You make really good points, Lok. But we also are just reporting on this being "a thing". @MikeB will be interviewing Ethan soon, and we'll be sure he chats with him about these very issues.
Hmm, maybe it is just me, but last time I looked everything was just a thing. Are we going to be subjected to these things constantly? Because after a while it gets hard to separate real things from all the fluffy things we see on the site.
Seriously, this could have been left for someone to post on the forums, where it would have the credibility it deserved.
FFA Nonconsentual Full Loot PvP ...You know you want it!!
Everytime this name pops up... my skin crawls and I shudder a bit as im reminded from my past mistake on creating a thread; regarding D;O and it's crowdfunding mismanagement and his desire to open a third crowd funding campaign. (Which also sent me on a nice 3-day vacation to add) We have finally arrived at destination shitwemadeitavenue.
Everything has already been said that could be said about this and I still have the exact same words to say regarding the entire Project Titanic: JAN.2014. "Point is that he has no idea how much money he needs to create divergence online." "All we can do is guide people and hope they won't support such rotten projects."
*Dammit... my words aren't spacing!* *Finally got some spacing :eh: * stupid bugs*
I can't believe that you can know this guy's history and still post this.
Nevermind, found it
"Sean (Murray) saying MP will be in the game is not remotely close to evidence that at the point of purchase people thought there was MP in the game." - SEANMCAD
I can't believe that you can know this guy's history and still post this.
I tried to google and find any past history but nothing much comes up. Can you point me in the direction you are referring to?
All I found was a lot of self promotion bits and an empty Wikipedia page. I think that says enough.
"I used to think the worst thing in life was to be all alone. It's not. The worst thing in life is to end up with people who make you feel all alone." Robin Williams
Star Wars is an IP held by very rich people. I am very surprised that an intelligent indie developer would openly connect themselves to SW. And show a video of models, textures, and UI that look like direct copies of SW assets.
Pardon any spelling errors
Konfess your cyns and some maybe forgiven Boy: Why can't I talk to Him? Mom: We don't talk to Priests. As if it could exist, without being payed for. F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing. Even telemarketers wouldn't think that. It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
As soon as I seen the first screens, I said to myself it looks like they took it from those guys that run private servers for swg pre-cu. I just laughed and closed it up thinking another scammer.
"Sean (Murray) saying MP will be in the game is not remotely close to evidence that at the point of purchase people thought there was MP in the game." - SEANMCAD
As soon as I seen the first screens, I said to myself it looks like they took it from those guys that run private servers for swg pre-cu. I just laughed and closed it up thinking another scammer.
I don't know. The graphics in the video look better than anything I've seen come out of a crowdfunded fantasy MMO, many of which raised vastly more money. Granted maybe the standards for fantasy setting graphics are lower because WoW.
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
I'm excited to see where it goes, but I will never give money to these crowd funded projects. I'm happy to pay for finished projects, but not for promises.
I'm excited to see where it goes, but I will never give money to these crowd funded projects. I'm happy to pay for finished projects, but not for promises.
This is where it goes... this is where it has gone for the better part of a decade. It's gone where it's going.
And how are there two failing "spiritual successors to SWG" somehow still bilking cash out of morons? Both this game and the Repop are utter shite and should be burned with fire.
The private servers with bad/incomplete coding and decade old engine are more than these games will ever be.
Well, they do have a download link, so that you can see the game before you give them any money. I would give them credit for that.... but the link doesn't work.
Lokto is right though Bill. When you report something like this then it sounds like mmorpg.com presents this as something credible.
There are so many shady and incompetent wannabe devs out there that you can't keep up your neutral reporting stance without hurting your own image.
Fair enough! I'll concede to that, but we are going to do an interview with them. So if you've got questions, email them to me! BillMurphy at MMORPG dot com - serious ones please.
Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
Lokto is right though Bill. When you report something like this then it sounds like mmorpg.com presents this as something credible.
There are so many shady and incompetent wannabe devs out there that you can't keep up your neutral reporting stance without hurting your own image.
Reporting or not, either is an editorial choice. Reporting it as news is essentially advertising that particular money raising effort. I would prefer this site constrain it's editorial leanings to actual, deliverable products, but that's not my call.
Asking only for $15,000 puts him closer to the pan-handler at the interstate off-ramp than a serious game developer in my mind. How much development can he expect to pay for with only $15,000? The amount alone, without the history that Lokto provided, makes me think this guy is just saying 'Please pay me'.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Always a mistake to invoke an old game, particularly one that has a cult following. No game will ever match their expectation, and will likely cause them to be predisposed to dislike it.
"$50 USD
Bronze Gamma Change Perk
Pre-order the full game to be released on Steam!"
Is it even legal to offer that?
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I posted this statement elsewhere, but I feel it applies here as well. The public seems to think that the money raised is only for development.
The point of a kickstarter is so you can pay your apartment rent, house mortgage, car, electricity, gas, water, car insurance, health insurance, life insurance, child's daycare, private school payment, and then pay a musician, 3d artist, 2d artist, animator, database expert, and rent a server farm. Notice that the game costs come LAST, because family comes first. My rough estimate of how much it would cost to make a game in 4 years with a 10 person team? $2,4 mill / year for 4 years (6 would be best), or $9,6 mill total.
Good or bad, this is news and deserves to be covered here. True every now and then and unbiased reporting of the state of things can be followed by and editorial where the author is free to state opinion.
My opinion, this is a MOD. There is no design or development. Free or ripped assets are thrown into and open source engine (that is only free for educational purposes only). I guess if this is a MOD and is non-commercial the the IP holders won't take action. Haha, yeah right!
Pardon any spelling errors
Konfess your cyns and some maybe forgiven Boy: Why can't I talk to Him? Mom: We don't talk to Priests. As if it could exist, without being payed for. F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing. Even telemarketers wouldn't think that. It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
You make really good points, Lok. But we also are just reporting on this being "a thing". @MikeB will be interviewing Ethan soon, and we'll be sure he chats with him about these very issues.
Please don't do this to your own credibility.
It might be completely obvious to you when you're just copy-pasting a press release, and when you're doing reporting, but it's not obvious to us. When you report about a project that's clearly doomed to failure in the same way you'd report a legitimate projects, you'll force us to doubt and question all the games and projects you tell us about.
Please have some kind of filtering for most obvious failures in place, or put up some kind of warnings in the article. It's not worth losing what trust we have in your articles for a thing like this.
Hi, I'm Ethan Casner; Lead Developer of Divergence: Online. And I'm the worlds greatest scam artist.
As suggested, I had a long history of personal and professional failure before 2013. I spent the better part of seven years, cleverly disguising my evil plans to cheat people out of their money by making it seem like I was trying to gain financial support and resources requisite to create the best MMORPG ever made. I named it "Divergence", as in "I want to Diverge you from your money".
Unfortunately, my plans were thwarted because I couldn't find anyone gullible enough to invest in my business. These swarthy and highly intelligent venture capitalists found me out time and time again by simple logic; I had claimed to want to make an amazing product and a ton of money, however I wasn't rich at the time. Nice try Mr Casner, but this is 2008 and we all know nobody asking for less than $10M USD is a serious game developer. How stupid do you think we are? We're going to dump our $200M into this other game called "APB". They said "Sure, we'd like some more money!", so obviously they know what they're doing.
The big break came in 2013 when I first heard about IndieGoGo. Here was a way of fooling people on a grass-roots level into giving me some chump change to finally jump-start my career as a professional con-man. My plan to trade eight years of my life for $30,000 would soon be complete, Mwahahahaha!
After the first IndieGoGo success, I constructed a scrooge-mcduck-style money bin to contain it all so I could go for a swim, but sadly, that amount of money didn't even line the bottom so that dream had to be put on hold. I deconstructed the money bin back into it's original form; the pile of cardboard sheets I was sleeping on, and got back to work.
But $26,000 wasn't enough. Oh no. That money-bin wasn't going to fill itself, so i hatched another glorious scam to fill our coffers with even more pocket-lint. This sinister plan involved spending the absolute entirety of that money building a totally-sweet and hideously powerful prototype game, then dubiously releasing it in it's entirety to everyone who had contributed. It was so stupid, it was brilliant... Certainly no-one could suspect such a devious scheme as this... Again, aforementioned "Mwahahaha etc".
And my plan worked perfectly... Foolish fools, unaware of the financial ruin that would befall them threw their delicious monies at our Kickstarter... Inflating it to a grotesque $19,626... Seriously how could anyone ever hope to be wasteful or incompetent enough to spend that much money making a game, much less an MMO? Who am I, Richard Garriott?
Even after Amazon and kickstarter malarkey resulted in us receiving only $11,000 of the kickstarter money, it was obvious that the scam was complete. With $11K, I could retire for up to six months before I had to get a part-time job at Denny's. It was more money than I knew how to spend, and I was flying high with actual meat in my ramen-noodles which filled my stomach now utterly-entirely. As I stretched out long on the new couch i bought brand new from Big Lots, living the life of a baller, frivolously spending $200 of my contributors money and relishing the hedonistic pleasures of knowing a bed wherein only the frame was now made of cardboard, I remember thinking, "This must be exactly how Sean Puffy Combs feels".
But fate however, had different ideas.
One day, watching players build entire cities in the virtual world we'd created, happy as clams in their ignorance, I came up with the crazy idea of, what if, I ported the game to a new engine and made it even more powerful... More expansive...
If instead of choosing a character, you could design that character... And instead of building your stuff out of props, a system that made everything you did relevant and different from everything else around you... My fevered brain swam with possibilities. If i played my cards right, I could double, maybe triple the amount of money coming in... Maybe even enough to move out of the unairconditioned closet I was renting from a friend for $150/month in order to afford things like "lines of code" and "actual game features".
Such a con though would require months, potentially years of preparation and extreme personal discipline. Could a human being really survive on less than $3,000 of personal income for a year of their life? What am I, @#$%ing Gollum?
I decided that I did in fact posses the mental and physical fortitude to accomplish such a feat. I could... Become the greatest scam artist of all time, and cheat potentially another 100 people out of their life savings. If their life savings was like.. $100 each or something.
Sure, people who've actually invested their money will likely tell you it's legit, but that's all just a part of my elaborate rouse to steal their money by cleverly providing a quality product, with personal support and a proven track record.
I, the maestro of deceit, the author of dark ingenuity, use our credibility of "actually providing what we promised " not once, but twice before as black currency to seed our evil plans... Players will be having so much fun that they won't realize how I'm victimizing them... It is, as they say, the perfect plan.
A plan that could make me a multi-thousand-aire... If only but for the stubborn, occasionally meddling three, or four, people on "public forums"...
Because these righteous holy-men of virtue... These brilliant paladins sling their arrows and make their posts of hatred before actually ever trying the thing of which they speak so ill, they render themselves completely immune to the dark spell i weave over all who actually try our product and go, "Oh. Yeah it's actually pretty good. How much did they spend making it? Yeah... ok... No seriously, how much?"
But evil will find a way into their hearts. By Beelzebub as my witness, I shall have your souls and your $20 bills. No human being can talk trash about a person they know nothing about, and about a product they've never tried indefinitely without giving in to the original sin of curiosity sooner or later... And when that day comes...
We'll be glad to have you with us in the game. We don't care about pride. We don't care about winning arguments on internets. We care only about growing a great community and every day making this game better than it was yesterday.
We show you exactly what we're about, what state the product is in, and precisely what you can expect out of with no gloss, exaggeration, or optimism whatsoever.
If you'd prefer to continue to give your money to big-name game franchises whose soul purpose is to spend millions on flashy CG sequences and advertising trying to trick the money out of you, then you are more than welcome to.
If you would, however, like to take a different path and support a developer who shows you total transparency about themselves and their plans, whom you can actually speak with on a personal level about your issues and concerns and treats you like a human being, whose purpose it is to continually re-invest the money they have coming in, resulting in the best MMO ever made, and that's ALL they want to do, then you should go to our IndieGoGo and sign your name to the cause.
Comments
Seriously, this could have been left for someone to post on the forums, where it would have the credibility it deserved.
FFA Nonconsentual Full Loot PvP ...You know you want it!!
Everything has already been said that could be said about this and I still have the exact same words to say regarding the entire Project Titanic: JAN.2014. "Point is that he has no idea how much money he needs to create divergence online." "All we can do is guide people and hope they won't support such rotten projects."
*Dammit... my words aren't spacing!*
*Finally got some spacing :eh: * stupid bugs*
Boy: Why can't I talk to Him?
Mom: We don't talk to Priests.
As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
Feydikan sums up Divergence Online development.
"OMG working so hard..pant pant... need sleep... pant pant.... and money... pant pant....keep faith"
Star Citizen – The Extinction Level Event
4/13/15 > ELE has been updated look for 16-04-13.
http://www.dereksmart.org/2016/04/star-citizen-the-ele/
Enjoy and know the truth always comes to light!
"We all do the best we can based on life experience, point of view, and our ability to believe in ourselves." - Naropa "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." SR Covey
And how are there two failing "spiritual successors to SWG" somehow still bilking cash out of morons? Both this game and the Repop are utter shite and should be burned with fire.
The private servers with bad/incomplete coding and decade old engine are more than these games will ever be.
So What Now?
Try to be excellent to everyone you meet. You never know what someone else has seen or endured.
My Review Manifesto
Follow me on Twitter if you dare.
Asking only for $15,000 puts him closer to the pan-handler at the interstate off-ramp than a serious game developer in my mind. How much development can he expect to pay for with only $15,000? The amount alone, without the history that Lokto provided, makes me think this guy is just saying 'Please pay me'.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
I self identify as a monkey.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
The point of a kickstarter is so you can pay your apartment rent, house mortgage, car, electricity, gas, water, car insurance, health insurance, life insurance, child's daycare, private school payment, and then pay a musician, 3d artist, 2d artist, animator, database expert, and rent a server farm. Notice that the game costs come LAST, because family comes first. My rough estimate of how much it would cost to make a game in 4 years with a 10 person team? $2,4 mill / year for 4 years (6 would be best), or $9,6 mill total.
Good or bad, this is news and deserves to be covered here. True every now and then and unbiased reporting of the state of things can be followed by and editorial where the author is free to state opinion.
My opinion, this is a MOD. There is no design or development. Free or ripped assets are thrown into and open source engine (that is only free for educational purposes only). I guess if this is a MOD and is non-commercial the the IP holders won't take action. Haha, yeah right!
Boy: Why can't I talk to Him?
Mom: We don't talk to Priests.
As if it could exist, without being payed for.
F2P means you get what you paid for. Pay nothing, get nothing.
Even telemarketers wouldn't think that.
It costs money to play. Therefore P2W.
It might be completely obvious to you when you're just copy-pasting a press release, and when you're doing reporting, but it's not obvious to us. When you report about a project that's clearly doomed to failure in the same way you'd report a legitimate projects, you'll force us to doubt and question all the games and projects you tell us about.
Please have some kind of filtering for most obvious failures in place, or put up some kind of warnings in the article. It's not worth losing what trust we have in your articles for a thing like this.
This isn't even the first time you're doing this. I still remember the Seldon Crisis Indiegogo announcement where you didn't bother to inform us that the game had just been kicked out of Kickstarter. http://forums.mmorpg.com/discussion/422134/seldon-crisis-indiegogo-initiative-begins
Please think about how articles like these affect our ability to trust any other article you write.
www.Divergence-Online.com