I would say look at what happened to Vanguard:SOH when they were forced to push out the game due to publisher issues (Microsoft then SOE). The beauty of this is that Brad and his team have a much larger timeframe to work in and that will lead to a better game so long as they don't get caught up in scope creep. Nothing good comes from rushing a launch, the main reason games get rushed is because of publishers that want to cash in on the game. People here saying interest shall wane need to reassess their own bias due to their impatience...and yes I am making the assumption you are impatient if you are demanding Pantheon gets released before the devs consider it ready.
How many MMOs have crashed and burned due to a terrible launch? How many MMOs have succeeded because they launched the game when it wasn't finished? Ultimately if you contributed to this team's effort you should at least have enough faith in them to trust when they consider the game ready to go live. The only way Pantheon will fade into irrelevance is if somebody releases a similar MMORPG in the meantime and last I checked there is nobody out there making a game like this. The demand shall remain until there is some sort of supply.
VR is well aware of the risks of a premature launch - there can be no doubt whatsoever of this.
VR is equally aware of the risk of flopping because of taking *too* long to launch. Developers always find things that can be done much better, but the time comes when they need to launch anyway and save the improvements for later patches or even expansions. Especially in a game like this where any improvements at middle or high levels can wait for months and months because few if any of us will get there that fast.
Often being open about things can be beneficial - even though many developers feel physical pain at actually telling their playerbase anything. SoE (now Daybreak) being close to the worst of a bad lot in terms of willingness to communicate.
Saying XXXX feature is okay but not great and we will improve it, or YYYY feature would be wonderful and we plan on adding it, encourages players that like many things but really want those changes to subscribe and stick around in the hope that the developer is actually telling the truth. Needless to say this approach requires that the developer have a high confidence level that the changes actually *will* be made within a reasonable timeframe - ideally the changes will be in progress but not ready to release.
Ziegfried said:I would say look at what happened to Vanguard:SOH when they were forced to push out the game due to publisher issues (Microsoft then SOE).
Microsoft realized that Vanguard was going to need years more work to actually be fully finished when Brad and Co. came to them needing more time and money. They did as many business do and washed their hands of what they felt was an investment where costs and completion was spiraling.
SOE(Smedley) picked up Vanguard for a song and forced out an incomplete game. (what these days we call an Early Access game).
Ziegfried said:The beauty of this is that Brad and his team have a much larger timeframe to work in and that will lead to a better game so long as they don't get caught up in scope creep.
Not even sure what this line means. How are you comparing hundreds of people working on a game to a couple dozen. Their timeframe is infinite and could lead to no game. And wth is 'scope creep'?
Ziegfried said:Nothing good comes from rushing a launch, the main reason games get rushed is because of publishers that want to cash in on the game. People here saying interest shall wane need to reassess their own bias due to their impatience...and yes I am making the assumption you are impatient if you are demanding Pantheon gets released before the devs consider it ready.
Another nonsensical statement. Since NO LAUNCH DATE has been set, how could it be rushed. And every target date for everything we know of has been missed, badly.
And blaming publishers? Seriously? When they guy painting your house comes to you saying it's gonna take another month? And he needs $5000 more? Stop blaming publishers for horrible game creation management.
Ziegfried said:How many MMOs have crashed and burned due to a terrible launch? How many MMOs have succeeded because they launched the game when it wasn't finished? Ultimately if you contributed to this team's effort you should at least have enough faith in them to trust when they consider the game ready to go live. The only way Pantheon will fade into irrelevance is if somebody releases a similar MMORPG in the meantime and last I checked there is nobody out there making a game like this. The demand shall remain until there is some sort of supply.
More nonsense.
Can't think of a single MMO that fits that description. Many have struggled and may have never achieved what might have been, but they still launched and lived for many years had thousands of fans and made money and jobs.
Most people that contibuted to Pantheon did so because they hope it offers a taste of what they had in EQ1 and Vanguard, from the guy that was involved in designing both.
We don't care or expect Pantheon to be some triple A major MMO. At best it's a niche market.
We just want some honesty and accountability. The honesty part involves creating a massive world with a handful of people. The math on that works out to years if you want quality compared to copy/paste reskinning jobs they do in all KR MMOs.
zewtastic said:We don't care or expect Pantheon to be some triple A major MMO. At best it's a niche market.
We just want some honesty and accountability. The honesty part involves creating a massive world with a handful of people. The math on that works out to years if you want quality compared to copy/paste reskinning jobs they do in all KR MMOs.
I don't know who "we" refers to but I'm expecting a major mmo and not one that is only for a niche market.
Also, zewtastic, the two of you have just stated something very much alike. The game will take years, it will be quality, it won't be rushed. Let's support and hope for a great experience that draws in the young gamers with the old.
Tigersin said:zewtastic said:We don't care or expect Pantheon to be some triple A major MMO. At best it's a niche market.
We just want some honesty and accountability. The honesty part involves creating a massive world with a handful of people. The math on that works out to years if you want quality compared to copy/paste reskinning jobs they do in all KR MMOs.
I don't know who "we" refers to but I'm expecting a major mmo and not one that is only for a niche market.
I guess you need to define 'major mmo' then.
Being a 100% "non-instanced" MMO, with the entire world in contention would sort of qualify as a niche though. No one does it.
Frankly VR don't have the horsepower to make a triple A modern game in our lifetimes. Something with the slick fancy overlays and popups like BDO and ArcheAge for example. Of course since all those type games have hundreds of people working on them and are totally driven by FTP monetization, that's required.
zewtastic said:Tigersin said:zewtastic said:We don't care or expect Pantheon to be some triple A major MMO. At best it's a niche market.
We just want some honesty and accountability. The honesty part involves creating a massive world with a handful of people. The math on that works out to years if you want quality compared to copy/paste reskinning jobs they do in all KR MMOs.
I don't know who "we" refers to but I'm expecting a major mmo and not one that is only for a niche market.
I guess you need to define 'major mmo' then.
Being a 100% "non-instanced" MMO, with the entire world in contention would sort of qualify as a niche though. No one does it.
Frankly VR don't have the horsepower to make a triple A modern game in our lifetimes. Something with the slick fancy overlays and popups like BDO and ArcheAge for example. Of course since all those type games have hundreds of people working on them and are totally driven by FTP monetization, that's required.
AAA (pronounced and sometimes written Triple-A) is an informal classification used for video games produced and distributed by a mid-sized or major publisher, typically having higher development and marketing budgets. AAA is analogous to the film industry term "blockbuster".[1]
In the mid 2010s, the term "AAA+" began to be used to describe AAA type games that generated additional revenue over time in a similar fashion to MMOs by using software as a service (SaaS) methods, such as season passes or expansion packs. The similar construction "III" (Triple-I) has also been used to describe indie game companies' works of very high quality
FFXIV 'roughly" has a similer size as Activision Blizzard and is considered a AAA MMO - Source - https://www.gamingfactors.com/big-development-team-final-fantasy-xiv/
Source: https://www.metacritic.com/feature/game-publisher-rankings-for-2018-releases
Take notice of what catagory Activision Blizzard is labeled as and then look at FFXIV as well. Further more devs do not always constitute triple A game. Also take note that in Wiki the definition clearly shows that triple A is an informal rating standard.
We have ranked these publishers in order from best overall game quality to worst, using a formula based on four factors:
Also what is important is that until VR can be graded by these above standards then its really safe to say that we can't be sure where VR will fall into in terms of ranking. Aslo FTP monetization isn't a metric that is being used as a metric to desribe whether a game is a Triple A or a Major Publisher or Medium Publisher. What is also important to note is that in the gaming industry dev teams tend to increase or decrease based on the needs at that time.
My final thought is that I am not saying that VR is or isn't capable because we don't have a clear standard to judge them by at this point until the game is released. When a game company or studio or publisher starts out they certainly aren't condsidered Triple A because as I already stated they haven't done anything to warrent such a lable at this point. Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Evorus
Edit: Spelling errors
zewtastic said:Ziegfried said:I would say look at what happened to Vanguard:SOH when they were forced to push out the game due to publisher issues (Microsoft then SOE).
Microsoft realized that Vanguard was going to need years more work to actually be fully finished when Brad and Co. came to them needing more time and money. They did as many business do and washed their hands of what they felt was an investment where costs and completion was spiraling.
SOE(Smedley) picked up Vanguard for a song and forced out an incomplete game. (what these days we call an Early Access game).
Ziegfried said:The beauty of this is that Brad and his team have a much larger timeframe to work in and that will lead to a better game so long as they don't get caught up in scope creep.
Not even sure what this line means. How are you comparing hundreds of people working on a game to a couple dozen. Their timeframe is infinite and could lead to no game. And wth is 'scope creep'?
Ziegfried said:Nothing good comes from rushing a launch, the main reason games get rushed is because of publishers that want to cash in on the game. People here saying interest shall wane need to reassess their own bias due to their impatience...and yes I am making the assumption you are impatient if you are demanding Pantheon gets released before the devs consider it ready.
Another nonsensical statement. Since NO LAUNCH DATE has been set, how could it be rushed. And every target date for everything we know of has been missed, badly.
And blaming publishers? Seriously? When they guy painting your house comes to you saying it's gonna take another month? And he needs $5000 more? Stop blaming publishers for horrible game creation management.
Ziegfried said:How many MMOs have crashed and burned due to a terrible launch? How many MMOs have succeeded because they launched the game when it wasn't finished? Ultimately if you contributed to this team's effort you should at least have enough faith in them to trust when they consider the game ready to go live. The only way Pantheon will fade into irrelevance is if somebody releases a similar MMORPG in the meantime and last I checked there is nobody out there making a game like this. The demand shall remain until there is some sort of supply.
More nonsense.
Can't think of a single MMO that fits that description. Many have struggled and may have never achieved what might have been, but they still launched and lived for many years had thousands of fans and made money and jobs.
Most people that contibuted to Pantheon did so because they hope it offers a taste of what they had in EQ1 and Vanguard, from the guy that was involved in designing both.
We don't care or expect Pantheon to be some triple A major MMO. At best it's a niche market.
We just want some honesty and accountability. The honesty part involves creating a massive world with a handful of people. The math on that works out to years if you want quality compared to copy/paste reskinning jobs they do in all KR MMOs.
I am not fond of when people break my posts up in this manner, but I'll address things as succinctly as I can. Accusing me of nonsense isn't going to cut it here, we have plenty of evidence to prove rushing development of MMOs leads to catastrophe. You are sliding the goal posts when you insinuate I expect Pantheon to be a AAA major MMO, I never said that. On the contrary I too believe this is a niche game. Scope creep is when a developer goes crazy introducing new ambitious features ala Vanguard (flying, ships, diplomacy, crafting, massive non instanced world, etc.) and simply runs out of time and money because of it. This is what happened with Vanguard imo, it's why Microsoft cut em loose. Honestly when SOE picked it up they saved the game and enabled it to at least get played rather than be vaporware. Did SOE do a crappy job? Sure...but no surprise there right? SOE's version of saving the game was pretty awful but at least SOMETHING got launched right? When you say stop blaming publishers I can only laugh because it was the publishers that ruined Vanguard. If Microsoft had stuck with it things may have been different, or maybe the scope creep was so out of control that it would have been a massive money pit we'll never know. The main point of my post was that THERE IS NO PUBLISHER this time around with Pantheon! Yes the timeframe can be as long as VR decides is necessary, and I like that. The worst case scenario is the one you mention where the game is vaporware that never gets released...but from all the gameplay footage I've seen so far I am seeing actual focused progress. If you want to see a nightmare go look at StarCitizen.
Some could say even EQ was rushed, but i dont feel it was. We did everything we could in alpha/beta to avoid any problems. Reporting, stress loading and i think the game turned out rather fine.
Take a game like Ark, Atlas now that was rushed to steam. 52 k players and they could not even get the servers up on launch. It was a royal mess.
Ithaca said:Manouk said:is it possible to determine from this number what amount are posters, as opposed to only lurkers?
It would be very tedious for us to try to find out but I am sure VR admins could do that easily.
Yeah, the reason I ask is that posters on these forums pay something, even the critics... monthly. Lurkers don't have to.
I see the forum stream as seperate than the pledges.
Land said:Bazgrim said:Idk about 12-18 months to release.
So longer?
Yes. Almost certainly.
Land said:
Bazgrim said:You're also right that there are many tens of thousands more that are watching from a distance.
Cohh's VOD of the latest stream has 7.4K views...Even adding in the people that watched it live, makes your statement sound like nonsense to me.
That's hardly an accurate metric to measure it by. But even still, as of me posting this, that video is up to 45k views. And many videos on Pantheon's YouTube have 100-300k views. But this goes beyond people just watching YouTube videos. There are many, many more people that are simply aware of Pantheon's existence, but aren't quite sold on it yet. They may think it's a good idea, but they don't actually think it's gonna make it to launch. That's what I mean by watching from a distance. So as it becomes more and more clear that the game will indeed launch, and it's not just a reskin of 1999 EQ, that'll start to get the attention of those skeptics.
Removed political comment, please keep this about Pantheon and no other game or government.
Please have a re-read of the guidelines if it has been a while so you can stay up to date with the changes and not run the risk of being moderated in the future: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/1595/pantheon-community-guidelines
Kilsin said:Removed political comment, please keep this about Pantheon and no other game or government.
Please have a re-read of the guidelines if it has been a while so you can stay up to date with the changes and not run the risk of being moderated in the future: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/1595/pantheon-community-guidelines
overseer kilsin strikes again! here i'll site it for you:
off limit topics rule #3
3) religious, political, and other “prone to huge arguments” threads
(throws a smoke bomb on the ground)
~poof~
while i'm at it let me test the limits of general rule #13:
Bazgrim said:That's hardly an accurate metric to measure it by. But even still, as of me posting this, that video is up to 45k views. And many videos on Pantheon's YouTube have 100-300k views. But this goes beyond people just watching YouTube videos. There are many, many more people that are simply aware of Pantheon's existence, but aren't quite sold on it yet. They may think it's a good idea, but they don't actually think it's gonna make it to launch. That's what I mean by watching from a distance. So as it becomes more and more clear that the game will indeed launch, and it's not just a reskin of 1999 EQ, that'll start to get the attention of those skeptics.
If view counts are useless why did you use more view counts as further evidence. The videos you cite on on Pantheon's channel are not "many" there's 4 in your range and they are 2 and 3 years old. That's not current interest. As a whole, viewer counts of those videos have been sliding - likely a function of both time released and low interest. Be less misleading and more truthful.
I want to play this game, but silent majority claims just don't hold any water as they're based on even less than the metrics we have. Frankly, the numbers just aren't there for claims of substantial widespread simmering support at this point. Saying otherwise is more of a detriment to the long-term survival of the game than anything else. There's nothing becoming more clear as time goes by and major game systems are not even fleshed out enough for public consumption. Hopefully, all this changes with the Project Faerthale, but realistically I think it's going to be more of the same for the foreseeable future.
took the plunge today & bought keeper...i have been watching from afar as many suggest that many others do...there are many fun games to play out there but no mmo has ever matched what eq1 or eq2 brought to the table imo...hoping this will scratch that itch...am happy to support this project which is something i dont normally do...long time eq1 (sept 99) & eq2 (xmas 2004) player
Its a safe bet that the contributors on the forums will play the game for at least a few months - Using YouTube or Twitch views is a poor indicator of player numbers. I have watched many many many streams and videos of gamges that I don't even intend on playing... at all. Just because someone clicks on a link, or they didn't log off of their Twitch/YouTube session before the next recommended video played, or a subscriber to Cohhalition (that watches everything Cohh Carnage streams because he's a good streamer) doesn't mean that they will pay to play PRotF.
Like I said, the only really good indicator is the number of people on these forums, which I think 20k is pretty awesome!
stellarmind said:Kilsin said:Removed political comment, please keep this about Pantheon and no other game or government.
Please have a re-read of the guidelines if it has been a while so you can stay up to date with the changes and not run the risk of being moderated in the future: https://www.pantheonmmo.com/content/forums/topic/1595/pantheon-community-guidelines
overseer kilsin strikes again! here i'll site it for you:
off limit topics rule #3
3) religious, political, and other “prone to huge arguments” threads
(throws a smoke bomb on the ground)
~poof~
while i'm at it let me test the limits of general rule #13:
Thank you for the good laugh.
This whole thread and the other weekly threads of "game will fail if/because" projections are useless. If you don't have faith in Pantheon or otherwise feel it is moving too slow then walk away (for a while or forever) instead of pretending your own fears speak for gamers in general and what they will or wont like.
The hype train hasn't even been put in motion yet (let alone been placed on the tracks) and people keep claiming it has derailed and interest is gone forever.
zewtastic said:Ziegfried said:The beauty of this is that Brad and his team have a much larger timeframe to work in and that will lead to a better game so long as they don't get caught up in scope creep.
Not even sure what this line means. How are you comparing hundreds of people working on a game to a couple dozen. Their timeframe is infinite and could lead to no game. And wth is 'scope creep'?
Scope creep is an engineering/project management term that refers to a design having a scope (or boundaries) that are clearly defined, but potentially not designed well and require creep (or expansion) of the original design after the entire foundation was already designed for a specific boundary. An example would be designing a WiFi infrastructure for a 1 million sq ft company that specifically requests coverage for 5 out of 9 floors. As an engineer or project manager, you should understand and explain to the company that over the course of X years, personnel in the other 4 floors will eventually need coverage even if they don't need coverage today and designing a network too small will create greater costs in the future (and possible redesign of their entire infrastructure) if they just plan for the scope creep in the present. In the MMO world, not planning for havnig X number of players would result in the scope creep of having to turn up VMs last minute, causing server populations to be an issue. This has crushed some MMOs during their go lives but I don't see this as an issue for PRotF - I'm just trying to give examples of what scope creep is and why it is good to avoid whenever possible.
Short version: they get more money and set more goals - repeat
It is a situation that has the potential to get very out of hand. On that note, I was just looking at the Tumbril Ranger and thinking how lost I in the current vision of SC.
I'm going to edit this to add that I don't believe Pantheon is or will be in this situation. I think this game is solid and the team has a clear idea of what they want to give us.
I think Joppa is a future rock star in game design. As long as he is effectively heading this project, I have a lot of faith in how this game will turn out. Not sure it matters to argue niche versus mainstream MMO, with so much of the world population playing games now, even if Pantheon qualifies as niche, it might have more concurrent players than EQ ever dreamed of. All I know for sure is for me to have fun, all I require is one full and vibrant server, that's probably a couple thousand players. Obviously VR needs a certain number of players to turn a profit and keep the lights turned on, but for the individual player on an individual server, once you get past whatever the server cap is, those extra numbers of players simply don't have much of an impact on your day to day gaming experience.
Venjenz said:Nailing down a chunk of the p99/EQ1 folks won't be that hard, but that is like 5k people at best.
It’s much larger than that. Actually, hundreds of thousands of us played Classic Everquest/Kunark/Velious ... returning here by the day. We’ve always been Brad’s original support. Anyway, cool thoughts Venjenz. :)