Originally posted by negacrowbar

I have been playing RPGs, MMOs, and every console and computer game since Atari and Commodore VIC 20, so I have seen games in all form of basic graphics, pen and paper, and to high end games of today. What I learned is that it doesn't matter what is used to create a game, it is the people who play the game that matters.

When I started reading this thread, I was looking for how the release of Alganon was going. I like to read what people have to say about a game, both good and bad, and it helps me decide if I want to try it.As most intelligent people who read these forums, I can tell the difference between the fanbois, trollers, and typical flamers and can piece out the forums that really tell about a new game.

Most of time, I am still willing to give a game a shot despite what is posted, because, in the end, the game is still free to try, and costs me nothing to give it a shot. In this fashion, I have disliked some like Earth Eternal, Soul Master, and Fantasy Earht Zero, while playing and paying microtransactins for games like DDO and League of Legends. But not since the Allods debacle have I seen a developer treat those with opnions with such rude words.

I have twenty years experience in customer service and I have never seen a representative of a company go to such lengths as to make the comments that you have on this forum, Mr. Smart. Because of your actions, and your actions alone, I will not be trying Alganon, nor any other game you chose to represent.

In fact, if you were flipping burgers at Mc Donalds, I would turn around and go eat at Burger King and I can't stand Whoppers.

Yah OK, whatever.

Originally posted by madeux

My advice would be to ignore all advice on the subject and just try it for yourself. 

Indeed. But you'd think that should be as simply as employing common sense. Most gamers won't touch a game without playing a demo. Now you can play the game for free for as long as you like in order to make an informed decision as to whether or not it is worth your time and money.

The trial and the F2P model are totally different. The original trial (which could be converted by buying the $19.95 client) was way more restrictive.

Those clamouring are those who a) don't understand it b) never actually played the game; but have no problems posting nonsense not based in reality.

Just try it for yourself and if its not to your liking,  move on to what is. Games - by their very nature - are not made for everyone to like. Thats why some succeed and some don't. Even those with massive Triple-A budgets end up failing, while the smaller (and less overhead) games are still moving on with whatever install base they have and which pay the bills.

As long as Alganon can pay the company's bills, thats all we care about. We don't care about much else really.

Originally posted by Dapyx

After I raised same issues on their forums, you know what people responded? That if I want to play a high quality, "western-style", "made by americans" game, I have to pay.

Why should I care if a game is made by americans? Runes of Magic is made in Taiwan by chinese and is better than some "made by americans" games. And truly f2p, not free trial.

Aion is made in Koreea and it's a big hit. 

Want to bet against me? I bet 100€ that Alganon will shut down before the end of next year if they will continue to use this f2p - "free trial" model. Not only it will shut down, bu with some financial loss, too.

Alganon is not DDO, LOTRO or Everquest 2. And their team doesn't have the same resources of Sony or Turbine.

Thats just nonsense. No such thing was said.

And no, Aion is NOT a hit in the US.

If you're going to post, at least post something that has some basis in reality.

Alganon is steadily growing thank you very much. I remember back in Dec when most of you - who aren't even playing it - were saying that it was dead in a few months. It is now August - and we're still making strides.

The biz model is just fine and we have no intentions of changing it.

If you don't like the game, don't play it, don't post about it. What's so hard about that?

What nonsense. As I already said, please stop making shit up just because you can.

Originally posted by Cherise

Yes they did the refunds.  But refunds were for prepaid subscriptions.  Was never a refund for the client itself since you still had to purchase the client to play the game.

From the other post it sounds like they bought the game but didn't continue beyond beta (or much beyond) so there would have been no refund involved.

Thanks for pointing that but yes, we did in fact do the subscription refunds.

There was no refund of the game client because that was not the case. With the subscriptions removed and refunded, you could play the game for free. All you had to do was buy the client for $19.95.

And you're right, that previous poster didn't continue beyond the Beta period it seems.

Originally posted by alkarionlog

well pvp in a F2P is normally P2W, so I wouldn't care much, and even with the several problems I read and you can know from other places too, its better you just play another game.

 

I would recommend dynasty warriors online, if you like DW I guess it worth the test in the CB of aeria ^^

Since you haven't even played Alganon and have no idea what you're talking about either way, you are in no position to even comment on the game, let alone a currently non-existent PvP component.

[Mod Edit]

OK, I'll bite.

MOST of those complaining about being banned, censored, warned etc are the same ones who tend to think that they are above the rules. And so just keep breaking them with impunity.

I've been warned, flagged etc on these forums, but you don't see me complaining about it. Why? Well because people ALL perceive things differently. What one mod may see as passable commentary another may view as trolling etc.

For the most part, these forums have the worst rep of any MMO base forum on the Net. Period. There is a reason for that: popularity being the primary one.

If you're going to setup a forum, you should be prepared to police it otherwise you end up with the likes of NeoGaf, SA and their ilk which are pretty much the lawless frontiers of web forum chats.

There is a reason that here, when you go to report a post, there are numerous choices. That alone is clear indication that the mod who gets to read the report needs to have some moral fortitude in order to make the right call. Most of mods on the Net completely fail the moral fortitude test. How so? Well because, like all of us, they're only human. As such they too tend to fall victim to mistakes, favoritism, opinions, different values etc.

For e.g. the majority of the angst ridden posters here won't last a day anywhere else where second chances are as good a club to the head. But they get to repeat their actions with impunity because, lets face it, anonymity is pretty much a passport to bad behavior for anyone who is intent on harrassment, trolling, hate filled rhetoric etc.

I tend to treat forums like I treat the public. If I don't know you, there is a good chance that I don't want to or need to. So, unless you have something worthy of my attention, you don't exist. But if you try to force your existence on me - and in a hostile manner - don't be surprised if I reach into my pocket for my taser. Or at the very least, my writing and/or verbal skills.

As humans, the sociological implications of discourse on the net is no different from any bar room or school yard brawl. You can walk away or deal with it. Except that unless you buy into the whole premise that words have power, you're probably going to end up dealing with it nontheless.

Which brings me to this.

If someone trolls you, posts disparaging, inflammatory or otherwise libelous material, the first impulse is to engage - and usually in kind. That usually devolves into a flamewar and on moderated forums, someone is bound to get banned and a thread locked or deleted. By the time the dust settles, the energy expended on the pointless excercise of engaging some unknown alias becomes just another period of wasted time on the already limited time you have here on Earth.

As an example, this Erstok person who seems to be fixated on me, decided to post some rubbish on the news thread about me, among other things, hiring my cousin to work at QOL. For one thing, coming from a small family, not only do I not have very many cousins, but I am also the only person in my family tree that works in the industry, let alone in the computer field. So, he basically decided to make shit up just because it fits his agenda and because he can. Thats called libel. And yes, it is legally actionable.

Here, to save you the click, let me post his missive verbatim :

Originally posted by Erstok

Derek Smart

Derek Smart

Derek Smart

Has never made or even put together a good game. But that's just my opinion.

What classes did you take to acquire your PHD, along with the amount of time and years in college did you spend to achieve it? Did you get a loan or did you pay for it all yourself. Tell me, why did you give your cousin a job and pay them more money then other people? Why did you carry on arguments over the internet with ex-employees of this game instead of having the decency of doing it behind closed doors? Is it really everyone elses fault you can google the silly things you have posted yourself on the internet? I'm just curious is all.

What a flawed man sees. His hands make broken. /facepalm

 

Tell me thats not trolling. It is. And what is the relevance of that missive to the news bit in question? None.

Not to mention that the very mention of something that is not true is not only legally actionable (it is called libel and I've written extensively about it and sued people for it - and won).

Now if any of you - or even me - had posted that, it would have been removed by now because not only does it break at least NINE of the reasons for reporting a post (you can't report a post in a news item it seems) here, but also it would have devolved to a pointless flamewar if I even responded to it. So, I didn't.

More often than not, you can just ignore it and move on. But you see, thats why the law exists. Even though the owners of the forums - by law - are not responsible for content posted by others - just the very act of pointing that out to an attorney, costs money. So, just because you're not legally liable, is that stupid troll worth the time and money or do you just want to do the best that you can to police your forums to the best of your ability and resources?

It is the same thing with lawsuit threats, regardless of whether you are in the right or wrong, you still spend money either way. Case in point, Allen's attorneys were sending letters out last week to sites asking them to remove interviews in which I outlined Allen's actions that saw him being fired from the company. Most of the sites contacted us and as I suspected, they just ignored the letters. Others, such as MMMOFallout, decided to play it safe rather than have to spend money pointing out that there is NO legal precedent that requires them to pull the materials, decided to comply.

When someone that you're going to insult and attack decides to fight back, the general consensus is that all the friends of the perpetrator (I will leave the discussions about sociological group behavior for another time) will join in. Why? Because thats the nature of castes of a feather. So what you end up with is a lopsided discource in which a bunch of people - in a bid to back up their "buddy" - engages in pointless rhetoric that goes nowhere. By the time the dust settles, the result is either a locked thread or several bannings (or warnings). Nobody wins.

Yes, people have been sued, fired and even killed over online behavior like that. And there is a reason for that.

There is a big difference between stating an opinion and harrassing someone. Then there's that fine line between flat out lying and outright libel. At the end of the day, your opinions are only important to you and trying to force them on someone - through a forum post - is nothing short of anti-social behavior that borders on narcissistic behavioral traits.

Another example is Wraith. He was baneed from the Alganon forums. Of course it had nothing  to do with me, but he - like most - is comfortable in the thought that he has the right to state his opinions (however unwanted and/or unwarranted) on a forum which has clear rules of engagement and moderation. He is also of the opinion that the world - as he sees it - is just fine; in which case, he was wrongly banned and thus the mod who banned him (like the mods who ban people here) must be idiots because he's right and they are ALL wrong. THEN to pour gas on an already burning flame, he decides to take it one step further with flat our libel (or lying depending on your perspective) that he was banned because of me. Nothing could be farther from the truth. And yes, posts on our Alganon forums are not deleted, they are saved so we can refer back to them.

So, in closing, yet another set of threads created for the sole purpose of attacking someone (yours truly) was deleted/closed by the mods and what do the perpertrators do? Take a wild guess. Yes, you got it. They go and create an all new thread and this time - once again - call the mods idiots (remember all mods are wrong and evil) while resuming the same discource that got the previous threads locked/deleted in the first place.

As you were.

You are 100% wrong.

Like all F2P games, if you want perks and such, you have to pay for them. Our model does not require you to buy anything in order to play the game. I guess the chart wasn't clear enough?

Anyway if you had actually played the game - like those who are doing just that - you'd know all this.

Originally posted by Blutmaul

Well, it seems the Big Deal is to buy the 19,95 Client now, as the service add ons will cost a total of 45 bucks:

http://www.alganon.com/forums/index.php?/topic/5204-alganon-goes-free-to-play/page__view__findpost__p__44199

That indicates that the service add ons are stand alone type...

 

Sorry thats just not true, nor is it as cut and dry as stated. Please refer to the chart previously posted as well as the press release and August newsletter.

The $19.95 client is no longer being sold.

Plus you don't have to buy anything to play the game.

As mentioned in the press release that went out yesterday, PvP (and a bunch of other things) is already in our dev roadmap and hopefully will arrive by the end of the year. We have a bunch of ideas of it that we're toying with, but the idea is to have PvP that caters to PvP players without compromising the PvE aspects of the game. Its not something that you just flip a switch and its there.

Originally posted by SBFord

On March 22, 2010:

Yes. When the investors brought me in last year to assess the situation, the first thought that crossed my mind was that here was a WoW clone, charging triple-A prices and being released in the busiest time of the year.

So after speaking with them and David, I advised that in this market it would be very hard for any small company without the right marketing, asset and clout to compete with triple-A titles. Let alone a WoW clone.

Since David had already released the game prematurely on Dec 1st and with near disastrous results, I pointed out that the barrier of entry was too high. So I had them drop the price of the client, create a trial version and to cancel all subscriptions going forward. The goal was to continue working to finish the game then re-focus it for a subscription-free business model in which you would buy the client but play for free. If you wanted some of the cool stuff, then you would have a micro-transaction system for that.

In the end, I put my foot down and so the Tribute Merchant system (the fancy name for the game's micro-transaction model) came to be.

Do you have a link to something earlier? Remember, Smart wasn't associated with the game until mid-February 2010. It appears that the person who went for the purchase model was the original developer, David Allen.

Tribute System came on board on March 1, 2010.

If you have something earlier, I'd love to see it. Not saying it didn't happen but I'd like to see a reference.

 

As has been written in several interviews already, I have been involved with QOL since Nov 2009 (when Allen first called me up to help him out) but behind the scenes. Allen was still very much in charge.

At the time, the game was still $39.95, had a subscription model and was nowhere near finished.

The decisions that he was making (and which I talk about in the interviews) are what led to the situation that saw him fired (by me) in March.

Until I came on-board, the investors had NO idea that he was in fact developing a near 1:1 clone of WoW. He was also stuck on the $39.95 client price, a subscription model etc because he turned his nose up at the F2P model.

I submitted my report and assessment to the investors indicating that he was making a lot of mistakes and that he was going to kill the game and company before long. He was later to prove me right (first in December).

Since he was still President and team lead, nobody - not even I or the investors - all final decisions were up to him.

I continued to push (we have several emails and Confluence posts to this effect) to change the biz model but he continued to reject them.

Then he released the game - unfinished - in Dec 2009 with his original biz model in place.

That was the beginning of the end for him.

I continued to push for the game to go F2P and subsequently forced him (since I was now working for the investors - not QOL or Allen - who controlled the purse strings) to have the team implement a micro-transaction system as a lead-in to a F2P model. That became the Tribute Market system.

Later I was able to get him to lower the price of the client to $19.95 and remove subscriptions.

He still didn't see the game as a F2P game.

Once he was gone (I fired him in Feb) , as President, I set to work energizing the team (first thing I did was appoint a capable and competent team lead, Brian Hughes, who the team trusted and respected, moreso than Allen) and setting a path to finishing the game.

F2P was always my top priority but you can't implement something like that for a game that was largely unfinished, buggy etc. A LOT of things needed to be in place. For one thing, you can't have a F2P game with an incomplete MT system, hardly any items in the cash shop etc.

So thats why it took almost three months to get to F2P. The game was officially completed and released at the end of April 2010.

The Tribute Market system made its debut in the official April release of the game. It was largely unfinished when Allen was fired back on Feb 22, 2010. He largely had nothing to do with that Tribute system at all.

The game - as it currently stands - is head and shoulders above what he signed off on an released in December 2009.

For a more comprehensive run-down, read my latest blog which links to a bunch of resources.

The game - like all games - is not everyone's cup of team, but as I said in the press release that went out yesterday, the game has been growing steadily and now that we've finally hit the F2P milestone, my long term plan and goals will determine the fate of the game.

In an industry where MMO games are failing left and right (just this week, two were announced to be closing), triple-A and better funded ones are going F2P etc I think I've done a darn good job thus far and the stellar team in place make my job a lot more easier because this game is more than just a paycheck for them. I envision the game growing over time as long as a) the investors still consider it a worthy investment to keep putting money in b) the game continues to grow and eventually makes up for the investors losses (under Allen's failed initiative).

Originally posted by PhelimReagh

 

I wonder why QOL didn't include something like this in the press release.

 

Actually it is in the newsletter which is linked to from the press release.

Everything is explained over here.

btw, Going F2P was something that I had been advocating since Dec 2009 but Allen (and most of the team) were totally against it. The closest that I could get was lowering the client price from $39.95 to $19.95 and removing subscriptions.

Once I got rid of Allen and was able to make firm and sensible decisions, moving the game to a F2P model was top of my list. And something like that doesn't happen overnight. So, here we are.

Originally posted by Gabby-air

So i was just going through the game list looking for any newly added games when i saw this Game and apparently it's being developed by Derek's studio 3000AD. For those of you who were speculating that Derek is driving the game to ground so he could get his hands on the technology might just be right but if not i sure as hell wanna see how he would do things his way since he blames the failure of alganon on the previous devs. Would be interesting any way...

I would choose my words very carefully if I were you. Slamming my games is one thing, but making libelous statements which have no merit or any basis in reality is a whole other deal.

For anyone who was actually paying attention, GCO (which we started after we finished and shipped both of the All Aspects games in mid 2009) was announced in Q4/2009 and teased over on its own temporary page. Long before I even knew that Alganon (which doesn't contain any tech that is usable outside of the game itself, as I've said in numerous interviews and in the lawsuit we filed against Dave Allen) existed.

[Mod Edit]

 Some of us do actually make a living doing what we love the most and it is quite alright if some don't like our games. My games are designed and developed for a select group of people and as long as they continue to be profitable for us and fun for those who actually do buy and play them, I could care less what others think.

Whatever man, whatever. I didn't realize that someone died and left you in charge. Get a grip.

Not sure why this thread popped up with a new post on Google Alerts, when in fact the most recent post is from April 7th.

Was there a recent post that was subsequently deleted?

Anyway, the current status of this matter is that everyone he named in his frivolous suit has or is in the process of counter-suing him for everything ranging from embezzlement and conversion, to everything in between.

That's what happens when you sue people who actually have money to defend themselves.

Meanwhile, we finished and shipped Alganon - and the game is growing everyday and with even more improvements to come.

http://www.alganon.com/forums/index.php?/topic/4852-instances-feedback/

If you were actually PLAYING the game, you'd know.

[Mod edit]

The game is just fine and is as expected. Like all games, it is not everyone's cup of tea and those who play it tend to like it. If you don't like it, don't play it and just move on.

Here are some reviews of this 2.0 official release

[Mod edit]

As I said previously, it is always easy for people who have no clue what happened to start pointing the finger, speculating and generally making comments as if they are better than anyone else.

This wasn't supposed to be going out until tomorrow, but here, go read and stop speculating.

Unless you or anyone else was first party to the events surrounding this issue, all these comments as to who is right, wrong, what happened etc is all speculation, hearsay, and conjecture.

So just stop.

[Mod Edit]