segundo. 30 minutes before rush hours 2 and half in rush hour. I get there and one the PC team. We are allowed to bring our controllers from home and generally we are playing 10 hours a dead to find the bugs the small internal teams could not. I find five show stoppers in my time from august until September. The real story is after the focus testers get folded into the larger 600 person temp team of testers, we go to a presentation on how to get into the industry. We are told become a QA tester. But it won't work for us. So Eric resinki goes to someone and a week later jeff Kaplan, shows up and tells the testers they are looking for a class designer. We are working on MW3 we knew Activision and Blizzard were one company because we had to write down all our accounts and social media accounts in the case of leak. So 17 at a time we go into a computer room and design a class. I came up a bard class that required minions throwing candles at the enemy because you know you have made it when fan hold up their lighters at concerts. Alyssa came up a dark hunter. One other guy was on the brain storming class he never told us what class he came up with. So I get a visit from one of the studio heads who I had no clue who was and he pulls me aside from the exercises we are doing in class design and has me come up with ideas that lead to shimmer and arcane movement. Apparently they wanted to update the mage class and figured why not see if anyone was a good designer. Mostly we are testing MW3 and when there is down time waiting for a new candidate build to compile, brain storming in our small group while most of the testers are playing on the arcade in the break room. So there was one class designer position they had said was up for grabs and I was going to get it, when I got asked the standard question if you can change anything about wow what would you change. I said the NPC and Players are backwards. The NPC are 15 feet tall and have custom gear and players all either look like clowns or they all look the same to get invited to raid and dungeon groups. Every paladin is blue and gold, every warlock in green and purple. The studio head said I think your wrong but the colors would how would we do that? I said if you make it so the colors are on the gear it would be a good start. He said we can move the colors to the gear but I may get back to you on the rest. I think a month goes by and we are heads down trying to find everything before MW3 goes gold and they can't fix it on machines with no internet. I'm in the middle of something when my team lead sends me a message go to the break room and wait. The developer who I had talked to about the class comes up to me and says so the bard class how many minions does it really need. I sigh and say at five you will feel like a rockstar at three kinda self conscience and any less just an idiot. He sighed and said I was afraid of that. Then he say at least the mage stuff worked and about the identity of the players I think your on to something. We go back and forth with ideas and he says how would you like a job a better one than the one we were going to offer you. Once I say does it pay well. He says yes. I say sure. He says go back to what you were working on it will take some time. So I get pulled in as one of the developers playing the press at the call of duty XP event for MW3. September happens all the temp testers are laid off I'm quietly told don't go anywhere. Two days after being laid off I get called and told I'm supposed to be at work. So I drive to the address in Santa Monica, I walk into Activision Blizzard headquarters and get setup working in the basement with the permeant testers along with Alyssa who had also gotten called in. So I get setup on actual developer accounts with Microsoft, Playstation and Steam. I get bowered by the head of focus groups to drink and beer and see an office he joke could be mine some day. I have no idea at this point but testing the call of duty website and day one patch. February 12 2012 rolls around and I am waiting to see if I get a better job and boss yells and me for day dreaming when 430pm rolls around I get escorted off the property. I week later I find out from one of the devs I got the art director position but lost it when the studio heads tried to get money for an MMO idea I had they said what was the worst thing that can happen. I should have waited six months to bring that up I would be the most well know person in gaming.
I went to Disney next got hired because the guy in charge of game support wanted some real answers and the QA team was not testing android phones like they claimed. So having a high end Samsung I was the preferred choice but I was not told that until after I got back from working at stero d in Canada. So I work at the Glendale campus and security tells me they can't give me special access. I have no idea what they are talking about at that point I did not realize having been hired as a manager when I was active duty to fix the ESPN shares issue. ESPN was buying stock and losing money but since the owned Disney stock they were always able to borrow more money.
I am given a five grand pc to test Disney games on and test the games on my phone getting reimbursed for buying the games. Some of those games were horrible. But I had experience with data bases from when I was at Davis Mounthan at the 25 OWS when I was doing data entry for Chuck Grassy who was a navy guy as far as I knew until later. So I knew how get the details for the tech writer to write up standard responses for the other support people. I was also being paid at my old rate of 19 and hour and some of the support were getting 12 after working for more than ten years. Sure I had more experience but the board was getting worse and the other majority share holders come to me and tell me ESPN bought ABC. I blink and say what are you talking about. They said the board was not listening to them so they sold me their shares. At which point I asked why didn't anyone talk to me first. I don't have access to those they are in the basement of the employment office in Florida. I gave the books back to the broker when I bought ESPN as a kid. So shortly afterward I get visited by two guys who wanted to know if I could fix ESPN. I said depends one what is wrong. The one guy said it is about a 100 million in the hole. I said people spend crazy amounts of money on sports this should be fixable. It turned out that ESPN was paying companies to advertise their products on ESPN network. Every other network you pay the network to advertise your product between the content the network wants paid for. So I got them to drop the commercials all together, I said do you know what talking heads are. They said no. I said so we will simply this. I want you to get players and put them in nice suits that fit right. It is not going to cost that much but we want people to respect the players for their knowledge as well as their skill at ball games. Just a news desk an odd number of people they don't have to agree just not make stuff up. Only talk about what they know. Next what most people want is easy access to the numbers they want to be able to look on their break to find out the score before someone else spoils the game for them. Basically they wanted to do it at the top of the hour, and I pointed out that for many people when they get a break might not be at a set time or at the top of the hour every fifteen minutes on the hour. Next I said people will pay more for quality, you want stuff that creates memories and stuff that look and or feels good. I'm sure there are dozens of companies that can create better quality sports jerseys and other stuff that people will pay a premium for. I said setup a tier system were you reward loyalty.
Within a week they were positive cash flow, within six months one million in profit. Then the Disney board got involved and I went from a shareholder with all the perks to fired. They sent a fake FBI agent who was a private investigator to find out if I had the money defend myself. Considering every time I have had money something goes wrong nope I ended up in series of crappy jobs. But I got the novel published on amazon I got the concepts hammered out for the MMO if anyone like say Microsoft decides it is worth developing.
I have wandered all over the world over the decades. Born to British parents and made a ward of the state of Pennsylvania at the age of five, I was raised by foster parents in New Jersey. My life was not bad it was just not the life I would have had growing up in Northern Ireland. I did not find out about my parents until I was in the UK while overseas for the United States Air Force. At which point I visited Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Finland to learn about my father's ancestry. When I was in Sweden, they told me based on the paperwork they got from the UK, I could have dual citizenship with Sweden and Norway, but my name was an issue. Apparently, Benjamin being the name of a saint was an issue in June of 1998.
So, the Norwegian's were trying to recreate old Norse as they felt they needed their own identity as they were taking back rule from Sweden. This led to a bit of back and forth and I decided in a fit pique I would trade saint for divine. Because I slept with so many women at that point, I decide to upgrade saint to divine. I was in a mood at the time. What I came up with was a play on Greek rain that got women pregnant. Shiny Bright water falling from heaven blessing the dawn light upon the killing cold waters of the fjords. Byö Ord eth/Ð aseir or Byórðæįr the ö becomes ó when two in a row. Thus, the name on my Norwegian documentation was Byórðæįr Vas'Ðrakken. They were deciding on the allowed characters and let me use the Russian į so I could do aseir correctly but later both Iceland and Norway decided not to include the accented i on their keyboards, but it is still legal for use in both countries.
Thus, I have a strong Scandinavian influence on much of my artwork along with Irish from my mother's side. Due to my parentage when I was in my thirties I looked like a young Steve Harris when I shave my beard.
I have worked as a programmer for epic, I was in college and epic was the only live code I could find at the time to practice converting to object-oriented code. I spent six months re-writing all the block code into functions. I eliminated about 60 percent of the code because as soon as you break functions out you can reuse the same function. I was in college learning c++ and c# and sure I knew pascal, but no one was using it anymore. I signed up for a GitHub account, answered a bunch of questions and forked the database. When I was done and it would compile without errors uploaded to GitHub. Basically, want teams do to use unreal for their own projects. I went to show my professor, and I couldn't find my fork. I think I spent twenty minutes before I realized Epic had made my fork the main branch because it was easier for them to re-do the past six months of updated than to re write the code as object-oriented code. So, I got to have epic developer on my GitHub. In working with the code, I learned about things like switch statements from ada that are used in c++. This helped me when I went to Full Sail University and worked with maya's scripting language.
From there I worked at Activision Blizzard in august of 2011. I had been playing world of warcraft for years, but I was hired as part of a focus group of military personal to make sure it would be fun for the active duty in tent city in Saudi. We were pretending to be part of the six hundred testers brought on for the final push before the game went gold.
Back then once the game was gold most people would not get any updates so anything critical had to be found and fixed before then. I found a couple bugs that caused issues because we were in a separate database because we were there to answer surveys and play the game to make sure it would be fun for guys who were using the real hardware. I think about two weeks in most of the focus group had come to the same conclusion. Not having any consequences to going down was perfect for guys dealing with the real version where if a buddy gets shot that might be the last time you talk to him or her. Women were not supposed to be in combat, but half the drivers and paramedics were women.
So, we get folded into the temp testers and do everything they do plus the surveys. Jira is really cool at what it can do. We go into a presentation on how to break into the industry. Meeting Mathew Mercer was cool, especially considering in 2011 he was not a big name. The developer giving the presentation said repeatedly to become a QA tester. Then when people asked what the next step for us is, he told us it wasn't going to work for us. People were ready to quit over this stunt. It might have been they were moving the temp testers to the Midwest because California is too expensive, or it might have been twenty of us while we played games were not hired as QA. Eric Resinski was one of the testers who was related to people who worked at Blizzard and he said when we were outside getting food, I'm going to fix this. I shrugged and just assumed he was full of it. A week later Jeff Kaplan shows up at 1000 pacific towers in El Segundo and says there is one position open for a class designer. Half of us looked at Eric. We went into the interview room 17 at a time and wrote up a new class for world of warcraft. We had to come up with everything to level 100. Which was higher than game was at when we did it. I have background writing romance novels for a publisher in England. Writing colorful scenes is something I can do in my sleep, but they wanted back story mechanics skills abilities and trees.
So decided to use the heralds of Valdemar and harpers as my inspiration. I ran games as a GM in New Jersey while at Ocean College and the adventures at the time were using the harpers, so I had a lot of experience writing about bards. The studio heads picked three testers to pull to the side to brainstorm on stuff. Unknown to us they were looking to update the Mage class and figured that we were already being paid and under NDA, so what was the harm. Most of the time it was while the other testers were playing on the arcade machines in the break room while the new builds of Modern Warfare 3 were compiling. It was me, Alyssa and one other guy I still can't remember his name. He didn't even tell us what class he designed. I wrote up a post on wowhead a few years back while I still had a rough idea of what I had done for the Bard class. Alyssa came up with a dark ranger and I think it got used for NPC instead. Mine got me in front of the studio heads who were in control of class design at that point and I get a bunch of what I think are more tests and come up with arcane movement for winter spring and shimmer for another test. The joke was on me as they really just wanted to update the mage class, so my test turned out to the be the stuff that went in the game while the bard class needed five followers to get the rock star feeling. I wanted kobolds holding candles like fans at a zeppelin concert.
They liked the class and had me do up to level 150. The problem was even three minions in iron forge with 100,000 players when it became the flavor of the month would as he said melt the server. He asked me how many minions it needed to feel the class fantasy, I said five even with three you are getting closer to the idiot feeling with one fan. He said, “well we will figure something out. You have the job but for one perfunctory question. If you could change one thing about world of warcraft, what would you change. This was pivotal point in world of warcrafts history. I said you have the npc and players mixed up. The npc are 15 feet tall and have custom gear and the players all look alike or like clowns to get invited to raids. I said every paladin is in blue and gold and every warlock in green and purple. He said so what would do about the gear. I said moving the colors to the gear would be great start. Everyone is in the same tier gear or looks like clown is going to kill the game eventually and I like world of warcraft. He said we can move the colors to the gear easy enough, but I don't think you are right about the rest.
It was another month before we did any more brainstorming, I am thinking I lost the class design job before I even had it. I find a bug in mw3 that is a showstopper and get a lot of attention because everything halts while everyone starts looking for anything like it in the game, and the artists go about removing the phone number on the assets and make sure to destroy any backup that might cause it to go into the live game. So, about this I get a message from my lead on the PC team to go to the break room. The same developers I had talked to about the class design is back and totally unapologetic about being wrong but jumps right into talking about art and design. I had apparently talked my way into a studio head position once modern warfare 3 was gold. He spoke to me a couple times and the long and short of it was he said they have a job for me, and they needed to wait until they were sure they had the money for it so just continue working on MW3.
I am tapped to play the press at the Call of Duty XP event instead of setting up tables and chairs like the rest of the testers because I could play strong and let the press earn their kills and not get upset dying. The game goes gold and all the temporary testers are told thank you and apply in six months to year for the next game. As I am packing up my controller I brought from home to test with my lead pulls me aside and says be available all week. I went home and next day I get a call why am I not at work. I was supposed to go to the Head Quarters building in Santa Monica and report to Matt my new lead.
I get there and the head of the focus group comes down from his office to get me access to the building and introduce to me to my new lead the head of permanent testers for Activision. I get my developer accounts setup with Microsoft and PlayStation. Which was funny he had been using our personal steam accounts and generic accounts up to that point. This required signing up with an actual developer console, which was funny because both of them were pcs. I mostly test the day zero patch and the builds happen at more regular intervals and the call of duty elite site. I get to go to the Launch Party with the celebrities and a few developers. The head of focus testing pulls me from testing and talks about game production and tries to get me to drink beers with him. I am at work and have to drive home so I am worried it is trap, but he shows me an empty office and says one day this could be yours and maybe sooner than you think.
February 12, 2012, rolls around it is the Vivendi shareholder meeting happens. I am getting nervous as it gets close to 430pm and I have not heard anything. My boss tells me to stop daydreaming and get back to work. I shrugged and then about fifteen minutes later security escorts me off the property, Matt tried asking what I did and security said he knew what he did. A week later I get a call we are really sorry you did have the job for four hours. I ask what job, the developers say art director was the first thing on the agenda, and they all loved the ideas we discussed and 100 percent you had the job. Only the MMO idea you had that we said what is the worst that can happen. Well, they got real quiet and asked whose idea it was. Thinking we needed to get in front of it we explained it was the new art director for world of warcraft. They said fire him, no we will do it, and who suggested him for the big time? At which point jeff got banished to hearthstone. If I had only waited six months to bring up the idea for the MMO I would have been the most well-known developer on the planet. My ideas got used and world of warcraft is better for it and I got paid for the work I did on world of warcraft because as a QA tester I made almost 70 grand before taxes due to all the over time. The problem was the next job required info on your last one, and Vivendi told Activision blizzard you can only say people worked there not how long or what they worked on. My guess is they did not want me to go to another studio and have it make a billion dollars and the shareholders who were not at the meeting would cause problems with the French legal system.