August,

James had been pushing me since day one to use Hero Engine for a multitude of reasons but at the time, it was my ignorance of Unity and everything I had read and was explained to by others that lead me to believe that using Unity was going to be the best option. Luckily, James knows Hero inside and out and when we switched, he was happy and hit the ground running.

I think he's just trying to make a statement that overall, there is a lot that goes into a decision like this and that it doesn't always mean it's a flagrant misuse of funds or us trying to pull a fast one on the public as some would like to infur.

Nonetheless, have a good afternoon.

James, get back to work before I beat you onto the homepage of the National Enquirerer and prove all these people right! lol

Originally posted by Mogus

August,

James had been pushing me since day one to use Hero Engine for a multitude of reasons but at the time, it was my ignorance of Unity and everything I had read and was explained to by others that lead me to believe that using Unity was going to be the best option. Luckily, James knows Hero inside and out and when we switched, he was happy and hit the ground running.

I think he's just trying to make a statement that overall, there is a lot that goes into a decision like this and that it doesn't always mean it's a flagrant misuse of funds or us trying to pull a fast one on the public as some would like to infur.

Nonetheless, have a good afternoon.

James, get back to work before I beat you onto the homepage of the National Enquirerer and prove all these people right! lol

 

Yes sir... lol But yes I know right now there's alot of uncertainty with you guys and with those who have backed us. Since making the switch to Hero we haven't released any Screenshots or videos or proof of what we have been doing. In the end though I really think once we do start releasing more in the way of Screenshots and Videos you guys will be just as excited about the progress we are making as we are. We have a long ways to go but we ARE truely making great progress and HeroEngine is just the engine that will be able to take us to our goals in the shortest time possible!

We're long overdue for a good scam or two.

The famous scams in this genre, Age of Mourning, Horizons and Dark & Light, are now a distant memory for many of us.  Some of us weren't even around to witness them unfold.  I can't tell you how easily people got swept up in those scams.  But we learned a lot from those days.  We learned to ask questions and put "2+2" together.  We learned that, in this business, nobody is going to look out for an MMO player, except the MMO player.

Now a lot of time has passed since those scams.  But I'd have to say that, today, it's far easier to perpatrate a scam.  Most of the distributional and informational safeguards that protected players have been swept away.  In its place we have new and innovative ways to plan, perpetrate, and conceal scams: kickstarter, digital distribution, social network teams, payolla.

All of these innovations reduce the safeguards consumers have always depended upon to protect them from scams.  Today, we have no retailer that prevents shoddy products from going on the shelf.  We have no press we can trust.  We have no reliable way to determine if social media hype is real, or fabricated.

The fact that people are questioning Greed Monger may or may not be regrettable.  One thing we can't deny is that it is understandable.  This is an industry that is about one small step above gambling and drugs, in terms of its legitimacy.  We have some rather unscrupulous players in this industry who do some rather unscrupulous acts that we are made to swallow: wholesale redesigns out from under someone, service cancellations, questionable monetization schemes, and so on.  Couple this with a consumer profile that is addicted to these things, and you have a perfect recepie for exploitation.

Indeed, I'm starting to come around to the view that every MMO--from the most stable AAA offering to the smallest indie--rests upon exploitation of its players.  Looking at it like that, the difference between a "scam" MMO and a "legit" MMO is just a matter of degree, not kind.

Awesome post Beatnik59.

And it doesn't matter if you're an indie dev or a AAA dev studio - if you want players to play your game - you have to play the politics game and do everything in PR speak.

It's called "being a legitimate business person/company."

How do you expect people to think you'll release a quality product worth their hard earned money if you can't at least fake a presentable face to the consumer?

It's called respectability - something you have to earn.

Being an "indie" doesn't give you the right to be a douche.

Indie are just the hipsters of game development. Most of the time it's garbage anyway.

The "lightning strike" Indie game is just as rare if not MORE rare than in the AAA business.

I remeber Dark & Light and what a train wreck that was.

I waited for what seemed like years for that game to come out and when it did, NOTHING worked and was very dry and just overall, bad.

I tried so hard to give that game a chance to catch up to its own hype and promises but it just never happened.

I admit, I was very let down at the time.

I have no intentions on a similar outcome with Greed Monger, just FYI, but yes, after experiencing things like that for myself, I can understand the initial cynisism. It looks to be an impossible task. Everyone has to understand though, the tools available now that weren't available back then make building a world and game soo much easier and add to that the savings in time and costs in pre-made assets. Yes, I have gathered most people here see that as some kind of bad thing, but for the assets I've spent MAYBE $5,000 on (not counting the custom housing models we have developed which are going to be double that cost but it's a huge part of the game and well worth it), would have cost me upwards of $100,000 or more to have them all custom made and take a year to make not to mention rigging and animation etc. This isn't to say we wont have custom items and such made, we already have a lot of nice custom things such as the housing models which are all custom and exclusive to GM and things like that. I've even been learning zbrush myself so I can dive in with random items that are needed in the game world.

So yeah, I know I shouldn't be posting but I can't help myself. I want to be an active part in the community as best I can.

I am JUST as passionate about the MMO genre as many of you. It's been a big part of my life for over 20 years. The only difference is, now I'm making one.

Excellent discussion ! Big props to Beatnik59 and Bad Spock for those points. Not saying anyone is right or wrong, or anything is absolute, justy a flat out good discussion can still be had on the 'net.

Peace everyone :)

While i personally have no stake in this... it might be in it's place to remind people that most of the big names in gaming today did not have much more knowledge or experince then Jason when they started. They made small games by trial and error of outright copying code from others.

In many way now is a better time to start like this because the amount of information at our fingertips is near infinite.

And so what if this project goes belly up, what does it matter to you as a potential player... If you invested in it youknew the risk and if you did not you will have lost nothing. The only one who stands to loose something here are the devs of GM. And at least, for better or worse Jason is at least doing something. Heck if i had the founds to do things like this i would do it too.

My only hope is that the team behind GM have learnt from this and will put forward a more pr-minded flow of information and take less fights with fans and "haters". Because while they are fun to watch in the end there is no winner.

I think the MMO market's gonna have to stop treating indy devs like they're big studio CS people they can talk down to...

It's high time those forum whiners get put back in their place by someone who doesn't give a fuck about unreasonable kids who think they're owed everything and for free.

Originally posted by BadSpock

It's called "being a legitimate business person/company."

How do you expect people to think you'll release a quality product worth their hard earned money if you can't at least fake a presentable face to the consumer?

Being an "indie" doesn't give you the right to be a douche.

 

And if people are being douches towards you and attacking you personally, not as a business person or company, you're not allowed to react as a human and not as a company?

My take on this earlier was, and still is, ill-informed good intent.   I fully expect that the goal of these guys is to make a cool MMO.   They are damned in their own words, though.   Just the links provided previously, and other comments on this and other sites provides all the evidence I need to conclude that this is a very shaky project. 

There's an obvious litany of poor decisions:  Initial name choice, poor understanding of the game engines, no interest in previous developers' experiance, chomping at the bit to do the big game - without even considering a smaller project or other experiance,  other flip-flopping, etc.   The big dude comes across as a guy who believes every word he utters, but looks to be a dilettante and acts sorta flakey.  It's the bed he's made, but he really doesn't want to lie in it now.

Most guys in the fighting game have to actually practice a bunch before they get in the ring.   And there's a reason for that..... 

Originally posted by Gwahlur

Originally posted by BadSpock

It's called "being a legitimate business person/company."

How do you expect people to think you'll release a quality product worth their hard earned money if you can't at least fake a presentable face to the consumer?

Being an "indie" doesn't give you the right to be a douche.

 

And if people are being douches towards you and attacking you personally, not as a business person or company, you're not allowed to react as a human and not as a company?

Would you be allowed to do that in any other company?

Originally posted by jimdandy26

Originally posted by Gwahlur

Originally posted by BadSpock

It's called "being a legitimate business person/company."

How do you expect people to think you'll release a quality product worth their hard earned money if you can't at least fake a presentable face to the consumer?

Being an "indie" doesn't give you the right to be a douche.

 

And if people are being douches towards you and attacking you personally, not as a business person or company, you're not allowed to react as a human and not as a company?

Would you be allowed to do that in any other company?

Point here is that it's HIS company to act however he pleases. If it was another company doesn't matter because it isn't another company. 

This is the part the average gamer never thinks or cares about when attacking someone who develops games. if you go to any popular games forums, you will spend at least your entire read going through arm chair developers wanting the game to be custom made for a single individual. I'm an indie developers as well working on my own project with hero engine. I honeslty can say all these years of being a player I sometimes fall back to my very jaded gamer attitude in regards to my fellow developers games.

But most of the time it's players who think they can design a game on their own who proceed to dictate whats going to make your MMOG sail or fail. it's hard for indie developers because many of us still play MMORPGs.  If we are not trying to figure out proxy nodes from killing AI  when we cross seamless zones :) we are working untold hours and days making games.

I just want players to understand that we are gamers who are making our own games, and sometimes we react like gamers when attacked. it may not be the pro PR way but we are learning as we go along. I would rather reply to a person on my games forums then ignore them like many big development houses do, or simply say coming soon.

Originally posted by Gwahlur

Originally posted by BadSpock

It's called "being a legitimate business person/company."

How do you expect people to think you'll release a quality product worth their hard earned money if you can't at least fake a presentable face to the consumer?

Being an "indie" doesn't give you the right to be a douche.

 

And if people are being douches towards you and attacking you personally, not as a business person or company, you're not allowed to react as a human and not as a company?

Nope, not even once.

Originally posted by JamesP

I'm sort of confused here.

In our KickStarter we stated that we were using Unity3D. At that time we were banking on getting our hands on a specific piece of Technology that would have allowed us to have the seamless world we were planning on having. We then found out that piece of technology was still in development,   

 

 This piece of technology has been available in Unity pro since 2009 in which I personally tested it., It works a lot better than HE since it does back ground streaming.

Reason I am calling you out on it is becasue that it a untruth to this engine.

Originally posted by ArChWind

Originally posted by JamesP

I'm sort of confused here.

In our KickStarter we stated that we were using Unity3D. At that time we were banking on getting our hands on a specific piece of Technology that would have allowed us to have the seamless world we were planning on having. We then found out that piece of technology was still in development,   

 

 This piece of technology has been available in Unity pro since 2009 in which I personally tested it., It works a lot better than HE since it does back ground streaming.

Reason I am calling you out on it is becasue that it a untruth to this engine.

And what "Piece" of technology do you think I was refering to? Asset Bundles? Those would have no effect on creating the Server side capabilities of having a Seamless World. Yes Client side has no issue with Seamless Worlds. Server side it's a known issue that Unity3D Can't handle Seamless Worlds out of the box.

We were banking on using uPikko from MuchDifferent... They wanted a Known (At least to me) amount of Rev. Share for the single uPikko License which wouldn't have included anything beyond uPikko. Plus we were told it wasn't even available to be licensed yet. 

Originally posted by JamesP

Originally posted by ArChWind

Originally posted by JamesP

I'm sort of confused here.

In our KickStarter we stated that we were using Unity3D. At that time we were banking on getting our hands on a specific piece of Technology that would have allowed us to have the seamless world we were planning on having. We then found out that piece of technology was still in development,   

 

 This piece of technology has been available in Unity pro since 2009 in which I personally tested it., It works a lot better than HE since it does back ground streaming.

Reason I am calling you out on it is becasue that it a untruth to this engine.

And what "Piece" of technology do you think I was refering to? Asset Bundles? Those would have no effect on creating the Server side capabilities of having a Seamless World. Yes Client side has no issue with Seamless Worlds. Server side it's a known issue that Unity3D Can't handle Seamless Worlds out of the box.

 

We were banking on using uPikko from MuchDifferent... They wanted a Known (At least to me) amount of Rev. Share for the single uPikko License which wouldn't have included anything beyond uPikko. Plus we were told it wasn't even available to be licensed yet. 

Our other option would have been to completely roll our own Seamless Technology. It would have taking several months or more just in research and development as well as would have been untested with it's own completely unknown issues. 

 Yes that was a kicker. It does require a bit more skill to seamless Unity with a client/server so that is cleared up.

Originally posted by Myrdynn

The reason people are attacking GM is because of his attitude towards some people here.

As well as the flip-flopping on their KS project.

Originally there were gonna be only 3000 plots available, that could be purchased thru KS, then they added more and gave some excuse.

At first, the only cost was going to be buying a plot, or selling a plot they would take a % of that sale, now they are covering it up by blaming Hero, or Unity or whoever else they can.  Now they might have to have a cash shop and/or subscription.  

Here's an idea for future developers, find this stuff out AHEAD OF TIME, not after your KS project, not after you make all these announcements.  They should have known all this stuff before they came up with the pricing policy.

This game at once showed potential, imo now its gonna be vaporware, or an under 1000 people type game

 

SW development in general, as well as gaming development, are highly changeable entities. Most of the time, the things you decide upfront are changed to something else due to learning new things, getting customer feedback and simply what is feasible and not feasible (in this case using Unity and finding out later that Hero is better suited).

So this "finding out stuff ahead of time" sounds like what is called the Waterfall model, which in general is considered a poor model for SW development. So at this early stage of development you should not take anything set in stone except that it will be a fantasy based MMO. Everything else is and should be up for debate.