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[alway]

It's pretty clear she made quite a good effort to refund people up to the point of her ability for the better part of a year. It's also pretty clear as per basically every crowd funding thing ever that even that is above and beyond what is actually required. Usually, they just vanish entirely along with all the money. So yeah, if people are harassing her, it's because they are dicks.

[Mattk50]

It's pretty clear she made quite a good effort to refund people up to the point of her ability for the better part of a year. It's also pretty clear as per basically every crowd funding thing ever that even that is above and beyond what is actually required. Usually, they just vanish entirely along with all the money. So yeah, if people are harassing her, it's because they are dicks.

She donated the remaining kickstarter money to anita sarkesian. Maybe you should read kickstarter's rules if you think refunding your backers if you never do anything isn't required.

She is pretending valid criticism is harassment, which it isn't. it can suck to get a torrent of attention and tweets critical of you and whatever but it's not harrassment. Maybe one or two people are actually harassing her but honestly, she's playing the victim card to try to shield herself.

[alway]

It's pretty clear she made quite a good effort to refund people up to the point of her ability for the better part of a year. It's also pretty clear as per basically every crowd funding thing ever that even that is above and beyond what is actually required. Usually, they just vanish entirely along with all the money. So yeah, if people are harassing her, it's because they are dicks.

She donated the remaining kickstarter money to anita sarkesian.[citation needed]

Maybe you should read kickstarter's rules if you think refunding your backers if you never do anything isn't required.

Kickstarter's rules are intentionally vague on this point. And as she does appear to have worked towards the goal, that most certainly is doing something.

She is pretending valid criticism is harassment, which it isn't. it can suck to get a torrent of attention and tweets critical of you and whatever but it's not harrassment. Maybe one or two people are actually harassing her but honestly, she's playing the victim card to try to shield herself.

There is no such thing as 'valid criticism' here because there is nothing for anyone to gain by criticizing here. Just because only a few are doing so in a blatantly illegal manner doesn't make everyone else piling on hate justified.

[Toady One]

I removed a few posts.  Please try to keep it together.

[Rez]

I'm not sure I follow your logic.  I don't really think your "criticism is invalid unless you have a stake" argument is valid.  The whole idea of arbitration is that a neutral party's criticism (judgment) is more valid than those directly concerned in a dispute.  The validity of criticism isn't tied to it's constructiveness, either.  Moreover, I think several parties could stand to gain by criticizing the manager of a failed project.

Presumably, people are criticizing this person, because she took their money and didn't do the project.   I imagine some of them are criticizing her in an attempt to get their refund; I'm sure many others are trying to destroy her reputation, so she can't run a successful, meaning funded, kickstarter in the future or convince people to give to her patreon.  That's mean, no doubt, but I'd get a warm fuzzy if I felt I stopped a con from scamming people or, more charitably, stopped a poor manager from wasting other people's money.  In the end, that's what this whole thread is about.  Bringing up bad projects and incompetent managers/artists and illuminating the problems with KS is what we do and that's a very important thing to do if we want small-scale patronage and investing to actually work.  Anyway, I digress; surely some of the people criticising her are doing so for valid reasons and for some kind of gain, material or not.

Just because a few are harassing her, be they sincere assholes, trolls, or agent provocateurs, doesn't mean that you can dismiss any criticism as invalid.


She didn't say she donated the KS funds to Anita, only the profits from a #gamedev gig.

By the by, if you're claiming one of the reasons you can't pay people back is because you aren't making enough money to pay your back taxes and health insurance, you probably shouldn't tweet that you're giving money away and that "It was the least I could do to make up for what I've done." (?)  Money is fungible and if she didn't really need the money from that gig, she had an obligation to give it to her creditors backers.

[Graknorke]

By the by, if you're claiming one of the reasons you can't pay people back is because you aren't making enough money to pay your back taxes and health insurance, you probably shouldn't tweet that you're giving money away and that "It was the least I could do to make up for what I've done." (?)  Money is fungible and if she didn't really need the money from that gig, she had an obligation to give it to her creditors backers.

This is, I think, the reason people are upset. The extravagant spending while struggling financially and with more pressing obligations. And being confusingly proud about it, on top of that.

[Draco18s]

I think this one pre-dates Dwarf Fortress in a way.

Trials of Ascension, or that MMO that wants to do permadeath and dragons that can wage war with "an entire city of humans" but can't seem to make it to beta.

When it first started, they had something like a dozen races planned: elves, humans, dwarves, dragons, gargoyles... but it turned sour when the project lead would make wild and rash decisions at the whims of whoever he liked that week, alienating the community and delaying launch.  No really, this is a game that back when I first heard about it (2002ish) had an open beta signup page, and still only just hit Kickstarter.

These "wild and rash" decisions involve things like "can't communicate with anyone outside your race and using external messaging systems to get around that will earn you a ban" or "dragons can't communicate with each other" or "any non-dragon settlement trying to help raise a dragon will be turned into a smoking crater."¹  Because when a dragon has a fair fight against a whole city of humans, you gotta put limitations somewhere.  And that somewhere ended up being on the survival rate.

Their most recent relaunch was about a year ago, taking donations at their website (you can see evidence of that in FAQ: "I earned Champion before Kickstarter, do I get early access?" "Yes") and severely limiting scope, only one race: human, with more to be added later, once the game's up and running and the money is rolling in.  The kickstarter now shows three playable races, adding back in the dragons (fire and ice, with enough differences to make these effectively two races) and some giant spider thing I haven't seen before / don't remember, which which appear to exist for those people who want nothing better to do than kill other players (permadeath, remember?).

They want $600,000 or the game will basically die.

Many of you have already given so much and we are forever grateful for your generosity. We couldn’t ask for better supporters, but our Kickstarter is our ‘do or die’. It is our proverbial fork in the road where the development of ToA will continue and become the game we all want to play, or it won’t.

¹Not making it up, although not enough of the original forums remain retrievable with the internet wayback machine.
I do clearly remember concocting a cunning plan (for my 14 year old self) that would have forced the GMs to smoking-crater a good portion of the map: join forces with a dozen or more friends and have each raise a dragon to adulthood.  Once there are enough dragons: fly four to a city and demand fealty: if a city is an even match for an adult dragon, then four should be overpowering.  Conquer one city per dragon and install each dragon as lord, utilizing the city to benefit the dragons' further growth.  Any city that doesn't cooperate is burnt to the ground.  Any city that does, is nuked by the GMs when they find out about it.  Instant immolation of a good portion of the gameworld.

[Aklyon]

That sounds like an interesting idea ruined by a very impressionable project lead.

[Graknorke]

Still wouldn't work. You'd need hundreds times more humans than dragons, and why would you invest tens of hours into the weaker side knowing there's a decent chance it could just get wiped out like nothing?

If each non-dragon player controlled an entire city then it could be more believable sounding, and switch to be more strategy and economics focussed than being like a traditional action-RPG.

[Draco18s]

That sounds like an interesting idea ruined by a very impressionable project lead.

I don't know if that's still the case, but definitely.  I heard tale of programmers being fired if they fell out of favor too far.  But yeah, there were wild swings back in the day.  Wild, wild swings...

Still wouldn't work. You'd need hundreds times more humans than dragons, and why would you invest tens of hours into the weaker side knowing there's a decent chance it could just get wiped out like nothing?

I don't know what the comparative power scale is any more, its not listed.  But yeah.  The thing that kept the dragon population "low" was the 1% survival-to-adulthood rate they'd planned on.  As in, a new hatchling dragon would find a serious threat of disease and starvation, with evenly matched fights with ordinary rabbits.

Suffice to say, stuff like that poisoned the well.  So I plan to sit here and watch it fail.

[MrWiggles]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/186771546/the-wizarding-world-online

The fan project Harry Potter MMO. Its gonna be awesome because professional game companies can't make MMOs, only fans with limited, to no experience  in making games, and MMOs can make MMOs. That's just science.

They also don't need license for Harry Potter, because they refuse to understand the basic of IP law, and they're non-profit. Even though Bioharzard (the "company") making it isn't a 501c.

And since have such a profound lack of experience, they can make this MMO on just 100k dollars.

Also, they linked to a crowd source campaign Documentary on Batman, and a crowd source campaign  original music based on Harry Potter, to show they can totally make harry potter games.

[Draco18s]

I can't even.

[MarcAFK]

Player characters:
Are these first years?

Edit They've got some nice art on the KS page, which is Nice, I guess.

[King Kravoka]

Still wouldn't work. You'd need hundreds times more humans than dragons, and why would you invest tens of hours into the weaker side knowing there's a decent chance it could just get wiped out like nothing?

If each non-dragon player controlled an entire city then it could be more believable sounding, and switch to be more strategy and economics focussed than being like a traditional action-RPG.

Maybe a game with playable dragons could work if the average power level is right.

Imagine a game where players can start out as Capital P-Powerful Mages, demigods and of course dragons.

[alway]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/186771546/the-wizarding-world-online

The fan project Harry Potter MMO. Its gonna be awesome because professional game companies can't make MMOs, only fans with limited, to no experience  in making games, and MMOs can make MMOs. That's just science.

They also don't need license for Harry Potter, because they refuse to understand the basic of IP law, and they're non-profit. Even though Bioharzard (the "company") making it isn't a 501c.

And since have such a profound lack of experience, they can make this MMO on just 100k dollars.

Also, they linked to a crowd source campaign Documentary on Batman, and a crowd source campaign  original music based on Harry Potter, to show they can totally make harry potter games.

Bog-standard Idea Guy territory. Honestly, I'm a bit surprised at how few of them we see on Kickstarter. Typically the flowchart goes:

Code: [Select]

Do I want to make games because I have cool ideas?      ->    No, I am currently an accountant, but perhaps want to try lion taming.
       |
       V
Yes, of course I do. Do I have any skills for making games?      ->   Yes, I am currently in the game industry or recently left it.
       |
       V
No. What do I know about making games?          ->     Making games is difficult and/or boring and I don't really want to do that, or am in the process of acquiring skills
       |
       V
I play a lot of games and have spent a lot of time in WoW.
       |
       V
GUILD BANKS GUILD BANKS AND DRAGONS AND COOL STUFF.I've even seen one pop up on facebook in a private group of some game devs in an awkward sort of "how'd you get this number" moment. The number of Idea Guys may even outnumber the number of game devs in the industry... Though I suppose it could also be the other facet of the Idea Guy, the hiding of their super cool industry revolutionizing ideas for fear of someone "stealing their ideas," which usually persists up until they get desperate when no one wants to join some rando's team who won't tell them what they would even be working on... Even still, I wonder if Kickstarter has a vetting process eliminating most of them, cutting it down to a mere avalanche from an unceasing world-annihilating gamma ray burst.