a pre-halloween post.
nothing in November - not that odd I guess.
nothing in December - year end wrap-ups aren't a thing, so normal I guess.
nothing in January - last years producer letter did come the very last day...
but here we are a week into February.
*crickets*

if Severlin was actually terminated, would anyone even be able to tell?

so what is it that makes you think Severlin is still with the company?

Pretty sure someone on the Forums would have found out and told us all.

At the very least, the Player's Council would have been told.

Jerry has failed

I seriously doubt the PC knows its ass from a hole in the ground.

Sev was mentioned by Coco on discord as the one who did the negative PRR/MRR pass.
AFAIK Sev has engine-level knowledge of the game so a certain amount of his time is spent on that. (E.x., he did reaper)

If we lose him, we're probably fucked given how many of the monkeys actually know what's going on.

DDO's engine is based on AC. Same with LOTRO.

Though it was developed by the Turbine team (with Microsoft's extensive assistance), it was published as a Microsoft title until 2004.

It had a multimillion-dollar development budget. It was designed by Toby Ragaini (lead designer), Chris Foster, Eri Izawa, and Chris Pierson. The development team consisted of 30+ full-time developers, including 6 artists, 4 game designers, 15 software engineers and 5 QA testers. Asheron's Call was technically innovative for its time. It did not use zoning, a technique of partitioning the game world into zones that ran on different computers on a cluster. This caused delay when moving between zones. Instead Asheron's Call had a single seamless world. It used dynamic load balancing to determine which computer in the cluster controlled which location area. If one area became overpopulated and sluggish control of part of that location would pass to another computer with a lighter load. Critical development software included Microsoft Visual C++ 5.0, Visual SourceSafe 5.0, Lightwave 5.5, and Photoshop 4.0 Asheron's Call uses Microsoft SQL Server for persistent game data. The original Asheron's Call client allowed computers to use either 3D or software graphics acceleration. The modern client requires a DirectX 9.0 compatible video adapter w/ hardware T&L.

Asheron's Call took 40 months plus 8 months of beta testing to complete. It was originally scheduled to ship during the fourth quarter of 1997. Production was delayed over a year because of the inexperience of the production team. The finished product contained approximately 2 million lines of code. There were six servers available at launch. Asheron's Call launched nine months after EverQuest on November 2, 1999. In the United States, it sold 57,143 copies and earned revenues of $2.64 million by early 2000. Asheron's Call had 80,000 players by the end of its first year. By the end of 2000 its subscription rate was third behind Ultima Online and EverQuest, with 90,000 subscribers from 200,000 box sales. While neither Turbine nor Microsoft have been forthcoming in releasing exact subscription counts, it is believed that Asheron's Call peaked in popularity in early 2002 at about 120,000 accounts and has since dropped to below 10,000. Dark Age of Camelot had 200,000 subscribers in May 2002, taking Asheron's Call's spot as third most popular virtual world.

Turbine was founded in April 1994 by Johnny Monsarrat and fellow students at Brown University, as a project with the goal to create the world's largest game. Monsarrat was hit by a car in 1994, which resulted in a payout he used to fund the company. In 1995 the company was based in his mother's house with 12 staff members. They found an office in Providence, RI, but later moved to Westwood, Massachusetts to better take advantage of the software engineers coming out of Boston's colleges. As CEO, Monsarrat used free food and office pranks to keep staff motivated.

The company was originally called CyberSpace because "that seemed cool". Its name was later changed to "Second Nature", but since that was taken, "Turbine" was chosen. Asheron's Call was the company's first game.