Trials of Ascension, Shady Practices and the Big Crowdfunding Debate

[lawow74]

I find it strange he didnt just rename himself.

I'm guessing his ego just can't handle the thought of not getting credit for what he's done in the past, good(I use that term subjectively) and bad both. He's convinced himself he's done nothing truly wrong, just fudged things, made mistakes, but he's totally gonna make it up, you'll see, one day his dream will come true...

[dextersmith]

Wasn't that added to Kickstarter well after GM was funded? I think that was the case anyways.

Even so, he made a point of renewing promises all over the net when he took over. Furthermore, he should be personally liable because his company wasn't registered at that time.

- - - Updated - - -

Hey look! he couldn't get the servers up in time, just as he "promised"



How people keep falling for such a scam..

Who is we?

He should have refrained years ago.

[Kyanion]

Even so, he made a point of renewing promises all over the net when he took over. Furthermore, he should be personally liable because his company wasn't registered at that time.

He should be liable but I doubt anything would ever come from it besides just a waste of time and money trying to pursue it.

[lawow74]

Wouldn't be surprised if he just deletes it or simply accuses me again of bringing up bullshit and so on instead of answering any of it.

Yeah, cos you're OBSESSED with him...

[Taojnhy]

According to that article at The Verge, it looks like Steam Greenlight will turn into Steam Direct where developers will just pay a yet-to-be-determined fee to list their games on Steam without the community voting process. I doubt it will really impact ToA too much; not least of which is that I don't see them putting up a dime of their own money until they really do have something that will at least make back the fee.

[Kyanion]

According to that article at The Verge, it looks like Steam Greenlight will turn into Steam Direct where developers will just pay a yet-to-be-determined fee to list their games on Steam without the community voting process. I doubt it will really impact ToA too much; not least of which is that I don't see them putting up a dime of their own money until they really do have something that will at least make back the fee.

Hell I've yet to seen a shred of gameplay from these people after the Kickstarter x2 failure and the Rebranding. The only thing ever shown that I could see was a few still pictures here and there. Their forums get less than 500 views on 'important' threads like Q&A and DevBlogs quite the far cry from the multiple thousands back in their FullofBullshit days. Hell I think this 'rebrand' has been along since mid 2015 and they've got hardly anything to show. I mean it is even less than the playable but pretty terrible Demo Island. Yet there have been 46 DevBlogs now. 46!

[8bithamster]

It seems that Rise of Heroes died as well? No updates at all anymore I was so hoping for a bit of amusement from our favourite bumbling dev

[Kyanion]

Right now it seems that half of the team are “artists”, then I guess you have the three stooges and Brax’s daughter and what not that… post in forums?

The forums also seem busy as ever... I guess they lifted the forum restrictions, spam bots are now once again the most active forum members. Pretty amazing, considering they used to have hundreds of new posts per week…

I miss the days of their 5 person 'social media team' whose other job was apparently to spam their own forums with fake posts about wanting to play the game.

I also enjoy how Take...what is this, 4? 5? of making this game is taking stupidly long now and they've got less to show than demo isle this time around. Man the 'hype' sure died down on those forums so it makes sense to open it up to spam bots and other useless crap.

[Xargoth6634]

According to that article at The Verge, it looks like Steam Greenlight will turn into Steam Direct where developers will just pay a yet-to-be-determined fee to list their games on Steam without the community voting process. I doubt it will really impact ToA too much; not least of which is that I don't see them putting up a dime of their own money until they really do have something that will at least make back the fee.

Ugh, this is going to make the shovelware problem so much worse. Anyone with a shitty game and a few bucks will be able to have it up on Steam. That's just fantastic...

[Taojnhy]

Ugh, this is going to make the shovelware problem so much worse. Anyone with a shitty game and a few bucks will be able to have it up on Steam. That's just fantastic...

Maybe, but I don't think it'll make it much worse. All Valve has to do is hit that fulcrum point with their fee that makes anyone wanting to list a game seriously consider whether they're going to make back their money or not. In the past the Greenlight fee wasn't very much and I suspect that was predicated on users who voted for the game to purchase it so that Valve would make money from sales. But the nature of the Greenlight process made it easy to abuse so that it was cheap for people to just throw up shovelware (look at the rash of Unity games that were little more than terrible asset pack demos) and could easily make back the fee if only 10-20 people bought it (which had to happen before the user reviews could warn others away). Hell, I think even Proctor got one of his "games" through the Greenlight process (City Life, though the project page is gone now) and he never even produced anything playable.

Now, if Valve assesses a $500 fee, then those shovelware folks are at a much higher risk to lose money since they would now need 50-100 people to buy; and bad reviews from the initial customers would deter everyone else. At some point it just won't be economically feasible for the scammers to scam.

[Azrile]

Maybe, but I don't think it'll make it much worse. All Valve has to do is hit that fulcrum point with their fee that makes anyone wanting to list a game seriously consider whether they're going to make back their money or not. In the past the Greenlight fee wasn't very much and I suspect that was predicated on users who voted for the game to purchase it so that Valve would make money from sales. But the nature of the Greenlight process made it easy to abuse so that it was cheap for people to just throw up shovelware (look at the rash of Unity games that were little more than terrible asset pack demos) and could easily make back the fee if only 10-20 people bought it (which had to happen before the user reviews could warn others away). Hell, I think even Proctor got one of his "games" through the Greenlight process (City Life, though the project page is gone now) and he never even produced anything playable.

Now, if Valve assesses a $500 fee, then those shovelware folks are at a much higher risk to lose money since they would now need 50-100 people to buy; and bad reviews from the initial customers would deter everyone else. At some point it just won't be economically feasible for the scammers to scam.

I believe I read somewhere that the fee will also be refunded gradually as your sales increase. So it isn´t like a fee as much as it is just a bet on your game. I actually like that a lot since they could put it at $2000. So say you pay $2000, and then you game makes $10,000.. at which point you are refunded your $2000. For people who are making quality games, paying the $2000 like that isn´t a problem except maybe for your first game.

People say it might hurt Itch if all of the garbage games move over there, but on Itch there are a ton of free and hobby games... so if Itch becomes drastically more popular because of this, those new eyeballs are going to play free hobby games on Itch rather than paying $3 for a digital homicide garbage game. Itch will probably be flooded with $2 games, but the people making the real money will be the ones who do $0/pay what you want games.

So did I read that right, Proctor is going to hook up his old computer to run his ´server´ out of his mom´s basement in order to get people psyched for his latest MMORPG?

[newbism]

strange emails abound and appleton is back. seems hes finally speaking out and if you read between the lines hes placing the blame on proctor which im not sure i disagree with and he claims hes trying to make this right.

im torn here as to what to do. i dont trust jason appleton one bit but i also dont see the harm in trying what he asks and after looking into things i went ahead a set things up to see where this goes. will keep you guys posted.

tbh i think appleton is a scammer but i also think he really believed he could do what he said with gm based on listening to proctor. its still his fault since he was the lead and if the project would have just failed it would have been left at that but then proctor and lumpy came out making promises and promises and doing nothing.

i cant post links but if you go the kicstarter page and look at recent updates you can see what im talking about.

[Edge-]

Without getting into detail of what I'm doing or even why you should follow through with what I'm about to ask you to do, I will say this...DO IT. Don't ask questions because I'm not going to explain right now. Just follow my instructions and wait patiently.

I've never had more confidence in anything in my life, after reading this.

Holy hell this train wreck just won't stop, they just need to quietly let this die already.

[Kyanion]

I've never had more confidence in anything in my life, after reading this.

Holy hell this train wreck just won't stop, they just need to quietly let this die already.

Man I am surprised at that post too. So he's supposedly going to give people I'm guessing a crypto currency in return for what they pledged? I am really interested to see how this train wreck continues.

[Post]

This is basically just so he has something to say to make himself look good when people attack him over the Greed Monger thing.

[Kyanion]

This is basically just so he has something to say to make himself look good when people attack him over the Greed Monger thing.

I mean if anyone actually gets their money back...well it is a cryptocurrency but if some people manage to get their money back it is better than nothing I guess. Yeah it is more of a token gesture to try and repair his credibility but I don't care about that much. I do care more about seeing people who got scammed get some or all of their money back.

[Taojnhy]

I can't help noting that Appleton was very careful to use the term "cryptocurrency" instead of "BitCoin". Want to lay odds that one of the many ventures he's attempted is a competing cryptocurrency?

edit: Or possibly not. It seems more likely that Appleton bought in on the ground floor of Waves currency and will simply offload those tokens on to the backers as a consolation prize, one that likely cost him very little.

[Kyanion]

I can't help noting that Appleton was very careful to use the term "cryptocurrency" instead of "BitCoin". Want to lay odds that one of the many ventures he's attempted is a competing cryptocurrency?

edit: Or possibly not. It seems more likely that Appleton bought in on the ground floor of Waves currency and will simply offload those tokens on to the backers as a consolation prize, one that likely cost him very little.

Yeah it prolly cost him very little but I guess it is better than nothing for those people that got scammed in the Kickstarter.

[Taojnhy]

Yeah it prolly cost him very little but I guess it is better than nothing for those people that got scammed in the Kickstarter.

I suppose, but just to get tin-foil-hatty for a moment:

1) We already know that Appleton has no problems with lying to suit his needs.
2) There are still approximately several thousand dollars in the total expenditures for GM that were never satisfactorily accounted for.
3) Suddenly Appleton is offering some kind of refund (he didn't make clear if it was a partial or full refund) to backers in the form of a relatively obscure cryptocurrency.

Given those, I pose this question: is it possible that Appleton used GM funds to invest in cryptocurrency? He's made complaints about financial difficulties (which I guess have turned around somewhat recently) since GM, so where did he get the money to invest?

To be clear, I have no evidence that this is what happened. But I don't believe for an instant that Appleton spends his own money if he doesn't absolutely have to and from that belief, I am suspicious of anything he claims to be doing to "make things right" that also involves money that isn't the full amount of what backers gave (and while from the backer's viewpoint getting a full return in the form of cryptocurrency may feel the same, I guarantee it doesn't feel that way to Appleton and it should). Granted, he most likely doesn't need to do anything from a legal standpoint, so yeah, better than nothing, but not enough for me to cut him much slack since it's pretty obvious that the reason he's asking people not to cash out immediately is to mitigate the damage to the value of his remaining stock.

I also admit I may be feeling unjustly harsh towards him; if it's any consolation it is a pale thing compared to the contempt I yet hold for Proctor.

Oh, I also realized I overlooked a statement he made when I second-guessed myself in the previous post about him being more involved than simply purchasing the tokens:

my own personal share of Cryptocurrency from a project I'm involved in

[Kyanion]

I suppose, but just to get tin-foil-hatty for a moment:

1) We already know that Appleton has no problems with lying to suit his needs.
2) There are still approximately several thousand dollars in the total expenditures for GM that were never satisfactorily accounted for.
3) Suddenly Appleton is offering some kind of refund (he didn't make clear if it was a partial or full refund) to backers in the form of a relatively obscure cryptocurrency.

Given those, I pose this question: is it possible that Appleton used GM funds to invest in cryptocurrency? He's made complaints about financial difficulties (which I guess have turned around somewhat recently) since GM, so where did he get the money to invest?

To be clear, I have no evidence that this is what happened. But I don't believe for an instant that Appleton spends his own money if he doesn't absolutely have to and from that belief, I am suspicious of anything he claims to be doing to "make things right" that also involves money that isn't the full amount of what backers gave (and while from the backer's viewpoint getting a full return in the form of cryptocurrency may feel the same, I guarantee it doesn't feel that way to Appleton and it should). Granted, he most likely doesn't need to do anything from a legal standpoint, so yeah, better than nothing, but not enough for me to cut him much slack since it's pretty obvious that the reason he's asking people not to cash out immediately is to mitigate the damage to the value of his remaining stock.

I also admit I may be feeling unjustly harsh towards him; if it's any consolation it is a pale thing compared to the contempt I yet hold for Proctor.

Oh, I also realized I overlooked a statement he made when I second-guessed myself in the previous post about him being more involved than simply purchasing the tokens:

Oh fuck yeah this is something to be wary of without a doubt. But as I said he probably doesn't have to do anything legally so if I was a backer I'd take anything I could get.

Is it possible he took money and invested it in all sorts of things and barely used any money to try and make this 'game'? It is quite likely based on how this all turned out.