Tag: Fraudsters

Crowdfunding Fraudsters: Save Asheron’s Call Gofundme


It’s been a while. Crowdfunding Fraudsters is a recurring column here at MMO Fallout where I look at campaigns on Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Gofundme that, in my opinion, need a good going over with a fine tooth comb. The use of the term fraudster does not imply malice, but rather the idea that the creator is not who he or she is represented to be, be that a skilled developer or businessperson.

Today’s subject is the Asheron’s Call Resurrection project, a Gofundme with a goal of $2 million looking to purchase/license the Asheron’s Call property off of Warner Bros as Turbine is ending support and the official servers are being shut down in January. As of this publishing, the campaign has managed to pull in $1,500 from 18 people (see above), an average of $83 per person, and several updates on the official Facebook page claim that the group has been in contact with Warner Bros. and that things are looking pretty good.

And here we come to problem number one: The goal of $2 million is a placeholder. I’ve spoken about this on pretty much every CF article attempting to crowdfund purchasing an IP, it is a horrible idea to set a goal without having an idea on how much you’ll be paying or confirmation that the company even has any intention of accepting such a deal. Let’s say for example that, by some grace of god, this group manages to just barely miss the $2 million mark by fifty grand, only for negotiations with Warner Bros. to hit a low end of $4 million and refuse to go lower. Guess who isn’t getting the IP? Guess who isn’t getting their money back? This also assumes that the claims are true that Warner Bros. is even interested in starting negotiations.

As far as the fundraising goes, sure, you can sit on that cash and wait for it to hopefully, one day, maybe perhaps hit the goal, but who is to say that Warner Bros. will be on board by that point? Corporations hate when you waste their time with pointless acquisition deals that go nowhere, especially when you wasted the time and money of their lawyers and officials the first time around. Negotiations like this die at the drop of a hat from very simple missteps, or say publicity that sheds a bad light on your ability to follow through, especially when one side is talking about it as much as this group is. Loose lips sink ships.

But Connor, you say, why would they be so unaccommodating on an IP that they probably have no intent on using? Why would it be so pricey? Well, the thing about companies is that they don’t operate on the same level of thinking as you or I, their unused properties aren’t treated like that couch taking up room in the garage that’s starting to smell, to be left in the street corner with a “free” sign and hope that somebody takes it. Unless the company is in dire need of money, they don’t look at their property on the grounds of “better something than nothing.” They also look at potential buyers and size them up based on their perceived competency and generally won’t just license/sell away properties to a ragtag, loosely connected group of developers, even if the money is good.

Barring the question of funding, I can’t imagine that Warner Bros. will want to do business once they see the level of stark immaturity on display from these groups. I’ve spoken before about how these resurrection projects tend to be led by individuals with massive and fragile egos, explaining why Crowdfunding Fraudsters has already racked up a couple of baseless lawsuit threats, and already the “save Asheron’s Call” community has split in half with both sides having Facebook tantrums and block wars. The focal point of the argument is, naturally, that the crowdfunding effort is incompetent at best, maybe a little shady, and possibly just an attempt to piggyback off of nostalgia to grind some cash out of desperate fans.

But don’t just take my word for it, take a look at these gems out of the horse’s mouth itself.

Dustin removed my post and posting ability on the Resurrection page within minutes. If you want your money wasted, make sure to donate to the unofficial Gofundme with no official resources, backers or direction. AKA, get your money stolen. (Source)

Our communications with Dustin and Justin were met with a lot of double talk and misleading information. Additionally, I felt that the GoFundMe efforts are extremely premature, and there is no solid evidence that what is being said, and the amount needed is accurately portrayed. (Source)

So here you have a nobody asking for $2 million in the hopes that he might actually divert what may or may not be sufficient funding for an acquisition that the property owner hasn’t given any real indication of being willing to sell. $2 million that, barring a philanthropic millionaire, will never be raised because Asheron’s Call doesn’t have anywhere near the following required to support random money being thrown at a person to pitch a buyout. The Gofundme has been up for 8 days and brought in 18 pledges. If you were waiting for an Earth-shattering kaboom, it would have happened by now.

Put it this way: The City of Heroes spiritual sequel by Missing Worlds Media raked in $678,000 and that community was massive compared to what remains of the Asheron’s Call base. Whatever hope the game has of surviving at this point, barring the sudden entrance of a wealthy backer, lies in community-run private servers, not throwing money to two crews of pedantic, arguing children who couldn’t get past phase one without immediately falling apart and being reduced to complaining on Facebook about who was deleting whose posts. If you want somewhere safer to put your money, I hear Digital Homicide is still floating around on the net.

Crowdfunding Fraudsters: League of Legends MMO


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Fraudster:
2a:  a person who is not what he or she pretends to be :impostor;

Dear potential content creators: Stop using unlicensed content as the basis of your projects. It is not only misleading from a consumer standpoint, it is illegal and will result in your campaign being shut down faster than you can say “cease and desist.”

Today’s crowdfunding frauster article is for the League of Legends MMO, a game not developed by Riot Games and not approved for development by Riot Games. It is, instead, in the works by the decidedly not-Riot Games studio…Kamron Nelson, a self-professed “lore enthusiast” from Salt Lake City. Nelson wants to raise $5 million to pitch a League of Legends MMO to Riot.

This project’s goal is to get Riot Games to work on this project with us, not to steal or infringe anything whatsoever. We love Riot and the game they’ve created; we just want an MMORPG based on the League engine that will allow us to explore the vast amounts of Lore we’ve been missing.

I assume that Nelson is using the term “us” in the royal sense, in the same vein that I use to reference to other, nonexistent staff here at MMO Fallout, because the Kickstarter page doesn’t indicate any real development team other than Nelson himself and a couple of Deviant Art users. If there is an actual studio that will work on the game, it has gone unnamed.

Like most pieces featured on Crowdfunding Kickstarters, the League of Legends MMO appears to be the creation of an “ideas guy,” someone with no apparent development background who decides he can create a game because he played a lot of them. Such mentality leads to financial disasters like Greed Monger, wastes hundreds of thousands of dollars in time and resources, and contributes to the already tainted reputation of crowdfunding.

So how does Kamron plan on investing the five million?

The money from this Kickstarter will go directly to Riot as an upfront ‘let’s make this game’ offer. If the project does not get fully funded, which is likely, no one is charged anything. It is RISK FREE unless fully funded.

Here’s the problem: Raising money to develop a game with rights that you haven’t secured and making promises that you can’t keep. It assumes that people are willing to fork over $5 million as a deposit in the hopes that waving said money under Riot’s nose will make them willing to work with an unknown entity to create a game with their own engine and characters.

By comparison, let’s look at other big crowdfunding efforts. Psychonauts 2 brought in $3.3 million as an established franchise with a big name attached (Tim Schafer). Shenmue 3 brought in over $6 million as an established franchise with big names attached and major corporate backing.

So the League of Legends MMO is funding hopes and dreams with the hope that everyone will get their money back should the campaign succeed but Riot says no anyway, handing their money to a guy that no one has ever heard of. Luckily the $5 million goal means that this project will fail long before Riot’s lawyers feel the need to get involved.

Crowdfunding Fraudsters: Sacrament From Kickstarter To Paytreon


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Fraudster:
2a:  a person who is not what he or she pretends to be :impostor;

Today’s Crowdfunding Fraudsters come in the form of Sacrament, a game that describes itself as a sandbox for everyone, by a small team of people who have no idea how to build a game. Remember Greed Monger and how that project went? Jason Appleton was just a businessman who evidently got the idea that video games were like a vending machine that you just put money into and the game came out. If you look around the room you’ll see neither Appleton or Greed Monger, the latter was canned and the former ruined his reputation in the gaming community.

But let’s cut our teeth and dive into yet another independent “developer” made up of guys who don’t have any experience making games but played some games and are pretty sure they’ve got the gist of it down. Like an obese man who eats a lot of cake and decides to open a bakery, the folks at Ferocity Unbound are pretty certain that their years of experience raiding and presumably crossing their arms and harrumphing at how the current crop of MMOs and free to play suck, and how much better it would be to go back to a time when MMOs all had subscriptions and companies went bankrupt like it was going out of style.

Sacrament has already tried and failed to obtain crowd funding, via a Kickstarter campaign that raked in just a couple thousand out of $250 grand. Now the company is looking towards Patreon, demanding monthly payments for a game that doesn’t exist and may never launch, by people who might not have the know-how to deliver on their promises. On the other hand, the benefit of Patreon is that unlike Kickstarter which requires a real product, they aren’t actually obligated to return any of the money should the project go belly up. Gamers with too much expendable money can pledge upwards of $50 per month.

If you’re interested in donating more than fifty grand, you can go ahead and contact the developer directly.

So instead of making this cut and dry, I took a little look at Sacrament’s website only to be overwhelmed with a gigantic wall of text that says pretty much nothing. Donald Trump couldn’t make a wall out of empty promises this great. You really need to see the kind of stuff that this developer is promising.

Naturally, Sacrament will have no levels.

We chose, instead, to take out the levels and incorporate tiers, which work as a difficulty scale. Some players will live in tier 12 where their difficulty is at its cap, some will find that grouping up and taking on tier 16 is where they love to be, others will simply take on the game until they are bleeding at the fingertips. We wanted the players to be able to go back and forth between tiers seamlessly and feel as if they were still earning their fight rewards.

You might be asking yourself “what does any of this mean? How do tiers work if there are no levels? What do the tiers signify? How do you rise up in tiers and how is going from tier 1 to tier 12 any different from calling them levels? What are the difficulty differences between levels?” Sure, the description of one of the bigger mechanical changes doesn’t actually contain any information on how the system works, but that’s not important. What is important is that this system is for you, the player.

Tell me more!

PvE will consist of 20 tiers. The first 15 tiers will have three zones – or locations – dedicated to the player’s progression through each tier. The final 5 tiers will be raiding tiers (larger group overworld content and actual 24 and 36 player instanced raid content) where you will have to beat all of the raids in order to flag yourself and move on to the next tier. Let me be very clear here… You will have no character levels, only tiers to show your strength of character!

No character levels, only tiers, right. Makes perfect sense. Hey this isn’t one of those games where there are no “levels” but instead the game uses skill levels that are effectively the same thing, right?

If a skill maxes at 100 and you achieve it in PvE then step into the Arena for the very first time. Your Arena rank is 1 your skill is downgraded to the max for that rank, let’s say 5. As soon as you reach rank 2 your skill is now 10, hit rank 3 and it is automatically 15, so forth and so on.

Thought so.

Sacrament is not your typical theme park MMORPG where the player is led by the hand from start to finish on a leash. While it may be an easy way to ensure players go exactly where the developers want them to go so they can literally control content, Sacrament’s content design is strong enough not to force people to do any quests. From the moment of inception of this game, there were a few key elements that existed before even writing any concepts down, and this was one of them.

Absolutely no hand holding. You’ll be leashed through each tiered zone, but they will not hold your hand at any point through it. It’s completely different from current games, just like how the tier system is completely different from levels. It’s totally different guys! Nostalgia, Everquest, this new generation, am I right?

But let’s talk about grouping. Since your game has no levels, there shouldn’t be any problem with two players of varying experience getting together and knocking down a boss for some sweet loot, right? I mean, the whole new thing about MMOs is allowing players to group up with their friends without having to wait for the lower guy to level up.

Unfortunately, since you are not flagged for the tier, your items are not assigned to the primary loot table and so seeing them drop will be less likely. However, even when one does drop you cannot loot it off of the corpse and cannot hold the item until your tier. This is one of the incentives of flagging for each tier. You’re still getting a sufficient amount of experience and currency drop (equal to what monsters in your tier would drop plus 5-10% per tier above your own) to give you plenty of reason to take on the more difficult content.

Sacrament is very friendly to people who want to group with their friends, just don’t expect to get any loot without the game holding up a giant middle finger. Also hold the phone here, experience in what? Your game has no levels, so what is the experience going toward? And why does gear need a specific tier flagged to use? Once again, how are tiers any different from levels when you are locking away loot, areas, and the ability to not just loot but equip gear? In the end, what is the difference between “you need to be level 12 to equip these pauldrons” and “you need to be tier 12 to equip these pauldrons?” Other than the completely user-unfriendly mechanic of having the game deny loot because you’re not high level enough, an issue that every other MMO seems to have figured out.

It should also be noted that while the game does penalize you for taking on content above your level, there is no penalty for farming content below your level. No handholding garbage, you got that? This is a hardcore game for hardcore people, now stop farming things stronger than you and start farming things weaker than you. Alright, tell me about the raids.

Side note, I honestly didn’t expect the raids to be this ridiculous. I’ve included just a small snippet of how Sacrament has thought up its raid bosses, but just get a load of this example.

At 75% of the boss’s health he roars and a Yeti comes down into the fight. The Yeti boss cannot be directly damaged by players, but summons waves and waves of adds that must die within proximity to the Yeti causing fire damage that burns the Yeti’s flesh and fur until it is dead. Once the Yeti is dead the boss will then obtain a small shield that cannot be damaged by players directly and will summon a wave (or two) of adds that must die within proximity of the boss to drop the shield and allow for the raid to continue to DPS the boss (if enough of the enemies are not killed within proximity of the boss then another set of adds AND a mini boss spawns again); this will happen once every 30 seconds.

I’m not even playing the game and I’m already searching for the unsubscribe button. Do they expect people to put up with this? This is about a quarter of the boss fight description, and it is described as a “mild raid” to boot! It not only sounds convoluted but frustrating and just one gimmick played over and over and over again. The first raid you hit is a 12-player PUG dungeon at tier 5, which if you read above is when people actually start seeing each other. Yep, the game starts off your interactivity with a 12-man dungeon. These don’t sound like game pitches as much as the ramblings of a mad man who went insane while playing World of Warcraft Vanilla and now runs around town trying to put together a 40-man raid on Walmart.

But that’s not enough, I need some ridiculous concept shoe-horned in for the sake of “hardcore” street cred. Give me a boss that can murder everyone in a zone.

The PvE/Crafter raids, Blended Raids, are unique and designed for your Epic Quests for both PvE players and Crafters. These raids will force the PvE players to fight off hordes of NPCs to provide the Crafters opportunities to create items that will allow the raid to progress or speed it up. Sometimes the Crafters must craft an item that prevents all players from dying to a zone wide one shot or build a wall that can allow players to hide behind it while the boss goes on a rampage.

This is all I’m going to specifically talk about as far as game mechanics go, you can probably anticipate where the game is headed by what I have written above. You can find everything at the main website, but it’s all a bunch of the same convoluted, overly-complicated functions you find in similar games. I not only have to question the marketability of a game that forces players through these ridiculous, multi-tiered raids, but I question the abilities of the developers to implement such complicated systems.

So let’s look at the three founders and their bios. If they don’t immediately tell me about 90’s nostalgia, you can count my money withdrawn.

I started playing MMORPGs with the first EverQuest, though I missed the launch by about a year. I was an active duty Marine at the time with two deployments, so leveling up through the game wasn’t nearly as enjoyable for me as playing the game at any level. I kid you not… I spent two years between Orc Highway in GFay and Crushbone. Yep. It was a blast, too!

MMOs of the 90s were fun and enjoyable; they’re where I cut my teeth in MMO gaming. Creators of recent MMOs have missed something. Many are so caught up in recreating the success of one title or another that they miss the mark when creating a fun game to play.

Gaming is my passion. From the first time I picked up a SNES controller and popped in that Zelda cartridge, I’ve been fascinated by video games.

Alright, nostalgia is one thing. I’m going to need to see your credentials. Do any of you have development experience?

Nearing the end of our time with ESO we had begun to discuss the concepts of a new game with two of our friends, Kraive and Ahdora, and I quickly realized that between the four of us we had quite a bit of insight and information. I drew up some documents to see how much information about game systems we could come up with and a month and a half later we had an entire game hashed out. I’m talking from the ground on up.

To my surprise, shortly thereafter I was asked by one of those friends if Kraive and I would give input on an idea he and his brother had for an MMO. I was even more surprised to find that it matched so closely with my own idea about the direction in which a game should go. Thus began a whirlwind collaboration on concepts: the beginning of what was to become Sacrament. In just a few short months, we’d hammered out the vast majority of our core game concepts. Things went from a dream to very real, very fast.

Personally I’m a long term player. Many can look at the sheer number of titles I’ve played and assume I’m one of the locusts, travelling from game to game until the next one comes along. I played Everquest for 6-7 years, I met my wife during a short break but I had intended to return to EQ. I had tried the other titles of the time but EQ was where I always returned.

So we have a development team made up of the “idea guy.” Alright, so you don’t have any credentials. Can you sufficiently play to the 90’s kid gamer?

This game addresses concerns that have been expressed by the gaming masses for years. Concerns that have heretofore either gone unanswered, or have been given only lip service. Sacrament offers so much to so many different kinds of players. I couldn’t be more proud to be a part of this project, and I cannot wait to share this with everyone. Consider Sacrament nourishment for your starving gamer soul.

I could use some nourishment, because reading through the website was exhausting.

This is what happens when the gaming press pays attention to every indie dev with a failed crowdfunding campaign. What isn’t surprising is that the game has a very small following of players willing to throw a substantial amount of money into the void, people who will no doubt be yelling at the press for not properly scrutinizing the developers a couple of years down the road when they dissolve pre-alpha.

Sacrament’s Patreon hasn’t started yet, the developer is still fleshing out details. May the buyer beware.

Crowdfunding Fraudsters: Life Is Strange 2


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Update: And the campaign has been shut down.

2a:  a person who is not what he or she pretends to be :impostor; also:  one who defrauds:cheat

Today’s Crowdfunding Fraudster comes to us from Kickstarter, for Life Is Strange 2. You may be thinking right now, “Connor, Life Is Strange was a completely legitimate game. It was published by Square Enix for crying out loud. How could a crowdfunding effort to make a sequel be fraudulent?”

The answer is simple: This campaign isn’t being run by developer Dontnod Entertainment, nor is it manned by publisher Square Enix. This campaign was started by a fan Scott Ashby, trying to raise twenty thousand dollars to persuade Dontnod to make the sequel a reality. According to the campaign page, there are two options should this be successfully funded: Give the money to Dontnod to fund the sequel or use the money to buy the rights to Life is Strange and hand it over to another developer to make said sequel.

Despite the money going to someone else to create the game, the campaign creator has already made some promises on how the game will be including 16 different endings, a musical mini-game, and other game features. Quite presumptive to think you can raise nowhere near the amount of money that such a game would require to develop, but to also hold said money ransom unless your demands are met. Whoever donates at the $1,000 level will be allowed to write the backstory for Principal Wells with every $1,000 donation after that being allowed to voice a character. Because that’s exactly what you want in a story, character plots that are essentially fanfiction and amateur voice actors.

So obviously the campaign is filled with as much ambition as it is lacking self awareness or a basic understanding of how the gaming industry works. Ashby does not have the rights to the game, is not making anywhere near enough money to buy said rights, can’t compel the developer anyway, and in some distant parallel universe where this campaign had any hope of succeeding, could simply walk away with twenty grand in his pocket and say that at least he tried.

Ultimately the sincerity of the campaign creator is irrelevant to the ultimate outcome: That backers will not see a return on their investment, and fans of the game could be tricked into thinking that this is somehow legitimate. The sooner that this project gets shut down, the better.

(Source: Kickstarter)