Myobi
Liturgist
- Joined
- Feb 26, 2016
- Messages
- 1,501
Trials of a Scamcion – Steam
Since I’ve step foot on the Greed Monger juicy thread I’ve been wanting to make a thread about Trials of Ascension, but I’ve been to lazy to re-cap this entire shit show, however, today is the day! Hell, where do I even start? Oh, I know! Marty, we have to go back, to 2001!
When Don Danielson (Brax) and his team “Shadow Pool”, registered the domain and announced what was supposedly going to be most innovating MMORPG ever, Trials of Ascension! It was pretty much the kind of video game where you can do whatever the fuck you want to do, you have a bazillion races to pick from, you can be a pixie, a dragon, a human, a gay ass golden fish, it doesn’t matter, because when imagination is the limit, as long as you don’t run out of toilet paper to write on, it is whatever the hell you want it to be.
Sadly, who knew that you need to know anything about game development at all to make an MMORPG, after going trough multiple game engines only to realize that shit was a little more complicated than using RPG Maker, the community started asking for proof that the project was more than just vaporware, however instead of proof, the “led-developer” Brax provided them with the dire news that despite getting multiple funding offers from big companies, all of them supposedly came with the price of turning Trials of Ascension into some sort of World of Warcraft clone, something that they just couldn’t accept, thus around 2008 the project was shut down without having anything to show for due the lack of capital.
In 2012, Trials of Ascension made it’s come back! Can you guess why? Golden age of crowdfunding! If a random guy can get 55,000$ for a potato salad, why wouldn’t the most innovating MMORPG be also showered with free money, am I right? Under the new team name “Forged Chaos”, Brax quickly launched his first Kickstarter:
Surprisingly, just concept art alone wasn’t enough to get those juicy free dolla dolla from backers.
You see, the problem is (spoiler alert) that despite going around claiming to have experience in game development, the truth is that none of them knew jack-shit about it, they couldn’t even code a basic calculator even if their life's depended on it, let alone at least a demo for a MMORPG, therefore it was time for Plan B:
The Trials of Ascension Store! To sum it up, it’s basically a Store that used to sell inexistent items & services for an inexistent video game, that according to the “Backers Agreement” it wasn’t even really a Store at all, it was a complex donation system with rewards! Thus, regardless the amount money you threw at it, you weren’t really owed shit for it. Over 60,000$ later they finally hired someone who could program, Teddy, who was given the task of creating a technical demo in order to give that juicy Kickstarter a second go… but as it turns out, those 60k must have burned up pretty quickly, ending up with Teddy leaving right before the launch of the new Kickstarter campaign, and despite of not even knowing how to turn on the god damn servers, they still went ahead with it:
It turned out as expected, a fucking catastrophe, still this is when shit starts getting fun, as some fairly generous backers started calling them on their incompetence, and as some more member of the team left, such as one of the “team leaders” Xanward , leaving us articles such as this:
This is the moment when Forged Chaos jumps into damage control, giving us some threads of pure gold:
As that didn’t worked out to well, they started censoring shit little by little, it started slowly by locking every thread where the community was discussing their failure:
But that wasn’t enough, new people could still pass by and see that entire shit show, thus they purged most of the forum, deleting anything that they deemed negative towards the project:
As you may guess though, it doesn’t end here, why should it? I mean, why do you even need cash, when you can get people working for you for free!?! That’s fucking right, this was the moment they arrived to the brilliant conclusion that maybe, just maybe! A fucking MMORPG was a tad little bit overreaching, therefore the project was scaled down from a MMORPG to a yet another sandbox survival game, and trough the help of a countless “volunteers” (trust me, I tried counting them up, but so many of them joined just to bail right after through the years that I just gave up) they started building up something to throw at the Steam Store, with the objective of making enough money to go back to the MMORPG version, that said, as long as you claimed to know anything about game development and were crazy enough to work for free, welcome aboard!
This bring us the present day, after years of a snail-paced development, a true master piece was finally born: https://store.steampowered.com/app/893870/Trials_of_Ascension_Exile/
This pretty much sums the basics up, however there is still some information that I would like to share and some points that I would like to highlight about this project, let’s start with the scam part, shall we? What’s a scam?
Let’s go trough that post from the led-developer again, shall we:
Source: http://i1244.photobucket.com/albums/gg570/MyobiPT/Trials of Ascension/Forum Posts n Threads/image.jpg
Those claims are pretty big for someone who is accepting others people money in order to accomplish a video game, they also go against what is stated AFTER both Kickstarters and the Store closed up:
Source 1: http://photobucket.com/gallery/user...ZvcnVtIFBvc3RzIG4gVGhyZWFkcy8xNi5qcGc=/?ref=1
Source 2: https://web.archive.org/web/2015050...ads/to-our-fans-both-present-and-future.4710/
Brax misled and bluntly lied to his community about his professional experience, while accepting their money through Kickstarter and a self-made donation system to develop a product that he was fully aware that at the time no one in his team had the skills to even start developing. By definition, this project is/was a scam.
That said, I want to remind you that sadly due their forum clean up, there is a lot that has been lost. I took multiple screen shots of the shit revolving around the development of this game, unfortunately it has been so many years that what I kept in my hard drive has been long lost, and lot of the content I've upload to photobucket got messed up with some sort of changes made to the website, making the pictures of full threads completely unreadable due the resolution.... luckily, we have the Way Back Machine and some scraps of what I've uploaded!
Let's start with Teddy's post on the entire issue after he left:
The answer to a question of a community on how the funds were being distributed trough the project (at least is was a believable answer?):
Lil Note: Many members of the ToA community blamed "trolls" (members of the forum MMO-Champion forum that were discussing the project there.) for the failure of both Kickstarters, thus why I've waited a couple of months after it's release to make this thread. According to https://steamcharts.com/app/893870, the game had an average of 4.1 players online the last 30 days... go figure.
Update#1: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/trials-of-ascension-–-steam.124004/#post-6316873
Update#2: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/trials-of-ascension-–-steam.124004/#post-6693017
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