Stringing on the Kickstarter customer, or Why this game needs to die

The parallax of "support" should be a self defeating issue, but it's not. This is why: If players feel the game is worth it, they support it. If they DON'T feel the game is where it needs to be, they support it.

I agree with you to a point. But you have not considered the ongoing cost of keeping the game up and running. They have servers, IT people, electricity, etc. Without the trickle of support, the game would dry up and be gone. If they sell 100,000 copies of the game, the incentive on the GGG side would be to take the money and run. Shut down the servers, save electricity, we've already made our money.

The part I agree with, is that GGG doesn't care as much as they should about the overall quality of the game. They are not going to, for instance, rebuild the game client/server relationship to fix desync. They are not going to rebuild the poorly optimized game client to improve on fps issues. Instead they are merely treading water by tacking on new content

Bump for old Hailrake

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

It's a great sign of the decay of this community's integrity that no one is pointing and laughing at that post.

I'd say that post has to do with integrity and lack of responses with globally alarming lack of faith in humanity.

Or we just became a bit too open-minded. He could be a Vogon? If so he doesn't even know what integrity means, it's not his fault and he shouldn't be judged for it.

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beefnuggy wrote:

If they sell 100,000 copies of the game, the incentive on the GGG side would be to take the money and run. Shut down the servers, save electricity, we've already made our money.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Bump for old Hailrake

how often did you fail on old hailrake?

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Vhlad wrote:

How do they accomplish this, with 12 players + monsters in a large arena, without any desync whatsoever, while keeping the game cheat-free? (i.e. 400+ hours played and not 1 speed hacker observed).

Probably by not being chincy with bandwidth, and letting the client get state updates more than every 10 seconds. I had hoped some of my support would let them update the client often enough that things never got so far out of sync that the resync would be jarring. Instead, we got fairy wings. Meh.

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Xtorma wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Bump for old Hailrake

how often did you fail on old hailrake?

First character skipped him completely. Second one died to him twice. Then at least 2 more deaths with later characters, at least one death during a race.

as someone who always enjoyed your theorycrafting posts, scrotie, I will go ahead and strongly disagree with majority of your first post here.

particularly, heres my problems with it

1. GGG model is drastically different from KS model. Yeah, I know this wasnt a direct comparison, but as someone who has very closely followed KS projects, they are nothing alike besides both being a form of crowdfunding.

The sad reality for KS is, maybe one out of 5 projects is actually decent enough. You can count very good ones on the palm of your hand.

All because game devs underestimate resources needed and overestimate themselves. It's already quite obvious that some game devs would be MUCH better with a proverbial publisher overseer with a whip.

KS also taught a valuable lesson to the gaming community, one that I always preach, is that your favorite idol might be a fucking hack. Tim Schaefer went from being a cult dev to a fat, lazy hack who cannot manage a game project to save his life. And Peter Moulinex lost his last respect over all the lies he's been feeding people forever. KS is good because it throws the devs into water and sees if they sink or swim without a publisher. and when they sink, they are publicly name and shame'd. Which is a good thing imo.

2. derived from point 1, unlike many games with broken promises, GGG gave us a game where promises were kept. I haven't been part of the community during close beta, but I don't see any philosophies that they changed or lied on to 'backers' (if you can call them 'backers'). THIS is a common theme of failed KS projects such as Godus. That and using KS money to jumpstart another project. Moreover, from what I understand, GGG had little promises in general. The supporter packs always were and are donations moreso than 'backer' funds. They're "good job, bros" donations you and only you made.

3. While I support your right to scream 'no one buy support packs', I vehemently disagree with it. I think it's very selfish. It basically translates to 'no one buy support packs because the game evolved from something I liked to something I don't like anymore and now I want a new toy. If you keep supporting this toy I wont get a new toy anytime soon'. It's utterly selfish and even childish, man.
Online-only games change. And we can't have a snapshot offline version. While I don't play WoW, I'm pretty sure todays WoW is drastically different from original, vanilla WoW, to the point where they seem like drastically different games mechanically and economically.
The game has evolved, for better or worse. People buying new supporter packs show support to GGG as CUSTOMERS AS WELL. Or at least I believe they do, why would they otherwise ? A lot of people like PoE even in its current state.

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beefnuggy wrote:

If they sell 100,000 copies of the game, the incentive on the GGG side would be to take the money and run. Shut down the servers, save electricity, we've already made our money.

it doesnt work like that. maybe in early 90s, in some obscure parts of the world with some crappy game, maaaybe but not likely at all.

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grepman wrote:

2. derived from point 1, unlike many games with broken promises, GGG gave us a game where promises were kept. I haven't been part of the community during close beta, but I don't see any philosophies that they changed or lied on to 'backers' (if you can call them 'backers').

Permanent cutthroat league. Paid private leagues. Loot tension/semi-FFA loot. Fixing performance issues. Forum-based trading. "Dark, gritty art style."

I can understand the argument that the game as it is is a finished product with some degree of polish. I'm not saying PoE is a piece of trash because it isn't. It's a good game. All I'm saying is GGG overpromised, underdelivered, and in some cases reversed its policy completely.

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grepman wrote:

3. While I support your right to scream 'no one buy support packs', I vehemently disagree with it. I think it's very selfish. It basically translates to 'no one buy support packs because the game evolved from something I liked to something I don't like anymore and now I want a new toy. If you keep supporting this toy I wont get a new toy anytime soon'. It's utterly selfish and even childish, man.

I didn't mean to yell. I thought I was talking at a normal volume.

I don't consider my request childish. I do consider it to be selfish, and nakedly so. That's why I expressed it as a favor to me. I hope I haven't misled anyone on that point, because I really don't consider myself to be speaking for anyone but myself in that portion of the OP. Since then, I've seen I'm not completely alone in how I feel, but even then, we are few. I hope more people agree with me, but I understand if they don't.