KickStarter Shroud of the Avatar - Lord British's Not-Ultima Online 2

[m_s0]

The way MMOs evolved they're basically scams by design past the 00s.

It gets worse. Not only do you pony up several thousand dollars for the Player-Owned Town, but then you have to buy the buildings for it, right? Haha, no! You FIRST have to buy LOT DEEDS to places in the Player-Owned Town you just bought! Then you have to buy the other buildings! And THEN you can buy all the things to decorate it all!

Uh. Wow.

 

[The Avatar]

It gets worse. Not only do you pony up several thousand dollars for the Player-Owned Town, but then you have to buy the buildings for it, right? Haha, no! You FIRST have to buy LOT DEEDS to places in the Player-Owned Town you just bought! Then you have to buy the other buildings! And THEN you can buy all the things to decorate it all!

To be fair, that's kind of how it works IRL. At least in the United States, you have to own the land before you start building on it. Perhaps by implementing it in such a ridiculous way, Richard Garriot was actually lobbing a subtle criticism of land tenure, crass commercialism and the harsh nature of laissez-faire capitalism.

 

[Caim]

So how much land speculation is there going on in Shroud of the Avatar?

 

[Eli_Havelock]

It gets worse. Not only do you pony up several thousand dollars for the Player-Owned Town, but then you have to buy the buildings for it, right? Haha, no! You FIRST have to buy LOT DEEDS to places in the Player-Owned Town you just bought! Then you have to buy the other buildings! And THEN you can buy all the things to decorate it all!

To be fair, that's kind of how it works IRL. At least in the United States, you have to own the land before you start building on it. Perhaps by implementing it in such a ridiculous way, Richard Garriot was actually lobbing a subtle criticism of land tenure, crass commercialism and the harsh nature of laissez-faire capitalism.

In much the same way that "Forsaken Virtues" is a bold admission of what most employees knew about LB since the mid-90s (or earlier), but the cult was too rabid and strong so you didn't want to speak up about it. Maybe there's some symbolism in how LB does a celebrity tourism while speaking something about environmentalism and leaving his games to be completed by other people. It's all been a way to double-dip his audience and get into the money OSI were envious of since the late 90s, now that they became something that not even Zynga would touch because even Zynga had standards. But technically incompetent to fail to connect to Steam to sell their shit. Oh, right. Doing that would have interfered with the sweet deals they offered to Markee Dragon. The greed and hubris both self-destructing this game (worse than what the shitty state of it already does) has been extremely entertaining.

All for a discount ESO of Unity Asset Store flips sold for many times over the superior product. Definitely some symbolism in there, like rats sinking with the SS Cost-cordia.

I feel sorry for the people who worked on the build system and "deck" system, because it does actually sound quite cool.

I wonder if the game actually started off as a scam? I remember that the combat system was different the first time I played it, from what it is now, so it's had a lot of iterations, and it seems unlikely that people would work on a system like that unless they were at least a bit serious about making an actual game at some point in its history.

There were some decent talent who added great parts to Shroud, like Puuk, but that was ruined by even more like Lum the Mad copying everyone else's shit except for what worked, along with the current retard at the helm having made all the technical decisions. Shroud was mostly started just to coast along and do little but have juniors work for them for as long as the money lasted, like Chris Roberts. Sure, rates of development can go slow, but taking months to figure out a roadmap for a roadmap is just too much.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

So fuck land, storage, customization, etc etc and be a murder hobo?

 

[thesheeep]

I wonder if the game actually started off as a scam? I remember that the combat system was different the first time I played it, from what it is now, so it's had a lot of iterations, and it seems unlikely that people would work on a system like that unless they were at least a bit serious about making an actual game at some point in its history.

Almost nothing in the games space starts out as a scam (if you ignore mobile, that is).

This is just one of the many cases where a good idea was failed to be executed well (or in time, or both).
And the result is but a handful of people stringing the thing along for as long as they can, likely deluding themselves, being unable to see the reality of the situation.
Well, them and the apparent whales that enable them.

It is definitely more sad than malicious.

 

[BritishAccentsGetTheGirls]

That Titler guy keeps posting that he has some kind of inside information on Portalarium and he has shopped it around to various news sites (including Ultima Codex) but that none of them will publish it. Why doesn't he just publish it himself on reddit or in a forum?

I'm curious to know what Port was doing for the first few years of the project when they had millions of dollars, tons of good will from the fans and a solid staff of ~30 working on the game.

Just thought I'd see how the momentum I set up years ago was going, quick check around the Shroud cess pits and... oh dear, published it years ago;



I time stamped it and put in relevant legal paperwork as the background images and everything...

Long story short, the lunatic stalker who was using Portalarium's own forums to send rape and death threats actually copied me into him begging Portalarium to "help harass him until he goes insane" and Portalarium despite knowing I was in the conversation, and seeing me link to "Jammaplaya" openly bragging he was abusing their own staff (Berek in particular) in pursuit of this, closed my online account and told him they'd done so. Which my legal team attempting to track him down to serve an arrest warrant had already planned for, and allowed us to instantly take Portalarium to the American Arbitration Association, as per their own EULA.

Turns out Portalarium had not only never paid the fees to be part of the court system as claimed, but they refused to answer the court summons multiple times; I even paid their attendence fees for them. Of course, if they'd have turned up they'd have had a judgement against them, because I had all the archives of the thread where they co-ordinated with "Jammaplaya" as well as archives going back years of how they'd supported harassment, and Chris Spears ranting about me personally to MassivelyOP.com and others.

With the result that the AAA extended the deadline to attend twice, and when Portalarium still wouldn't turn up, declared they'd never be considered again due to poor behaviour, ordered them to remove any mention of the AAA from their EULA, and refunded all my fees because I'd shown good faith.



Now here's the thing; It's been rather hilarious listening to blowhards over the years who talk a lot of trash but don't actually understand the real process of fighting for change deliberately shoot themselves in the foot by not educating themselves in how to get a better games industry, and instead focus on personal abuse, all whilst serving the wider purpose of toxifying the brand and ensuring decent people go nowhere near Shroud of the Avatar.

But I'm actually trained in academic research and publishing, so I know the actual standards that need to be held in public reporting... The first one of which is you can't share private correspondence without the permission of the person involved. But here's a quick sample of just some of the titles and dates of edited correspondence with Eurogamer... Let's see, also in there are responses from "submissions" which is SidAlpha (before he went off into anti-SJW land); he was interested but like most YouTubers has to produce constant up to date content with high click value to stay relevant so the conversation just died out as he moved on. Andreas Bertits used to post on Raw and writes for PCGamers.de I think it was. He wanted to run the story but couldn't get it past his editor. You never normally hear back as to why, but Bertits gave me the only feedback I got, that because I had the legal documents now, and the game was too small to have much of a public interest element, his Editor was too nervous to run it. Eurogamer, Ars Technica, Kotaku all had supportive reporters who submitted it to the editor too; no information from those, but it did inform the coverage... or lack of it... most amusingly guess why Ars Technica deleted the lunatic as soon as he turned up, and publicly labelled him a stalker? Oh yeah, they knew all about him by then, all whilst stupid people tried to gaslight me about documents I supposedly didn't have.

Jim Stephanie Sterling? Good, Good people and discussed it for a long time with me, but has their own reporting style Shroud didn't fit into I suspect. Some of the feedback on their coverage of EA worker conditions came from me though, for reasons I'll come back to later. Rockpapershotgun? Polygon? Appreciated the submissions, hence why I can keep posting it in comments without being deleted as slander now because again they've seen the court documents and had my lawyers contact details. But getting it above the line didn't pan out. The game is just too niche for anyone to give a shit to actually stick the boot into. But when the game folds, you can bet I'll be there still in some of the coverage...

MassivelyOP.com though? I just keep submitting it to them as a laugh to remind them that they allowed Chris Spears to forge claims that the police reports I'd sent in to Berek were something I was doing to his children... Even though the forums he claimed it was done on didn't exist when he said it happened. Go through that archive and see how MOP deletes all the attempts to point out Portalarium is actively harassing people in their comments, not just from me, whilst leaving the slander up. It took until Chris Spears himself had a childish tantrum about their coverage of their crap game and abused them directly before they started adding the warning label found elsewhere in this thread to any of their Shroud coverage. They won't mention any of the harassment of critics though, gosh I wonder why?

Steam? I reported the illegal EULA to them multiple times. Portalarium never were made to take it out; hell they aren't even the developers any more, Lord Brexit long since fucked off, but you can get away with any anti-consumer bullshit on Steam until the media fire storm starts up, so Steam hasn't even made them correct who is running the game now.

Again though, it did protect me from the wider dirty tricks; so when V.D./VladamirBegemot/MrAdventur3/variations on Victor X on Steam tried to forge "doxxing" him by posting on MassivelyOP under his real name and then reporting quoting him from there in to Steam to shut down my entire account (Because that's the normal decent think to do to try and remove a Steam Shroud review), they simply ignored him because I'd already given them the documents too. Remember when he turned up here and went on a massive rant about me? He still accuses random posters of being me to this date, even though my only sin was not wanting a literal scamming lying sockpuppetting piece of shit to rip anyone off. He never did send out the 3d prints from the 3d printer he scammed $3000 from people who thought they were supporting a turtle sanctuary either, as far as I can tell. That's what happens when you use your own identity to try and silence people VD, we get to see exactly who you really are.

Meanwhile I've had people send me stories that are claimed to be from Portalarium staff during the "downsizing for efficiency/going nomadic" periods; but I can't verify them to a legal standard so I've not shared those publicly. Could all be bullshit; Certainly I've caught sockpuppets trying to gaslight me again and again; Doesn't matter because given a choice between protecting their own backers from rape and death threats , someone at Portalarium thought that protecting the person making them instead, as long as they claimed to be harming critics was the more acceptable thing. I didn't need anything more than that, and I've got the documents to US lower court standards now to prove it.

Come at me in a UK court if you dare Portalarium and try and prove me wrong. How well will it go when you didn't dare show up in a US trial even when I was paying your fees, you shitheads?

Meanwhile the personal stalking still continues; I popped over to Kickstarter just to thank my obsessive friend for bad mouthing the game for the past two years under a name he thinks is my first name, whilst hoping I get upset that what... I can't play Shroud of the Avatar?! Bwahahaha. Moron. I don't even think he's sane enough to know what he is trying to achieve any more. He will continue to make Portalarium look like shit just to get at who ever he's currently obsessed with. VD continues to live up to his name and be a virus stuck to the dirty Shroud though and tries to avoid the US taxman by selling goods there. He wants RMTs to take it over entirely now. Of course he does. Wouldn't it be funny if Chris Spears had hired him as a bedroom coder? Top quality people over there

But if you want to know more... write in to the media and ask them to cover it. I've done my part. Heck, I actually worked for EA. I was on staff at UO when Lord Brexit came to pimp himself briefly, I was EM Gotan in the honor guard behind him. Narcissistic cunt didn't even say hello to any of the staff and we were given no explanation as to why we were being called onto duty at short notice either. Hence why I've also been posting here and here about what the gaming industry is really like because my NDA is up. I went from not just a lover of Ultima but a member of staff over at EA... but unlike all the cultists, fanboys and greedy cockwombler RMTs, I recognised when my heroes were turning out to be absolute twatwaffles, and stood up for what was right. Get it above the line and I'll be able to tell you far more, with journalistic protections this time.

We now return you to the slow embarassing death of the project itself. And don't forget to post TLDR and other mocking emotes to this, you alienated and exploited RPGelords!

 

[PrettyDeadman]

That Titler guy keeps posting that he has some kind of inside information on Portalarium and he has shopped it around to various news sites (including Ultima Codex) but that none of them will publish it. Why doesn't he just publish it himself on reddit or in a forum?

I'm curious to know what Port was doing for the first few years of the project when they had millions of dollars, tons of good will from the fans and a solid staff of ~30 working on the game.

Just thought I'd see how the momentum I set up years ago was going, quick check around the Shroud cess pits and... oh dear, published it years ago;



I time stamped it and put in relevant legal paperwork as the background images and everything...

Long story short, the lunatic stalker who was using Portalarium's own forums to send rape and death threats actually copied me into him begging Portalarium to "help harass him until he goes insane" and Portalarium despite knowing I was in the conversation, and seeing me link to "Jammaplaya" openly bragging he was abusing their own staff (Berek in particular) in pursuit of this, closed my online account and told him they'd done so. Which my legal team attempting to track him down to serve an arrest warrant had already planned for, and allowed us to instantly take Portalarium to the American Arbitration Association, as per their own EULA.

Turns out Portalarium had not only never paid the fees to be part of the court system as claimed, but they refused to answer the court summons multiple times; I even paid their attendence fees for them. Of course, if they'd have turned up they'd have had a judgement against them, because I had all the archives of the thread where they co-ordinated with "Jammaplaya" as well as archives going back years of how they'd supported harassment, and Chris Spears ranting about me personally to MassivelyOP.com and others.

With the result that the AAA extended the deadline to attend twice, and when Portalarium still wouldn't turn up, declared they'd never be considered again due to poor behaviour, ordered them to remove any mention of the AAA from their EULA, and refunded all my fees because I'd shown good faith.



Now here's the thing; It's been rather hilarious listening to blowhards over the years who talk a lot of trash but don't actually understand the real process of fighting for change deliberately shoot themselves in the foot by not educating themselves in how to get a better games industry, and instead focus on personal abuse, all whilst serving the wider purpose of toxifying the brand and ensuring decent people go nowhere near Shroud of the Avatar.

But I'm actually trained in academic research and publishing, so I know the actual standards that need to be held in public reporting... The first one of which is you can't share private correspondence without the permission of the person involved. But here's a quick sample of just some of the titles and dates of edited correspondence with Eurogamer... Let's see, also in there are responses from "submissions" which is SidAlpha (before he went off into anti-SJW land); he was interested but like most YouTubers has to produce constant up to date content with high click value to stay relevant so the conversation just died out as he moved on. Andreas Bertits used to post on Raw and writes for PCGamers.de I think it was. He wanted to run the story but couldn't get it past his editor. You never normally hear back as to why, but Bertits gave me the only feedback I got, that because I had the legal documents now, and the game was too small to have much of a public interest element, his Editor was too nervous to run it. Eurogamer, Ars Technica, Kotaku all had supportive reporters who submitted it to the editor too; no information from those, but it did inform the coverage... or lack of it... most amusingly guess why Ars Technica deleted the lunatic as soon as he turned up, and publicly labelled him a stalker? Oh yeah, they knew all about him by then, all whilst stupid people tried to gaslight me about documents I supposedly didn't have.

Jim Stephanie Sterling? Good, Good people and discussed it for a long time with me, but has their own reporting style Shroud didn't fit into I suspect. Some of the feedback on their coverage of EA worker conditions came from me though, for reasons I'll come back to later. Rockpapershotgun? Polygon? Appreciated the submissions, hence why I can keep posting it in comments without being deleted as slander now because again they've seen the court documents and had my lawyers contact details. But getting it above the line didn't pan out. The game is just too niche for anyone to give a shit to actually stick the boot into. But when the game folds, you can bet I'll be there still in some of the coverage...

MassivelyOP.com though? I just keep submitting it to them as a laugh to remind them that they allowed Chris Spears to forge claims that the police reports I'd sent in to Berek were something I was doing to his children... Even though the forums he claimed it was done on didn't exist when he said it happened. Go through that archive and see how MOP deletes all the attempts to point out Portalarium is actively harassing people in their comments, not just from me, whilst leaving the slander up. It took until Chris Spears himself had a childish tantrum about their coverage of their crap game and abused them directly before they started adding the warning label found elsewhere in this thread to any of their Shroud coverage. They won't mention any of the harassment of critics though, gosh I wonder why?

Steam? I reported the illegal EULA to them multiple times. Portalarium never were made to take it out; hell they aren't even the developers any more, Lord Brexit long since fucked off, but you can get away with any anti-consumer bullshit on Steam until the media fire storm starts up, so Steam hasn't even made them correct who is running the game now.

Again though, it did protect me from the wider dirty tricks; so when V.D./VladamirBegemot/MrAdventur3/variations on Victor X on Steam tried to forge "doxxing" him by posting on MassivelyOP under his real name and then reporting quoting him from there in to Steam to shut down my entire account (Because that's the normal decent think to do to try and remove a Steam Shroud review), they simply ignored him because I'd already given them the documents too. Remember when he turned up here and went on a massive rant about me? He still accuses random posters of being me to this date, even though my only sin was not wanting a literal scamming lying sockpuppetting piece of shit to rip anyone off. He never did send out the 3d prints from the 3d printer he scammed $3000 from people who thought they were supporting a turtle sanctuary either, as far as I can tell. That's what happens when you use your own identity to try and silence people VD, we get to see exactly who you really are.

Meanwhile I've had people send me stories that are claimed to be from Portalarium staff during the "downsizing for efficiency/going nomadic" periods; but I can't verify them to a legal standard so I've not shared those publicly. Could all be bullshit; Certainly I've caught sockpuppets trying to gaslight me again and again; Doesn't matter because given a choice between protecting their own backers from rape and death threats , someone at Portalarium thought that protecting the person making them instead, as long as they claimed to be harming critics was the more acceptable thing. I didn't need anything more than that, and I've got the documents to US lower court standards now to prove it.

Come at me in a UK court if you dare Portalarium and try and prove me wrong. How well will it go when you didn't dare show up in a US trial even when I was paying your fees, you shitheads?

Meanwhile the personal stalking still continues; I popped over to Kickstarter just to thank my obsessive friend for bad mouthing the game for the past two years under a name he thinks is my first name, whilst hoping I get upset that what... I can't play Shroud of the Avatar?! Bwahahaha. Moron. I don't even think he's sane enough to know what he is trying to achieve any more. He will continue to make Portalarium look like shit just to get at who ever he's currently obsessed with. VD continues to live up to his name and be a virus stuck to the dirty Shroud though and tries to avoid the US taxman by selling goods there. He wants RMTs to take it over entirely now. Of course he does. Wouldn't it be funny if Chris Spears had hired him as a bedroom coder? Top quality people over there

But if you want to know more... write in to the media and ask them to cover it. I've done my part. Heck, I actually worked for EA. I was on staff at UO when Lord Brexit came to pimp himself briefly, I was EM Gotan in the honor guard behind him. Narcissistic cunt didn't even say hello to any of the staff and we were given no explanation as to why we were being called onto duty at short notice either. Hence why I've also been posting here and here about what the gaming industry is really like because my NDA is up. I went from not just a lover of Ultima but a member of staff over at EA... but unlike all the cultists, fanboys and greedy cockwombler RMTs, I recognised when my heroes were turning out to be absolute twatwaffles, and stood up for what was right. Get it above the line and I'll be able to tell you far more, with journalistic protections this time.

We now return you to the slow embarassing death of the project itself. And don't forget to post TLDR and other mocking emotes to this, you alienated and exploited RPGelords!

Didn't read, but judging by the length of your post you are some kind of lunatic.

 

[Eli_Havelock]

Sounds like there's a fun game starting to shape up here.

After playing for a while this is my 2c worth.
The new night vision - love it. Great improvement guys!
The air shield buff - not so thrilled. I know you’re trying to balance, but it feels tough.
The torpid torment - wow. That’s mean. I can get through the mage room in the Rise with ice shield + evasion.
Whichever way I go, still drinking lots of potions.
The experience reminds me of a passage in a Frederick Forsyth book (fiction, but so well researched a lot could be accurate). It describes a British SAS troop on a “training run” - ten mile forced march through the mountains with full pack. The rendezvous was an army truck. Just as they approached the truck, an officer sitting on the tailboard smacked his hand on the truck’s side, it started up and drove off. FOR ANOTHER FIVE MILES.....
I guess that like the SAS, those stubborn enough not to rage quit or drop out will end up being resilient as hell. Hoping so anyway

Why, yes, I'm sure by this point any SotA cultist could survive anything put into their koolaid.

 

[Eli_Havelock]

Didn't read, but judging by the length of your post you are some kind of lunatic.

When buying developer blood excited the cultists then the batshit bar was already raised pretty high. You might as well sit back and watch the real entertainment of this "game": the rather fucked-up community around it.

Fucking LOL.

~All our stuff is still here!~
(Along with it's issues)

"The second largest crowd funding in the history of online gaming",

but we never had Star Citizen's $100's of millions. SOTA became what it is today on less than 1% of what Star Citizen's been funded with. I often wonder what SOTA would have became with those types of funding numbers.

When placed front and center as a target, SOTA has many weak points to hit, yet continues to be a great value to those who now come to our game "Free to Play", and our micro transaction funding cannot be said to be "Pay to Win", unless that's in winning a player housing lot decorating contest. "The Sims" is a great example of how that same continued funding plan continues to work well for SOTA.

It wasn't free to early backers but it wasn't expensive either, unless you were a gambler "investing" seeking to turn a re-sell profit. Only some were very successful in that regard and some still continue to turn a coin through re-selling, but the bountiful hay-day of those days are over. As a lover of the entire Ultima history in every game they have or ever will again produce, I'm very satisfied and looking forward to our games continued successful future, even with it's burn points that come and go or here forever. It's still Ultima and the Ultima way of online gaming life.

Many "Gaming Critics" who make their money reviewing games said SOTA would not last, they backed their claims of fortune telling with many false claims as well as just unleashing their target practice at SOTA's most always temporary soft points, of which so many of those critic's points then made are now not existent, as they were as many of SOTA's short comings, "temporary awaiting updated programing".

SOTA "was" the second most successful crowd funded game of all history within it's past history, which made it a very big target for all the fan boys of other games to follow, with many of those failing, or being out-right development scams. SOTA was pointed at as a scam within those past storms of scandals but truth prevailed, the SOTA critics were wrong and proved wrong through the outcome of history. Star Citizen was the #1 player funded while we were #2 and in invested "dollar to dollar" player funded value, only recently has Star Citizen come into even being a game at all, so our SOTA funding (I believe) out-stretched Star Citizen's investors dream fulfilments. Sure they were/are building a much higher programing required game, yet SOTA got to a more finished level sooner in something that could be actually played. In that Rabbit vs the Turtle race, the SOTA Rabbit won, achieving playable long before Star Citizen, without spending 100's of millions in development costs. SOTA was said to never financially survive but has and in great shape to continue. SOTA's development is slow when compared to some, yet it's financial survival future is assured. SOTA's developers have been a lean company both in Portalarium as well as in Catnip, yet it's always been the quality of SOTA's programmers who have made the difference in balancing development dollars with company survival dollars. Our programing continues and will into our future. SOTA will never vanish with your stuff as many other games have, meaning that all old and new player's micro-transaction have a forever future ahead of them with well proven developers with a well proven company plan to take SOTA into our forever future.

SOTA Burn Notices are what they are, some will come, some will go and some will always be there to hit on and well deserved to be hit...

But our early backer stuff is still here! :D So we haven't lost anything!

Good points @Burzmali , we all came with individual hopes in backing our game and came out with what's been possible.
I do hope you feel that Ultima need to come re-visit us and all your stuff more often!

"It's our early backers that carry our history because our forums don't go back that far anymore"...

"Still in Development" still applies when talking SOTA and possible missed early development issues still come up as weak points, but as a Free to Play and surviving off Micro-Transactions game, Sota is well worth "that" play button.

In the far past sometimes I've sometimes felt like this picture of John Goodman about some issues in our game, but SOTA survived and it is what it now is.
But every micro-transaction and all our early backer stuff is still here! :D So I'm very happy and satisfied about that!
~Time Lord~

 

[Morblot]

That text, Jesus Christ

 

[kaisergeddon]

Good lord, those guys are going to overdose on their copium pills. Well, at least they're having fun... right?

 

[Eli_Havelock]

Good lord, those guys are going to overdose on their copium pills. Well, at least they're having fun... right?

They wish. Most of it has been We Happy Few smiles and enforcing everyone to take their Joy or be banned from the community (and why the community has been whittled down into Chris Spears, his last few buttboys, and those who still must prove that they have more money than sense):


(Aesthetically, We Happy Few was brilliant. Design-wise, it had too much trash, with the procedural generation being more of a fatal flaw than adding anything. They should have used handmade maps for the main story mode, then for an extra mode had the procedural. Uncle Jack was a treat... at first, but then wandering across the same area after a while the repeat wore on.)

The cult are posting shit like this as if it's supposed to be amazing:

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Wait! They're fighting a fucking spider? Didn't that dude from Florida get his butt-boy bandits together to fight fucking SPIDERS? Its all I see bears & fucking spiders. Where the fuck is John Goodman?

 

[ADL]

Say what you will about this pile of shit but at least the combat deck system is cool.

 

[Eli_Havelock]

Say what you will about this pile of shit but at least the combat deck system is cool.

Magic Legends makes playing a Diablo clone a pain in the ass with that crap, this just looks like busywork for sake of having any complexity to The Sims: Crackhead Cult Edition. From looking at the absolute borefest of combat, the non-existent economy, and the absolute cacophony of player-made towns being an eyesore to their own population, it DOES look like the deck is the closest to a developed system in this game and remarkably good when compared to the rest, much like how costume jewelry might look valuable in comparison to the mud it fell into. Look, it has the potential to be cleaned off and might be valuab- no, it's still shit.

Anything to spice it up, right? If only they put in enough effort into developing where you could switch from PVE to PVP content a lot easier, then there might be a bunch more people actually using any of the PVP content that is rotting out there.


(Alt link until media tag works. 2nd edit: I see, it cuts out the -bJzD3XMQGqaEB5gi from the end of the pasted URL in the media formatting box; fixed by manually adding it back in.)

There would be SOME kind of life besides flipping cards like the gypsy from Ultima wasn't totally stolen from the same SCA act.

If only they had a developer who knew how to do anything right. Who the fuck throws these changes out onto live without first going through a test server? That twitter thread has Shroud losing another streamer and the dev is just clueless about it all. As someone said elsewhere, first this guy makes a class for a classless game, then makes a particular playstyle for that class, then AFTER everyone jumps on Flavor of the Month and spends time/resources/sanity/life savings on getting to progression content with it he nerfs it into the ground.

Absolute legends.

 

[Eli_Havelock]

Some of the bugs might be from how they just have no clue how to do an update.

Looks like some server changes did not get published with the last patch. This might have caused some client server mismatch on some stuff. I saw a report of durability issues with repair and this might have been the cause. Now published and hopefully fixed!

 

[Eli_Havelock]

And they say journalism is dead, but here's New Britannia News Network telling it like it is:



A retweet might seem like nothing, but this is the community that would consider you a heretic if you said anything bad about their cult leader. Now they are openly taking shots at him.

There's also a surprising amount of Honesty and Humility around the last real developer lately. Did he forget what game this was?

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Oh! Speaking of all that fuckery:


Casual-tested, carebear-approved!

I should have looked for reviews years ago. lessee.....

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

And while looking for more SOTA content, this video was said to be relevant; somehow.

 

[Eli_Havelock]

On schedule, the annual attempt to get the community to look bigger than it is post, now in monthly format.

Some crackheads are really invested in the idea but jump ahead of themselves:

player count is going up not down its up a lot not sure what you mean by lowest.

https://steamcharts.com/app/326160
The API site that closed down (because RMT sales were still as shit as ever since the developers intentionally destroyed the RMT market after making it a big deal).

MassivelyOP was the last MMO site who wasted their time on this farce, and even they have stopped their coverage as of a month ago.

 

[Eli_Havelock]

Remember all the shit they used to boast about this game? The elitists are now shredding it all apart themselves. The last few remaining elitists for this "MMO" (of under 1k CCU since ever) are now saying the solution to the amazing things they were sold as "old school" is to rip off all the games they shit on to boast how Shroud was so wonderful and unique and speshul.

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/about-archer.168809/#post-1322653

What is this, all the people who said archery is OP before are now saying it's been over nerfed? It's almost as if your goal wasn't to kill archery but only to get it balanced... Madness, can't believe you guys

No but for real, I think this should 100% be a thread Chris looks at, considering you guys are all saying that archery got over tuned, it's time to look back at some of the recent changes and maybe tone them down! (For PvP obviously, PvE archers seem to be fine from what I've seen, but I might be wrong here deltalok ?)

Correct. Most current PVPers just want balance which is why the current best are all rocking dual mossys with chaotic feedback and super pot drinking to help point out it's the current Uber build . Archery could use a boost now...

All of the best PVPers are using one class after another just got nerfed into the ground in the hopes that there will be balance?


https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/about-archer.168809/page-2#post-1322858

Completely agree. From SWG to WoW to EQ and everything in between, tanks do almost no damage. The only DPS lower than a Tank's... is a Healer's.

If we're talking in terms of the "Holy Trinity" of Tank, DPS, and Heals... SotA is a game where everyone is eventually DPS, even the healers. We can debate the nuance of a "classless" and "limitless" system until we're blue in the face... but that conversation has been happening for literal years and gotten us literally nowhere.

I'm quite happy to see the progress that's been made, especially lately. But I think it's time for us to admit that our little game isn't going to escape the "Holy Trinity" trope... it's what I want. And lately, it seems like more and more people are discussing the game thus.

I'd love to be able to play a super high DR agro holding machine that depends 1000% on a good healer while the DPS on my team whittles down my target. And I'd love for the team experience to have obvious roles being filled instead of a party of 12 being made up entirely of tanky DPS, healy DPS, and DPSy DPS.

And yes, dynamic potion slots need nerfing. If I can't cast healing blast on myself, then why are dynamic potion slots able to basically render 99% of the Life tree useless. There's no reason to do anything with life outside of resurrect and purify when I can just chug potions and remain alive far easier.

I've always said Fire was going to be the last great nerf... but I'm starting to feel like dynamic potion chuggers are going to clutch their ring like Gollum and drag Frodo down into the lava with them.

The last thing I want to hear now is a "Don't nerf THIS... just bring everything else UP," it's just time to admit dynamic potion chugging is OP af.

There is so much wrong here, but that's Shroud.

Where's Lord "The World's Best Game Designer Because Frankly All Others Are Lazy" Brexit going to run to next to hide from his third disgraceful abdication of responsibilities? Mars? No, wait, they haven't set up celebrity tourism for him to take a ride and say he did a first, just like his early game career after a game literally called Avatar.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Mars? In search of Friends?


btw... romances


If I really had the know how I would make a RG buck homage... a game designer who is frozen in time.

 

[Eli_Havelock]

https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/get-your-sota-on-with-this.169154/

"Get your SotA on with this"

"I think it's awesome how Valve continues to advance gaming on Linux. I recently purchased an Index, and Alyx is truly amazing."

 

[Eli_Havelock]

Yes, there are still cultists. (woo, a rise of 2 making another multibox account- required for this game's beyond autistic crafting.)

No, they haven't all yet died from drinking the kool-aid. (But as you'll see it's not for lack of trying!)

They think PvP will save their game after banning a top PvP streamer and his guild, players who kept the majority of the game's entire PvP scene alive, and now the cultists are having to amuse themselves with something called "PvP Fishing". (It is apparently a bigger hit than the dance parties - you know it's bad when Trammies consider doing anything PvP.)

They think streaming will save their game after Catnip stopped the weekly shows and rating stanked. (If anyone stopped their part of streaming to the "50 people on their friend's list" [always divide that by ten] there would be only a fraction of a person streaming a game at a time, which is about right because Catnip banned the only major streamer still possessing any kind of spine to speak independently of the devs' balls in their mouth.)

It's distilled cult at this part, so you know what that means: once anything happens to their king god thing they will find some spectacular way to end it all.