Derek Smart promises more in the coming months.
Tag: Derek Smart
Derek Smart Promises Alganon Coming Back Again
Alganon Hits Four Year Cancelversary
As server code migrated by hand written on rice.
Alganon Still Returning, Says Smart
Line of Defense Shows Life After Two Years
Alganon Has Not Been Sunset, Is Still Planning A Comeback
Alganon isn’t dead, it’s merely resting.
You may be surprised to read that Alganon’s servers went down for maintenance and migration in November 2017 and haven’t been up since. In that time, Derek Smart’s company 3000AD has bought out Quest Online and now owns the Alganon game, the company is moving its servers to cloud-based servers, and there are apparently plans to kick the advertising back in once the game goes live again.
When will that be? After over a year, it’s not entirely set in stone. Derek Smart posted a couple of weeks back to confirm that the migration is still a work in progress.
The biggest problem that Alganon has is that it is an MMO. So you can’t just turn it off, unplug the servers, then plug it it back in. It has been running on legacy servers for many years; and when 3000AD bought it from QOL, I made the decision to not only move it to cloud servers, but also to make certain revisions along the way.
In addition to that, the game never really had that much marketing since 2012; so not a lot of people knew about about other than than the 250K+ accounts who already knew about it. So I’ve also been working with several parties on partnership deals which would see a territorial release as well as targeted marketing for it’s eventual relaunch.
Those of you who were around since the start, will also remember that I did the same thing back in 2010 when I took over the game. It was subscription based etc. It went offline for some time while it was being retooled for F2P etc. It later relaunched as F2P[qol.com], (I also refunded all subscriptions paid up to that time), then we added PvP[qol.com] etc
The game has not been sunset or I would have announced it as such. It’s coming back as soon as everything that I’m working on completes. Yes, it’s taken some time, but that’s how these things go. Plus, we’re not like other larger companies that handle MMO games, and thus have lots of people, resources, and money to do things like this within a reasonable time frame.
Source: Steam
Line of Defense To Split: Line of Defense and All Out War
Turns out Daybreak isn’t the only company that can split its games in half.
It’s been a while since we last heard from Derek Smart’s Line of Defense, the Planetside-competing open world shooter. According to the latest dev blog, 3000ad is wrapping up remaining features and continuing to port the game to Unreal 4 engine.
“The current focus is on improving the art assets, wrapping up remaining (the game is already content and feature complete, so there’s nothing to cut) WIP features, tweaking and debugging several items, and completing the game while continuing on with the UE4 port in parallel.”
As a result, Line of Defense will be split into two products: Line of Defense will become a session based game with up to 64 players per server while Line of Defense – All Out War will continue the persistent MMO version that has been in development for the past few years. The closed beta servers are expected to go online at some point in early 2019.
“We are expecting to push a new test build to those with access to our CBT servers at some point in Q1/19. No firm date yet. And no, we don’t expect to open the game to additional testers at this time. Those of you who already own a copy via the CBT which we ran for over a year, will retain access until final release.”
Source: Line of Defense
Line of Defense Leaving Steam
3000AD has announced that Line of Defense is leaving Steam, citing trolling and harassment from the community. In a post on the Steam forums, Derek Smart points to the lack of developer control when it comes to review bombing, the lack of proper moderators employed by Valve, and a lack of control over ratings and comments.
“You can flag a comment that blatantly breaks the guidelines. Then you get to hope that any action is taken. As I type this, there are a few of those on the LOD store page which not only have personal attacks, external attack links, entire essays attacking me – and NOTHING about the game.”
As a result, Line of Defense will no longer be sold on Steam in the coming future. Players who already bought the game will receive a second copy to be used since the Steam version will stop being updated. Instead, customers will access the game via Playfab.
According to Smart, this is not a guarantee that Line of Defense will never return to the platform.
“We won’t be the first developer or publisher to pull a game from Steam. And others have pulled a game, then brought it back later.”
Line of Defense is currently in Steam Early Access. It carries a “mostly negative” rating and is played by an average of .4 players in the last month [Source: Steam Charts].
(Source: Steam)
Star Citizen Threatens Lawsuit Against Escapist Magazine
If you haven’t been paying attention to the ongoing drama surrounding Star Citizen, the public spat between Chris Roberts and Derek Smart has expanded to include a very critical article published, and subsequently backed up by, The Escapist. The article alleged discriminatory practices at CIG against racial minorities, enforced by Roberts’ own wife, that Roberts himself would routinely insult and demean employees, and that the company was “bleeding money and employees.”
Chris Roberts responded to the article by, naturally, blaming Derek Smart, and taking the time to dig up dirt on the article’s author to engage in personal attacks.
I know you say that “none of these come from Derek” but we both know that’s not true. You are quoting the exact same things in your email he has spewed in his blogs and twitter for months. If you want me to give you links to the exact same claims (which are patently UNTRUE) I can but we both know it’s coming from him and the few people he’s rounded up.
Derek Smart’s name, despite having no part in the creation of the Escapist’s article, comes up more than 20 times in Roberts’ response. Roberts also pulls from other unrelated events, including Gamergate, Randi Harper, and Brianna Wu.
In an update posted to the response page, Cloud Imperium Games has made it public that they intend to take legal action against The Escapist, maintaining the claim that the article was a conspiracy between the author and Derek Smart. CIG has demanded a public apology from The Escapist, as well as an apology to their HR department and an investigation into how the article was approved. Otherwise the developer intends to take legal action.
Normally, we would keep this behind closed doors, but we felt it was imperative to put our statement on record and indicate how disgusted we are with The Escapist’s irresponsible actions. Corporate at Defy Media asked us to delay publication of this letter while investigating, but we feel strongly that the record needs to be set straight without further delay.
As noted in the letter, anything expressed should not be construed as a complete statement of the facts.
(Source: Star Citizen)
Derek Smart, Indie Devs, And Death Threats
As those of you who follow my Twitter account (see right hand side of page) know, I spent a good part of last night following up on a story that broke earlier in the day yesterday. Derek Smart, game developer and ex-Star Citizen pledge, posted via social media that he had received a death threat over his continued criticism of Chris Roberts and the handling of Star Citizen’s development. While death threats have become common enough that the media pretty much glosses over them these days, the source of the threat was even more interesting.
The email, posted in full by Smart to social media, originates from an sae.edu email address owned by Carlos Bott, mobile developer and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maryland. Smart also posted the raw data from the email to show that it did indeed originate from the SAE servers. MMO Fallout was able to corroborate via a third party source who wished to go unnamed that the email did originate from SAE’s servers likely using Google Apps to manage their email.
MMO Fallout reached out to Bott, who has fully denied sending the email in question. Judging from my contact with both parties, it seems very likely that this could break out into legal action in the near future. For our readers, we suggest not jumping to conclusions or presuming guilt until more details can be shared.
Any further information will be covered as it arises.
MMO Fallout 