As I said on radio, this is such a fascinating story to me.

My girlfriend actually manages projects like these for a living, so I told her the whole story, and she's also fascinated.

This project had potential, but they got so many basic things wrong. Among them:

- Stressing innovation and gimmicks over the established basic requirements

- Poor marketing plan which lacked any kind of budget as a contingency

- Lack of proper market assessment, and completely ignoring advice of industry veterans which was provided for free on 2+2 and elsewhere

- Putting the cart before the horse -- "solving" problems like HUDs, bumhunting, etc which are really only faced by sites with substantial existing traffic. At the same time, they didn't focus on creating a basic site which would attract traffic in the first place.

- Improper reaction to the site's initial failure, focused upon customer blaming rather than introspection regarding their ill-advised plans.

- Inability to see that the site should be built for and aimed at recreational players, not pros. Pros will come if the games are good.

- Poor software testing procedure, leading to a buggy launch


The amazing thing is that they still don't get it, and are repeating the same mistakes.