Quote:
Originally Posted by Gage
You go through a SD temp agency to get hired on as QA. That starts between $8 and $10 an hour, no benefits.
That is the easiest way to get moved up to associate designer, and the rates I quoted are correct. At least they were last year.
I seriously doubt its much more now tbh.
Why do you think SOE hires so many unexperienced people from the community to positions?
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I had to wait for a year after submitting my resume after college before a QA spot opened. Two bachelor degrees with programming experience in C, I made $10 an hour (My college buddies working for Nokia, Microsoft, or Lockheed-Martin in Usability engineering or programming were making $60-80k at this point), no benefits, and mandatory 6 month contract with stiff penalties for leaving, and locked me from moving into any other position within SOE or being hired directly by them. Meanwhile, I was still doing volunteer work as a class team lead for Dark Ages of Camelot (Mythic) on their internal message boards (Thanks Sanya/Tweety!)
As a tester, I found the most bugs on the game, and made suggestions directly to the development team for EQOA (which the team had great communication with its testers relative to other games). I ended up working on UI shortcuts at the dev studio as overtime pay toward the end. At the end of 6 months, I told the QA manager that this job was BS for my qualifications, so a month later when a position opened, I was made a QA lead, and a full time employee with benefits starting at $15/hour.
While there, Planetside was in Alpha/Beta. For my own amusement, I wrote a program with spreadsheets to completely dissect the game in terms of weapon-armor-vehicle analysis of every possible scenario, including blast area, damage over time, damage degredation over range, armor types, and COF hits/range DPS ratios, all pre-launch. I showed that to the QA manager who said "you don't belong here".
The Planetside team invited me to talk mechanics, and they were going to hire me as a mechanics designer for the combat system. Not too long thereafter, budget cuts closed positions that were opened and I was stuck in QA. An invite from the EQ2 development team (we're talking 2003) to the rest of the company invited anyone to submit there ideas and work as assistant designers (not designer pay, but work part time in the dev studio).
I was hired early before the wave from CS/QA came in. I was assigned as the scripting designer and my first assignment was to design the boat tutorial around the story for it. Expectations were low, get a tutorial that guides a player how to move, learn some basic shortcuts and windows, and some simple combat. Instead, I scripted every single lively gesture of the characters, even during mid-sentence (which was not done anywhere else in game). I had many in-between assignments and used my college background to teach the other designers how to script, and even wrote a manual on how to do so specifically for the game. I almost lost my job because of it: not all leads are thrilled by that kind of initiative. I don't know if it was punishment, but I was assigned to work on basic population for ALL the city zones (all the hoodies, all the south/east/west/north sides, both cities). I added a lot of scripting to move the people and animals about town, and made sure to include something extra interesting about one or more of the characters that was scripted for each zone. Finally, I was hired as an associate designer, with no increase in pay (note: this was pre-Gallenite leading). In fact, I made less because as a QA lead/assistant designer, I made overtime pay, but I was salary once hired as a full-time dev. I had various other assignments and tools I've made between the time I finally landed myself as spells/combat mechanics dev a full 2.5 years after I was first hired into QA. The first 4 years were ridiculous amounts of overtime, and a good amount of it self-induced to improve/fix things because I was passionate about doing the right thing overall. I thank Gallenite's ability to prove that quick development cycles = slower increase in subs and my last year was not riddled with OT like the ones previous.
Once you're in, you're in. I've turned down mechanics offers from various up-and-coming MMORPGs at the time. I interviewed for the mechanics dev for WoW (the OG left post-launch), but I just wanted to see the offer since I already knew I was applying to graduate school. In the overall scheme of the video game industry, it's still new, and it's tough to get past anyone responsible for hiring that hires among friends first, then within company to land a spot for a design position, regardless of qualifications/degrees outside of the game industry.
EDIT: Office savoir-faire (street smarts) go a long way. Fresh out of college, I believed naively that one's skill in a field determines there success. In hindsight, had I been more relaxed, focused on making friends with the right people, I might had advanced faster through less working and with more pay as I saw a few others do around me.
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