For me.. the difference is Brad actually owned a lot of his mistakes.
I'm not sure I remember him ever talking about a lot of it, and the one that sticks with me - his schill shenanigans in the face of criticism - still to my knowledge has never been addressed by him.
I'm sure that he thinks he doesn't owe any of the FOH peeps anything but then again that's a big part of why I wouldn't trust anything he says.
A valid point but since I've only got his EQ clone project to throw my money/vote at, he gets it by default. With respect to a WoW clone kickstarter, who cares? Won't get my money and has no affect on my life if it thrives or dies.
What I was trying to point out (most recently) was that the argument that
"Giving Brad money will signal to the industry that there is a demand"as if doing so might usher in a new era of EQ clones simply doesn't hold water. In regards to the latter part of your quote above, the fact that you're willfully limiting your perspective to your own viewpoint to the exclusion of all else does not mean that you can ignore reality and that it will go away. The only people that are going to seriously consider making a niche MMO like Brad in preference to an MMO with more "modern" aesthetics are those that are already inclined to do so and/or wouldn't be successful trying to KS some sort of action-y MMO. You know where the lion's share of the money is, and it isn't with EQ 2.0. With Brad's resume and experience, he is quite possibly locked into the niche of MMOs that is EQ1/VG/EQ2.0/etc. Which is probably part of the reason why he's always going to be making a game in this niche category of MMOs and not trying something more mainstream.
I thought the whole point of Kickstarter is giving people a chance to help kickstart niche projects? (projects that will not be funded by big publishers but the developers believe they can be successful and there's demand for such games; hence the player help fund these projects).
This sub-debate got derailed from the original points like a game of telephone, so I'll try not to be snarky with you. But backing Brad's KS on the premise that it will "grow" the EQ1 niche genre is probably well intentioned but not realistic in the slightest. If you or Tad10 or whoever else wants to throw money at Brad, then fine - just don't try to argue like it's some sort of noble cause because that's bullshit. I'm perfectly fine with someone saying
"I know it's a risk but fuck it"and that's why I only really spoke to that risk originally.
You can do an MMO on the cheap if you abandon all the modern trappings: bazillion quests (dev time), seemless world (dev time, art assets), flying mounts (dev headaches, animation assets). I can not find it - but I think somewhere it was posted that original EQ cost around 5 million. I'm sure someone with better search-fu can find it.
This is a somewhat lulzy position given how you feel about instancing.
I'd wager that instancing, when compared to other methods aimed at combating bottlenecked content, might be the cheapest and easiest way to go. I imagine that your response to this might be
"what's wrong with bottlenecking content"to which I might just laugh and segue into another "niche/low pop" circular debate.
Do you and Erronious really think we should sit on our ass and bitch on this board for another ten years?
GTFO of here with that, you know full well that you'll be sitting on your ass and bitching in another 10 years and so will I.
For me this really boils down to if you are ok with handing a known shyster more money after he's frittered it away in the past, and I think that the MMO community has a terribly bad habit of throwing money at project after project.
