Trials of Ascension, Shady Practices and the Big Crowdfunding Debate

[Bodoh]

Most, if not all of their programmers or however you may call them, come directly from their own forum playerbase

There's no 3D modeller person!.
The next day, there are 3 budding modellers from the KS.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...morpg/comments

John Paul Larson on January 15
According to Jason Appleton you are not an investor, instead in his description you are out of luck since the company is no more. And the IP transfered to James Proctor. I am persistent. I refuse to be subjected to summary abuse.

Then the next week, he becomes their environment designer...



The previous community manager, Derium parted ways with Electric Crow Gaming.

Then suddenly, a DarkPenguin appears.

Then James makes announcements without his community manager...

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index....98177/page-30

Holy fuck me running- This thing refuses to die... I'm gone for a month or so and the whole world is upside down. And wheres the cleve thread? it wont let me see it. I has lots of catching up to do because evidently everyone went fucking mad since december.

@ GM_JamesPro PM me here, cant get into my FB acct so if youre reading this , log in.

Edit-Let me add that I'm at a loss for words - Which is not something i'm used to, being the wordy motherfucker that i am. Dude, there are websites now reporting this shit, stories across the internet on massivley and shit- I hope you have one hell of a plan to finish this through because you just put a huge spotlight on yourself . This one isnt going to go away like Town life.

After this,

James will probably state,

he has a writing team behind him:

- lead character-writer (2/2),
- lead environment-writer (1/1),
- musician-writer (1),
- programmer-writer (2/2),
- concept-writer (0/2),
- novel mechanics-writer (2/2)
- back-end MMO-writer (0/2)
- website description-writer (0/2)

to back him up in his fiction writing.


He's probably missing multi-character writing skills,

but hey, if he can show dialog of a character talking to himself, or describe the travels of a single-character, or fantastically describe what happens during Pong, or Space Invaders, he might be going somewhere.

[bbr]

James, do not sell yourself short... you have actually been writing a lot of fiction the last 5 years...

That's one of the sharpest posts ive seen in a while :P

[Bodoh]

@Bodoh He was talking about Trials of Ascension.

Whoops. My bad.

[bbr]

Speaking of angry game devs with an inferiority complex,.
im sure everyone has seen this one before? : http://kotaku.com/angered-game-devel...-fo-1765484317

[Kelimbror]

Speaking of angry game devs with an inferiority complex,.
im sure everyone has seen this one before? : http://kotaku.com/angered-game-devel...-fo-1765484317

I haven't, but I can't wait when free speech inevitably and easily wins this case. The moment the courts start silencing critics of art/commercial products is the moment our society begins a freefall to the end times. And to think these 'devs' are so scummy they tried to crowdfund to purchase lawyers to go after someone for 10 MILLION dollars. They don't have enough money to get lawyers, but they want 10M. You know how much of that will be given to their crowdfunders? Lol, none.

The update about the crowdfunding is hilarious though:

Digital Homicide has taken down its crowdfunding request “due to harassers donating amounts specifically to cause charges rather than donations and charge backs to cause financial fees...[W]e will be seeking another avenue for donations”

[bbr]

The court date is this wednesday i think.
there's no way theyll get the 75K they want for the lawyers.
their fb: https://www.facebook.com/Digital-Hom...6414158320572/
the gofundme: https://www.gofundme.com/47uexn9c 225 / 75.000$

jim's youtube flame that started the whole catfight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?annota...&v=3HNmb2ct5QI

[lawow74]

Getting butthurt over someone being critical of your game is a pretty childish thing to do. This guy is posting a negative critique(the fact he gets income from doing so is beside the point)of a product, the same way people do of goods and services all over the world. He didn't go out of his way to make noise over it until those responsible for the product went out of their way after him. Streisand Effect? Or do they honestly think bad publicity is better than no publicity at all?

[zaxlor]

So I started playing this mobile game called Summoners War the other day and saw THIS on the world map!

https://cdn.mmos.com/wp-content/gall...-world-map.jpg

I think that's about as far as the "game devs" are going to get with having anything of their work published. As an aside, while trying to google image search for that, the top 10-15 images are all for Summoners War, with only a single image from the real Trials of Asension showing up.

[Azrile]

Getting butthurt over someone being critical of your game is a pretty childish thing to do. This guy is posting a negative critique(the fact he gets income from doing so is beside the point)of a product, the same way people do of goods and services all over the world. He didn't go out of his way to make noise over it until those responsible for the product went out of their way after him. Streisand Effect? Or do they honestly think bad publicity is better than no publicity at all?

They spent 2 hours on law.com and found out they could file a $10M lawsuit for $19.95. The fact that they did not even bother to spell check or grammar check their official court papers kinda indicates how serious the court is going to take this.

[bbr]

So I started playing this mobile game called Summoners War the other day and saw THIS on the world map!

https://cdn.mmos.com/wp-content/gall...-world-map.jpg

I think that's about as far as the "game devs" are going to get with having anything of their work published. As an aside, while trying to google image search for that, the top 10-15 images are all for Summoners War, with only a single image from the real Trials of Asension showing up.

I played and quit that game about a year ago,. got a bunch of 5 star monsters.
Its very slow to level - balance is lacking,. but still better than most p2w games.
It was "coming soon" back then,. no rush there it seems.

Getting butthurt over someone being critical of your game is a pretty childish thing to do. This guy is posting a negative critique(the fact he gets income from doing so is beside the point)of a product, the same way people do of goods and services all over the world. He didn't go out of his way to make noise over it until those responsible for the product went out of their way after him. Streisand Effect? Or do they honestly think bad publicity is better than no publicity at all?

If you check the other games they have up on greenlight,. i think they're actually TRYING to get as much negative publicity as possible.
They have a game about ass, and one about a giant testicle. >_>

[Azrile]

Download Unity > Make a shitty "video game" > Throw it into steam > Let people talk shit about it > Sue them > ??? > profit.

Most of their games are basically weekend gamejam type games. Once you pay the $100 greenlight fee ( 1 time overall, not per game).. it is not bad financially to spend 10 hours making a ´game´ and getting a few hundred dollars in sales from it. I believe I saw in one of Jim´s videos that these are like Proctor, basically kids still living at home.

[Deleted]

Not sure if this has been posted...

Last weeks dev blog:

http://trialsofascension.com/news/ar...5#.VyeHzvmLSM8

This weeks dev blog:

http://trialsofascension.com/news/ar...h#.VyeIxvmLSM8

[dextersmith]

Not sure if this has been posted...

Last weeks dev blog:

http://trialsofascension.com/news/ar...5#.VyeHzvmLSM8

This weeks dev blog:

http://trialsofascension.com/news/ar...h#.VyeIxvmLSM8

Why promote them? People wouldn't know they exist if it wasn't for this free advertisement.

[Juvencus]

Why promote them? People wouldn't know they exist if it wasn't for this free advertisement.

Because this thread is not about censorship.

For example, the best way to prove someone is racist is to let them speak.

[Deleted]

Why promote them? People wouldn't know they exist if it wasn't for this free advertisement.

I'm not promoting them. Everybody in this thread knows they're fuck-ups.

It's just interesting to keep up with it. Some of us have been following this since Azrile started this thread, me included. Right now I (And possible others) are waiting for the testing phase so we can laugh at it.

If more people don't like this 'advertising', I'll stop. I don't see the problem myself though.

[Edge-]

Because this thread is not about censorship.

That's not censorship, dude. That's just ignoring a group that rightfully doesn't deserve any additional attention, unless people want to continue making fun of them because apparently that's fun and cool.

[Kelimbror]

Because this thread is not about censorship.

For example, the best way to prove someone is racist is to let them speak.

'Best to keep your mouth closed and seem like an idiot than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.'

But yeah, not providing actual examples to the source material in a discussion is bad. If you need to hide something, you're either not confident in your position or you don't have a very good argument. In this case, the fear is that some people will see these blogs and actually support the 'game'. But is it really our position to stop that from happening? I don't think so. We should want these things widely exposed.

Think about it like this, would you relink an article by a gaming site that details every point of this company's history in 'developing' this 'game'? I would, because it would be a laundry list of terrible things. Seeing these silly blog posts might dupe 10 people, but 100 people are going to realize what a piece of crap this is.

Obviously we aren't going to advocate to Valve that they should include this on Steam, but letting people see what is actually being said by the people we want to prove are incompetent is the correct thing to do.

That being said, linking it as: "Lol look what they did now" doesn't really fit into any of that. That also being said, I do like to keep up with this so I'm not fussed.

[Kyanion]

That's not censorship, dude. That's just ignoring a group that rightfully doesn't deserve any additional attention, unless people want to continue making fun of them because apparently that's fun and cool.

Well I personally have no problem making fun of them because of how they wasted $63,000, talked a ton of bullshit and got caught lying multiple times.I mean we've seen logs from over 10+ years ago with Brax and Co talking about being in an office and working on a game and claiming to learn how to make games in the school of hard knocks when the truth was none of them had any coding skills whatsoever and couldn't be bothered to learn anything in over 10+ years.

I am always interested in seeing the 'devblogs' where they do hardly anything and promote it as something important that happened. I am waiting until we can see the actual 'game' and see how horrible it will be.

So in summary, fuck those guys. I don't give a free pass to people who are trying to go 'legit' after getting caught running a con. Some people might forgive them but I don't. I've seen what they have done and I saw people get scammed out of money.

[Deleted]

I am always interested in seeing the 'devblogs' where they do hardly anything and promote it as something important that happened. I am waiting until we can see the actual 'game' and see how horrible it will be.

So in summary, fuck those guys. I don't give a free pass to people who are trying to go 'legit' after getting caught running a con. Some people might forgive them but I don't. I've seen what they have done and I saw people get scammed out of money.

This is my reasoning too. I want to know how this ends up. Can't leave it hanging in the middle.

It's also interesting for me to see how many youtube views they have (And they blocked comments for obvious reasons). Before Teddy, all their threads had dozens of pages, tons of youtube views and more silly stuff like that. We've seen it all, how it went from incompetence to a scam, and to where we are now. An 'actual' game being developed. And now I want to see it crash and burn permanently the Proctor way.

[lawow74]

It may take a while for ToA to die off. I expect they'll reach a point of releasing something. If it's by any avenue where customers can provide unfiltered reviews, it's likely to get panned. Chances are, people involved will drop off the project afterwards. If they try and replace them with more free volunteers, it might take a while before the project gets enough stink that no one will want to be involved. That is what I expect will be its eventual death. They won't be able to get anyone on it to improve it beyond whatever state it reaches and it'll expire.