A public call for MJ to drop the NDA

Mendel

Torval said:

Kyleran said:

Slapshot1188 said:

I bet money that the poster above doesn’t have a Camelot Unchained account or he wouldn’t spout silly stuff like that.

Or believes treating paying customers with honesty, integrity and fairness is for suckers....

Or better yet, paying customers are suckers...

Pretty sure people who throw hundreds or thousands of dollars at empty promises have always been thought of as suckers. What did paying customers buy? The promise that some project would try their best to create a vision of a product. We just never realistically figured most of these were doomed to failure and got nasty and bitter about that when it happened.

It was a good thought experiment that could have gone another direction, but it didn't. Lesson learnt here is don't throw money at these things. And if someone chooses to then don't expect it to succeed and don't bitch about it when it all falls through.

I have no sympathy for me (Ashes) or anyone else who gambled on this and lost. It's like people who go to Vegas and cry when they come back broke. I get the frustration but at some point you just have to move on and don't make that mistake again.

Your "lesson learnt" is accurate, but only from the customer's side.  What lessons should the businesses have learned from the repeated failures of crowdfunded titles?  What about the propensity to overstate deliverables and underestimate both cost and development time?

I don't know that the failure can be safely and entirely placed on the customer.  Some of it *has* to fall back to the company.  Only, it doesn't appear to be.

Slapshot1188

Ungood said:

Kyleran said:

Slapshot1188 said:

I bet money that the poster above doesn’t have a Camelot Unchained account or he wouldn’t spout silly stuff like that.

Or believes treating paying customers with honesty, integrity and fairness is for suckers....

Or better yet, paying customers are suckers...

Just for the record, I believe people that "Buy" a product before there is a Product, are just suckers waiting to happen, so obviously I do not have an account to a game that does not exist yet.

Yet you did in fact “Buy” Crowfall before it launched as a product.  So maybe not so “obvious” that you don’t have an account with CU...

Slapshot1188

tzervo said:

Kyleran said:

nurso said:

ILLISET said:

I 100% agree with this.  It would be very nice to be able to tell everyone the raw truth about what's going on with the game.  

I don't understand why monthly newsletters aren't enough ... why does everyone and his dog feel entitled to have insight into a private business?

The minute he accepted other people's money to build the game he gave up his "right" to run a private business venture.

But those people already know the raw truth since they have access don't they?

My honest belief is that the rumors and scuttlebutt out in the wild is worse than reality.  Their current PR is a disaster.  Maybe opening it up and even letting non-backers try it could provide a spark or at least some interest.  

Kyleran

tzervo said:

Kyleran said:

nurso said:

ILLISET said:

I 100% agree with this.  It would be very nice to be able to tell everyone the raw truth about what's going on with the game.  

I don't understand why monthly newsletters aren't enough ... why does everyone and his dog feel entitled to have insight into a private business?

The minute he accepted other people's money to build the game he gave up his "right" to run a private business venture.

But those people already know the raw truth since they have access don't they?

Strangely enough, no.  As I am unwilling to be bound by the terms of the NDA I've never set up an account to their test environment.

I won't be dictated to on who I can share  information with especially after such an unreasonably long development cycle.

He promised delivery almost 7 years ago, 7, time he quit hiding in the shadows and face whatever shade is thrown his way.

Ungood

Kyleran said:

Strangely enough, no.  As I am unwilling to be bound by the terms of the NDA I've never set up an account to their test environment.

I won't be dictated to on who I can share  information with especially after such an unreasonably long development cycle.

He promised delivery almost 7 years ago, 7, time he quit hiding in the shadows and face whatever shade is thrown his way.

Since when has an NDA stopped people from throwing shard at a Developer that has not delivered a game.

I mean, you don't need to know what crap he has made to know he is 7 years late, so piss on that and burn him in effigy.

nurso

YashaX said:

I think people have every right and reason to aggressively voice their grievances if someone sells them a product or an idea that in no way lives up to the expectations set. In cases like this, there is pretty much no other way to hold the developers accountable.

Are you trying to justify vigilante justice?

nurso

Ungood said:

When it comes to Crowdfunding, something to keep in mind is that you're not a costumer, you have not bought a product, you have invested your money into a venture (or pipe dream as it where) that may or may not succeed, which makes you an investor, perhaps a foolish one, but an investor none the less.

Emotional investing, perhaps, but one is not an investor in the conventional sense. You have given money for an idea, not invested in a company.

And yes, every backer can now log into the weekly playtests and see for themselves. So it's no problem to see for yourself if you are willing to spend money  ... but it's not necessary: the monthly public newsletters are a good summary of the state of the current build.

Ungood

nurso said:

Ungood said:

When it comes to Crowdfunding, something to keep in mind is that you're not a costumer, you have not bought a product, you have invested your money into a venture (or pipe dream as it where) that may or may not succeed, which makes you an investor, perhaps a foolish one, but an investor none the less.

Emotional investing, perhaps, but one is not an investor in the conventional sense. You have given money for an idea, not invested in a company.

And yes, every backer can now log into the weekly playtests and see for themselves. So it's no problem to see for yourself if you are willing to spend money  ... but it's not necessary: the monthly public newsletters are a good summary of the state of the current build.

Yah.. I have got to admit that Crowed Funding is closer to a bunch of people pooling their money into a pot to bet on a horse, then it is to actual investing into a company.

I'll give that one.

Slapshot1188

Torval said:

Mendel said:

Torval said:

Kyleran said:

Slapshot1188 said:

I bet money that the poster above doesn’t have a Camelot Unchained account or he wouldn’t spout silly stuff like that.

Or believes treating paying customers with honesty, integrity and fairness is for suckers....

Or better yet, paying customers are suckers...

Pretty sure people who throw hundreds or thousands of dollars at empty promises have always been thought of as suckers. What did paying customers buy? The promise that some project would try their best to create a vision of a product. We just never realistically figured most of these were doomed to failure and got nasty and bitter about that when it happened.

It was a good thought experiment that could have gone another direction, but it didn't. Lesson learnt here is don't throw money at these things. And if someone chooses to then don't expect it to succeed and don't bitch about it when it all falls through.

I have no sympathy for me (Ashes) or anyone else who gambled on this and lost. It's like people who go to Vegas and cry when they come back broke. I get the frustration but at some point you just have to move on and don't make that mistake again.

Your "lesson learnt" is accurate, but only from the customer's side.  What lessons should the businesses have learned from the repeated failures of crowdfunded titles?  What about the propensity to overstate deliverables and underestimate both cost and development time?

I don't know that the failure can be safely and entirely placed on the customer.  Some of it *has* to fall back to the company.  Only, it doesn't appear to be.

Certainly the failure is actually all on the people making the promises about delivering a product. I'm not saying it isn't. But buying into this high risk idea without any insurance in the case of failure is all on those throwing money at these ideas. The people buying in didn't cause the failure, aren't responsible for the failure, but are accountable for their own personal losses due to the failure.

There is no accountability and very little recourse unless it can be proven that the project was conducted in bad faith. The fact that these are high risk high failure rate with no recourse scenarios should give people a lot of pause.

What business lessons can we take away? I think there are a lot of takeaways from this. One, crowd-funding can be a great market analysis tool, but you better have real funding and business plan outside of trying to gauge market interest. If you can't get real investment behind your plan even after market interest then that should signal that investors don't have confidence in either what you're doing or how you're trying to do it, or both. There are a lot more, but I think those would be some core practical takeaway points someone considering this sort of approach might want to consider.

The fact that all of these are service oriented projects should also throw up some serious red flags. Even if they produce an okay product, if it fails and they shut the doors in a few months still gives players little to no recourse. You don't even have to buy into crowd-funding to get burnt with one of these games. https://massivelyop.com/2022/02/04/element-quest-is-already-sunsetting-as-devs-lament-a-lack-of-players-and-funds/

We now have the benefit of experience.  I don’t know about you,  but a decade ago when this fiasco started I kind of believed the experienced developers who said they could do this in a few years.  Sadly,  over the last decade I’ve almost become jaded.  Hard to believe I know...  

nurso

Slapshot1188 said:

My honest belief is that the rumors and scuttlebutt out in the wild is worse than reality.  Their current PR is a disaster.  Maybe opening it up and even letting non-backers try it could provide a spark or at least some interest.  

Their current PR is definitely a disaster. No doubt about that.

And yes, it was planned from the beginning that non-backers will be able to test the game for free shortly before launch. The NDA will drop long before that: after the new RvR map with working gameloops is released.

BLNX

Slapshot1188 said:

Torval said:

Mendel said:

Torval said:

Kyleran said:

Slapshot1188 said:

I bet money that the poster above doesn’t have a Camelot Unchained account or he wouldn’t spout silly stuff like that.

Or believes treating paying customers with honesty, integrity and fairness is for suckers....

Or better yet, paying customers are suckers...

Pretty sure people who throw hundreds or thousands of dollars at empty promises have always been thought of as suckers. What did paying customers buy? The promise that some project would try their best to create a vision of a product. We just never realistically figured most of these were doomed to failure and got nasty and bitter about that when it happened.

It was a good thought experiment that could have gone another direction, but it didn't. Lesson learnt here is don't throw money at these things. And if someone chooses to then don't expect it to succeed and don't bitch about it when it all falls through.

I have no sympathy for me (Ashes) or anyone else who gambled on this and lost. It's like people who go to Vegas and cry when they come back broke. I get the frustration but at some point you just have to move on and don't make that mistake again.

Your "lesson learnt" is accurate, but only from the customer's side.  What lessons should the businesses have learned from the repeated failures of crowdfunded titles?  What about the propensity to overstate deliverables and underestimate both cost and development time?

I don't know that the failure can be safely and entirely placed on the customer.  Some of it *has* to fall back to the company.  Only, it doesn't appear to be.

Certainly the failure is actually all on the people making the promises about delivering a product. I'm not saying it isn't. But buying into this high risk idea without any insurance in the case of failure is all on those throwing money at these ideas. The people buying in didn't cause the failure, aren't responsible for the failure, but are accountable for their own personal losses due to the failure.

There is no accountability and very little recourse unless it can be proven that the project was conducted in bad faith. The fact that these are high risk high failure rate with no recourse scenarios should give people a lot of pause.

What business lessons can we take away? I think there are a lot of takeaways from this. One, crowd-funding can be a great market analysis tool, but you better have real funding and business plan outside of trying to gauge market interest. If you can't get real investment behind your plan even after market interest then that should signal that investors don't have confidence in either what you're doing or how you're trying to do it, or both. There are a lot more, but I think those would be some core practical takeaway points someone considering this sort of approach might want to consider.

The fact that all of these are service oriented projects should also throw up some serious red flags. Even if they produce an okay product, if it fails and they shut the doors in a few months still gives players little to no recourse. You don't even have to buy into crowd-funding to get burnt with one of these games. https://massivelyop.com/2022/02/04/element-quest-is-already-sunsetting-as-devs-lament-a-lack-of-players-and-funds/

We now have the benefit of experience.  I don’t know about you,  but a decade ago when this fiasco started I kind of believed the experienced developers who said they could do this in a few years.  Sadly,  over the last decade I’ve almost become jaded.  Hard to believe I know...  

That's the biggest drawback to this, like funding alternative art. Sometimes you get a brilliant work of art, but more times than not you get crap.

YashaX

Slapshot1188 said:

Ungood said:

Kyleran said:

Slapshot1188 said:

I bet money that the poster above doesn’t have a Camelot Unchained account or he wouldn’t spout silly stuff like that.

Or believes treating paying customers with honesty, integrity and fairness is for suckers....

Or better yet, paying customers are suckers...

Just for the record, I believe people that "Buy" a product before there is a Product, are just suckers waiting to happen, so obviously I do not have an account to a game that does not exist yet.

Yet you did in fact “Buy” Crowfall before it launched as a product.  So maybe not so “obvious” that you don’t have an account with CU...

He also used to defend CoE ...

Ungood

YashaX said:

Slapshot1188 said:

Ungood said:

Kyleran said:

Slapshot1188 said:

I bet money that the poster above doesn’t have a Camelot Unchained account or he wouldn’t spout silly stuff like that.

Or believes treating paying customers with honesty, integrity and fairness is for suckers....

Or better yet, paying customers are suckers...

Just for the record, I believe people that "Buy" a product before there is a Product, are just suckers waiting to happen, so obviously I do not have an account to a game that does not exist yet.

Yet you did in fact “Buy” Crowfall before it launched as a product.  So maybe not so “obvious” that you don’t have an account with CU...

He also used to defend CoE ...

I did, but I also bought the game only after there was a game to play. So not sure why any of you are somehow confused by that, it's Not that hard to grasp really.

Give me a game to play, and I'll chose if I want to buy it. Crowfall gave me a game to play, and I made the choice to buy it.

If/When CU has their game in a fully playable state, I'll decided if I want to buy their game as well.  

Also, if you read what I said about the game, I said it was in a playable state, and that it will launch, of which I was 100% on target about. It was playable and it did launch.

As far as their numbers went, the devs made no sign they were worried about population numbers, so I had no reason to believe anything was amiss.

As far as a launched state goes, I liked the beta better than a live game. That was a huge ass let down, really, set a bitter stage when I logged in.

Not to mention it launched with a lot of bad ideas (some of which I tried to warn them about) no doubt brought about from trying to appeal some dated and bygone gamer population that had a woody for DAOC, and failed, OMG, did they ever fail with that..

Anyway, did they ever get ya all back with their supposed changes that ya all wanted them to make to get you all back?

My guild flipped them them bird and moved on to New World when it launched, so I have no idea what is going on with Crowfall these days.

My bad, thought you said Crowfall, I just saw that you said CoE.

No, I didn't defend them. I said you all should read the contracts you sign, and that I liked the concept of the game. And the concept was great, no joke, if that game could have been made, that could have been a genera changer. Crying shame it was just a shit scam.

Funny how someone was all hot and bothered about that game as well, but also claimed not to have an account with them.. Funny that one. Something I still don't believe to be true.

In fact that same someone after losing their shit over being told that they should read the contracts they sign 4 years ago, then talked about how they are signing big building contact, as in the dirt, which came across like they were "Websiting as on the internet" and looked like an ignorant troll in the process.

Funny how that same person is still today pissing and moaning about not liking the contracts they have signed.. some levels of stupid.. never change.

Slapshot1188

Too funny.  Jokes literally write themselves.

Brainy

Torval said:

Kyleran said:

Slapshot1188 said:

I bet money that the poster above doesn’t have a Camelot Unchained account or he wouldn’t spout silly stuff like that.

Or believes treating paying customers with honesty, integrity and fairness is for suckers....

Or better yet, paying customers are suckers...

Pretty sure people who throw hundreds or thousands of dollars at empty promises have always been thought of as suckers. What did paying customers buy? The promise that some project would try their best to create a vision of a product. We just never realistically figured most of these were doomed to failure and got nasty and bitter about that when it happened.

It was a good thought experiment that could have gone another direction, but it didn't. Lesson learnt here is don't throw money at these things. And if someone chooses to then don't expect it to succeed and don't bitch about it when it all falls through.

I have no sympathy for me (Ashes) or anyone else who gambled on this and lost. It's like people who go to Vegas and cry when they come back broke. I get the frustration but at some point you just have to move on and don't make that mistake again.

Well things in life is risk vs reward.  I remember a long time ago, if I had gotten into UO just a litter earlier I could have had a house in a city or next to a popular dungeon entrance.  I still got in earlier enough for some benefit but I am sure that the sense of just missing out in that game probably set me up for early crowdfunding scams.

However suckers is a bit over the top, people spending $1000 on bitcoin or doge coin instead would easily be multi millionaires now.  So one persons sucker could be one persons lucky winner.

In reality something big will eventually happen in gaming whether its metaverse or some other technology, and the people getting in early are going to benefit from it.  The negative feelings I have now developed to crowdfunding will likely cause me to miss that new opportunity.  I am now very risk adverse to new gaming projects so there is little likelihood I will be going all in early on the next big gaming thing.

So its a cycle, sometimes luck and timing just play a too big of factor.

Morgenes83

Ungood said:

Silly request, If they have nothing, there is no reason for them to do it.

Here fixed it for you

Slapshot1188

Again, I think the most important takeaway from this thread is that MJ seems to have totally withdrawn from the CU community.  His last post was in November and only a handful in the months prior.

That, more than anything is not a good sign.

Or maybe... he's grinding away and will pop up again with a  super-Jesus-patch...

nurso

Brainy said:

However suckers is a bit over the top, people spending $1000 on bitcoin or doge coin instead would easily be multi millionaires now.  So one persons sucker could be one persons lucky winner.

Better to sink your money into an honestly intended but ill-fated project than to make money at the expense of others in a Greater Fool scam.

Ungood

Morgenes83 said:

Ungood said:

Silly request, If they have nothing, there is no reason for them to do it.

Here fixed it for you

Eh.. if they had nothing, there would not be whiners wanting to talk about it.

Ungood

Brainy said:

However suckers is a bit over the top, people spending $1000 on bitcoin or doge coin instead would easily be multi millionaires now.  So one persons sucker could be one persons lucky winner.

Perhaps, but things like that are like betting at the races, hard truth that no one really wants to hear, is if you can't afford to lose the money, you should not be gambling with it.

Fools are the people that gamble and can't afford to lose.

Suckers are the people that think they are absolutely gonna win this time.

Sure you could get lucky, but it's just that.. getting lucky.

meddyck

It would be insane to lift the NDA before the years long backlog of refund requests is dealt with. You may feel free to infer from that what backers might say if the NDA were lifted.

What would really benefit the project is for CSE to be sold to a quality publisher (not EA) who could both give it the resources it needs to make substantial progress and actually launch within 2-3 years but also impose accountability and stop the seemingly endless addition of new game systems that didn't need to be there for launch.

Slapshot1188

meddyck said:

It would be insane to lift the NDA before the years long backlog of refund requests is dealt with. You may feel free to infer from that what backers might say if the NDA were lifted.

What would really benefit the project is for CSE to be sold to a quality publisher (not EA) who could both give it the resources it needs to make substantial progress and actually launch within 2-3 years but also impose accountability and stop the seemingly endless addition of new game systems that didn't need to be there for launch.

Apathy is worse than hate...  and I can assure you that this game currently has the most apathy of any game I am watching... unless you count that silly Ragnarock:Last Stand game that Mark put out that sold like 10 copies.

I mean.. Mark himself seems to have total apathy as his last post on the game's forums was November of last year (about his dog).  Maybe he's got something super secret under wraps, but the total disconnect from his dwindling community is not a good sign.
 

BrotherMaynard

Slapshot1188 said:

meddyck said:

It would be insane to lift the NDA before the years long backlog of refund requests is dealt with. You may feel free to infer from that what backers might say if the NDA were lifted.

What would really benefit the project is for CSE to be sold to a quality publisher (not EA) who could both give it the resources it needs to make substantial progress and actually launch within 2-3 years but also impose accountability and stop the seemingly endless addition of new game systems that didn't need to be there for launch.

 unless you count that silly Ragnarock:Last Stand game that Mark put out that sold like 10 copies.


 

Now now, don't go hating on FSR, the game has been picking up steam recently:



They are preparing a 3 GB Muspelheim content patch, so you never know, by this time next month the player base could very well explode. In more ways than one.

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

YashaX

meddyck said:

It would be insane to lift the NDA before the years long backlog of refund requests is dealt with. You may feel free to infer from that what backers might say if the NDA were lifted.

What would really benefit the project is for CSE to be sold to a quality publisher (not EA) who could both give it the resources it needs to make substantial progress and actually launch within 2-3 years but also impose accountability and stop the seemingly endless addition of new game systems that didn't need to be there for launch.

Amazing to think that after all this time (has it been 8 years now?), it would still take all that just to possibly get the game launched in three years from now.