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Greed Monger switches back to Unity and Forums get Removed!
taus01
Member Posts: 1,352
Why did the Greed Monger Forums get removed? Was this a request from Jason Appleton to remove the negative information posted about the game?
We got an answer from MMORPG.com:
Originally posted by BillMurphyOriginally posted by taus01
Why did the Greed Monger Forums get removed? Was this a request from Jason Appleton to remove the negative information posted about the game?
In case this hasn't been answered yet, yes. He emailed me directly and asked us to remove the negative posts about the game. He also hinted at taking legal action if we didn't remove the posts of our users, and we decided we didn't need a baseless lawsuit.
If you want to blame someone for the removal of the game listing and forums, blame Jason Appleton. But when someone threatens us with legal action, we can either a.) ignore it or b.) react with what we think is appropriate. In Greed Monger's case, it's probably just better to igore its existence as a website.
I wish the Greed Monger devs well, but I'm not too thrilled with how they handled the negativity our forum users tossed their way. If they can't take the criticism and claims of trolls, they're in for a rude awakening in this industry.
Maybe one day we'll re-add the game to our list, but that depends on whether or not our users are allowed to post about it without the site being under threat of legal recourse.
Latest word is that they switched back to Unity after going from Unity to Hero. LOL. Read Mr. Appletons post here:
Cheers
PS: I thought there is supposed to be an Alpha release for Backers in April. It would be nice to have the forums.
Comments
Let me get this straight: they switched game engines, then tried to convert a bunch of stuff to the way the new game engine wanted it. Then they decided to switch back to the old game engine, but wanted to wait quite a while before telling anyone. Oh, and they did this just before they were promising to release a public alpha test. Oh, and they want you to pay now to get access to the early tests.
Don't you think that screams, "We have no clue what we're doing?" It's not far shy of, "Please buy our game before you figure out that it's vaporware!"
I don't know if they asked to have the game taken off of this site or if staff here made that decision, but either way, it looks justified to me.
As long as the "devs" can keep convincing people it's a thing and profiting from such assumptions, yes.
Yeah, it is hillarious. Here is my original post from the forums and the research about his so called credibility in game design:
Update: Acording to Mr. Appleton 70 votes over 2 days constitutes a general approval of making the game Subscription based.
"Since then, we got a general approval from the backers that a $10 sub would be ok, which re-opened the doors to Hero" - Mr. Appleton
Update: Mr. Appletone refuses to answer two simple questions that could clear up a lot of fears from his backers and people hoping this game will eventually become reality. He has, in this thread tried to avoid the question by changing the focus from him to me basically refusing to make a statement.
Do you consider making a second kickstarter?
Assuming that you do a second kickstarter and it fails, will the game still be made?
Update: Mr. Appleton has graced us with another post not exactly answering these 2 simple questions with a yes or no but i think we got an answer now. You decide from this quote:
"Will the game get finished without the 2nd campaign?
Well, yes, that is what I'm trying to say. When I think of Alpha, I think of a game near completed with bugs and such that will need to be ironed out. I'd like to have the game as close to ready as possible by Alpha, BEFORE any additional funds are brought in." - Mr. Appleton
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A brief history of Greed Monger (click on the dates to read his original posts):
September 9 2012: Jason Appleton discovers Unity game engine, discovers a new mission in life -- he is going to make a really cool RPG game! Although he's never actually done any coding or stuff. But he's done, like, some HTML. Experienced Unity developers try (unsuccessfully) to try to talk him into starting small, and actually learning about how to use the program and starting on smaller more attainable projects first, rather than make a huge RPG his very first project.
September 10, 2012: Unity is just so cool!!!
September 10, 2012: Jason Appleton decides to put together a team of people who understand maybe a bit better than him, how to actually make a game. Gets a little antsy when Unity moderators stall on posting his thread, as they explain "it comes off as the typical 'I'm the ideas guy and need a team to do the actual work for me'. These types of threads are rarely approved these days." But they approve it anyway. He actually posts a lot of these threads, because this is all so exciting....
September 13, 2012: Jason Appleton continues his quest of actually finding someone who can make his game for him in Unity.
October 14, 2012: Despite the advice not to start buying lots of assets for some future game when he doesn't really understand how to program in Unity yet, Jason Appleton starts buying art assets (but has problems importing them into his Unity program). Oh help!
October 14, 2012: Jason Appleton decides he probably better hire someone else to make his Kickstarter demo video for him, as he is still struggling with how to make all this stuff really look like an actual game. He states at that stage he has a potential investor, not a gamer but an old guy "worth millions" and "like a father to me" so he is not the least bit worried about getting his dream funded, he just needs someone who can make his ideas look like ... you know .... an actual project. So he can then sell his ideas to the people who actually have money. And, um, talent.
October 23, 2012: Jason Appleton types up a REAL PRESS RELEASE announcing his new Kickstarter promotion for his new groundbreaking online MMORPG! It will be JUST LIKE Ultima Online! (Except that was of course designed by real game developers). He sidesteps questions from more experienced Unity developers, on whether he's actually found a way to cut down trees (apparently Unity isn't very friendly about stuff like that.)
November 12, 2012: Oh -- it would probably help if he could find an actual World Builder for his open world RPG.... don't worry, he is sure to find someone.
November 13, 2012: Flush with victory from an early KS success (which some notice, attracts an unusual number of backers making $2000 pledges right off the bat, leading some to question whether this is similar to his buying up Facebook likes in bulk only to have them all vanish a week later; ie will all those big pledges really be there at the end or are they promotional gimmicks to look like the project is a solidly backed one?), Jason Appleton announces he is going to be buying up A LOT!!! more premade generic medieval game assets, so anyone he hasn't yet bought from, should start adding them to the asset store, as he now has money to burn...
November 18, 2012: oh but maybe he should suddenly switch his game engine? Does this other one maybe look even better?
April 2013: We changed the game Engine back to Unity but did not tell anyone. "Well, the truth is, we switched back to Unity not long after we switched to Hero. Aside from the issues of the revenue model, no cross-platform support and other things the player base has been expecting, the engine just wasn’t a fit for us. We didn’t want to announce this as quickly as we did the initial switch because we wanted to make some solid headway into the game’s development in Unity first."
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Mr. Appleton want's to become Govenor of Ohio ( click me ) Of cause by hiring people doing it for him. Naturally!
Mr. Appleton is going to be selling sexual enhancement pills and is learning how to make iOS and mobile games, also C++. ( read the "I just have hobbies post" )
"I’m about to become a distributor for some Sexual Enhancement pills that work like crazy! I’m also teaching myself Objective-C programming while learning the Apple SDK and Interface Builder to create my own iPhone apps."
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This person clearly has ZERO management skills or experience in game development. He runs out of money now and want's to start a 2nd kickstarter funding by selling more imaginary land plots.
If they have the skills to pull this entire thing off, they have not yet demonstrated those. He had to hire someone to make the demo video for them (they couldn't even do that part themselves) and although he says he already has a team fully assembled and "most of the work done," as of yesterday he is still trying to hire people competent to do the actual programming for crafting, skill progression, UI, combat, world design, housing, and all the most basic of the game features, as all they can actually do themselves at this stage in time is make a staged scene for the videos using Unity3D + generic assets. Why does he need to hire people who can actually program if they already have most of the work already completed?
Even their logo art and npc models are simply generic store assets, which they seem to be showcasing on various sites are "their" level of graphic detail. Here is where they actually got all those assets in their pictures:
http://u3d.as/conten...val-citizen/2Ez
http://u3d.as/conten...eval-farmer/2qZ
http://forum.unity3d...gon-Model/page2
http://u3d.as/conten...ruction-kit/1CN
http://www.the3dstud..._product=279850
I am baffled...
False, people gave them money throughout the year, not just in April.
and I was saying give them a chance...
Oh, I know. I was just jumping on the "accuse everything of being an April fools joke" wagon.
You make it sound like he went in with the idea that a game engine would do most of the heavy lifting to create a game for you, as opposed to the reality that a game engine can only do a relative handful of things that will be commonly needed by many games while leaving you to do most of the real work yourself.
If you want to create anything other than a very simple game, it's not enough to know how to use a particular game engine. You need the skills (and the license!) to be able to modify it when you inevitably learn that what the game engine wants to do in a bunch of particular situations is not what you want to do. That's a much higher threshold of competence required.
Maybe that's why Nvidia announced their GeForce 700M series cards today: so that fanboys would think that the bunch of rebrands and salvage parts that tech sites are reporting was just an April Fools' Day joke and hold out hope that there really are better cards coming this year.
His posts on the Unity forum where things like: "I bought all these assets, how do i use them" and "I am going to make a MMO but i never made a game and my Programming skills are HTML"
Those where his words and the Unity veterans told him to start with an easy game to get to know the engine before going for the holy grail of game design, a MMORPG.
He ignored them and told them he will just hire people that do it for him. It was quite amusing to follow his posts, most of which have been deleted by now unfortunately.
I feel really sorry for people that actually gave him $500 and more for virtual land plots.
I take it you don't like Nvidia.
I don't like giving new names to old cards, in an effort at convincing people that they're not actually old cards. I also don't like having specs that say "up to" whatever, meaning that the card you actually get could be much weaker than what you you reasonably expected.
In Nvidia's defense, they're really only doing what laptop vendors demand that they do, as they're the ones directly trying to trick consumers into overpaying for inferior hardware.
It seems like a silly thing to do. Benchmarking and reviews will tear up the new cards if that's the case. It's not like that's something they can hide forever.
Yeah cant agree more, this is what inexperience brings, I'm not going to be hard on them, cos making games is not easy, the way they have used kickstarter is not good, and for those that backed the game, it will be kick in the face to either see the project turn to vapoware or just end up a game that cant achieve what they set out to do due to hardware limitations, and that could lead to a knock on affect. really KS needs to sort this kind of thing out.
Well I don't think that's the issue here, people need to get paid for the work they do, I presume he pays the development team, but making an mmo of the type scale that he wants for 90k, I don't think it's doable.
The sad thing is he probably didn't pocket much of it lol. He's been buying up assets, getting licenses for different software, and bouncing back and forth between engines on top of attempting to pay for some favorable reviews lol. I said this would happen awhile back and some of the fans and even Appleton tried to say I was trolling lol.
The guy has no experience at all, the project has no direction at all, and he has trouble commiting and does things more on a whim than anything. He went from "I want to be governor", to "I want to be an MMA champion", to "I want to be an MMA promoter", to "I want to sale male enhancement drugs", to "I want to be a game developer".
Theres pretty much zero chance of anything worth while coming from any of this if anything ever actually does get developed. There was more chance of Dark and Light becoming a reality than Greed Monger.
Probably removed the forums because it's not actually a real game in development. It's just some random guy's pet project with no real chance at going anywhere.
It's amateur vaporware.
You make me like charity
Yeah, unless a developer has a lot of clout and experience backing them then the term "real development" is opinionated, that's not to say that "pet projects" won't be successful though, some of the best games that push the industry have come from pet projects.
Those rely on talent, experience, and or dedication. The team behind Greed Monger hasn't displayed any of these traits so I doubt it will fall into that category lol.