Cimarb, on 09 August 2014 - 11:32 PM, said:
I am disappointed that they ignored our suggestions too, but can we not go down the "negativity with no meaningful contribution" road?
The absolute best thing that could be done is for PGI to release the art assets to the public domain after going bankrupt.
That is the most valuable contribution PGI could possibly make at this point, short of firing Paul and putting in competent business leadership - but even that would be mostly a waste as PGI has 'cleverly' cooked their books to make sure there is nothing left in the event of an asset seizure. Do the new maps really cost $250,000? Hell no. The maps, themselves, are not very costly.
Take Terra Therma, for example - the cost? The useless bit of construction equipment scattered around. Chalk up a bill for unique asset creation and some animation while throwing in the lawncare/snow shoveling costs during that time, and you've got $250,000 by time you factor in employee performance bonuses and server operation costs for the month it took to create the map.
Kind of like the useless bit of construction equipment with animations on Forest Village. Doesn't need to be there and is not at all a focal point of the map - yet costs money to put into the map when you have to pay studio artists.
Same with the "star gate" in Tourmaline.
The Canyon Network is about the only one that doesn't have a bunch of useless nonsense scattered about through it, and it came out during the 'rapid fire' release of maps back around April of 13.
So, as for what I expect from them - it's that they will waste their resources - deliberately - so that the game is effectively a cash-grab.
I know I am a 'negative nancy' - here, but when you look at the pattern of behavior, that is what it amounts to. Lots of empty promises with expensive products and development costs that make anyone connected to the computer industry perks an eyebrow at.
It would be like going to a fast food restaurant and having them argue that their burgers are 'artisan crafted' and therefor warrant a $20 charge for the burger. You'd look at the burger, look at the charge, and smack them in the face with the burger.
Of course, since people have no idea what is or is not a reasonable charge for various digital assets - they'll accept that a map takes a quarter of a million dollars to make without realizing that maps a hundred times more intricate with carefully crafted scripts get created by individuals for modding competitions for essentially free. And their collision models match up with their graphical models.
While being part of a company does mean that you have to pay for things that communities will self-create for free - claiming that it costs $250,000 is a massive stretch of the accounting. $50,000 would be a high-end for map development costs for games of this variety.
Which - I'm off on a tangent. Once I get started, I can just keep going and going. So I'll just stop, now - I have other things I've been neglecting elsewhere.