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[ZeroGravitas]

I can tell you that I personally find it annoying that skepticism about this game is disregarded as a conspiracy theory when four years after the fact we have nothing but hot air.

What's interesting is that The Mandate thread just got necroed, and it appears to be an example of a funded kickstarter that failed to deliver anything, yet there's not a 150 page debate over that game being fraudulent.

different details, different reactions

[nenjin]

I compare TWS to Kickstarters like Rogue-U. The game which was trying to make a nostalgia driven Quest For Glory clone, has had to run a second Kickstarter to finish the game, has only pushed out an alpha to backers in the last year and has shifted goal posts multiple times in the last 5 years.

If I were wont to blow my top over it, I could have called it a scam long before now. While a second Kickstarter and and a seemingly endless dev cycle did raise my eyebrows (and I did not back the second Kickstarter), I didn't start shouting fraud. I'm still waiting on that game, which has taken FOR FUCKING EVER to even approach something called a release.

I'm way more inclined to believe KDG overestimated both their own completeness and their own skills, than believing the far less likely scenario that he creates fake updates just to keep the FTC off his back. TWS is like the 9/11 Truther conspiracy of Kickstarter. The more simple explanation is that they're in over their head and are still trying to dig themselves out.

[Egan_BW]

It's too bad because it seemed like a solid concept/game - guess they suffered from overscope.

[ZeroGravitas]

I compare TWS to Kickstarters like Rogue-U. The game which was trying to make a nostalgia driven Quest For Glory clone, has had to run a second Kickstarter to finish the game, has only pushed out an alpha to backers in the last year and has shifted goal posts multiple times in the last 5 years.

If I were wont to blow my top over it, I could have called it a scam long before now. While a second Kickstarter and and a seemingly endless dev cycle did raise my eyebrows (and I did not back the second Kickstarter), I didn't start shouting fraud. I'm still waiting on that game, which has taken FOR FUCKING EVER to even approach something called a release.

I'm way more inclined to believe KDG overestimated both their own completeness and their own skills, than believing the far less likely scenario that he creates fake updates just to keep the FTC off his back. TWS is like the 9/11 Truther conspiracy of Kickstarter. The more simple explanation is that they're in over their head and are still trying to dig themselves out.

well, i hope you're right

[bloop_bleep]

I suggested that everyone list out their arguments, in order, without repetition, so we can have an intelligent discussion.

Apparently, people are incapable of doing that, because everyone has continued to completely forget or disregard their opponents' arguments, causing everything to repeat again. Many, many times.

And no, it's not just Damiac doing it. Every single one of you is doing it. nenjin, you did it just now, by ignoring the fact that the developer claimed he had a working prototype from the very beginning, which he could've released at any time. Rogue-U didn't make that claim.

Honestly, at this point the discussion is completely pointless. Everything that's being said has been said before. If you want to fill a couple hundred more pages with inane arguments you are free to do so, but I'm bowing out.

[Damiac]

Actually, there has been good conversation between rational people discussing something. It's just drowned out by people shouting "There's nothing to discuss! Stop Talking! 
Bleep bloop is right.

Here, you can follow the actual discussion this way, and ignore the noise between:

I trimmed out redundancy, noise posts and non-arguments, but if someone thinks I missed something of substance, let me know.  I think if you follow the conversation that takes place in these linked posts, you can see where to continue the actual conversation from here, if you're so interested.  Bloop Bleep's post in particular lays things out pretty well and neutrally.

Quite honestly, I should link this very post at the end, to really capture the nature of this thread.  That way you can keep going around and around forever. I have to admit, the metagame has incredible replay value.

[nenjin]

And no, it's not just Damiac doing it. Every single one of you is doing it. nenjin, you did it just now, by ignoring the fact that the developer claimed he had a working prototype from the very beginning, which he could've released at any time. Rogue-U didn't make that claim.

Because no developer has ever overestimated their product before, right? And especially not when there's a financial incentive behind it. While Rogue-U didn't say they had a working prototype they could release tomorrow, they DID say they could complete the game with their initial Kickstarter. Then lo and behold, that's wrong. They overestimated their skills, underestimated the amount of work it would take, project scope changed, team members changed, they rebranded the project in a second Kickstarter, yadda yadda sisboomba. Fraud? Or just being shitty at estimates?

The thing is, people claiming fraud are claiming KDG acted with malice. That their intent was to defraud, from the outset. Malice is one of the hardest things to prove because it's about what was in someone's heart when they did something. You can demonstrably prove their initial claims were false. Why were they false though? Because he deliberately misrepresented the situation or because he overestimated his progress? If you can prove that, I'd like to see it. I think we all would. We'd all like to know if he acted with malice. But that's the harder claim to prove. No one is disagreeing he was wrong in the initial Kickstarter. That his ideas about how the AI was supposed to work were fundamentally flawed. What we're disagreeing with is that he is, without a shadow of a doubt, a fraud. (Which I think is totally wrong anyways, because you don't go through that amount of effort to create fake update videos. Or did he just magically invent all those assets, animations, writing, UIs and display cost free out of thin air?)

Again the far more likely scenario is that he's a junior developer, who is a bad project manager, who suffered from scope creep and who was too willing to claim completeness for the sake of getting backers. Which puts them firmly amongst many, many Kickstarters that still go on to release a product eventually, one day, when the internet has ceased crawling up their ass.

The same shit happened with NetGain. Dude thought he had it locked in and all he needed to do was the actual work. Then as he dug in, he realized his ideas weren't feasible, tried a re-write and after months the whole thing melted down when his money ran out and he had to become a working stiff again. I see more of that in TWS than what we have actually identified as legitimate frauds on Kickstarter.

Maybe I should also save this post since I've already also had this conversation in this thread before, so the next time Damiac decides to parachute in and bang the fraud drum I don't have to type it all out again for his sake, so he feels adequately debated. Since we're taking the route of being smug about all this.

[birdy51]

I did actually finally sit down and watch the video, which was kind of cool except... Do grand strategy type games usually have this much depth to them? The amount of numbers and seemingly arbitrary values is honestly more terrifying than any eldritch god.

[USEC_OFFICER]

It depends. Generally it's less 'Lots of unique values' and more 'Repetition of the same values multiple times'. Once you understand how the basic systems work it becomes much less overwhelming.

[Xgamer4]

Yeah, TWS looks like it'll definitely be one of the more complex grand strategy games out there, but it's definitely not alone. It looks roughly on par, or even less complex, than some of the Paradox games, and the UI actually looks quite good. Very dense, but well-laid-out and reasonable, just from the snippet we've seen. No "well, now we click 6 layers deep..." things, etc.

[Cruxador]

I did actually finally sit down and watch the video, which was kind of cool except... Do grand strategy type games usually have this much depth to them? The amount of numbers and seemingly arbitrary values is honestly more terrifying than any eldritch god.

In terms of the sheer quantity of fiddly numbers? Nope. The archetypal grand strategy games are Paradox's titles, and they don't have that much. In terms of diverse game mechanics, they're up there, especially after getting a dozen expansions, but there's a lot fewer numbers that you have any reason to look at, and generally they're divided into semi-discrete subsystems, so you rarely are considering more than a few numbers at a time. This might be the case for TWS too, but so far it's looked overwhelming to me too. I think it could be better if UI elements (and some extent of the map) are obscured at the beginning and only slowly revealed as you progress, at least when playing the "easy" characters. It kind of sounds like while there's an intent to make certain old ones easier to play, there's nothing that drastic or tutorialy, but we haven't heard anything about that kind of stuff in years.

[Darkmere]

So, as someone who's watched this for years but isn't a backer:

Can anyone describe to me in concrete detail how a single function of this ... we'll call it a project... actually works in gameplay? With sample numbers and a way to use it to your advantage?

I don't mean fanfic LARP terms, I mean actual proven on-camera gameplay specifics.

[ndkid]

The thing is, people claiming fraud are claiming KDG acted with malice. That their intent was to defraud, from the outset. Malice is one of the hardest things to prove because it's about what was in someone's heart when they did something. You can demonstrably prove their initial claims were false.

I would disagree that malicious mens rea is necessary for the intent to be to defraud from the outset. One can intend to mislead while still thinking that one has the customer's best interests at heart. (If you think the desire to mislead, however "minor" you might consider the deception, is inherently malicious, then we just have a semantic disagreement.)

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The possibility that strikes me, personally, as most likely is the one where Josh (with or without Joe's knowledge, that's harder for me to determine, and the fact that we only have Joe's side of the story makes me unwilling to assume Joe's version is the fully true one) exaggerated what was already done as part of an effort to get the KS to be successful. Unseemly, for sure, but, much like speeding, it's an unseemly thing which I think of as almost universal among Kickstarter campaigns, including plenty of successful ones. (And I'm defining "successful" pretty loosely here, because if we defined success by a KS delivering what it promises *when* it promised it would, I doubt the success rate in the video game space hits the double digits.) So, probably meets a legal definition of fraud in a number of jurisdictions but, to reiterate my point above, a fraud which I suspect almost every KS campaign of.

Then, there's that time of high morale, right after the campaign funded. Joe and Josh are probably high on living their dream. They're now officially professional video game developers! Why, the generosity of backers is going to let them make a game even *cooler* than the one they had initially planned! Art assets are bought. Plans are shared.

And then the reality of video game development starts to set in. There's a problem. Looks like a big refactor is going to be needed. Didn't help. A partial rewrite? Didn't help. Damn, now we're two weeks behind. Somewhere along the way, you start getting exposed to the ugly side of the internet, where people are quite happy to tell you, at length, how the thing you're doing is crap, or the way you're doing it is rubbish. And, now, when your fourth attempt to squash that bug still fails to do the trick, you start to wonder... are they right? Maybe you just need a break... you've been neck-deep in this game for months straight. So maybe you take a week off. I mean, you're already late, so what's a week?

I've never been that developer. But I've definitely had to manage that developer. Hell, I've had to fire that developer before, because if you can't tell me that you're having that big of a problem, then I can't help you solve that problem, and you're just wasting the company's money.
----------

I haven't seen anyone make the argument that what Josh is doing is polite, or good business, or even reasonable. I haven't seen anyone arguing that he doesn't constantly break self-imposed commitments without warning. He is being selfish, and, in doing so, has lost most of his supporters and what was probably one of his only remaining friends. I think it exceedingly unlikely that Josh's life is currently what anyone would classify as "happy". And all of that is stuff he could have avoided with relatively minor behavioral changes. (I say minor to describe difference from the behavior he chose, not how easy or difficult he would have found those changes to make; I don't know the man, much less the inner-workings of his brain.)

I think most people participating in this conversation would agree that the project was an interesting idea that they'd like people to get to play through.

I don't begrudge people who want to argue, even academically, what laws Josh has or hasn't broken, so long as they're at least clear in the priors they're assuming. I think there's room in this thread for the mobs with pitchforks and the people who want to discuss how cool, or lame, the content of the videos are every few months when they randomly appear. But the internet takes people's natural tendency to fall into opposing camps and dials it up to 11. So I just like to remind myself, sometimes, that we're mostly arguing over things at the edges, while agreeing to a solid 90% of the facts, and even mostly agreeing in our opinions.

[nenjin]

I don't think you can maliciously do what you think is in the customer's best interest. I.e. misleading customers and taking their money with no intent to deliver a product a priori cannot be in their best interest, because they get nothing. So I still assert that if you're calling TSW deliberate fraud, you're claiming malice and you need essentially either a confession or internal communications proving malicious intent. Both are rather hard to come by. A jury or judge could still find malice but the burden of proof without direct evidence is quite high. Way higher than "he said he had a playable prototype and yet we got nothing."

[ZeroGravitas]

The thing is, people claiming fraud are claiming KDG acted with malice. That their intent was to defraud, from the outset. Malice is one of the hardest things to prove because it's about what was in someone's heart when they did something. You can demonstrably prove their initial claims were false. Why were they false though? Because he deliberately misrepresented the situation or because he overestimated his progress? If you can prove that, I'd like to see it. I think we all would. We'd all like to know if he acted with malice. But that's the harder claim to prove.

fraud doesn't require malice, just his knowledge of the falsity of his statements. try again.

edit: also, it's important to note that it's not up to us to prove what he was thinking at the time. anything about his state of mind or intent can just be alleged generally; it's up to him to come up with evidence supporting whatever his excuse is (like "overestimating his progress").