I have always wondered just how far you can take Madlibs for quest generation. So many quests are really just one of a dozen or so formats with local NPCs and objectives inserted. If the quest templates get created correctly how dynamic could quests become based on what a given city/settlement needs at the time and what is currently spawning in the area (assuming either state ever changes).
In light of the reality of Dwarf Fortress procedurally generating almost everything, pretty far, I'd say, Trasak. :)
The locations, names, races, items, goals, types, rumors, all of that is procedurally generated in the quest context, in DF. (aside from the entire world geography, topography and underground, too.)
I don't know. It does seem a concern to some extent, but to some other I've seen several games that didn't seem DB coded and some of them were amongst the most successfull and played.
Perhaps it's a consideration from this last decade for coders or whatever. I don't see it as a big issue if quests aren't shaked in and out once written.
I'm not a coder, my line of work is about as far from programming as you can get, but if, as all the coders in this thread say, using variables is such common and standard practice across all segments of the industry, then I don't see why it's hard to believe that what Zewtastic noticed is the (poor) result of a quick line done specifically for the stream.
Maybe the underlying database system isn't fully functional. Maybe it's not populated yet. Maybe that particular string related to that task is not finished.
Call it fanboyism or whatever, but there's too many variables (heh) to start grabbing pitchforks and poo-pooing the work that the coders and engineers are doing.
vjek said:eunichron said: ... Maybe the underlying database system isn't fully functional. ...Great Veeshan, don't even suggest that! That would bring the entire previous (almost) 7 years of development effort into question.
I seem to recall one the dev streams where they mentioned a big part of Project Faerthale was re-engineering a lot of the underlying systems, so that may very well have been true for the first 5-6 years.
I've been really trying to get my head around how something like this occurred.
It frankly makes no sense to me from my experience working with game systems like this.
I'm more than confident they're using LUA to script the NPC's. (https://www.lua.org/start.html)
And modern day LUA does have libraries that allow DB connection. (https://keplerproject.github.io/luasql/index.html) Much more functional than it used to have twenty years ago.
It's not beyond expectation that all object(NPC) related information would be in a relational DB of a sort. Maybe even MySQL.
(when a player enters a new zones, all information/detail about all NPC's [and other objects] in the zone are generally uploaded to your game client. It's not really that much in compressed binary or some other technique).
And they would have (I assume) made tools to add/edit entries, etc. Required for those creating quests, adding objects and lore.
In large projects of this nature you will have many databases and types, depending on the speed that you would need to acquire the data and the flexibility of it's functionality. A relational DB(MySQL, MSSQL), A NoSQL DB (Couchbase, Cassandra, Redis), maybe even some data that's kept in cache (https://redislabs.com). And of course there's your Azure, DynamoDB, etc.
Even from day 0, if you are scripting in LUA you would (I hope) have some connection to a DB where the master list of your thousands of objects(npc, etc.) would reside. It might be a different DB than where your player records would be kept, and so forth. It depends on the architecture.
Maybe the linkage code (to connect a quest to an npc to a player quest panel) hasn't been scripted in, someone hard-coded items, or numerous other possiblities I'm totally unaware of.
The fact that a character is recognized by npc's shows the player-character data object exists. This has to hold all pertinent fields. Such as name, gender, race & class. But it also has to retain what quests the player-character has seen, started, what quest step they are on for each quest, all their faction values, all their gear, their buffs, everything. The player-characters entire history basically. Otherwise the npc would keep showing the character the same quest intro dialog for example.
We saw NPCs kill Perkins Dire Lord(by reading his race and/or factions), and saw two NPC's fight, because they are at war (because of faction levels), so there must be some sort of data object associated with npc's.
Lot's of code work to do, not a lot of people to do it is likely the bottom line.
I guess I'm not concerned. Probably a simple explanation.
I just found it odd.
vjek said:Were any of those games client/server based, MauvaisOeil?
Absolutely. The two best examples I can give beeing EQ & Wow, they aren't recent or new for sure. But I'm 100% confident they didn't get npc id's in quest descriptions and texts as there were a lot of errors reported in both theses games mensionning wrong NPC's and such. Hell in the french localization of EQ (when it was quite a new thing) there were even developper's note to each other left in quest dialogs that actually appeared when talking to NPC's.
You are making a big assumption that the people writing the quests are directly coding those quests into the game. I very much doubt that they are. I would expect that whoever are creating the quests will be using an app designed for that purpose and will not be typical coding. The app will allow them to design quests in much the same way as someone who wants to create a picture will use paint. Normally you will never be concerned about coding unless the application doesnt do what you want it to. Then they will have a discussion with the coders of the app who will then change it. There maybe scripting involved, but again it will be to do with quest logic and not in-game display mechanics.
In this quest app I would expect that you will enter quest text that is to be shown to the player, indicate what items are to be shown where, link quest pages together and map out the quest logic path. The application will allow you to "pull" in variables that represent the game world items such as the quest givers name or a location or an item name. Once the quest mechanics have been mapped out it will be tested in the application before being exported to the game database. The quest builder will then test it in game world where the above problems has shown up. You will not be directly coding each and every quest into the game.
Yes, the data provided by the quest has true code behind it to allow the quest to operate in-game, but the problems described above are to do with text presentation of the initial quest design, not the failure of the in game quest mechanics. What has happened is that the quest designer has typed the name instead of using the correct internal variable. Thats it!
First impressions are an important aspect, but you are a tester. We are in pre-alpha. Your mind set should be to expect and find issues, not to be playing the game as though it is complete. You are here to spot the problems and raise them, not shout that the game is broken when it isnt.
There is also a strong posibility that at the time of that video they didn't have the test server and databases all connected properly so either it defaulted to the text used to build the UI or someone realized they were not linking properly and just threw in some example text to show the UI without thinking about how it would be analysed.
It could be hardcoded, but another possibility is that the one field is being pulled from the database is the screen name column, but the pop-up name is being pulled from another column. I.e. the code says get the Abbreviated_Name column for the screen, but should really be get the Full_Name column that is associated with the pop-up for the Unique_ID INNER JOIN that is associated with the NPC in the CharacterName database table.
It is not unusual to have multiple columns being associated with a unique key to get/change/be flexible, etc. I find it highly unlikely that that stuff is hardcoded at this stage, if it ever was hardcoded.
vjek said:eunichron said: ... Maybe the underlying database system isn't fully functional. ...Great Veeshan, don't even suggest that! That would bring the entire previous (almost) 7 years of development effort into question.
LOL! Dude, it's absolutely already in question. To the greatest extent it could be.
gamexilor1 said: At this point, I couldn’t care less how they code things, as long as this game gets released within the next decade.
I thought something like this, many years ago. But I was optimistic then. Somewhat. (My old boss at my last studio was not, and did not pledge.)
A decade? That might preclude me living long enough at this point, to actually see the game, much less an actual alpha.
We're at the moment of the development cycle, in years, where no game should still be this far behind, not to mention seemingly re-tooling things for the 2nd or 3rd time? Just keeping up with the Unity engine upgrades could be work enough.
VR people have now been cashing paychecks for years while continuing to talk game-theory and future plans, while deleting concerned forum posts and showing minor changes in on-going proof-of-concept videos. Video's which largely seem designed to keep the trickle of new pledging alive.
Frankly, if the alpha does not arrive soon (and I'm fairly confident it won't), I think it's safe to call it dead, for me. As it will either fade away or languish in a perpetual state of "under developement" as long as pledges trickle in, and the song and dance goes on.
zewtastic said:gamexilor1 said: At this point, I couldn’t care less how they code things, as long as this game gets released within the next decade.I thought something like this, many years ago. But I was optimistic then. Somewhat. (My old boss at my last studio was not, and did not pledge.)
A decade? That might preclude me living long enough at this point, to actually see the game, much less an actual alpha.
We're at the moment of the development cycle, in years, where no game should still be this far behind, not to mention seemingly re-tooling things for the 2nd or 3rd time? Just keeping up with the Unity engine upgrades could be work enough.
VR people have now been cashing paychecks for years while continuing to talk game-theory and future plans, while deleting concerned forum posts and showing minor changes in on-going proof-of-concept videos. Video's which largely seem designed to keep the trickle of new pledging alive.
Frankly, if the alpha does not arrive soon (and I'm fairly confident it won't), I think it's safe to call it dead, for me. As it will either fade away or languish in a perpetual state of "under developement" as long as pledges trickle in, and the song and dance goes on.
You're making the assumption that it's "that far behind". That said, I recommend you go listen to the latest dev stream recording about Pledges. There's an interesting tidbit in there that may shed some light on what their anticipated timeline is.
Kalok said:... You're making the assumption that it's "that far behind". That said, I recommend you go listen to the latest dev stream recording about Pledges. There's an interesting tidbit in there that may shed some light on what their anticipated timeline is.
Here's the reformatted youtube tanscript of the pledge recording:
--
hi folks it's that time of the month again and i have another visionary realms legend with me today customer service manager michael artois butler
welcome michael
me oh you just got cut off there mate
oh
that first part sorry you can hear me
okay yeah i can hear you can hear me
perfect yes sorry i think you've spoken at the last bit
just popped out okay so
topic for today is pledges and rewards so we'll go through the list from the website
from the pre loaded questions from all of our vips
in order top to bottom get through as many as we can and then we'll try and open up for a q a at the end so getting stuck
straight into it uh first question is say i wanted to give additional money to vr without affecting my existing pledge
what's the best way to do that just open a support ticket or should i send bearer bonus to kilsin
[Laughter]
well the answer to that we actually have quite a few um fans and and people who've pledged that have either they've got a couple different
ways either they've gone ahead and opened a whole brand new pledge they completed their vip and went around for the second round
or we have also other people who decided i want to give something every month so they sign up for the monthly subscription
that pretty much all that does is give you access to the to the forums and also show that you're supporting us but it's another
way that you can give us on a monthly basis um other than that usually the best way to do it is we do have a miscellaneous payment link
that we can supply via support and then you can just you can give extra money to that um but there are some curious things there
i know if you don't want to change your your level and whatnot we're making some changes to how all the pledges have worked
because i don't want people to feel that they can't contribute because they like what level they were on or they're getting a special pledge
reward that they don't see in the other one so we've been doing a lot more of grandfathering in a lot of those pledge
rewards to allow the people to keep those if they want to continue to uh you know pledge more so we don't we
the best answer probably is to just contact support we work through each person individually to figure out where you're at and what you want to do um
we have some folks who even gift pledges by paying more into it then they might want to give it to their brother or you know their best friend or something like that and get them in the game as well
okay
i will be honest with you not none of this has been figured out um how it's going to be handled we do know we have pleasure wars people are getting the pets
um but we also know there's a very fine line especially with many of you who are ardent supporters and we don't want to go to any type of a pay-to-win
model so we're very cognizant that as we add more things in that way we want to make sure that we're not um stepping over that line where people
would feel that we're going against what we've always said which is pay to win is not where pantheon is um i'm not sure how the pets are going
to work i would say just from the initial conversations we've had it's going to be similar to where it just kind of follows you around
um i don't know what they're going to look like yet i've been asking for some of the artists to maybe give me some mock-ups that we can
put out there because that's kind of the next step i'd like to do is actually get some information on a lot of these pleasure reward these cosmetic items um
so that people would have that uh information perfect and that question was how is a vanity pet used in game and how can you get more pets beyond pledging i
had myself muted in
obs so the recording won't know that question only these guys will okay i'm sorry about that um
what is the difference between an explorer's backpack and a back and a bag of the leg legget um again those haven't comple we haven't created those items yet
um but we're trying to be very careful in um again back to the pay to win uh type of things but the bags are going to you know have a certain they probably
all have the same amount of slots um they're all going to have if we haven't decided on you know weight reduction or not weight reduction and
where that falls into a pay to win type of mentality which is something that um you know we always debate internally as well but they're probably going to be
very similar the difference is is we are really going for a lot of we were trying to go for flavor of the cosmetic items so that if you were
say like for example that legate pledge that you might want all the things that are of the legate thing because you like to
role play that or it's something really important to you that you have things that kind of uh are in the same flavor or you know that can match or whichever way that
they're going to be so they're going to be very similar but it's just going to come down to how you how you want to choose because as we know bags don't show in the game so it's more of what it would look like say in your inventory and what you prefer
perfect and i might group these next two together because they're very similar so what kinds of illusions will the flasks create how long will they last
and also what in the world does the ring of the fallen do
sounds intriguing uh those are still being fleshed out so that some of this is these are all things that we have on our on our list of items i continue to to push on these since uh the pledges and the pleasure awards are something that falls under my uh responsibility um we don't know i mean those are kind of
some of them some of those neat things maybe we open that up and have people give us their thoughts on what they think it should do
what they would like to see because then that would give us some ideas of uh the way to progress for this you know i remember in a lot of different games
if you're able to
make an illusion you know are you gonna look like a different different class right or a certain npc um or even an inanimate object those are always cool too so um maybe that's something that we want to hear from all of you what what you guys think yeah perfect mate
um okay so this one's about renaming items um i don't understand why items would need renaming is that for crafted items only or will we really be able to change the name of dropped items in-game um the plan for this it kind of fell into um again this is one of those early those early rewards and as things were being thought out
they didn't really kind of go all the way down the rabbit hole of what would that mean while you're in game the thought process we currently have with this is
that you say you loot something a really cool sword you get something that you really like and you want to it's it's yours it's you know it's not something you're gonna be able to give off to anybody else but you want to give it its own name you know maybe it's a um
it's you know a sword that is you know has ice damage or something so you want to call it you know ice spike or or something like that uh where you would be able to if you didn't like that name you can put that name onto whatever that item is um for all intents and purposes
within our database that is still the same it's gonna still be the same item of what it originally was but when you see it and then if other people say inspect you and look at it they would see it with what that that name that you have and probably in parentheses what what it really was right that's it also um
there will be like a a name filter on that as well so you can oh yeah yeah we're not gonna let it can get out of hand but yeah there would be there would be
the names that would be appropriate for things so we're not gonna just let people name things that don't fit within our our theme of the game um awesome and the
last one for this um poster is there any discussion or thought into allowing us to prepay for the monthly sub as a way to support the game uh i'd be willing to put money in today to earn three months of the game after release um we have talked about it and as you know there were some very early pledges that um you know and some of these and some of the larger pledges that give you uh x amount of months um as a part of a subscription uh because we are a subscription based game
um that is not something that we're willing to do right now because we don't we want to make sure that that just kind of leaves us with um it's an accounting nightmare for us because if somebody was saying to change their account or it moves over here once the game comes out there there could be some cs nightmares with us trying to figure out where everything went um i'm not ruling it out to say that as we get closer to launch that there would be a uh the ability to do that which uh you know a lot of people might like for budgeting purposes they can just kind of pay ahead and you know and pay those next several months that they don't want to play but it's just not feasible for um this period of the development
okay so um this person's curious about the designer quest line part of the rainborn pledge what would be involved in that what kind of quest
um seeing that quests as a thing seem to be coming out of different direction in pantheon norm would be a normal type of quest a keeper quest epic law etc they're already there's actually quite a bit of latitude for these the people who have this as a pledge perk
would be working you know via email with different members of the design team that you know you would say you know what type of a quest that you were looking to do we know where we need to slot certain things in uh certain types of quests whether it's a lower level quest or it's like you said maybe it's a equipment quest or um something has to do with lore or anything like that um and then we would figure out where that would slot and then there would be guidelines given for that so to the point of there needs to be x amount of steps um you know their needs and those steps would require maybe it's not all going out and killing certain types of monsters there might be you know you have to have a couple of uh steps where you kill things a couple of things where you maybe combine something and crafting or you know that just we'll kind of lay that out and do a framework for it and then get a lot of the input as far as we would then be able to provide
like okay here's these npcs we're thinking about it's in this area this is kind of the flavor of it and then have that person uh work with us to come up with you know a lot of the the type of text it would be working with say you know justin with his um with all the lore stuff that he has and making sure that it jives with that and and and work through that whole process to where we get it kind of in the end that it's ready to go in so using we would be using our tools on our side but actually getting all that input for that design piece um from the person who pledged
yeah perfect that would be the same we've designed a dungeon as well for the um even higher yes well the design attention is a little differently so we actually put some information up on that um that one is if i remember right that is at our the top tier of the vip yes um and and our plan pre-coveted um was that we were actually going to invite people to come into the office um on a set you know set a couple of days and it's not and it's like a it's a work session as we we would probably have a uh a design already done right it's already mapped out as far as what the geography and things like that look like but sitting down and working with uh the developers to come up with okay
what lives in this in this dungeon what type of quest would be involved in this what uh you know what type of uh epic battles would be taking place in here so
that would be one of those things where again we have a lot of work we've already uh done as far as making sure that the geography and everything is there but really finding out okay what what's going to happen what are we doing here who's fighting who how does this you know what kind of their traps are there different things in here and you know we're still wanting to that do that but we're not sure whether it's going to end up that we might have people that would be on say a zoom session or something like that throughout the day just depending on how travel would be based on the global pandemic
yeah awesome okay
so this is a very common question any thought to some a la carte options in pledging for instance i'm really interested in the cloth map but i can't get to the
rainbow and pledge
oh i love a la carte we talked about this i believe last year when we talked about this and i know i've posted about it a la carte is something that i'm beating
the drum on a regular basis however as you've all seen we've just revamped the main website the next piece that has to come with that is actually the storefront
um for the pledging and all of that and with that would come the ability to do all the cart pieces um even in a la carte adding in you know you know choose your
own pledge type of thing or just doing an add-on piece like i want this but oh also give me a shirt and give me uh the cloth map or whatever we know how
popular some of those items are and we want to find a way to bring those for folks to get and that's really where we're at honestly the only reason that the cloth
map was we removed that from that is physical items is a is as a small team that we are it's a that is a difficult uh item for us in a lot of ways to fulfill
um you know we have there's an overhead associated with that as opposed to digital pieces which we can you know do pretty easily within game so we are trying to find ways that how do we how do we give this and how to how can we make sure that we give people what they want because i know people want some people want all the physical things they don't necessarily want in-game cosmetic items then there are other people who want every single cosmetic item we ever are gonna make and that might that's gonna be a way that we can deliver that too right
so you purchase a pledge but then you want uh maybe a couple other uh cosmetic items well how do we do that how do we deliver that and so those are some of the things that we're looking at that will be coming with that store revamp when we actually have uh the ability to revamp it
yeah good info okay so again this is on designer quest dungeon raid how will the implementation of pledge rewards regarding designer quest dungeon rate work will the earliest backers of the tiers that grant that be given the opportunity first to put forward their ideas and how long would you estimate it would take in years or whatever metric you feel is fit to implement them into the game post launch
so i think this means if like you know 10 people all have designer quest and 10 people have designed a dungeon like how is that order gonna be arranged you know
first in best dressed kind of thing and how long will that take for them to be able to do that well like i said the designer the designer dungeon thing is going to be kind of almost like a group think in a lot of ways that one because of the immense amount of work that's involved with that and ideas and coming up and how we generate that stuff that that's going to be kind of a group project the design a quest line or the or those type of things um we are going to be probably sending all of those out um at the same time and then work them as they come in very similar what we've done now already with um we've had some you know name and npc and uh name we had some name a point of interest and i can tell you right now that um some of those uh npcs are already in game that people had uh put in names for so those are going in slowly as they get populated um so it's just us it's just a a process of us getting in the information and then making sure that we can um you know slot the the resources to use it so it's not really going to be like kind of a first come first serve it's going to be let's get everybody the chance to start working on it and then as they come in we put them where they need to go and we keep track of that
yeah that's perfect um
okay so originally one of the pledge rewards for an additional character slot which is not shown for the current vip pledges only pledges 200 and lower uh is this an oversight what was the intended number of character slots per server for each of the pledge tiers and is there a way to add additional slots at each level all of this
i believe all of the all of the pledge tiers i think from 100 up have that additional character slot whether it's not showing on there i can go back and look at the pledge page and and make some changes to that but the intention is they all have that whether they're going to get i don't know how many i don't think we've settled on how many characters you're going to be allowed per realm um but all of them are going to have that additional one that's just that's just how it is for all the pledges so yeah some of the earlier ones might have it might have been oversight they missed that but that's part of our grandfathering end where we're allowing you know basically all this stuff um for all the pledges
the other question we get all the time is about early character creation earlier character creation is going to be on all of those pledges that that also had the early name reservation there are two different types of uh rewards the early name reservation is something will happen before we actually go through and we'll be able to lock those names to certain accounts but then probably you know three days or a week before the game actually launches for um for full release it will be where people can go in and do their early character creation who have that as a perk they can go in create their characters you know do all the the customization you want to do for the faces and whatever else and then they're ready to go as soon as those servers turn on you'll be able to just log right in so that is something that we're going to be providing for all of those pledges
perfect
um okay so is there a way to pre-purchase extended game time for both the primary account and the buddy code account say that again uh is there a way to pre-purchase extended game time for both the primary account and the buddy code account
not yet that again is something that will happen as we get closer to um to launch uh you will be able to then at that point go in and you know buy a three month or six month or a year subscription whichever you want to do you know and probably there's going to be like a you know a small discount across that for the larger
subscription that you purchase um that's how you do it the buddy key we kind of changed the wording on that because it was very confusing a lot of people had with well if i'm getting another copy of the game does that mean that i get two people into you know alpha testing and two people in the beta testing so we changed the body key and it's for at launch you basically can hand this off instead of having to have somebody go and spend you know whatever the retail price we're gonna have for a game key you can give them this game key then they can sign up and they can they can pay for a subscription or you can give them a subscription yeah perfect
um okay so back in may 2019 uh atoya made a comment about a resolution uh that should be forthcoming on a la carte upgrade options for pledge tears has there been a resolution on this approach and if so um is it to be implemented it is going to be implemented
uh that's what we talked about but just don't it's we're having some technical limitations again as a small team um people are wearing many hats and it just comes down to when we have the time to put forward with that so now the website is out of the way i'm hoping hoping hoping that uh i can get some resources assigned over there to start working back on what we already had a nice framework for yeah good stuff
um stand-alone fundraising options have been implemented prior specialized name plates have additional options been considered recently
they are always being considered uh i will tell you that was a very um we were very happy with that that was a very successful um fundraising one that allowed us to bring in um if i remember at that with our animator um and and ross has been doing you know tremendous he's been with us and um it is something we look at i mean this this is but we really want to have a um a set goal with it right we don't want to just go out and say hey give us give us money and not really have a reason for what we're trying to get to as it's like say a stretch goal right
um yeah we've discussed it um you know there was there was talk i remember even at the time we were talking about i know people always want them you know talking about the necro talking about the bard you know is that a stretch goal is that something that you know we work towards getting that in is that something we want to do but we're also very cognizant that especially all of you as our vips you have spoken with your wallets already you've told us what you want you told us
that you support us and we don't want to go back and continue to you know feel like we're asking you to put more into something with it we're wanting to show you what we have and hoping that um as we continue to develop the game and you see what you have that you know maybe you're inclined to give something but we're not
wanting to you know go back and just make you feel like it's we're always asking you know like a say a pbs fundraiser every month type of thing um
could the continued existence of the one year subscription pledges be used to extrapolate an internal timeline of development for example if someone were to pledge 100 a month for pre-alpha access would that pre-offer access need to be relevant for as many months as the difference between the pre-alpha and the alpha access pledges
no it has no timeline uh correlation between those the access to pre-alpha testing access is it's a pledge reward it's a thank you uh as well as we want to have you come in and help us with this it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to last another year right um it's and and that's one of those things that i'm very cognizant about is like okay what what does that look like as we move forward and we're rolling through say with pa5 now and you know when alpha is going to be on the horizon whenever that's going to be which i'm not going to get any dates um but what does that you know what does that look like in i don't know we did we real we honestly we broke up the payment plans for just so that it makes it easier for people who want to support us so that they don't necessarily have to put such a large amount out in one fell swoop because we all know budgets can be tight and we just try to find some way that it makes it easier for people to support us if they want to yeah that's it exactly um
i'm going to read quickly one from the vip sure just because it's relevant um will our account our account pages eventually update with the details of our specific pledges example uh the originator pledges from 2017 are no longer available but i would like to see what rewards were part of that pledge
yes that is the plan of store 2.0 and the account management piece of that so that was in my uh my documentation stuff that i said i needed to have um for our store going forward is the ability for people to see uh what one they exactly have and we started that we have kind of the first little bit of an iteration on that now if you go to uh the pledge page now and you click on upgrade you can actually click and it will give you a comparison right now of saying okay you have this and you would be getting this so it gives you that's like the very first iteration of what we're trying to do but um ideally what it's going to look like is you would be able to log into your account it said oh i have the this like you said originator plan you'd be able to click on that it would show you the date that you purchased and it would say here is everything that was on the originator pledge at that time that you purchased right because there are some things that have dropped on and off on some of these pledges earlier before that which we're trying to stop doing now just because it is so confusing but yeah that that is our goal to have that
okay perfect um
[Music]
okay a little bit of a funny one are there any pledges that were put in early on that you now wish hadn't been promised [Laughter]
you know there are there are some things that i i don't know maybe not everybody's aware of this but there were some of the early earliest pledges there was stuff that that came through um there's a few people who have some stuff where they were just trying to figure out like there's a there's a there's a horse there is a pair of there's a pair of boots yes and those are uh are those are a very um sore subject because again we're getting down to what constitutes pay to win and what
doesn't and how do we resolve those things so yeah there are some that i think that weren't just as well thought out when the team was a lot smaller and maybe not as well versed with looking at some of those implications of of when you give somebody something what it's going to do i'm not going to say i'm an expert at
all on setting up any type of kickstarting or crowdfunding pledge stuff i'm learning i've been learning as i go we've we've obviously we've slipped in some areas and we try to resolve those and be as honest and upfront as we can um yeah but it's a learning process for us and yeah some of those early ones were there there was one it was really odd there was a box um there's like seven people are gonna get a box of like actual like a physical copy of the game and a box and some other stuff in it i'm like how am i gonna deliver a box to somebody i gotta build boxes yes there's a few things in there that was questionable to start with but again as as you said we were learning we we we thought it sounded great as gamers to start with and then we realized that someone actually had to make those things and that those people were us and we're like okay now how do we do this so a lot of things back there we kind of we're a little bit smarter now as we're kind of moving along to not unbalance the game and promise something that's going to be too hard to deliver to many people so which is why we kind of put a little bit of restrictions on some of the things going forward
yeah i mean it's it um it's changed i mean over the years yes if you look back at that early kickstarter stuff even how we get games now is even then it was most of the stuff was still delivered digitally but you could still theoretically go into a store and purchase a copy if you wanted right most everything now i mean what's the percentage of games that are actually delivered digitally so people don't care as much about physical copies they might for something like a collector's edition and maybe that's something that's appealing but again that's something that has another cost involved and maybe that's something that we could introduce as another little uh you know extra a la carte type of thing if people wanted some type of a physical something for it absolutely
um so this is another quick one of the vips there was a period of time where old ks backers which is kickstarter were able to hook their old pledges back in for some of those earliest rewards is there any chance we'll see this return to court those earliest adopters
so we have quite a few people who are still honestly on they they did that they took they pledged uh for the kickstarter it failed we put out the the call and said hey if you want to come to our website and pledge that we'll honor those and those are honored and we have quite a few people who are still on those and those are some sweet packages um however you know we also have some people with those kickstarter pledges that want some of this new stuff we've got and this is again our change kind of in our stance in that we would like those people to if they want to upgrade they shouldn't lose any of that stuff because they're such a long time backer
in fact i just helped somebody a long time back it wasn't one of the kickstarter ones but one from before this had some retired stuff upgrade and they're now into the vip piece and they are getting all the other things there but they also get some of those cool things that they didn't that aren't on there like like the cloth map right they they get that because they pledged way back when they had that as one of their their rewards so they're getting that because during the time they pledged that was on their pledge and so we're not going to take that away from them
yeah and that's also another one's just posted um speaking of the early pledges there was a five dollar head start add-on available that is supposed to offer early access is that actually going to be honored or has it been reworked
i can honestly there's not very many people that that impacts so i think i'll be handling each of those individually uh it's most likely will just be if
they're not already i have to go back through and look um because a lot of those are like you said there are the add-ons so if those people are not already in say
alpha or beta uh we'll probably just convert it into something like that so they can get in and and and play that way to help with testing you know those last
those those last stages or whichever one they would be on but we're not the discussion at this point has not been okay we're gonna say launch on a tuesday
or whatever but we'll let everybody in that had early access on the friday before um that had that discussion we haven't had internally yet um i haven't gotten the temperature of the team on how we feel about that i know personally for myself um i like the idea of you know we open and everybody's able to get access at the same time but the people who have the early access to create their characters are going to be a little bit ahead because they've already you know spent that 30 minutes or whatever figuring out what do i want in this class you know what do i want them to look like what what's their abilities you know like as far as their uh strength and constitution what i want those to have so it's still a discussion we're having but we we really haven't made a decision yet yeah that's it
um okay so i would love to see a lifetime subscription expansion pack made available most gaming subscriptions have an annual prepaid package for around 100 so something in the two and a half thousand dollar range that includes expansions would be something i could support we we had a lifetime we did very early um yeah we explained this too like i put a post out quite a few years ago after we revoked the lifetime subscription because we are a subscription-based um we do have the subscription model for our company to to make revenue and giving away early lifetime subs for a set price and then not being able to continue to collect off that after that period um it does impact us in quite a significant way um so we we revoke that to continue with our subscription pledges and carry on like that so we didn't have to put a cash shop or anything like that in there to sell exactly you know things that would unbalance the game yeah and that's one of those ones again like i had recently we i had another person who upgraded um and they had that they had the the the lifetime subscription because they were one of our earliest pledgers at a lower tier they get to keep that as well because they had that at the time but they've also now have upgraded and so there's no reason that they should lose something because they've been backing us for so long we don't want to take anything away that's just that's just the wrong message to send anyone you know all of you have been supporting us for so long and there's no reason that we should be taking those away from you that way
i believe mine was that i got the journeyman pledge from kickstarter that got transferred over i had like lifetime and early testing access which i was pretty happy nice until i became a member of the team um all right so
for those of us who have the pledge perk design an item can you explain exactly what that entails what limitations there will be and when designing these items might take place
uh that is the next one i have on uh my agenda to do uh in regards to the design or name um uh perks from the earliest ones um i haven't flushed it completely out i still have some more talks i have to have with joppa and how we want to approach this but a lot of is going to be you know not only naming the item what type of an item it's going to be whether it's a weapon armor um some other inventory piece right um and then any types of things like does it have any type of any type of stats or um you know any any basically anything that you would see in an item description even down to if they have flavor text right um because some items might have some flavor text there and those would all be could be part of this now again all of these are that are um that are submitted we usually ask people to give us like three because um we want to get we want to get one for each of the people who have this as a perk um but sometimes you know we'll get stuff that's just not going to work within the game it's either named incorrectly or it's too overpowering and so those are where we can go back and find one that hey we can make might be able to work with this and then we start conversations uh with the person who submitted to say can we what about this we we have an issue here can you you know maybe tweak this a little bit make it so that would work for us and we'll go and and work with them back and forth and most likely a lot of that conversation will probably be coming from from me or potentially a designer just depending on how busy they are but i would be relaying the information that i get
from the design team
but yeah that's kind of our next our next one on that is to help us with some of those some of those items which you know we and also honestly the one big caveat is we don't want items that are going to be named after your character um that just isn't going to work and those automatically you will get removed or something like we had some people who who tried to name an npc and they were naming them like the names of you know real-life people we can't we can't do that so yeah that's where we try to work with people so and then once it's put in what i'm trying to do is actually go through once we've selected one we'll let the people know hey
uh your you know item such-and-such was approved or like your name of an npc whatever it was has been approved same game and then now it comes a little easter egg to go out and try to find that when you get in where is this where is this npc or where does this where does this item come from so yeah that's here perfect right
okay last one and we have already touched on this but it is basically just to reiterate what will the difference between explorer's backpack a bag of the leggett
and satchel of the black rose b so capacity weight reduction will bags be clickies or give stats
we did go over this that will just be your appearance on the same slot yeah it'd be probably appearance uh it's kind of kind of same thing for the the cosmetic item so we have we can cover this with uh the chest piece right so we have a tunic of the ages we have a i think there's a robe of the black rose there's a bunch of different ones there again it's going to come down to what that appearance is now i'm wanting to get those items and what they look like obviously prior to launch so that people can choose what they have uh what they want with it right so you know i really want that one or oh that one looks terrible or fit might this fit this this character for me right um and then just we've been spitballing uh between uh madoki and i were actually the way that we would deliver those
to people so maybe there's just a way that you um you can go to a vendor with a special coin we give you and you can choose right you get one or the other type of thing and that's they're all gonna be they're gonna be similar but they're gonna they're gonna look different right and that's what's gonna give you that um that ability to wear those cosmetics that you want the oh like the special nameplate snake
yeah um we're not going to reopen that one that was a very special one for that and that was going to look very different um because it was that it was that special special drive that we did um there are name plates and nameplates are going to be part of uh most of the rewards um however i don't know what they're all going to look like yet we're still figuring that out i think that as people have been in we've gotten a lot of feedback honestly in uh you know for the shakeouts as well right and people see the nameplate so we want to we want to know you know what does that look like how are people feeling about that and how how we're gonna um address that i know that we have what we're also talking about little little icons right you have a lot of games you have like a little icon maybe by your name interchangeable so maybe you collect some other name plates and other icons which you can have you know one visible right whichever one you choose so yeah um there will be some name plates um i'd love to see and it's like i can't you know it's not my side of the thing there but i'd love to find some that may be requestable for some name plates too
so that maybe that would be something that we could we can push to the design team so i think that would be awesome you run along somebody and it's like where'd you get that one they did some epic quest that would be awesome exactly and look the dragon slayer killing like a dragon in vanguard you used to get like a dragon slayer title that was after the raid yeah it was something i was like looking forward to for so long when i got it was amazing things like that that question too i muted myself in obs to clear my throat but it was can you reopen the nameplates again just for those on the recording who go what the hell was he just talking about um they'll now know why all right
so number two can we do a monthly pledge to upgrade to the three thousand and ten thousand dollar tiers yes it takes a little more work on our side to do this but we we do handle this so um there's a we have one for the there's already one for the rainborn which is the uh the three thousand dollar tier um any money that you've already pledged obviously will um applies to whatever that is so you're talking about the upgrade so say you have for most people that are in this audience you have the you know you're at the the vip pledge you have the thousand dollar tier you want to go to the rainborn um you have to pay that basically the difference so you can do those monthly payments that i think are the 300 payments but you're only going to have to do as many to get you up to that level plus i think there's just a little bit that we've been figuring out just to cover some of our costs i'll be honest our monthly payments um for all of the packages that we have the monthly payments they're a little more expensive for us because we are charged we're not a payment processor our payment processors do charge you a little bit more for those transactions so because we rely so much on our our fans to help us with the development of the game um it's tough for us to eat all of those costs for those on a monthly basis so that's why we put some of those out and they're like a 12 month or 11 month um but the the the best way to do this is just contact support
uh madoki and i both are very willing to come up with a plan outside of even that that will make it make sense for you um we've had we actually had some people i've had some people that were say at the 300 level and they wanted to get to the vip and we we gave them a you know like kind of like a one-time offer for them where they could do it in a two-month payment because they didn't want to do the hundred dollars a month and we were able to to get them that way so just talk with us we're willing to work through this and find a a payment plan um for where you're wanting to go to um we're pretty flexible with that we are a small shop but um a doc and i talk on a daily basis and work through these that's it and if you're not sure the best thing too is to um submit a a what is it something a ces ticket that's it submit a cs ticket and ask the question
the the guys are great um there they'll be able to help you with whatever question you have uh so going on
number three status of potential guild pledges
yeah that is something that um i'm pushing for the store 2.0 you would say so um looking at and we've actually drawn up quite a few different uh potential ideas for what that would look like and what that would mean so um how do we get guilds you know involved right now guild functions within the game are not there but it is something that as we move forward we know it's going to be a stronger piece that we want so what what are the most important things to that guild and maybe that's something that again um share with us your ideas on if there was to be a a guild type of a pledge or a guild package um what would you want to see in that
you know i mean we've had some discussions if does it mean that you get x amount of like maybe even once we launch there's a guild subscription and you get x amount of um you pay this money and you get this many months or this many like accounts paid for for that month that are part of that guild and there's something else there um but yeah we're open to listening to really what what is important to the guilds and and figuring out um what would make sense to put into into pantheon that doesn't you know break the game basically yeah nice and
the last one is about spousal and buddy account upgrades that don't involve making another account
yes is that possible or what is the um so one of the things in part of our account management that we're looking at is we do have quite a few people who play with
spouses or play with family and what does that look like in say an account management format so maybe you have one master account underneath it multiple game accounts that can be controlled and paid for all through one transaction which should make it easier to keep everybody kind of in one you know one billing cycle or however they want to do that we've we've experimented with that right now with our accounting our account system that we have for um the game accounts and we're actually testing that with some of our our test accounts and it seems to work well so we're looking at how does that make sense if we wanted to roll that out at release so that people could you know you have one say family accountant underneath that you could have other other game accounts um and and what that means perfect
um and just on nameplates someone put forward what about different colored names instead of nameplates i know people who would pay stupid dollars for colored names in game yeah
i think that we go back and forth of that i know that there's also a pretty vocal uh group that would be against that um seeing that in game i mean i don't know um it just comes down to opinion on how people are going to kind of feel about that if you see that i mean that the colors of the names really should mean something and we don't want to set it up as like a uh you know i'm better than you type of thing because i have this color name or whatever um we do have you know that makes sense to have some of the names different colors which be you know cs people or things like that but uh i don't know that's one of those things where we we've talked about a little bit there but we really don't want to turn it into something where people feel that they're missing something or again it's does that cross over into the pay to win where people feel that somebody's getting something else because they paid more money yeah and
also another idea thrown forward was a custom guild icon slash name plate um for a guild which is a pretty good idea yeah certainly within the realm you know that's something we can talk about i'd like to see that in that if we're having a discussion topic about it let's let's talk about it and we've got um 187 actually has got a guild discussion up about um guild pledges so he's linked that in the vip section so if you guys want to follow that and um add to that i'll um i'll link that to the team and we can we'll keep an eye on it okay
so we got 10 minutes left guys well that's done for all the hard questions the um as in like the pre-pre-loaded questions
if you've got anything that we didn't cover that you want to talk about or anything you want a little bit more detail on if you know that we can talk more about it then please tag my name in discord chat and we'll get as many more done as we can in the next 10 minutes
it's been good so far lots of good information well well thanks i'm as we said we're a small team so a lot of us take on a lot of different areas and uh this is ne of those areas where as when i came in three years ago they're like help help with this help us figure out what we do with all of it and who who gets what and where does it go and how do we track all this yeah it was a i i worked on the pledge rewards folk for a while back then trying to help sort them out and i did a lot of work on it and wow it was i got a few more gray hairs than i would have liked going through all that stuff i spent my days buried in spreadsheets most of the days so yeah that's that's it um
so this question is about lizard race when this is really about more pledges and rewards but we don't really have an idea on a lizard race just yet or if it will be in game but it would be nice we'll see what happens if we can fit it within the law and we get the teams to um kind of sort that out we'll see what we can do and a rabbit race i don't know let's just remind when you say rabbit it reminds me of the rakies from vanguard they used to have a little rocky rogue all right so we've got 10 minutes guys we can wrap it up early it technically is a 45 minute drt dev round table but we can push it out to an hour if you guys have more questions
we're happy to hang around but we don't want to just drag it on for the sake of it and make people listen to us for no reason is there anything you guys want to add to the previous questions we have or anything new i want to say before we end is that if you have any questions because it has been a little ambiguous in some of the pledge things always the best thing to do is open a support ticket i go through those in fact i get all the pledged ones that come to me in most cases and we can answer those for you and you know that it again it's going to come down to our our goal is to make sure that we're taking care of those who have been taking care of us um that's important to us and we want to recognize that so you're going to hear more often yes we'll do that or we'll figure out a way
to do these things then just flat out no so that's just how we want to approach this yeah that's exactly right we appreciate it we're first and foremost uh
first and foremost crowdfunded and the the amount of support from the community has been amazing those who sometimes support and then you know take a break and just let things kind of simmer until they come back and check in sporadically and or to those that log in every day and follow us um our every move um we we appreciate you all
it's much love there it's um yeah it's uh it's a huge effort for what you guys have done for us and we appreciate it immensely all right
so is there a way the nameplate option could be added to our personal profiles i think that's more of a forum you mean on the forums
yeah so maybe with the new forums potentially i mean there's a lot of work that we need to do on that um i haven't talked to molad really yet on all of the capabilities we're going to be able to do with the forums but yeah i think that there'd be some kind of there'll be some cool stuff there if we were able to do you know recognize something within the pledge perks um on those forums i think that'd be kind of cool so that's a discussion we'd have to have yeah cool
um there's another one first i think if you put a support ticket in asking that question mate i think you will um the guys will be able to handle that when
they can actually see your account um so pledge suggestion submitted in-game painting uh not necessarily obvious not necessarily of yourself imagine that for example many mmos have art in various in-game locations yeah that's a good idea man yeah self-portraits i think like painting it does get into there is a few here's a few hurdles with that and we kind of cover it with even the way we like these the perks we have for like the name and item or the npcs and stuff um because of the way that society gets with litigation uh we have to be careful with um some of the items that we get as far as you know ideas or things that are used
it's one of the reasons why we don't take any unsolicited ideas um through the through any of our things we just can't we can't do that because if we were to do something similar to that that somebody might say oh i told you that right
um it's an interesting thing it might follow along with that i know that but the problem is we've retired most of those name you know name and item or design and item things those are for really those early backers so um i don't know if it's going to come back it's an interesting idea though we'd have to figure out how we could do it and make it such a way that um it doesn't turn into some type of a mess or that maybe somebody used something that's copyrighted from someone else and we just didn't know because we can't go out and find the copyright on our right so i think it's like talking about like dogs playing poker he's in a ton of eq taverns like for each tavern salmon's playing poker i remember yeah i remember we put all those in yeah so something like that i think like you know i don't know if we could take it from the public or from you know third parties but maybe you know putting forward a competition or something i could do for the community where you guys vote for what you want we can get our art team to um make something like that so you've had a you know an input you can contribute to it but i don't know if we can actually take third-party um you know portraits or things like that you know if you have a contest the only thing that's going to win is gas bats yeah yeah i know i've i've already got one like briefed up for that that's uh um we even joke about that in their dev channels you would have seen too michael the skype channels about gas bats that's still an ongoing joke yeah okay so um bloke bats
um so we've got about five minutes left the vip round tables they go as soon as we're finished here um i stopped the recording we all
say you know i thank you in a fair well and then i immediately start uploading i will then post it after about an hour an hour and a half i'll post it to the vips and the champions in their dedicated sub forums and then one week later i open it up and i will announce it and post it across all of our um official channels to the public so you guys get the the live version the champions get in on the um immediate release for one week and then after that everybody else gets to
have a listen uh oh rich you have some time to uh to to basically mute me or take things out i like it yeah no they do i put us up just raw there's there's
nothing no um editing going on whatsoever i just got to remember i keep muting myself in obs to mute coughs or the neighbor's making a noise or banging doors i'll
mute and then i forget to turn it back on and ask a question so then you start talking and answer something and the recording people have no idea what
you're talking about not too much i fed my cat before we started so she didn't get to hear her much nice i've only done that twice and i've explained both times so it should be good but yeah usually i'm pretty good okay well that's pretty much it guys we'll um we'll wrap it up we've got we can't really give any pre-offer
stories at the moment um oh no sorry um khaleesi is saying thanks um to you for fun interacting during pre-offer and yeah i i try to i try to get in there because
i know it's a long haul for a lot of us and so i appreciate everybody who helps and helps us throughout the whole process with testing and everything else i'm looking forward to when we have it again so i can't tell you when but i'm looking forward to it me too i haven't been able to get in as much i got in a couple of times and was um a bit of banter and doing some trolling trying to offer sell gold to people i banned you for that um but yeah um yeah i want to definitely
get you for the next one it was a lot of fun gmming and catching up with everyone and getting to interact with the community and run around and group with people and turn off my gm powers and and have some fun it was it was really good yeah well hopefully by the next one they'll have made my hammer of banning which i asked for yes please i would love one of those too mate and on that note we'll wrap it up guys thank you very much we appreciate everyone we got a big turnout
today which was great so thank you all to those who came in and spent their time with us all those of you who gave up sleep as well from europe and other places we really appreciate it thank you very much guys yeah thanks for having me and and enjoyed it today guys you're very welcome mate you're one of the always welcome back we might have to do another one in a couple of months time oh never never worry hopefully maybe when we have store 2.0 that would be amazing yes all right i'll pencil that one in but thank you very much guys we hope you have a great weekend and we look forward to seeing you in pa-5 as soon as we release that
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Which part are you referring to? The phrase " .. when alpha is going to be on the horizon whenever that's going to be .. " ?
The only way to get to know where the game actually is in terms of completeness is to get a pre-alpha pledge, otherwise we have to discuss what we do know. Games take time unless you have huge backing and production teams and of course, huge amounts of money. VR is doing it on a budget.
What we do know:
chenzeme said:The only way to get to know where the game actually is in terms of completeness is to get a pre-alpha pledge, otherwise we have to discuss what we do know. Games take time unless you have huge backing and production teams and of course, huge amounts of money. VR is doing it on a budget.
What we do know:
- The major building blocks are in place
- For people to be invited into PA5 means that there is a game to play
- Pre-alpha will bring in more and more character roles
- The game world is being built to a high standard
- A bug has been found!
- Alpha phase is likely to follow PA5
- Beta will follow that
- The final release is not in sight
- There has never been a schedule laid out for us so nothing is behind it
- It will be released when it is ready
People are just upset that its taking so long. Are they right? Are they wrong? Well we're all entitled to our opinions. And everyones opinions is relative to their personal experience/investment/patience. Really its personal, until they come here to let everyone know how they feel about the current timeline of development. They get their panties in a wad then start making all sorts of psuedo expert assumptions and we all have to bear witness to their expert analysis and subsequent emotional breakdown over the game not getting done fast enough.
Guess what, tomorrow is a new day and so is the one after that and so on and so forth. And at some point one of those days we will be getting the game. People just have no patience. The ones chiding about it taking too long are the same ones that complain about wanting features that would turn it into every other modern MMO.
vjek said:Kalok said:... You're making the assumption that it's "that far behind". That said, I recommend you go listen to the latest dev stream recording about Pledges. There's an interesting tidbit in there that may shed some light on what their anticipated timeline is.Here's the reformatted youtube tanscript of the pledge recording:
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hi folks it's that time of the month again and i have another visionary realms legend with me today customer service manager michael artois butler
welcome michael
me oh you just got cut off there mate
oh
that first part sorry you can hear me
okay yeah i can hear you can hear me
perfect yes sorry i think you've spoken at the last bit
just popped out okay so
topic for today is pledges and rewards so we'll go through the list from the website
from the pre loaded questions from all of our vips
in order top to bottom get through as many as we can and then we'll try and open up for a q a at the end so getting stuckstraight into it uh first question is say i wanted to give additional money to vr without affecting my existing pledge
what's the best way to do that just open a support ticket or should i send bearer bonus to kilsin
[Laughter]
well the answer to that we actually have quite a few um fans and and people who've pledged that have either they've got a couple different
ways either they've gone ahead and opened a whole brand new pledge they completed their vip and went around for the second round
or we have also other people who decided i want to give something every month so they sign up for the monthly subscription
that pretty much all that does is give you access to the to the forums and also show that you're supporting us but it's another
way that you can give us on a monthly basis um other than that usually the best way to do it is we do have a miscellaneous payment link
that we can supply via support and then you can just you can give extra money to that um but there are some curious things there
i know if you don't want to change your your level and whatnot we're making some changes to how all the pledges have worked
because i don't want people to feel that they can't contribute because they like what level they were on or they're getting a special pledge
reward that they don't see in the other one so we've been doing a lot more of grandfathering in a lot of those pledge
rewards to allow the people to keep those if they want to continue to uh you know pledge more so we don't we
the best answer probably is to just contact support we work through each person individually to figure out where you're at and what you want to do um
we have some folks who even gift pledges by paying more into it then they might want to give it to their brother or you know their best friend or something like that and get them in the game as well
okay
i will be honest with you not none of this has been figured out um how it's going to be handled we do know we have pleasure wars people are getting the pets
um but we also know there's a very fine line especially with many of you who are ardent supporters and we don't want to go to any type of a pay-to-win
model so we're very cognizant that as we add more things in that way we want to make sure that we're not um stepping over that line where people
would feel that we're going against what we've always said which is pay to win is not where pantheon is um i'm not sure how the pets are going
to work i would say just from the initial conversations we've had it's going to be similar to where it just kind of follows you around
um i don't know what they're going to look like yet i've been asking for some of the artists to maybe give me some mock-ups that we can
put out there because that's kind of the next step i'd like to do is actually get some information on a lot of these pleasure reward these cosmetic items um
so that people would have that uh information perfect and that question was how is a vanity pet used in game and how can you get more pets beyond pledging i
had myself muted in
obs so the recording won't know that question only these guys will okay i'm sorry about that umwhat is the difference between an explorer's backpack and a back and a bag of the leg legget um again those haven't comple we haven't created those items yet
um but we're trying to be very careful in um again back to the pay to win uh type of things but the bags are going to you know have a certain they probably
all have the same amount of slots um they're all going to have if we haven't decided on you know weight reduction or not weight reduction and
where that falls into a pay to win type of mentality which is something that um you know we always debate internally as well but they're probably going to be
very similar the difference is is we are really going for a lot of we were trying to go for flavor of the cosmetic items so that if you were
say like for example that legate pledge that you might want all the things that are of the legate thing because you like to
role play that or it's something really important to you that you have things that kind of uh are in the same flavor or you know that can match or whichever way that
they're going to be so they're going to be very similar but it's just going to come down to how you how you want to choose because as we know bags don't show in the game so it's more of what it would look like say in your inventory and what you preferperfect and i might group these next two together because they're very similar so what kinds of illusions will the flasks create how long will they last
and also what in the world does the ring of the fallen do
sounds intriguing uh those are still being fleshed out so that some of this is these are all things that we have on our on our list of items i continue to to push on these since uh the pledges and the pleasure awards are something that falls under my uh responsibility um we don't know i mean those are kind of
some of them some of those neat things maybe we open that up and have people give us their thoughts on what they think it should do
what they would like to see because then that would give us some ideas of uh the way to progress for this you know i remember in a lot of different games
if you're able to
make an illusion you know are you gonna look like a different different class right or a certain npc um or even an inanimate object those are always cool too so um maybe that's something that we want to hear from all of you what what you guys think yeah perfect mateum okay so this one's about renaming items um i don't understand why items would need renaming is that for crafted items only or will we really be able to change the name of dropped items in-game um the plan for this it kind of fell into um again this is one of those early those early rewards and as things were being thought out
they didn't really kind of go all the way down the rabbit hole of what would that mean while you're in game the thought process we currently have with this is
that you say you loot something a really cool sword you get something that you really like and you want to it's it's yours it's you know it's not something you're gonna be able to give off to anybody else but you want to give it its own name you know maybe it's a um
it's you know a sword that is you know has ice damage or something so you want to call it you know ice spike or or something like that uh where you would be able to if you didn't like that name you can put that name onto whatever that item is um for all intents and purposes
within our database that is still the same it's gonna still be the same item of what it originally was but when you see it and then if other people say inspect you and look at it they would see it with what that that name that you have and probably in parentheses what what it really was right that's it also um
there will be like a a name filter on that as well so you can oh yeah yeah we're not gonna let it can get out of hand but yeah there would be there would be
the names that would be appropriate for things so we're not gonna just let people name things that don't fit within our our theme of the game um awesome and thelast one for this um poster is there any discussion or thought into allowing us to prepay for the monthly sub as a way to support the game uh i'd be willing to put money in today to earn three months of the game after release um we have talked about it and as you know there were some very early pledges that um you know and some of these and some of the larger pledges that give you uh x amount of months um as a part of a subscription uh because we are a subscription based game
um that is not something that we're willing to do right now because we don't we want to make sure that that just kind of leaves us with um it's an accounting nightmare for us because if somebody was saying to change their account or it moves over here once the game comes out there there could be some cs nightmares with us trying to figure out where everything went um i'm not ruling it out to say that as we get closer to launch that there would be a uh the ability to do that which uh you know a lot of people might like for budgeting purposes they can just kind of pay ahead and you know and pay those next several months that they don't want to play but it's just not feasible for um this period of the developmentokay so um this person's curious about the designer quest line part of the rainborn pledge what would be involved in that what kind of quest
um seeing that quests as a thing seem to be coming out of different direction in pantheon norm would be a normal type of quest a keeper quest epic law etc they're already there's actually quite a bit of latitude for these the people who have this as a pledge perk
would be working you know via email with different members of the design team that you know you would say you know what type of a quest that you were looking to do we know where we need to slot certain things in uh certain types of quests whether it's a lower level quest or it's like you said maybe it's a equipment quest or um something has to do with lore or anything like that um and then we would figure out where that would slot and then there would be guidelines given for that so to the point of there needs to be x amount of steps um you know their needs and those steps would require maybe it's not all going out and killing certain types of monsters there might be you know you have to have a couple of uh steps where you kill things a couple of things where you maybe combine something and crafting or you know that just we'll kind of lay that out and do a framework for it and then get a lot of the input as far as we would then be able to provide
like okay here's these npcs we're thinking about it's in this area this is kind of the flavor of it and then have that person uh work with us to come up with you know a lot of the the type of text it would be working with say you know justin with his um with all the lore stuff that he has and making sure that it jives with that and and and work through that whole process to where we get it kind of in the end that it's ready to go in so using we would be using our tools on our side but actually getting all that input for that design piece um from the person who pledged
yeah perfect that would be the same we've designed a dungeon as well for the um even higher yes well the design attention is a little differently so we actually put some information up on that um that one is if i remember right that is at our the top tier of the vip yes um and and our plan pre-coveted um was that we were actually going to invite people to come into the office um on a set you know set a couple of days and it's not and it's like a it's a work session as we we would probably have a uh a design already done right it's already mapped out as far as what the geography and things like that look like but sitting down and working with uh the developers to come up with okay
what lives in this in this dungeon what type of quest would be involved in this what uh you know what type of uh epic battles would be taking place in here so
that would be one of those things where again we have a lot of work we've already uh done as far as making sure that the geography and everything is there but really finding out okay what what's going to happen what are we doing here who's fighting who how does this you know what kind of their traps are there different things in here and you know we're still wanting to that do that but we're not sure whether it's going to end up that we might have people that would be on say a zoom session or something like that throughout the day just depending on how travel would be based on the global pandemic
yeah awesome okayso this is a very common question any thought to some a la carte options in pledging for instance i'm really interested in the cloth map but i can't get to the
rainbow and pledge
oh i love a la carte we talked about this i believe last year when we talked about this and i know i've posted about it a la carte is something that i'm beating
the drum on a regular basis however as you've all seen we've just revamped the main website the next piece that has to come with that is actually the storefront
um for the pledging and all of that and with that would come the ability to do all the cart pieces um even in a la carte adding in you know you know choose your
own pledge type of thing or just doing an add-on piece like i want this but oh also give me a shirt and give me uh the cloth map or whatever we know how
popular some of those items are and we want to find a way to bring those for folks to get and that's really where we're at honestly the only reason that the cloth
map was we removed that from that is physical items is a is as a small team that we are it's a that is a difficult uh item for us in a lot of ways to fulfill
um you know we have there's an overhead associated with that as opposed to digital pieces which we can you know do pretty easily within game so we are trying to find ways that how do we how do we give this and how to how can we make sure that we give people what they want because i know people want some people want all the physical things they don't necessarily want in-game cosmetic items then there are other people who want every single cosmetic item we ever are gonna make and that might that's gonna be a way that we can deliver that too right
so you purchase a pledge but then you want uh maybe a couple other uh cosmetic items well how do we do that how do we deliver that and so those are some of the things that we're looking at that will be coming with that store revamp when we actually have uh the ability to revamp ityeah good info okay so again this is on designer quest dungeon raid how will the implementation of pledge rewards regarding designer quest dungeon rate work will the earliest backers of the tiers that grant that be given the opportunity first to put forward their ideas and how long would you estimate it would take in years or whatever metric you feel is fit to implement them into the game post launch
so i think this means if like you know 10 people all have designer quest and 10 people have designed a dungeon like how is that order gonna be arranged you know
first in best dressed kind of thing and how long will that take for them to be able to do that well like i said the designer the designer dungeon thing is going to be kind of almost like a group think in a lot of ways that one because of the immense amount of work that's involved with that and ideas and coming up and how we generate that stuff that that's going to be kind of a group project the design a quest line or the or those type of things um we are going to be probably sending all of those out um at the same time and then work them as they come in very similar what we've done now already with um we've had some you know name and npc and uh name we had some name a point of interest and i can tell you right now that um some of those uh npcs are already in game that people had uh put in names for so those are going in slowly as they get populated um so it's just us it's just a a process of us getting in the information and then making sure that we can um you know slot the the resources to use it so it's not really going to be like kind of a first come first serve it's going to be let's get everybody the chance to start working on it and then as they come in we put them where they need to go and we keep track of that
yeah that's perfect umokay so originally one of the pledge rewards for an additional character slot which is not shown for the current vip pledges only pledges 200 and lower uh is this an oversight what was the intended number of character slots per server for each of the pledge tiers and is there a way to add additional slots at each level all of this
i believe all of the all of the pledge tiers i think from 100 up have that additional character slot whether it's not showing on there i can go back and look at the pledge page and and make some changes to that but the intention is they all have that whether they're going to get i don't know how many i don't think we've settled on how many characters you're going to be allowed per realm um but all of them are going to have that additional one that's just that's just how it is for all the pledges so yeah some of the earlier ones might have it might have been oversight they missed that but that's part of our grandfathering end where we're allowing you know basically all this stuff um for all the pledgesthe other question we get all the time is about early character creation earlier character creation is going to be on all of those pledges that that also had the early name reservation there are two different types of uh rewards the early name reservation is something will happen before we actually go through and we'll be able to lock those names to certain accounts but then probably you know three days or a week before the game actually launches for um for full release it will be where people can go in and do their early character creation who have that as a perk they can go in create their characters you know do all the the customization you want to do for the faces and whatever else and then they're ready to go as soon as those servers turn on you'll be able to just log right in so that is something that we're going to be providing for all of those pledges
perfectum okay so is there a way to pre-purchase extended game time for both the primary account and the buddy code account say that again uh is there a way to pre-purchase extended game time for both the primary account and the buddy code account
not yet that again is something that will happen as we get closer to um to launch uh you will be able to then at that point go in and you know buy a three month or six month or a year subscription whichever you want to do you know and probably there's going to be like a you know a small discount across that for the larger
subscription that you purchase um that's how you do it the buddy key we kind of changed the wording on that because it was very confusing a lot of people had with well if i'm getting another copy of the game does that mean that i get two people into you know alpha testing and two people in the beta testing so we changed the body key and it's for at launch you basically can hand this off instead of having to have somebody go and spend you know whatever the retail price we're gonna have for a game key you can give them this game key then they can sign up and they can they can pay for a subscription or you can give them a subscription yeah perfectum okay so back in may 2019 uh atoya made a comment about a resolution uh that should be forthcoming on a la carte upgrade options for pledge tears has there been a resolution on this approach and if so um is it to be implemented it is going to be implemented
uh that's what we talked about but just don't it's we're having some technical limitations again as a small team um people are wearing many hats and it just comes down to when we have the time to put forward with that so now the website is out of the way i'm hoping hoping hoping that uh i can get some resources assigned over there to start working back on what we already had a nice framework for yeah good stuffum stand-alone fundraising options have been implemented prior specialized name plates have additional options been considered recently
they are always being considered uh i will tell you that was a very um we were very happy with that that was a very successful um fundraising one that allowed us to bring in um if i remember at that with our animator um and and ross has been doing you know tremendous he's been with us and um it is something we look at i mean this this is but we really want to have a um a set goal with it right we don't want to just go out and say hey give us give us money and not really have a reason for what we're trying to get to as it's like say a stretch goal right
um yeah we've discussed it um you know there was there was talk i remember even at the time we were talking about i know people always want them you know talking about the necro talking about the bard you know is that a stretch goal is that something that you know we work towards getting that in is that something we want to do but we're also very cognizant that especially all of you as our vips you have spoken with your wallets already you've told us what you want you told us
that you support us and we don't want to go back and continue to you know feel like we're asking you to put more into something with it we're wanting to show you what we have and hoping that um as we continue to develop the game and you see what you have that you know maybe you're inclined to give something but we're not
wanting to you know go back and just make you feel like it's we're always asking you know like a say a pbs fundraiser every month type of thing umcould the continued existence of the one year subscription pledges be used to extrapolate an internal timeline of development for example if someone were to pledge 100 a month for pre-alpha access would that pre-offer access need to be relevant for as many months as the difference between the pre-alpha and the alpha access pledges
no it has no timeline uh correlation between those the access to pre-alpha testing access is it's a pledge reward it's a thank you uh as well as we want to have you come in and help us with this it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to last another year right um it's and and that's one of those things that i'm very cognizant about is like okay what what does that look like as we move forward and we're rolling through say with pa5 now and you know when alpha is going to be on the horizon whenever that's going to be which i'm not going to get any dates um but what does that you know what does that look like in i don't know we did we real we honestly we broke up the payment plans for just so that it makes it easier for people who want to support us so that they don't necessarily have to put such a large amount out in one fell swoop because we all know budgets can be tight and we just try to find some way that it makes it easier for people to support us if they want to yeah that's it exactly umi'm going to read quickly one from the vip sure just because it's relevant um will our account our account pages eventually update with the details of our specific pledges example uh the originator pledges from 2017 are no longer available but i would like to see what rewards were part of that pledge
yes that is the plan of store 2.0 and the account management piece of that so that was in my uh my documentation stuff that i said i needed to have um for our store going forward is the ability for people to see uh what one they exactly have and we started that we have kind of the first little bit of an iteration on that now if you go to uh the pledge page now and you click on upgrade you can actually click and it will give you a comparison right now of saying okay you have this and you would be getting this so it gives you that's like the very first iteration of what we're trying to do but um ideally what it's going to look like is you would be able to log into your account it said oh i have the this like you said originator plan you'd be able to click on that it would show you the date that you purchased and it would say here is everything that was on the originator pledge at that time that you purchased right because there are some things that have dropped on and off on some of these pledges earlier before that which we're trying to stop doing now just because it is so confusing but yeah that that is our goal to have that
okay perfect um[Music]
okay a little bit of a funny one are there any pledges that were put in early on that you now wish hadn't been promised [Laughter]
you know there are there are some things that i i don't know maybe not everybody's aware of this but there were some of the early earliest pledges there was stuff that that came through um there's a few people who have some stuff where they were just trying to figure out like there's a there's a there's a horse there is a pair of there's a pair of boots yes and those are uh are those are a very um sore subject because again we're getting down to what constitutes pay to win and what
doesn't and how do we resolve those things so yeah there are some that i think that weren't just as well thought out when the team was a lot smaller and maybe not as well versed with looking at some of those implications of of when you give somebody something what it's going to do i'm not going to say i'm an expert at
all on setting up any type of kickstarting or crowdfunding pledge stuff i'm learning i've been learning as i go we've we've obviously we've slipped in some areas and we try to resolve those and be as honest and upfront as we can um yeah but it's a learning process for us and yeah some of those early ones were there there was one it was really odd there was a box um there's like seven people are gonna get a box of like actual like a physical copy of the game and a box and some other stuff in it i'm like how am i gonna deliver a box to somebody i gotta build boxes yes there's a few things in there that was questionable to start with but again as as you said we were learning we we we thought it sounded great as gamers to start with and then we realized that someone actually had to make those things and that those people were us and we're like okay now how do we do this so a lot of things back there we kind of we're a little bit smarter now as we're kind of moving along to not unbalance the game and promise something that's going to be too hard to deliver to many people so which is why we kind of put a little bit of restrictions on some of the things going forward
yeah i mean it's it um it's changed i mean over the years yes if you look back at that early kickstarter stuff even how we get games now is even then it was most of the stuff was still delivered digitally but you could still theoretically go into a store and purchase a copy if you wanted right most everything now i mean what's the percentage of games that are actually delivered digitally so people don't care as much about physical copies they might for something like a collector's edition and maybe that's something that's appealing but again that's something that has another cost involved and maybe that's something that we could introduce as another little uh you know extra a la carte type of thing if people wanted some type of a physical something for it absolutelyum so this is another quick one of the vips there was a period of time where old ks backers which is kickstarter were able to hook their old pledges back in for some of those earliest rewards is there any chance we'll see this return to court those earliest adopters
so we have quite a few people who are still honestly on they they did that they took they pledged uh for the kickstarter it failed we put out the the call and said hey if you want to come to our website and pledge that we'll honor those and those are honored and we have quite a few people who are still on those and those are some sweet packages um however you know we also have some people with those kickstarter pledges that want some of this new stuff we've got and this is again our change kind of in our stance in that we would like those people to if they want to upgrade they shouldn't lose any of that stuff because they're such a long time backer
in fact i just helped somebody a long time back it wasn't one of the kickstarter ones but one from before this had some retired stuff upgrade and they're now into the vip piece and they are getting all the other things there but they also get some of those cool things that they didn't that aren't on there like like the cloth map right they they get that because they pledged way back when they had that as one of their their rewards so they're getting that because during the time they pledged that was on their pledge and so we're not going to take that away from themyeah and that's also another one's just posted um speaking of the early pledges there was a five dollar head start add-on available that is supposed to offer early access is that actually going to be honored or has it been reworked
i can honestly there's not very many people that that impacts so i think i'll be handling each of those individually uh it's most likely will just be if
they're not already i have to go back through and look um because a lot of those are like you said there are the add-ons so if those people are not already in say
alpha or beta uh we'll probably just convert it into something like that so they can get in and and and play that way to help with testing you know those last
those those last stages or whichever one they would be on but we're not the discussion at this point has not been okay we're gonna say launch on a tuesday
or whatever but we'll let everybody in that had early access on the friday before um that had that discussion we haven't had internally yet um i haven't gotten the temperature of the team on how we feel about that i know personally for myself um i like the idea of you know we open and everybody's able to get access at the same time but the people who have the early access to create their characters are going to be a little bit ahead because they've already you know spent that 30 minutes or whatever figuring out what do i want in this class you know what do i want them to look like what what's their abilities you know like as far as their uh strength and constitution what i want those to have so it's still a discussion we're having but we we really haven't made a decision yet yeah that's itum okay so i would love to see a lifetime subscription expansion pack made available most gaming subscriptions have an annual prepaid package for around 100 so something in the two and a half thousand dollar range that includes expansions would be something i could support we we had a lifetime we did very early um yeah we explained this too like i put a post out quite a few years ago after we revoked the lifetime subscription because we are a subscription-based um we do have the subscription model for our company to to make revenue and giving away early lifetime subs for a set price and then not being able to continue to collect off that after that period um it does impact us in quite a significant way um so we we revoke that to continue with our subscription pledges and carry on like that so we didn't have to put a cash shop or anything like that in there to sell exactly you know things that would unbalance the game yeah and that's one of those ones again like i had recently we i had another person who upgraded um and they had that they had the the the lifetime subscription because they were one of our earliest pledgers at a lower tier they get to keep that as well because they had that at the time but they've also now have upgraded and so there's no reason that they should lose something because they've been backing us for so long we don't want to take anything away that's just that's just the wrong message to send anyone you know all of you have been supporting us for so long and there's no reason that we should be taking those away from you that way
i believe mine was that i got the journeyman pledge from kickstarter that got transferred over i had like lifetime and early testing access which i was pretty happy nice until i became a member of the team um all right sofor those of us who have the pledge perk design an item can you explain exactly what that entails what limitations there will be and when designing these items might take place
uh that is the next one i have on uh my agenda to do uh in regards to the design or name um uh perks from the earliest ones um i haven't flushed it completely out i still have some more talks i have to have with joppa and how we want to approach this but a lot of is going to be you know not only naming the item what type of an item it's going to be whether it's a weapon armor um some other inventory piece right um and then any types of things like does it have any type of any type of stats or um you know any any basically anything that you would see in an item description even down to if they have flavor text right um because some items might have some flavor text there and those would all be could be part of this now again all of these are that are um that are submitted we usually ask people to give us like three because um we want to get we want to get one for each of the people who have this as a perk um but sometimes you know we'll get stuff that's just not going to work within the game it's either named incorrectly or it's too overpowering and so those are where we can go back and find one that hey we can make might be able to work with this and then we start conversations uh with the person who submitted to say can we what about this we we have an issue here can you you know maybe tweak this a little bit make it so that would work for us and we'll go and and work with them back and forth and most likely a lot of that conversation will probably be coming from from me or potentially a designer just depending on how busy they are but i would be relaying the information that i get
from the design team
but yeah that's kind of our next our next one on that is to help us with some of those some of those items which you know we and also honestly the one big caveat is we don't want items that are going to be named after your character um that just isn't going to work and those automatically you will get removed or something like we had some people who who tried to name an npc and they were naming them like the names of you know real-life people we can't we can't do that so yeah that's where we try to work with people so and then once it's put in what i'm trying to do is actually go through once we've selected one we'll let the people know hey
uh your you know item such-and-such was approved or like your name of an npc whatever it was has been approved same game and then now it comes a little easter egg to go out and try to find that when you get in where is this where is this npc or where does this where does this item come from so yeah that's here perfect rightokay last one and we have already touched on this but it is basically just to reiterate what will the difference between explorer's backpack a bag of the leggett
and satchel of the black rose b so capacity weight reduction will bags be clickies or give stats
we did go over this that will just be your appearance on the same slot yeah it'd be probably appearance uh it's kind of kind of same thing for the the cosmetic item so we have we can cover this with uh the chest piece right so we have a tunic of the ages we have a i think there's a robe of the black rose there's a bunch of different ones there again it's going to come down to what that appearance is now i'm wanting to get those items and what they look like obviously prior to launch so that people can choose what they have uh what they want with it right so you know i really want that one or oh that one looks terrible or fit might this fit this this character for me right um and then just we've been spitballing uh between uh madoki and i were actually the way that we would deliver those
to people so maybe there's just a way that you um you can go to a vendor with a special coin we give you and you can choose right you get one or the other type of thing and that's they're all gonna be they're gonna be similar but they're gonna they're gonna look different right and that's what's gonna give you that um that ability to wear those cosmetics that you want the oh like the special nameplate snakeyeah um we're not going to reopen that one that was a very special one for that and that was going to look very different um because it was that it was that special special drive that we did um there are name plates and nameplates are going to be part of uh most of the rewards um however i don't know what they're all going to look like yet we're still figuring that out i think that as people have been in we've gotten a lot of feedback honestly in uh you know for the shakeouts as well right and people see the nameplate so we want to we want to know you know what does that look like how are people feeling about that and how how we're gonna um address that i know that we have what we're also talking about little little icons right you have a lot of games you have like a little icon maybe by your name interchangeable so maybe you collect some other name plates and other icons which you can have you know one visible right whichever one you choose so yeah um there will be some name plates um i'd love to see and it's like i can't you know it's not my side of the thing there but i'd love to find some that may be requestable for some name plates too
so that maybe that would be something that we could we can push to the design team so i think that would be awesome you run along somebody and it's like where'd you get that one they did some epic quest that would be awesome exactly and look the dragon slayer killing like a dragon in vanguard you used to get like a dragon slayer title that was after the raid yeah it was something i was like looking forward to for so long when i got it was amazing things like that that question too i muted myself in obs to clear my throat but it was can you reopen the nameplates again just for those on the recording who go what the hell was he just talking about um they'll now know why all rightso number two can we do a monthly pledge to upgrade to the three thousand and ten thousand dollar tiers yes it takes a little more work on our side to do this but we we do handle this so um there's a we have one for the there's already one for the rainborn which is the uh the three thousand dollar tier um any money that you've already pledged obviously will um applies to whatever that is so you're talking about the upgrade so say you have for most people that are in this audience you have the you know you're at the the vip pledge you have the thousand dollar tier you want to go to the rainborn um you have to pay that basically the difference so you can do those monthly payments that i think are the 300 payments but you're only going to have to do as many to get you up to that level plus i think there's just a little bit that we've been figuring out just to cover some of our costs i'll be honest our monthly payments um for all of the packages that we have the monthly payments they're a little more expensive for us because we are charged we're not a payment processor our payment processors do charge you a little bit more for those transactions so because we rely so much on our our fans to help us with the development of the game um it's tough for us to eat all of those costs for those on a monthly basis so that's why we put some of those out and they're like a 12 month or 11 month um but the the the best way to do this is just contact support
uh madoki and i both are very willing to come up with a plan outside of even that that will make it make sense for you um we've had we actually had some people i've had some people that were say at the 300 level and they wanted to get to the vip and we we gave them a you know like kind of like a one-time offer for them where they could do it in a two-month payment because they didn't want to do the hundred dollars a month and we were able to to get them that way so just talk with us we're willing to work through this and find a a payment plan um for where you're wanting to go to um we're pretty flexible with that we are a small shop but um a doc and i talk on a daily basis and work through these that's it and if you're not sure the best thing too is to um submit a a what is it something a ces ticket that's it submit a cs ticket and ask the question
the the guys are great um there they'll be able to help you with whatever question you have uh so going onnumber three status of potential guild pledges
yeah that is something that um i'm pushing for the store 2.0 you would say so um looking at and we've actually drawn up quite a few different uh potential ideas for what that would look like and what that would mean so um how do we get guilds you know involved right now guild functions within the game are not there but it is something that as we move forward we know it's going to be a stronger piece that we want so what what are the most important things to that guild and maybe that's something that again um share with us your ideas on if there was to be a a guild type of a pledge or a guild package um what would you want to see in that
you know i mean we've had some discussions if does it mean that you get x amount of like maybe even once we launch there's a guild subscription and you get x amount of um you pay this money and you get this many months or this many like accounts paid for for that month that are part of that guild and there's something else there um but yeah we're open to listening to really what what is important to the guilds and and figuring out um what would make sense to put into into pantheon that doesn't you know break the game basically yeah nice andthe last one is about spousal and buddy account upgrades that don't involve making another account
yes is that possible or what is the um so one of the things in part of our account management that we're looking at is we do have quite a few people who play with
spouses or play with family and what does that look like in say an account management format so maybe you have one master account underneath it multiple game accounts that can be controlled and paid for all through one transaction which should make it easier to keep everybody kind of in one you know one billing cycle or however they want to do that we've we've experimented with that right now with our accounting our account system that we have for um the game accounts and we're actually testing that with some of our our test accounts and it seems to work well so we're looking at how does that make sense if we wanted to roll that out at release so that people could you know you have one say family accountant underneath that you could have other other game accounts um and and what that means perfectum and just on nameplates someone put forward what about different colored names instead of nameplates i know people who would pay stupid dollars for colored names in game yeah
i think that we go back and forth of that i know that there's also a pretty vocal uh group that would be against that um seeing that in game i mean i don't know um it just comes down to opinion on how people are going to kind of feel about that if you see that i mean that the colors of the names really should mean something and we don't want to set it up as like a uh you know i'm better than you type of thing because i have this color name or whatever um we do have you know that makes sense to have some of the names different colors which be you know cs people or things like that but uh i don't know that's one of those things where we we've talked about a little bit there but we really don't want to turn it into something where people feel that they're missing something or again it's does that cross over into the pay to win where people feel that somebody's getting something else because they paid more money yeah andalso another idea thrown forward was a custom guild icon slash name plate um for a guild which is a pretty good idea yeah certainly within the realm you know that's something we can talk about i'd like to see that in that if we're having a discussion topic about it let's let's talk about it and we've got um 187 actually has got a guild discussion up about um guild pledges so he's linked that in the vip section so if you guys want to follow that and um add to that i'll um i'll link that to the team and we can we'll keep an eye on it okay
so we got 10 minutes left guys well that's done for all the hard questions the um as in like the pre-pre-loaded questions
if you've got anything that we didn't cover that you want to talk about or anything you want a little bit more detail on if you know that we can talk more about it then please tag my name in discord chat and we'll get as many more done as we can in the next 10 minutes
it's been good so far lots of good information well well thanks i'm as we said we're a small team so a lot of us take on a lot of different areas and uh this is ne of those areas where as when i came in three years ago they're like help help with this help us figure out what we do with all of it and who who gets what and where does it go and how do we track all this yeah it was a i i worked on the pledge rewards folk for a while back then trying to help sort them out and i did a lot of work on it and wow it was i got a few more gray hairs than i would have liked going through all that stuff i spent my days buried in spreadsheets most of the days so yeah that's that's it umso this question is about lizard race when this is really about more pledges and rewards but we don't really have an idea on a lizard race just yet or if it will be in game but it would be nice we'll see what happens if we can fit it within the law and we get the teams to um kind of sort that out we'll see what we can do and a rabbit race i don't know let's just remind when you say rabbit it reminds me of the rakies from vanguard they used to have a little rocky rogue all right so we've got 10 minutes guys we can wrap it up early it technically is a 45 minute drt dev round table but we can push it out to an hour if you guys have more questions
we're happy to hang around but we don't want to just drag it on for the sake of it and make people listen to us for no reason is there anything you guys want to add to the previous questions we have or anything new i want to say before we end is that if you have any questions because it has been a little ambiguous in some of the pledge things always the best thing to do is open a support ticket i go through those in fact i get all the pledged ones that come to me in most cases and we can answer those for you and you know that it again it's going to come down to our our goal is to make sure that we're taking care of those who have been taking care of us um that's important to us and we want to recognize that so you're going to hear more often yes we'll do that or we'll figure out a way
to do these things then just flat out no so that's just how we want to approach this yeah that's exactly right we appreciate it we're first and foremost uh
first and foremost crowdfunded and the the amount of support from the community has been amazing those who sometimes support and then you know take a break and just let things kind of simmer until they come back and check in sporadically and or to those that log in every day and follow us um our every move um we we appreciate you all
it's much love there it's um yeah it's uh it's a huge effort for what you guys have done for us and we appreciate it immensely all rightso is there a way the nameplate option could be added to our personal profiles i think that's more of a forum you mean on the forums
yeah so maybe with the new forums potentially i mean there's a lot of work that we need to do on that um i haven't talked to molad really yet on all of the capabilities we're going to be able to do with the forums but yeah i think that there'd be some kind of there'll be some cool stuff there if we were able to do you know recognize something within the pledge perks um on those forums i think that'd be kind of cool so that's a discussion we'd have to have yeah coolum there's another one first i think if you put a support ticket in asking that question mate i think you will um the guys will be able to handle that when
they can actually see your account um so pledge suggestion submitted in-game painting uh not necessarily obvious not necessarily of yourself imagine that for example many mmos have art in various in-game locations yeah that's a good idea man yeah self-portraits i think like painting it does get into there is a few here's a few hurdles with that and we kind of cover it with even the way we like these the perks we have for like the name and item or the npcs and stuff um because of the way that society gets with litigation uh we have to be careful with um some of the items that we get as far as you know ideas or things that are usedit's one of the reasons why we don't take any unsolicited ideas um through the through any of our things we just can't we can't do that because if we were to do something similar to that that somebody might say oh i told you that right
um it's an interesting thing it might follow along with that i know that but the problem is we've retired most of those name you know name and item or design and item things those are for really those early backers so um i don't know if it's going to come back it's an interesting idea though we'd have to figure out how we could do it and make it such a way that um it doesn't turn into some type of a mess or that maybe somebody used something that's copyrighted from someone else and we just didn't know because we can't go out and find the copyright on our right so i think it's like talking about like dogs playing poker he's in a ton of eq taverns like for each tavern salmon's playing poker i remember yeah i remember we put all those in yeah so something like that i think like you know i don't know if we could take it from the public or from you know third parties but maybe you know putting forward a competition or something i could do for the community where you guys vote for what you want we can get our art team to um make something like that so you've had a you know an input you can contribute to it but i don't know if we can actually take third-party um you know portraits or things like that you know if you have a contest the only thing that's going to win is gas bats yeah yeah i know i've i've already got one like briefed up for that that's uh um we even joke about that in their dev channels you would have seen too michael the skype channels about gas bats that's still an ongoing joke yeah okay so um bloke batsum so we've got about five minutes left the vip round tables they go as soon as we're finished here um i stopped the recording we all
say you know i thank you in a fair well and then i immediately start uploading i will then post it after about an hour an hour and a half i'll post it to the vips and the champions in their dedicated sub forums and then one week later i open it up and i will announce it and post it across all of our um official channels to the public so you guys get the the live version the champions get in on the um immediate release for one week and then after that everybody else gets to
have a listen uh oh rich you have some time to uh to to basically mute me or take things out i like it yeah no they do i put us up just raw there's there's
nothing no um editing going on whatsoever i just got to remember i keep muting myself in obs to mute coughs or the neighbor's making a noise or banging doors i'll
mute and then i forget to turn it back on and ask a question so then you start talking and answer something and the recording people have no idea what
you're talking about not too much i fed my cat before we started so she didn't get to hear her much nice i've only done that twice and i've explained both times so it should be good but yeah usually i'm pretty good okay well that's pretty much it guys we'll um we'll wrap it up we've got we can't really give any pre-offer
stories at the moment um oh no sorry um khaleesi is saying thanks um to you for fun interacting during pre-offer and yeah i i try to i try to get in there becausei know it's a long haul for a lot of us and so i appreciate everybody who helps and helps us throughout the whole process with testing and everything else i'm looking forward to when we have it again so i can't tell you when but i'm looking forward to it me too i haven't been able to get in as much i got in a couple of times and was um a bit of banter and doing some trolling trying to offer sell gold to people i banned you for that um but yeah um yeah i want to definitely
get you for the next one it was a lot of fun gmming and catching up with everyone and getting to interact with the community and run around and group with people and turn off my gm powers and and have some fun it was it was really good yeah well hopefully by the next one they'll have made my hammer of banning which i asked for yes please i would love one of those too mate and on that note we'll wrap it up guys thank you very much we appreciate everyone we got a big turnout
today which was great so thank you all to those who came in and spent their time with us all those of you who gave up sleep as well from europe and other places we really appreciate it thank you very much guys yeah thanks for having me and and enjoyed it today guys you're very welcome mate you're one of the always welcome back we might have to do another one in a couple of months time oh never never worry hopefully maybe when we have store 2.0 that would be amazing yes all right i'll pencil that one in but thank you very much guys we hope you have a great weekend and we look forward to seeing you in pa-5 as soon as we release that--
Which part are you referring to? The phrase " .. when alpha is going to be on the horizon whenever that's going to be .. " ?
"no it has no timeline uh correlation between those the access to pre-alpha testing access is it's a pledge reward it's a thank you uh as well as we want to have you come in and help us with this it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to last another year right um it's and and that's one of those things that i'm very cognizant about is like okay what what does that look like"
It seems like people could be worried that if they pledge to pre-alpha then the very next day Alpha starts they'll feel like they wasted money. So to me the question meant something more like "are we really going to get a year more of pre-alpha access or should I just wait for alpha to start?"
To which the answer was basically "we can't say, but the pre-alpha access is a Thank You for pledging."
Ranarius said:It seems like people could be worried that if they pledge to pre-alpha then the very next day Alpha starts they'll feel like they wasted money. So to me the question meant something more like "are we really going to get a year more of pre-alpha access or should I just wait for alpha to start?"
To which the answer was basically "we can't say, but the pre-alpha access is a Thank You for pledging."
Quite accurate.
When I initially pledged if I had known PA would go on for years with no apparent ending point, I probably would have pledged at a higher tier to get access to PA. I in no way expected it to last as long as it has. But I also did not realize they would stop hiring and keep the team tiny when I pledged. I thought they were going to build a team large enough to complete an MMO in a realisitic time-frame.
If they said tomorrow PA is gonna last at least 2 more years, some might up their Tier subscriptions I'm sure.