Trust and Doing the Right Thing (regarding Early Founder Pledge Gifts/Transfers)

Hehe, and in those threads I had the benefactors back too.. saying they deserved a great look place too, and we can all use it if we liked it better, i'd stick with the old style.. *sheds a single tear for the loss of the old knight's keep.

(I'd trade my new knights keep deed in for an old knights keep if they gave us the option)

 

Portalarium have my trust and are doing the right thing. Release 1, awesome. Release 2, even more awesome, keep up the great work!

 

Mostly agree, but I'm not expecting a more polished looking product for a pre-Alpha. But when you consider that ESO was in beta (not even alpha nor pre-alpha) for 9 months, and SotA is due to be released in 9 months, well.....

I have a feeling the developers are not having an easy time and the frustration level must be difficult to cope with. I trust we have good developers. I'm just not sure that the timeframe was realistic.

 

I'm not 100% confident SotA will launch on time with all the promised features. Either some features will come late, or the game will launch late I suspect.

That being said, they have shown us the game by letting us play directly what they have so far. And R3 is around the corner.

Patience is a virtue, even if LB didn't include it in his original eight.

 

I echo the timeframe sentiment, because hey, patience may be a virtue at times, but I admit in chafing at the delays. The fact that we still are guessing and scratching our heads over just basic combat, and other central style systems that we have yet to experience, makes me a little concerned so far, since the clock is very much ticking down.

I love the housing, shinies, and other pretty stuff that's been shown so far, but a large majority of any MMO or RPG type game is usually spent slaying those virtual dragons. It's fairly certain that any new feature, especially ones as polarizing as combat, PvP, guilds/grouping, heck even looting what the monsters drop, are going to go through some critique and reviews as they are polished for the final gameplay, since we have some passionate folks.

Let us get into the meat and potatoes of the game, since for me personally, I've had a difficult time selling or even explaining interest in SotA, because I can't really explain or point to solid gameplay design yet. We have a lot of style and flashy content, now show us the actual substance that will not only draw prospective players in, but will be a strong lure to retain them for long term success.

 

Well it seems focusing on cash items and making backing dollars has been the biggest draw - crafting and housing seem to be it. Once you tap out that crowd, you have to start coming up with the other things that make a game to tap a new crowd.

So we're still waiting.

 

Yeah, I'm not opposed to them making cash items (won't necessarily be buying them myself, but that's a while other topic of in-game rewards vs RL expenditures), but I am just a little worried when I look at the timeframe. Q4 2013 was originally when some stuff was slated, and we're actually almost done with Q1 2014. Tick tock, guys.

Even from just a marketing and publicity standpoint, there are dozens of gaming websites and reviewers who are chomping at the bit, but don't have substantive material to actually review yet. I want to see the groundswell of support and interest in this title, and be a strong contender when it launches. That only happens if the core gameplay and mechanics are competitive and polished out the gate.

 

I have perhaps a stupid question. I'm an Early Founder. Let's say I did want to help someone else convert their existing pledge to a Founder Pledge. I see that I can gift a pledge to someone. In another thread I was discussing jumping from Adventurer to Virtual Collector in a theoretical sense. But how would I do that if I wanted to?

If they had an existing $45 Adventurer tier, could I gift them a $60 Founder tier, and when receiving it, they'd go up to the $100 Founder Virtual Collector tier?

Avoiding the double-post and lumping my reply here. I think part of the reason they devs spent all their time on housing first is that is to had to take care of people spending hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars first. If they had nothing to show those players early, they'd have a fairly legit reason to gripe.

Likewise, by showing off those fantastic homes to everyone else early, they're creating incentive for existing backers to maybe upgrade their pledges and purchase housing add-ons.

It isn't like they haven't worked on combat in the background. It has just been disabled in all builds to this point and we won't see it until R4.

 

@enderandrew
You are correct. You would gift them any founder tier. After they accept it, they would need to contact support for account merging. Once that is complete, they would be a Founder at the combined total of their two accounts.

 

I'm surprised the so called Royal Founders are demanding a better looking house.

 

That was an old(relatively) thing... when the benefactor knight house was released some (most) knights thought it looked better than the founder house... I thought the issue was silly, and liked the old look of the founder knight's keep. they changed it to match the style of the benefactor house. which most are happy with.. (They added a sweet balcony). It just annoyed me because the people complaining had access to both houses, so they had their choice, it felt like a case of one-up manship, or I should have nicer things... I didn't care for that attitude... and... that's all i'm saying on the topic so it doesn't get dredged up anymore heheh.. I like the guys who were wanting changes so no hard feelings here on the subject.

 

One only needs to concern themselves with whether or not they're getting what they were promised when they made the pledge, not worry about what others are getting. I don't need to be better than other pledgers. Nor am I especially jealous (I'm admittedly a little jealous) of those who pledged above me.

If anything, I'm grateful that people were willing to open their wallet in a big way to get this game made. Every single backer benefits from that, because the whole game is better because of the budget they received.

 

If you put money into something advertising you can only get it until a certain date (Kickstarter April 7th 2013) then a year later it is being gifted to anyone that is not right.


Truth in Advertising Laws

• Americans depend on the FTC's Consumer Protection Bureau to enforce truth-in-advertising laws that protect consumers from deceptive campaigns. Federal law requires companies to have objective evidence to back up any claims made in advertising. It also bans deceptive ads that leave out critical information about a product that could influence a consumer's decision or could in some way threaten a consumer's safety.

 

"Let it die, let it die, let it shrivel up and die!"

Point made. My vote for this thread....

 

The best way to put it to rest would be to stop posting now, wouldn't it?

 

I don't know, what do you think?

 

Does this mean we're getting off topic?
(too bad we don't have a smiley with the devil head)

 

What's done is done. I'm not happy about it either..but at least Port did make a goodwill gesture by changing early founder titles and items. Does it completely erase the mistake? No. At this point we can do one of two things: abandon the project that we all believe in or continue to support it. I'm picking the latter.

 

This is just false. they can extend promotions and sales if they want to. Don't try to claim there is some legal grounds they have to abide by set time limits for promotions, sales, exclusive offers. What you are referencing does not apply to this. It applies more to standing behind your product and being truthful about what your product can and can't do. Both in the US and the UK they can do it, I haven't checked all countries though. They announced they would do it based on requests from people who couldn't afford to either pledge or be at the level of pledge they wanted to be.

Stop doing this.

 

If a video game is marked a console exclusive and they advertise that the only way to play that game is to own a specific console, and then later that game is made available to other players, was it false advertising?

There was a glitch in the website's software. They could have alienated players who gave the game money by punishing those who got benefit from it, or they could make the best of the situation and try to handle it gracefully.

False advertising would be intentionally misleading from the get-go. There is no indication that occurred here.