Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

kudos_sl said:

$10k but regardless I have a feeling that guy may be bullshit anyways. What kind of guy has $10k to throw at a pile of shit like this and has an anime character avatar and sits on some shit forum all day? Pretty sure if you got that kind of money you ring up Brad at his house on the batphone.

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Going by his claims on page 1I really want to like the new official website. | Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen

Offering a potential value upwards of 6 figures in hard currancy + whatever the additional value of services would amount to.... Being shelved like this has not spurred me to jump in and start backing their private site.

I'm canceling my sub within the week, if nothing changes, and just sit on the fan sites for a bit.

It isn't that I feel more "privlidged" than other backers, rather... You just don't treat the ones with deep pockets this way. If Tiffany's treated me like this in December, I'd have quickly found another place to drop 50k on an engagement ring......

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quick! an angel investor get the chloroform!

Pretty sure that guy is just "pulling a a_skeleton_03". What will be funny is if they think that too, and the guy ends up being legit. Losing 100k due to shitty communication has to sting a bit.

Tide27_sl said:

I will not disagree with the statement that there is a market for another Everquest. What I would disagree with is the fact that there would be enough of a market for an Everquest type game to justify a $8m-$10m investment for such a small niche market. I have been in the industry over a decade now and shipped many titles. It would be a very difficult sell to try to find investors to spend this type of money for such a small niche market. There is massive chance for never seeing any ROI on a game like this with those types of numbers tossed around and there is a very remote chance that anyone would be willing to risk $10m into a project that has such a high chance of failure in the marketplace.

Brad leading this team sure the hell doesn't help his case either. He is not well liked or respected in the industry and has a proven track record of failing at pretty much everything he has attempted. Doesn't help him that he has burned many bridges in the industry either. While certain people maintain political correctness on social media , there is a reason he has no job.

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why do you assume it would be a small niche market? everquest had over 500,000 players at its peak before 95% of the gaming world knew what a MMO was. if a game made in the mold of EQ could maintain a half million players or so today, that would be considered a gigantic success, and not niche at all.

etchazz_sl said:

why do you assume it would be a small niche market? everquest had over 500,000 players at its peak before 95% of the gaming world knew what a MMO was. if a game made in the mold of EQ could maintain a half million players or so today, that would be considered a gigantic success, and not niche at all.

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Because about 450k of those people left as soon as something they considered better came along. A game made in the EQ mold today has to compete with all the options, its would not be the only thing to play like its predecessor.

Que the completely out of touch poster telling all about the MMO peers EQ had, even though there weren't any 3d modeled worlds beyond AC at the time, which came second, and didn't have even a remotely similar gameplay model.

Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen II: Fuck!! are they already trying to get the sequal funded?

Burnesto_sl said:

Who's dick did Brad suck to get the other thread rickshawed?

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I was trying to reply in the other thread and thought I lost privileges for being awesome.

I guess it makes sense since this is a new chapter and what happened during the ks is wholly irrelevant to the project moving forward. It is not like there was a lot of real game development discussion because there was no real game development.

I know some think they should wind up for another run at ks, but at this point I disagree. I am very curious to see how the self crowd funding route works out for a long term project like this.

I am still wondering what the game is going to be besides allegedly a hardcore niche game with corpse runs. Others have raised concerns about the opinions of those most aggressively supporting the game at this point not being this hardcore nostalgic game people allegedly want.

To me, regardless of the ks issues, I am convinced there is not a significant nor viable audience for essentially an eq redux. The interest simply is not there and no amount of pretty ksers would have changed that.

So who knows how the game will develop but I think watching the process, for the time being will be interesting. That development seems to have begun with a mid to high level dungeon and its surrounding zone is also interesting. I just know that even if the ks had been immaculate that the old school harsh game would have never materialized. 10% of the people who want that game post here and of those 10% only a handful would ever find a consensus on an overall design.

So certainly whomever pays monthly for alpha access will have a huge amount of input to game design. They can't just ignore the people who are literally paying the bills.

I just find the whole thing fascinating and no matter which way it goes the result will be amazing, one way or another.

Melvin_sl said:

There is a market for a EQ clone though, it's just really really small. If Brad & Co. learn one thing from their failed kickstarter, this should be it. I'm not at all convinced that they really understand what the word "niche" means. If they can rein their collective egos in and rightsize their plans, Pantheon could (hypothetically at least) turn out to be a successful indie game. What are the odds of that happening though?

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30 plus member development teams and budgets over eight million. I don't feel like they have a handle on the scope of what such a game really would need to be.

Carl_sl said:

Que the completely out of touch poster telling all about the MMO peers EQ had, even though there weren't any 3d modeled worlds beyond AC at the time, which came second, and didn't have even a remotely similar gameplay model.

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Wasn't there a 3D MMO called Meridian something or other? This was before EQ came out.

Lithose_sl said:

You're comparing these numbers to things like SC, or KC or other succesful large KS; that's not really a fair comparison for judging how much this raised. Those were huge aberrations.

The fact is, the VAST majority of KS campaigns raise less than 10k. Only1.7%of ALL KS campaigns break 100k (Look up the stats page), it's an EXTREMELY small amount (Heck, only about 300 "game" KS's have ever broke 100k, out of 8 thousand attempts, and a HUGE amount of those attempts had tech demos, and far more fleshed out documentation than Pantheon, rise of the turd.) Most,the vast majority, of social media campaigns with no discernible add budget? Willnotget more than 500 backers, because the amount of backers is VERY small compared to the amount of population a project has interested in it, even if they have absolutely amazing work behind their campaign.

So, yes, it's a HUGE backing. It's fuckingastronomicalwhen you compare it to ALL of KS, and not just huge wins like Star Citizen or Camelot (Which both, btw, had great social media campaigns run by professionals.) This project was absolutely an aberration in terms of size. The fact that so much money was raised, on such a THIN premise, is astounding to me: you should be astounded to, all you have to do is compare it to other projects that didn't have a marketing campaign to launch with it, or were small scale ideas with no technology demos or other usually required mechanics. 3k backers for the amount of work that went into this (IE none.)? Was huge.

Edit: And just to specify why I say it's "huge" considering how bad it was displayed? There was a paper about the statistics behind KS campaigns in a business journal I read (Dynamics of Crowd Funding); one of the elements on a campaign being successful was called "Signals of quality". This element had a massive effect on community members within the market backing the campaign (So you could have a huge market, and if you didn't get these signals down, you're campaign would still have a 50+% failure rate, despite again, the market being huge). Getting these "signals" correct was as simple as a display of your possible "outcome" (So a tech demo), a pitch video, and steady releases without spelling or grammar errors and a "fluid" release of rewards. Brad failed in 3 out of 4 of these, and yet still managed to capture a large population in his "community": and achieve 50% funding (Most failed KS's fail before the 30% mark.)...This is VERY abnormal, and I believe it speaks to the market being pretty large--the fact that 3000 people were "die hard" enough to fundDESPITEsuch low signals of "quality"? Most likely means the total market out there is significantly larger.

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You are confusing what a big ks campaign is to what would actually signify a high level of interest for the development of an mmog.

Tide27_sl said:

I will not disagree with the statement that there is a market for another Everquest. What I would disagree with is the fact that there would be enough of a market for an Everquest type game to justify a $8m-$10m investment for such a small niche market. I have been in the industry over a decade now and shipped many titles. It would be a very difficult sell to try to find investors to spend this type of money for such a small niche market. There is massive chance for never seeing any ROI on a game like this with those types of numbers tossed around and there is a very remote chance that anyone would be willing to risk $10m into a project that has such a high chance of failure in the marketplace.

Brad leading this team sure the hell doesn't help his case either. He is not well liked or respected in the industry and has a proven track record of failing at pretty much everything he has attempted. Doesn't help him that he has burned many bridges in the industry either. While certain people maintain political correctness on social media , there is a reason he has no job.

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The reality is maybe there is a market that could support a one million dollar game. Things get trickier though when you talk about how it will work. In three to four more years is a fifteen dollar monthly charge for a game (instead of forum access) make sense?

This debate keeps going back and forth on if a market exists. Let us define it as brad seeing it otherwise we can say three people paying for a $500 game is a market. Brad envisions a twenty to thirty plus development team with a cost of at least eight million dollars to meet their goals.

I don't believe a market of players exists to support an old school eq-like hardcore niche game that costs that much or more.

We are likely talking about 10000 monthly subs in 2017 (minus all those who have lifetime subscriptions already).

I have layed out my ideal plan for a super tightly focused game that could likely be done for a lot less money but be delivered on time or even early and be able to grow. Clearly this is not the route they are going to take. I think it is absurd things like crafting and pvp (pvp is pretty much all I like in mmogs these days) are even on the table.

Honestly most people would not care if they used a bunch of premade assets to fill out the world just as long as the combat and core interaction is stellar.

If they could lock down combat and flesh out the classes, first and foremost, the rest is literally icing. Instead we seem to have the traditional mmog development soup where trying to be all things to all people. They have it even worse, though, because the people they might alienate are people giving them money NOW and not just potential subscribers in the future.

I do think someone could create a hardcore niche game for a reasonable price. But god damn it why does anyone think that initial game needs anything more than combat based character development. Literally everything else could be added later on.

Imagine if a development team solely focused on the characters, classes, mobs, abilities, spells and combats. If that was all they focused on in building the game. Instead we have to slot developer time into picking flowers. Heck I think quests are even a later add on.

A hardcore, old school , niche game will start and end with combat interactions. So make that the game and then build out from there with that always as your central focus.

For those of you who played Eq from launch of 99 until kunark: what percentage of your time playing was related to fighting mobs (actual fighting, corpse recovery, selling loot, training abilities, buying spells), what percent was just wandering around and what percent was doing anything else. I would suspect the majority of players spend almost all their time in those first two categories and the rest was minuscule.

So build the game that way. The rest can follow. Invest the time into spells and abilities. Invest the time into mobs. Don't invest the time into crafting or housing or anything else that does not deal with pve bloodshed.

Nobody in June of 2009 was telling their friend "hey check out this game where I can collect orc belts and exchange them for a shitty reward."

They were like "I am a dark elf shadow knight and is gang out at this log and bears and halflings keep kicking my ass, you should check it out."

Lost Ranger_sl said:

Pretty sure that guy is just "pulling a a_skeleton_03". What will be funny is if they think that too, and the guy ends up being legit. Losing 100k due to shitty communication has to sting a bit.

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I'm pretty sure that Wyre Wintermule is Graye from the Vanguardthegame.com forums; he is a hardcore Vanboi that wouldn't lose faith in Brad McQuaid very easily. I'm pretty sure he is for real and explains why there was a $10 backer on day 2 that never last faith and pulled out.

Aeiouy_sl said:

You are confusing what a big ks campaign is to what would actually signify a high level of interest for the development of an mmog.

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No, I'm not. Projects draw generally from communities with interest in the product, not with interest solely in the KS campaign. The "KS" social factor is more a part of reaching that community (In the paper, the product is about half the equation, while the KS campaign is the other half--if the product quality is low, the risk of failure is around 50%, if the KS campaign is weak, it's also 50%--he explained how he measured these in the paper, they were "okay" metrics, not great but believable). But anyway, the size of the project usually correlated to the size of a community predisposed with interest in the product.

Also, on that note? Brad's campaign as anemic and poorly run. So even if you were correct? You'd still be proving my point. Because his actual "KS" campaign was "small" and yet he developed a large amount of interest compared to most KS campaigns. Which should obviously point to a lot of interest PRIOR to the campaign--if this were any other field, such a conclusion would be an absolute--for some reason though, people want to rewrite the rules to explain this particular campaign. (Everything from EQ people being psychotic, to it being "just different".)Now, I said earlier, I'm not going to discount that some aberration came from the fan boys being psychos. But that's not all of it.

Anyway--a campaign funding a turd, regardless of size, won't raise above 10k, except in someVERYrare case. (Like Sarkezians Damsels, heh.) But typically true turd campaigns never break 100k/1k backers without a discernible project; much less 400k/3k.

Lithose_sl said:

A campaign funding a turd, regardless of size, won't raise above 10k, except in some VERY rare case. (Like Sarkezians Damsels, heh.)

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I actually liked Sarkeesian's videos.

Arctic_Slicer_sl said:

I actually liked Sarkeesian's videos.

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The reason why I called it a turd was because she was essentially doing those videos for free before, and then just promised "deeper research". But didn't really go into specifics about what that meant except that she'd actually buy and play the games, which contradicted her "gamer cred" background (Then after the KS, she was caught using lets plays from other channels.)....So by "turd" I meant that her information was very thin, so like Brad she had a lot of "low quality" signals--so instead of focusing on the product, she relied on her social media buzz to pump money in.

That works onlyveryrarely in KS (Usually you need both social media buzz/campaign prowess AND a good product/pitch)...Brad, in the end, did not have half the pull Sarkeesian did--so I can't really see him raising quadruple the amount with those tactics, when it's so rare for even highly hooked in KS agents to break 100k. (Which leads me to believe the actual community/market for this game is sizable---again, not "huge" but big enough for brad to have extorted 800k had he run the campaign halfway decently.)

Soygen_sl said:

Dude can't even spell privileged and we're supposed to believe he was potentially going to invest 6 figures into this turd? He also brags about spending 50k on an engagement ring at Tiffany's in the same post.


Oh internet...you so crazy.

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The only thing he missed was talking about the supermodel gf who likes three ways with other supermodels that he bought the engagement ring for.

Its the same neckbeard crowd all laden with thousands of post count on an evil crusade to stop Brad. So funny. Carry on you fat fucks