Adembroski goes off on Twitter about EA/Madden

[leaffan]

Reading through seen stephenson on there... his job title is now:

Digital Marketing Manager for the Columbus Blue Jackets

:rofl:

 

[MrBill]

Pasta captured pics of all of the texts in case they get taken down....

http://www.pastapadre.com/2012/12/03/former-madden-developer-speaks-out-regarding-frustrations-and-disappointments

 

[bucky]

Adem is now LEGENDARY. F EA......long live Adem.

 

[Realist]

Good job Broski.

Now what your back and don't come up missing....

 

[Champ]

http://www.pastapadre.com/2012/12/0...ut-regarding-frustrations-and-disappointments

lol at the comments

 

[jms493]

Let me see if I got this straight...This guy used to be a taxi cab driver, and because of his superior ball-washing skills he ended up becoming part of the Madden development team, despite having no prior dev experience whatsoever, where he joined a long list of talent-less hacks who also had no prior game development experience (Ian Cummings, Jake Stein, Chase Becotte (an OS Mod), Bumble_OS (another former OS Mod), etc.)?

Combine that with a couple of douchebag, money-grubbing leaders at the top (Riccotello and Moore), and it says an awful lot about why Tiburon football is in the sorry a$$ state that it's in.

ique:

 

[JimLeavy59]

I heard OS banned him.

 

[bucky]

I heard OS banned him.

From what an OS mod said, Adem wasn't banned from OS, the guy making those funny comments against Adem some against OS was banned from OS. Wasn't sure which guy you meant when you said OS banned him.

 

[dave]

Adem and I were talking about this on Facebook chat a few nights ago. Was surprised to see he took it to Twitter.

The year I went to Orlando to test Madden 11 .... it's easy to see why you can love and hate working in a place like that. Madden has been a turd for too many years and I doubt it will be fixed next year either.
That said, I still play the turd ... I just wish it was somewhere near the level of 2k basketball, NHL or Fifa.

 

[Playmakers]

None of this surprises me at all......

But really what is going to change?

EA has been doing this crap with their Madden, NCCA Football and NBA Basketball games for a long time now. I play their football games because quite frankly there's no other football games to play anymore.

At the end of the day we all still give EA our money regardless of how buggy, flawed or incomplete their product is out of the box. They have slowly but surely been killing the NCAA Football series and have done nothing about it. These sports forums creates threads on how to improve the games and the so called game changers/dev's will listen and take the feedback.

That never seems to happen (IMPROVEMENT) IMO......this guy Adembroski hasn't said anything new to me lots of REGULAR/ORDINARY guys have felt this way about EA.

This is a company that created a NBA Basketball game where the actual players on the court couldn't even throw a simple alley oop pass......they create a College Football game where a True Option Team can't even execute or run their Option Offense and they create a Pro Football game where the NFL Teams don't even run proper offenses or plays.

But lets ask ourselves at end the of day after we still give EA our $60 bucks who's the biggest fools them or us?

 

[killgod]

We are. But really, you aren't going to convince people to stop buying the game, so holding off isn't going to change a damn thing.


While the game is a shite version of actual football, in a decent league there's much to be enjoyed.

 

[leaffan]

It's funny how that comment is true in some regards. Why EA lets some of those people who have no game development knowledge in is beyond me. I've been on this since some of the MM guys were getting jobs there.

 

[MrBill]

Nobody is shocked at what Adembroski is saying, we know there are some good guys at EA working hard but all it takes is one person and a lot of corporate oversight to get it sideways. I still believe that for all of the warts, that Madden '13 was a step forward over Madden '12 so it's hard for me to completely blast the game. For Madden '14, I'd like to see them fine tune the engine and polish what they have already put out there without adding a bunch of new features that will need work after launch. Then just like in the PS2 era, we can have an almost perfect football video game for one year before the next generation of consoles are released and we start back at square one :facepalm:

 

[leaffan]

Nobody is shocked at what Adembroski is saying, we know there are some good guys at EA working hard but all it takes is one person and a lot of corporate oversight to get it sideways. I still believe that for all of the warts, that Madden '13 was a step forward over Madden '12 so it's hard for me to completely blast the game. For Madden '14, I'd like to see them fine tune the engine and polish what they have already put out there without adding a bunch of new features that will need work after launch. Then just like in the PS2 era, we can have an almost perfect football video game for one year before the next generation of consoles are released and we start back at square one :facepalm:

This is the first madden game I've bought at launch and played for more then 20mins since 2005.

The game still fucking sucks. If I wasn't in tst I would of traded it in by now. Offline "franchise" is beyond horrible.

 

[killgod]

lol. found this on kotaku, straight ether.

I have some acquaintances that still work at Tiburon. One used to work on the Madden team but is now working on some other project.

Some interesting tidbits I heard after the nuclear self mutilation this weekend:

- This Dembroski character seemed to imply in his rant that he quit working for EA Sports but it's pretty clear that he was fired.

- He was fired because of extreme incompetence. One of my acquaintances told me he routinely showed up 4-5 hours late for work or never showed up at all. He apparently struggled with every thing he was asked to do and in my friend's words...'never seemed to understand what he was working on even after it was explained multiple times in the simplest terms.'

- I guess it was common knowledge that developers on the Madden team couldn't stand to work with him. When he was actually at work, he constantly argued with his co-workers or disappeared for hours at a time. I guess he also wasn't too fond of the nickname that he was given at work...'dumb bro'. I hear there were even some memes created about him after he left.

- One of my friends told me that when he was let go, there was a mini-celebration on the Madden team that he was finally gone. It seems that another designer on the team was doing contract work and he left the team when his contract was up a few months before Dembroski. Apparently quite a few people on the team complained when that guy left the team and Dembroski stayed on the team instead of him.

- My friends joined the team after Dembroski was hired, but there was a lot of talk about how he got the job in the first place. I guess he was hired by some guy that is no longer at the company and nobody still on the team understood how a guy who had no experience and was a taxi cab driver was hired on to a team like Madden. A lot of people on the team were concerned about his constant professionalism issues and it clearly showed that he had never worked in a corporate environment in the past.

- There was a big incident towards the end of the game where Dembroski was in charge of finishing a major portion of the franchise mode and when the deadline passed for him to turn in his work, he'd spent weeks lying to everyone about his progress. The lead designer had to work 20 hour days just to clean up the mess but Dembroski's disasterous lack of work actually ended up causing major bugs in the mode that had to be patched and caused a lot of issues with the community. My friend said that quite a few of the programmers on the team got pretty angry with him when that happened. He was also in charge of the NFL stats stuff and he constantly made excuses about why that was tuned so badly even though he was in charge of it.

- One friend said that Dembroski routinely threw temper tantrums when his ideas (which were apparently pretty terrible) didn't make it into the game. He constantly clashed with everyone on the team and just couldn't handle any of his ideas being rejected. That friend also said that nobody was surprised when this Twitter thing happened. I'm guessing the guy was pretty unstable.

- The producer that he ripped so badly on Twitter actually made excuses for Dembroski throughout the year and fought for Dembroski to stay at the company at one point when it looked like he'd be fired at an earlier point in his time at EA Sports.

- I asked about the scouting system in particular and was told that the scouting system that Dembroski was referring to was actually shown to a group of community members who immediately hated it. Those community members actually worked with the team to tune the system that is in the game right now and from what my friend says, it has been well received by the fans as far as he has seen.

- I gathered that Dembroski was truly an entry level grunt. He had no contact with any executives, the CEO or anyone else important and they certainly didn't include him in any EA Sports company strategy sessions. All of the Call of Duty stuff seems like it was some crazy rant he made up in his head, which wasn't out of the ordinary. He seemed to have quite a few conspiracy theories about how EA worked but never really was included in any conversations about Madden outside of what he was going to work on every week. I'm sure that frustrated him to no end as an obsessed fan.

- Both of my friends say that this is just a last ditch effort by a disgruntled employee to get some attention after an embarrasing year at the company. No one on the team will speak to him after this (I'm pretty sure they didn't anyway) and he's going to find it very tough to get a job in the industry after this. They hope he enjoys the rest of his career as an angry, petty cab driver.

 

[jms493]

so your saying adembroksi goes off like a idiot on twitter is ACTUALLY an idiot....you dont say?

didnt read it all but damn....

 

[bucky]

Sounds like it could be damage control spin.

 

[killgod]

The article itself mentions that AJ won't comment further, which makes you wonder.

 

[BigBucs]

Sounds like it could be damage control spin.

Yea, sounds like a bunch of bullshit. Sounds like this "friend" is completely trying to discredit Adem to save face. Nobody as incompetent as they are trying to make him seem would last 5 years on a major development team.

 

[MrBill]

That Kotaku rant had to be written in the third person by somebody that still works at Tiburon. I don't talk to my "acquaintances" that often and we certainly don't hash the dirt. I do that with my close friends or people that I talk to regularly. Just because I met someone at a dinner party six months ago, doesn't mean that I am going to call them for the dirt if something from their company hits the Internet.

Considering that Adembroski didn't have anything that inflammatory to say other than what was directed at this one "unnamed person", it seems like somebody wanted to undermine his credibility and that person is probably very close to the "unnamed person". I mean we all recognize that artistic creativity and the corporate work place do not mesh well together.

Corporations are ran by bean counters and all they want to know is how many beans you can produce and sell at X price along with how cheaply can you provide the product. Video game houses are full of artists that want the perfect product, which works better in the case of games like Borderlands or Halo where you don't have to have a game out every year (2 years seems to be the perfect timeline to develop a major video game). Unfortunately, EA is already working on the following years version of the game when the current years version is launched because they just have one Madden team.

I think EA would be better off in the long run to follow Activision's lead on the Call of Duty franchise and bring in another team for Madden and have them and Tiburon alternate years like Infinity Ward and Treyarch do for Activision. That would double cost of producing the bean though and even though it would double quality and increase sales, you would need a senior level...I mean a board member of EA pushing it to override the mid level bean counters that would shoot it down.