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So I hear JC got fired?


Daphne Jones

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8 hours ago, GraXXoR said:

This is a bit unusual, when a CEO changes, there is often at least a press report of some description

Depends on how bad the situation is. 

 

If the shareholders come together and change the CEO then yes. A press report would/should be out. 

 

If the CEO was replaced by order of a judge in the sequence of a nasty lawsuit. Then any communication is a liability that can have a legal consequence. 

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7 hours ago, Daphne Jones said:

Private Equity? I'm not sure that's actually different from VC, except that VC is a business rather than someone hoping to ride the company's coat tails to wealth. 

PE and VC are vastly different in concept and application.. For a company like NQ, PE investment would be terrible as it is the kind that would pick a failed investment apart trying to sell what can be sold to recoup as much as possible.

 

VC is the kind that fosters growth and development of a company and VC investors will walk away, taking their loss, if the company fails to deliver. 

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We can hope that JC wanted to stick to the vision and the pressure of doing that and running the place was getting to him (not surprising).

There isn't much players can do but wait and watch and hope that this may help in some way.

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I see the game as having just as good a chance to survive as with JC at the helm. It was long overdue.

 

Everything we've seen and heard suggested he wasn't just a bad leader because he lacked experience in the game industry...but because he wasn't open-minded and didn't want anyone else's ideas. That's reflected in how NQ interacted with the community and (from all the evidence we have) based on how he treated his own employees. It was always his project, his vision, his castle, his "ready player one" roleplaying game.

 

When the community complained, he told them why they were wrong. I expect he did something similar with his own employees, hence the very high employee turnover and slow, slow progress. 

 

If investors want to salvage this game, they can't just "sell off" tech because there's nothing to sell.

 

Everything they've made is very buggy and vendor-locked on AWS or Unigen2 (which no one in the industry uses) -- never worth it to buy buggy code that hasn't been proven to scale! It's far, far cheaper to develop it yourself long-term...any studio with the cash to buy tech like this would have wisdom enough to avoid it. "Wanna buy tech for this game that's been mired in bugs and hasn't shown it can scale even with low population?" No, hard pass, maybe worth $50,000 but not anything substantial enough for investors. 

 

i expect the investors will make up their mind shortly -- but my guess?

 

They wouldn't start taking things over unless they had some runway left to try to salvage the project. Otherwise they'd have laid everyone off and shut it all down already, because every day it is online is money spent. I'm not holding my breath, but getting JC out of there might be the change NQ needs. 

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58 minutes ago, ShippyLongstalking said:

I see the game as having just as good a chance to survive as with JC at the helm. It was long overdue.

 

Everything we've seen and heard suggested he wasn't just a bad leader because he lacked experience in the game industry...but because he wasn't open-minded and didn't want anyone else's ideas. That's reflected in how NQ interacted with the community and (from all the evidence we have) based on how he treated his own employees. It was always his project, his vision, his castle, his "ready player one" roleplaying game.

 

When the community complained, he told them why they were wrong. I expect he did something similar with his own employees, hence the very high employee turnover and slow, slow progress. 

 

If investors want to salvage this game, they can't just "sell off" tech because there's nothing to sell.

 

Everything they've made is very buggy and vendor-locked on AWS or Unigen2 (which no one in the industry uses) -- never worth it to buy buggy code that hasn't been proven to scale! It's far, far cheaper to develop it yourself long-term...any studio with the cash to buy tech like this would have wisdom enough to avoid it. "Wanna buy tech for this game that's been mired in bugs and hasn't shown it can scale even with low population?" No, hard pass, maybe worth $50,000 but not anything substantial enough for investors. 

 

i expect the investors will make up their mind shortly -- but my guess?

 

They wouldn't start taking things over unless they had some runway left to try to salvage the project. Otherwise they'd have laid everyone off and shut it all down already, because every day it is online is money spent. I'm not holding my breath, but getting JC out of there might be the change NQ needs. 

If the original engine builder can’t avoid item duplication bugs, item teleportation bugs, and keep client/server terrain state synced...

 

A third party picking the engine up has a snowball in hell chance of doing better.

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Interesting that the paperwork pasted here says the change happened on March 24th, which is nearly 2 weeks ago now (the later dates people have posted are when the paperwork ended up being filed with whatever authority French businesses have to file with).  You'd think this would also have been in discussion for a while before it happened.  To me, the lack of an immediate announcement means it feels like someone trying to move things forward in a positive way rather than trying to shut things down.  If you weren't going to try to continue moving forwards why would you incur all those costs of server running after you made the decision?  Sometimes when people put money into a company they want to put their person in charge so they can make sure it's spent the way they want it to be ...

 

JC's vision is the reason I started playing DU and I hope he's still involved and able to bring it to life.  Hopefully this will help move things forward in a positive direction as others have said.  There's plenty of feedback out there which they could listen to and IMO there are some fairly easy things NQ can do to start to make a functional game community again and start moving on.

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24 minutes ago, Daphne Jones said:

Weird. I can't press the reaction button any more today. Never seen that.

 

So I'll just say I agree with @FuriousPuppy 's thought above. Kill it or fix it and let us know which is the plan.

You get 10 reacts in any 24 hour period. On busy days I run out... it's a thing.

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On 4/4/2021 at 1:49 PM, Daphne Jones said:

Just to clarify something, I stay out of blazemonger's threads and it would be polite if he would stay out of mine.

Daph, you're a riot. Never change. ❤️

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11 hours ago, ShippyLongstalking said:

Everything they've made is very buggy and vendor-locked on AWS or Unigen2 (which no one in the industry uses) -- never worth it to buy buggy code that hasn't been proven to scale! It's far, far cheaper to develop it yourself long-term...any studio with the cash to buy tech like this would have wisdom enough to avoid it

I dont agree. 

 

There are allot of things working perfectly. 

Some we can see, others we cannot. 

The game deals with recursive referencials very well. ( a player can be moving on a construct moving inside another construct...) 

Lua part works well. The entire interconnection between lua and piloting has value. 

 

Server side to client data transfer works well. 

 

I dont think the game failed because of bugs. 

Other games with more bugs are being successful. 

 

The game is simply not fun to play. 

And it was made that way tnx to management decisions. 

 

 

As an example. Empyrion could use the client tech. They discart all the MMO part of it and also the dynamic voxels and use the client side of DU to render and calculate physics. 

That way players would be able to walk on moving ships. 

 

Even if the tech is unusable, it still has value for other companies to learn how it was done. 

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3 hours ago, Aaron Cain said:

Just hope we get our money back if this goes down, would be pretty shitty if the investor gets the money and the backers get shit. But thats how this little corrupted earth works

 

Expecting refunds on pledges is at best optimistic, I'd not count on it as IF DU gets broken up and parts sold off, the value would not even begin to cover the 20+ million the investors put in. And even if refunds would be considered, backers would be at the very end of the list.

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6 hours ago, Aaron Cain said:

Just hope we get our money back if this goes down, would be pretty shitty if the investor gets the money and the backers get shit. But thats how this little corrupted earth works

That's the whole point of having backers with no equity position - don't have to pay them back.

 

I knew that's what I was signing up for and I'm OK with it. But if they're going to kill it, I wish they would stop wasting my time.

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11 hours ago, joaocordeiro said:

As an example. Empyrion could use the client tech. They discart all the MMO part of it and also the dynamic voxels and use the client side of DU to render and calculate physics. 

That way players would be able to walk on moving ships. 

 

Even if the tech is unusable, it still has value for other companies to learn how it was done. 

 

The idea that Empyrion or any other game could just "use the tech" makes no sense. Entirely different engines -- you can't just "use the client side". 

 

They'd need to completely rewrite Empyrion. It isn't like the code is just plug and play. It's probably not even well documented.  

 

No one would pay big money to acquire a whole codebase for the sake of "learning" -- the concepts you're talking about are well understood, not some great mysteries that only NQ has solved. It's far, far cheaper and more effective to write the code yourself. Any studio with money to throw away on acquiring code for 'learning' wouldn't need to. 

 

The only studios that could possibly ever utilize it are those that are making brand new games; you can't "plug in" mountains of code written on a different engine to whatever project.

 

And if you're a new studio starting a new project, you want clean code that you understand completely, not some monstrosity from an old project that will be a nightmare to fix and maintain. 

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i think some of you are panicking about this being the end. i suggest you wait and see what happens. All i know is that this could possible be a good move to move forward in getting the game out.

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Here's the thing... 

 

Unless JC got fired for a scandal or health/drugs issue then he got fired because they think the game is failing.  So one of two things will happen.  They shutter it, or they 'fix' it.  Lets look at the latter. 

 

If a VC is going to fix a failing restaurant they don't just come in and change the wallpaper and add a dash more paprika to the chili.  They reevaluate the entire business because whatever is there clearly isn't working.  That means major changes, and since the biggest issue is lack of customer interest they will focus on appealing to more people.  A broader appeal to a more mainstream audience. So anyone who uses the term 'casual' to denigrate suggestions they don't like are in for a very rude awakening.  When a game is failing, you don't double down on niche appeal after firing the guy who designed it.

 

As a newcomer it doesn't bother me but I suspect most of the people who consider themselves fans of the game will be writing a lot of angry forum posts in the near future.  

 

(The only other possibility is they are keeping JC and just giving him a boss, but I wouldn't hold my breath as it was his 'vision' that caused the subscriber count to tank in the first place)

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50 minutes ago, Taziar said:

Here's the thing... 

 

Unless JC got fired for a scandal or health/drugs issue then he got fired because they think the game is failing.  So one of two things will happen.  They shutter it, or they 'fix' it.  Lets look at the latter. 

 

If a VC is going to fix a failing restaurant they don't just come in and change the wallpaper and add a dash more paprika to the chili.  They reevaluate the entire business because whatever is there clearly isn't working.  That means major changes, and since the biggest issue is lack of customer interest they will focus on appealing to more people.  A broader appeal to a more mainstream audience. So anyone who uses the term 'casual' to denigrate suggestions they don't like are in for a very rude awakening.  When a game is failing, you don't double down on niche appeal after firing the guy who designed it.

 

As a newcomer it doesn't bother me but I suspect most of the people who consider themselves fans of the game will be writing a lot of angry forum posts in the near future.  

 

(The only other possibility is they are keeping JC and just giving him a boss, but I wouldn't hold my breath as it was his 'vision' that caused the subscriber count to tank in the first place)

 

I couldn't have put it better myself.

The change of the ceo certainly opens up many possibilities. Of course, that also leaves a lot of speculation, but what you say also has a lot of truth to it. 

 

I am clearly convinced that we are experiencing the final nail in the coffin, that we are no longer getting the game that was advertised in the KS.

 

DU will survive with this action. The only question is, what will change?

My speculation: DU goes F2P, avatar and element skins are coming to the cosmetic shop asap.

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5 minutes ago, SirJohn85 said:

 

I couldn't have put it better myself.

The change of the ceo certainly opens up many possibilities. Of course, that also leaves a lot of speculation, but what you say also has a lot of truth to it. 

 

I am clearly convinced that we are experiencing the final nail in the coffin, that we are no longer getting the game that was advertised in the KS.

 

DU will survive with this action. The only question is, what will change?

My speculation: DU goes F2P, avatar and element skins are coming to the cosmetic shop asap.

 

I agree that DU will likely go F2P eventually....but I think it'd be a mistake for them to do that anytime soon.

 

While the sub model makes no sense for DU in its current state, it does work as a gate to ensure that only very interested players willing to pay install the game. 

 

If they go FTP, they'll be opening those floodgates and neither the new player experience nor the technicals can handle this gracefully.

 

They have a lot of work to do before they can even get to the point where FTP will make them money. 

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1 hour ago, Taziar said:

(The only other possibility is they are keeping JC and just giving him a boss, but I wouldn't hold my breath as it was his 'vision' that caused the subscriber count to tank in the first place)

Yes and no.. The 'vision' was why they had a successful kickstarter and initial VC rounds. The inability to turn the vision into reality, and then finally subverting the vision in later patches was what made people leave the game. So new management could still try to make DU using the original vision, but this time with sensible priorities and dev methods.

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9 minutes ago, ShippyLongstalking said:

 

I agree that DU will likely go F2P eventually....but I think it'd be a mistake for them to do that anytime soon.

 

While the sub model makes no sense for DU in its current state, it does work as a gate to ensure that only very interested players willing to pay install the game. 

 

If they go FTP, they'll be opening those floodgates and neither the new player experience nor the technicals can handle this gracefully.

 

They have a lot of work to do before they can even get to the point where FTP will make them money. 

 

I agree with everything you say. It just doesn't make sense where the journey should go now. What is currently shown does not work in its state. In principle, the game would have to be tackled from scratch. The only things you can take over are assets (meshes, textures, sound...).

 

12 minutes ago, CptLoRes said:

Yes and no.. The 'vision' was why they had a successful kickstarter and initial VC rounds. The inability to turn the vision into reality, and then finally subverting the vision in later patches was what made people leave the game. So new management could still try to make DU using the original vision, but this time using sensible priorities and dev methods.

 

The 20 million euros are gone. The question is to what extent the new management is willing to save the game. I am still actively following Ashes of Creation and from the original 30 million euros that the CEO invested, he talked about having to revise upwards and invest another 10 million euros. 
 

I hope that NQ will slowly but surely make a statement about the situation.

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