In one of the most convoluted announcements in history.
Tag: Pathfinder Online
One Year Later, Pathfinder Online Still Hasn’t Secured A Buyer
The news on Pathfinder Online has been dead for the better part of the last year, and for pretty good reason: Nobody is left. It has been one year since we learned that everyone on the development team, sans three people, were laid off with CEO Ryan Dancey resigning his post and user acquisition virtually nonexistent. When you look at the company overall, their success (or lack thereof) isn’t exactly hard to pin down. An overly ambitious plan coupled with a monetization model that presumes a gaming population willing to pay a premium subscription price for a game that is in “early enrollment,” otherwise known as alpha.
Naturally the company is seeking a buyer or an investor and that process isn’t going so well. Acting CEO Lisa Stevens announced that she had received a signed letter from a company willing to take on Pathfinder Online and see it through to completion. This was, as those of you who follow the game will know, part of the end of the year announcement posted December 23rd, 2015. According to the post, acquisition was meant to be completed by March 1st, 2016. It never happened.
According to Stevens’ posts on the official forums, dated April 13th, things are progressing slowly. They are progressing, however.
Unfortunately, this one is taking longer than anyone wants, but is progressing nicely. I will let you know that Newcorp has been putting money towards the current expenditures for PFO while things are finishing up. They wouldn’t do that if they didn’t think it was likely to go through. Now is it a guarantee? No. Because if it was a guarantee then we would be moving forward. But it is likely. And they are behaving as it that is the case. They have even hired a real estate firm to start looking for office space for a studio up here in Seattle.
Stevens later clarifies that Newcorp is footing the bill for half of the operating costs each month. At the end of May, players were told that “the finish line is in sight.”
The pace has really picked up on the deal for NewCorp to take over Pathfinder Online. The finish line is in sight. We are hoping to give NewCorp a voice through the Goblinworks forums in the near future prior to the deal closing so that they can interact with the community and start to convey their vision for the game to you. Look for news about this in the coming weeks. The team here at Goblinworks is very excited about the future and would like to thank all of you for your support through this long process.
Those of you with calendars are well aware that the “coming weeks” has translated to nearly four months with no apparent further action. Over the past couple of months, Pathfinder’s acquisition announcement has been delayed time and time again, with the company more recently targeting September 1st, then September 9th, and now apparently September 23rd to give some news. These deals tend to be pretty shaky, despite the fact that Newcorp has enough interest to fund the game and keep it going for the past six plus months, but with these business deals literally nothing is guaranteed until the papers are signed and the checks clear. Up until that point, the deal could go sour at any moment.
I’ll leave you on a note of interest that a few players have pointed out to me. In about three months, Pathfinder Online hits the point where subscriptions from the highest backers on Kickstarter run out. I’m not going speculate on the progress of the business deal, but this seems like an important milestone when it comes to keeping the game operational.
MMO Fallout will update as soon as news becomes available.
Pathfinder Online Has Three Employees Left
Pathfinder Online, currently in early enrollment, has three employees left. In an announcement on the official website yesterday, Acting CEO Lisa Stevens revealed that the majority of the Goblinworks team has been laid off due to a lack of funds. The company is currently seeking outside investments in order to ensure that the game can make it to open enrollment, however right now the three employees and servers are being supported by the community.
Due to the commitment that you have made to the game, your current subscriptions are able to keep the core team employed and the servers live. We will continue to move the game forward with that team and keep the servers live as long as the continued financial support from the community is there.
The bad news accompanies even further bad news, that CEO Ryan Dancey has resigned his position due to personal reasons. Given Dancey voicing his disapproval of the community’s outreach efforts earlier this year, the news that Pathfinder is facing financial difficulty may not be all too surprising.
According to the news post, Pathfinder presently has enough funding to keep the servers up through September. Anything after that is wholly dependent on subscribers.
(Source: Pathfinder Online)
Pathfinder Online’s Recruitment Is Flat
Pathfinder Online is currently in “early enrollment” (read: alpha/beta) while charging a subscription, a combination that doesn’t exactly see customers falling over each other to sign up. Regardless, Goblinworks CEO Ryan Dancey took to the forums to express his disappointment in player recruitment being “almost zero.” He suggests that players head to other websites including Reddit, news websites, and the Eve community to openly discuss their activities.
Settlements that are committed to growing should have someone delegated to be visible in these places making regular posts and talking about the cool stuff their Settlement is doing. When the wider community sees activity and fun, that is a powerful attractant.
Dancey’s comments have been criticized by community members, pointing to the game’s early access state coupled with the subscription putting players off.
Ryan, I strongly feel that mass recruiting efforts now are premature. The kind of people we’d be able to pick up from the mainstream sites are people who will login for a week, see a game which is very immature, draw incorrect conclusions, and never come back. The longterm success of the game will be much better if we wait to recruit those people until we have a chance to actually keep them.
I think the real failure was in the original business planning by the people in charge. Seems like what they suspected was a MVP that the target audience would pay money for was grossly miscalculated. Maybe this would have worked 10 years ago.
I will not go and try to make the game look like a million, using sugar-coated words and focusing on telling the positive stories, while completely ignoring or downplaying the negative parts in front of other gamers. So I’m doing the best I can for GW, and that is, being silent.
(Source: Pathfinder)
Pathfinder Online Holds Early Enrollment Back
If you’ve been waiting patiently for the Pathfinder Online Early Enrollment period to begin, well you’re going to be waiting a bit longer. In a post on the Goblin Works developer blog, Ryan Dancey announced that early enrollment will be put on hold until the developer can deal with issues relating to stress tests and server capacity.
We have set an internal objective of being able to handle 2,000 simultaneous connections, and 100 characters active in a single Hex as our minimum threshold for server performance. This reflects our expected peak concurrent activity for the first 10,000 players in game – roughly what we anticipate during the first 90 days of Early Enrollment activity. Currently the server does not reliably meet that benchmark.
The blog post does not mention a timeframe for when early enrollment will launch. Stay tuned.
(Source: Pathfinder)
Pathfinder Online Delays Early Enrollment
Goblinworks has announced that Pathfinder Online’s open enrollment period will be rescheduled to give their developers more time to implement more features that the community has requested be made available at the start of open enrollment.
There are a lot of final pieces coming into place to turn Pathfinder Online into a Minimum Viable Product so all of our early adopters can play and have a great time. The Auction House didn’t make it in for a build last week and that is a critical feature of our MVP. As always, Goblinworks is dedicated to making sure the players have a solid and fun game experience.
This is the third time that Goblinworks has delayed open enrollment for Pathfinder Online. Open enrollment currently costs $100 for access beginning in September (estimated), $50 in October (estimated), with players expected to pay a monthly subscription during open enrollment.
(Source: Goblinworks)
Pathfinder Online Early Access Coming Soon
Goblinworks has announced that open enrollment for Pathfinder Online will begin on September 15th. The open enrollment area is suited for at least twenty thousand active players, and to ensure that the game reaches those numbers, Goblinworks has accelerated all open enrollment packages to have access beginning the first month.
In addition, all early enrollment package owners will be invited to play in the alpha stage. The timing for alpha early enrollment will be announced soon. If you want access to early enrollment and haven’t purchased a package yet, however, you will need to buy in at the $50 level for access starting month 2 (October) or $100 in month 1 (September).
There are a few other announcements including premium items, base camps, and more. Check out the entire announcement at the link below.
(Source: Goblinworks)
Pathfinder Online Meets Kickstarter Goal: 27 Days Remaining
You know with all this publicity that Pathfinder Online better launch and be the greatest thing since sliced black bread. Goblinworks still has 27 days left to their Kickstarter project for Pathfinder Online, and not only has the goal been met, it continues to be exceeded. One thousand people pledged over sixty thousand dollars so far, and the number continues to rise even as I write this article.
So, check it out. Pathfinder Online is a hybrid sandbox-themepark MMO based around the pen and paper game of the same name. By donating, you can gain access to some interesting rewards.
(Source: Pathfinder Kickstarter)
Kickstarters For You: Pathfinder Online
Pathfinder Online has been featured here at MMO Fallout several times, mostly to discuss the more hardcore routes that the themepark/sandbox hybrid would like to take. From old Everquest corpse runs to bounty systems and everything in between, Pathfinder is the dream of some well known names in the gaming and role playing businesses. From CEO Ryan Scott Dancey (Chief Marketing Officer at CCP Games) to Lisa Stevens (Vampire The Masquerade), Mark Kalmes (City of Heroes) and a guy named Richard Baker (3rd edition of some indie pen and paper game called Dungeons and Dragons), Pathfinder Online is bringing together all of the big names to hopefully put out the best MMO on the market.
However names don’t pay the bills, and allegedly neither do pictures of seven legged spiders. So Pathfinder Online is on Kickstarter (see: Title), and needs your dosh. The goal to meet is $50,000 by Friday, June 8th. You can head over to the Kickstarter page linked below for a trailer and much more information as to the game itself, including some cool rewards for pledging your lods of emone.
Remember: Kickstarter is a method for aspiring companies to get funding and start out on a closer relationship with their consumers. Your pledge will not be charged until the Kickstarter fund ends (June 8th in this case), and if the goal is not reached you will not be billed at all.
Let's Talk Pathfinder's Bounty System
At the beginning of the month, I did an article on Dominus, and their advertised bounty hunter system, making the point that it was woefully prone to abuse, not unlike many other bounty systems MMOs have attempted to incorporate over the past decade or so. Well the folks at Pathfinder Online must be after my own heart, because they’ve detailed their own bounty system that addresses many of my concerns.
First off, players are given the option to place a bounty when they are murdered (killed unlawfully) and apparently only at that point. Not only can you put a bounty on the person who murdered you, but anyone else who damaged you or assisted that person. So let’s say you are ganged up on by a fighter, a ranger, and a healer. You’ll be able to put a bounty on the heads of the fighter who murdered you, the ranger who stayed afar and pelted you with arrows, and the healer who healed the two.
In addition, you can specify who can redeem the bounty. The idea is that bounty hunter guilds will form up, and players can essentially contract a specific guild/player to be able to collect the bounty, preventing the killer’s friend from collecting it. But death isn’t the end: When your bounty is collected, you are given the option to re-issue it. Want to make a griefer pay? Keep resubmitting his bounty until your coffers run dry or he rage stops logging in.
This also raises a heavy risk for players who like to role play as red (criminal) gangs. Kill the wrong person, and you could find yourself on the receiving end of a very long manhunt. Granted, this whole system does not apply in cases of declared war, where killing is lawful. The hope is that this will prevent players from running around killing each other for no reason and to make a murderer’s life that much more dangerous.
Granted, there are still some ways to exploit this system, including the murderer being in secret cahoots with the mercenary guilds, but the Pathfinder solution is one of the best I’ve seen.
MMO Fallout 