Best posts made by Canterbury

#9 here... currently Founder, but might upgrade.

I like the way the devs are handling this. Unlike seemingly every other game out there, they want to get the game right first, rather than adding carrot after carrot after carrot to people and then having to squeeze all that stuff into the game. Far better to aim for a manageable game, rather than one that has two-dozen extra features tacked on.

The thing about UO isn't that it was a great game. Demonstrably, it wasn't. The graphics, the controls, the system overall... all of it was pretty average. What made it special was the community and the fact a game like that hadn't really been seen before. And that's why, year after year, people go chasing MMOs hoping it will be the next UO. And it never can be because that time has changed, both in terms of the video game industry and where people are in their personal life.

@mazikar said in Bit worried where the Kickstarter is:

The more of the game they can show, and the cool stuff.... fighting, magic... and not the seen it before stuff... cool "look at that!" stuff. The sooner the better. Monsters and cool animations, interesting deaths, finishing moves on bosses, that kind of stuff sells.

I agree and, presuming this stuff is already lined up for the weeks ahead, getting it out maybe sooner than they were planning to. Don't go into the last 7 days, for example, still saying, "We have great things to show you guys!" Get it all on the table in the first half of the campaign so it can soak in out there.

@staticsprite said in Bit worried where the Kickstarter is:

Already at 43%, it will be fine the kickstarter will get there. The more info they give to us, the more people will pledge. For the ammount of marketing they did I think we are on the right track

Yes, but it's 43% of a tiny amount, coming from a small group of people.

It needs to raise more but, more important than that, needs more people willing to pony-up.

I fully understand Kickstarter fatigue, and people who have been ripped off in the past with it.

But for passion projects like this, they really do need support at this stage; even from the point of view of showing investors/publishers (who are clearly needed in this equation), that the interest/support is there.

So, yeah, even just greater numbers would be good at this stage; even if most of them only tossed in a small amount.

So almost halfway through the month, and we've only just limped past 500 backers, and are still halfway to the target.

Someone new to crowd funding might conclude that's OK, as we'll get the second half in the second half of the month.

However, that's not how successful crowdfunds work. Especially for such a tiny amount of money, we should have been smashing that figure in the opening 2-3 days, tops. In terms of numbers, we should have at least a couple of thousand people interested now; a drop in the bucket versus how many are here in the community (unless there's a lot of sock puppet accounts, of course).

Does this mean I think it will fail? No, presumably it will keep growing and if anyone involved in the project, or a big backer, has any common sense, if there's 20K left in the last 24hrs, it makes sense to drop a 20K pledge in to unlock the 150K worth of money (talking in US$ terms here).

So I think the crowd fund will get there, but I think the support level is WAY too low,

I hated the maps in Albion. All really small and tricksy pathing. None of it felt like a big world where I could go anywhere. It felt really really really annoying to get around after the first hour or two.

@Pluto said in Pledge Packs Are Going... With A Sale!:

Wrong. You are significantly better off backing now versus the KS. Without the KS, they wouldn’t be at the position that they are.

Wrong? Er... we can all see how much the KS raised - €111,662 for those who don't want to check - which clearly hasn't paid for the team to be making the game all this time, including before the KS. While that KS money is nice, sure, there's no way it's the backbone, or even a significant amount, in terms of what it will cost to make the game over the life of the project. Do you know how much this stuff actually costs? Possibly not, given what you're saying. To pretend that the KS somehow saved the game and is the only reason the game is being made (or whatever you're inferring by "they wouldn't be in the position they are"), is actually the wrong comment being made here. Not mine.

Long story short, I'm delighted new people are signing up to the game, spurred on by the pledge discounts, which largely equate to what the early-bird rates were on KS. More people and more money is GREAT for the game. You can pooh-pooh that all you like, but I think anyone with their eye on the bigger picture cannot see it as anything but a great outcome.

Aspects like being able to build anywhere (or at least, outside of established cities, like in Star Wars Galaxies), remains the Holy Grail of open world sandboxing to me. It places you and your stuff in the game world and even if no one ever comes inside your house, it doesn't matter because, to you, you are there, living in the game world.

@Esoba said in Pledge Packs Are Going... With A Sale!:

Yeah, for me: game being made > individual gripes that I may have. I suppose they could have offered the discount, but removed some things from each of the discounted pledges, in order to keep the original value of some of the earlier purchasers. However, even that route is filled with tons of extra work for very little benefit imho.

I hear you in a broad sense... but do keep in mind that many of the discounts are in line with what the earlybird KS prices were... so there are KS people who paid exactly the same amount as what's being offered in this sale. I think that's hugely important to remember. A lot of people got those earlybird KS prices, me included! So was that bad, too???

I am backer #9

Personally, I think the dev team have got this.

It's when communities think they're running a game that all manner of major issues start.

Let the devs do their thing. We'll feedback on it.

@jetah said in Bit worried where the Kickstarter is:

Being active on the forums is cheap. When you ask for money you see true community!

Indeed. But you also need to see enough of that "true community"!

We made a pretty good start, but if we're already starting to plateau, that's a bit of a worry.

I think we'll need to end this month-long Kickstarter with at least 5000-10,000 backers.

Still haven't cracked 400 people

I think I was right to flag this as early as I did; I've got pretty good at reading crowd-funds over the years.

But it brings me no joy to flag it at all. By now, I'd like us (even expect us), to have a couple of thousand backers at least.

@grofire said in Bit worried where the Kickstarter is:

more people will put there money after they will see the future spotlights.

I don't understand that mindset at all. The premise, and what the game will be, is on the table.

There will be more 'fluff' announced, for sure, but if someone's sitting out there and doesn't understand what the game is going to be, based on what's already been said, they'd have to have a learning difficulty, to be honest.

I don't know what else can be shown, above and beyond what we already know, that could change someone's mind.

@wolefie said in Meaningful Guilds?:

Imagine guilds not being about 'The sickest PvP metas' or 'Rp guild only 12+ make profile first' or whatever! Just guilds to actually make money in an immersive way by delivering services to other players!

I see this sort of stuff kicked around in pre-game communities all the time and I can see why; people get excited about the possibilities and spit-balling what they might be able to do. In reality, however, people don't want second jobs. Their time with the game will probably be very light, and they won't spend it standing on a street corner, pretending to be a cop that no one else in the game will even formally recognise as a cop. Just one example, I know. I fully accept that some might. But in a niche game like this, nowhere near a majority will. Indeed, the devs are developing for people who are time poor as the average gamer for this style of game is older and time poor.

@plume said in Bit worried where the Kickstarter is:

@canterbury I like Titan Quest so I picked up the anniverary edition for myself and a few friends, as well as World’s Adrift for friends. The sales are good. Today it looks like there are a lot of franchise sales with the most notable being Civilization.

Actually, Titan Quest Anniversary is a decade old ARPG remastered to work better on newer systems. I’ve always found it a lot of fun and I saw a multiplayer option although I haven’t tested it yet. It’s similar enough to Fractureds premise to play while waiting for it to release. ^_^

Cheers for the update. I will take a closer look later today. At face value (the pop up window thingy), I wasn't seeing much.

@cronykil said in Bit worried where the Kickstarter is:

They need something with the wow factor and it doesn't look like they have it yet. Maybe the KS was a bit premature. I'm here for the long haul, but I cannot get any of my mates interested without something impressive to show them.

It's such a tiny, tiny total, too. People are all, "We will probably hit it!" And I think, wow, there'd be something wrong if we didn't hit it - it's so tiny! A game with passionate grassroots support should have walked past 150K US in a couple of days.

@prometheus said in Bit worried where the Kickstarter is:

The relatively low number of backers compared to the size of the community is surely a "disappointment" for us, but not a "worry".

It's good to hear it's not getting you down. You have my full support... worried or not!

RP servers break down communities and make them smaller. For a niche game like this it would be NUTS to divide the community.

And I acknowledge that numbers don't bother some RP people. They could be playing on a server and see next to no one and think it was idyllic. But in an MMO, the whole idea is to have a population that's... well, massive. Or at least as big as can be. And sending a chunk of RP people off onto another server, in a niche game like this, defeats that idea.