An old, dumb question

This may sounds extremely dumb but...

I always thought that Bill Roper, along with Max Scheaffers and his brother and other ex Blizzard's employees were behind Guild Wars.

I just took a look at Arena.Net staff and none of them are there, as I expected. Instead, some are ex Blizzard's employees such as Mike O'Brien, Patrick Wyatt and Jeff Strain. Not that these programmers don't have talent, but I was so certain that Bill Roper was with 'em on GW.

Anyone feels like enlightening my darken soul ?

By the way, this is my very first post here. Might as well add a little "Hi !" to it while I'm at it.

Hi !

there are two groups who have left Blizzard and gone on to their own companies. Arena.Net is one, and bedamned if i remember the one the guys you're talking about went to.

http://www.flagshipstudios.com/

Go to the who we are link, there's all the people you are after.

Thanks for your time but I managed to found out their website right after Duality commented about the 2 teams that left Blizzard Entertainment.

In regard to your sound of disappoinment at not finding Roper under Arena.net's employ, I know that after reviewing the Roper site, they appear to just be getting going since leaving blizzard. Mind you, it is apparently becuase they had to program a whole new 3D engine, however, they are just getting their official site up for their first game just making alliances with some korean company. The PCgamer magazine article about the game appared to be unavilable to me in th U.S. too. So Roper and crew may have been Blizzard's stars at one time, and as with any stars there are "understudies."

Not knowing anything personally about this my tendency is to think Jeff Strain and crew were the real backbone of the machine, the ones who, though well learned from their "mentors," they committed original acts of genius on their own and didn't get the credit. Just how it is in the corporate environment. I say that because they worked on GuildWars for years it appears starting shortly, if not almost immediately, after leaving Blizzard to have the gold release of GuildWars less than a month away.

Also the 3D engine in Guildwars is not the Wow or Blizzard engine they left behind. Look at the WOW screen shots and you'll see what I mean in an instant. It almost looks as hokie as Runescape, but I am not out to start a whole negative thing on WOW or Runescape. Every game has a market, WOW too.