Spam Spam Spam Humbug 129 – Shroud of Catnip, Blade of Incompetence
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Podcast Topic(s)
An airing of grievances, if you will, concerning Shroud of the Avatar’s acquisition by Catnip Games. No, not the Netherlands-based Catnip Games that made a few lightweight action titles; this Austin-based studio is Chris Spears’ personal development studio (and a handle that he has gone by for quite some time. e.g. on Twitter).
Also discussed is the debacle surrounding the cancellation of shipping out signed physical copies of Blade of the Avatar/Sword of Midras, the Tracy Hickman-penned prequel to Shroud of the Avatar, to Kickstarter backers who were promised them. Indeed, it comes as a surprise to some in the discussion that Hickman himself didn’t even have a copy of Sword of Midras on hand for himself!
Full show notes at spamspamspamhumbug.com.
So, the rights…
I couldn’t get a definitive answer to who owned the rights. So, I have to guess.
As far as I can tell, Sword of Midras belongs entirely to TOR.
Ownership of Blade of the Avatar is fuzzy.
Apparently Portalarium had the rights to publish enough copies to fulfill pledge rewards. They seem to have been required to buy those from TOR, who would not lay out the book the way Portalarium wanted and was charging an exorbitant price.
Rustic and I asked the key people whose permission we needed to print a small batch of special editions.
Our answer was that Portalarium and Catnip could not be involved, and to not approach TOR.
This isn’t directed at you Frank, as you tried to honestly engage at ShroudUnlimited way back in the day, so I know you personally always tried to get to the truth; But I was pointing they were abusing the Kickstarter process, and in particular the book publishing THREE YEARS AGO.
https://www.reddit.com/r/shroudoftheavatar/comments/52o9c3/as_suspected_kickstarter_confirmed_for_episode_2/d7lyz42/
Sionova on Reddit has an excellent timeline of the claims made around the book here;
https://www.reddit.com/r/shroudoftheavatar/comments/dgvfra/blade_of_the_avatarsword_of_midras_book_timeline/
Note in particular the quote from Dallas Snell on June 13th 2016 where he claims that the publishers forced them to add the extra chapters, and withhold it from backers. I noticed it, and understood EXACTLY what it was revealing about both their finances and their basic dishonesty at the time, hence my post above. They should have had the money to pay for a precise production run for all the backers who already had spent the money on Kickstarter; and from the publisher’s point of view, a company with a set order for guaranteed customers means no returns, and thus is preferable to printing stock they can’t be certain to sell themselves.
So either Portalarium hadn’t budgeted correctly, or more likely the money had already gone if they were 3 years into the project before they’d even signed up for a publisher yet, and the real reason they got terrible terms because they couldn’t afford to even fulfil their backers commitments. Of course, there were plenty of books for sale on Amazon in 2016, if you wanted this “over-priced, badly laid out” Sword product apparently… Because the reality was they needed the extra sales even back in 2016, and thus new income, to keep the project staggering from disaster to disaster short term.
Had the game ever taken off as their ridiculous SeedInvest projections claimed, MAYBE they could have gone back and ordered the books they already owed.
However I’m sure TOR, like Travian and BlackSun after them, quickly realised this pile of badly coded, badly written, grasping for cash rubbish wasn’t going to sell itself. And never will. So now you’re never getting the book; here’s an item tied to yet another Add On Store system in the hopes it’ll encourage you to spend even more cash instead!
And they can’t let you try and publish your own run of the books now, because it would mean getting answers on all the shady deals they made to survive even this long. Not even you Frank, one of the greatest contributors, are allowed to try and repair some of the damage done to others because you’re not allowed to know what went wrong. Not whilst there are still Whales to squeeze for their last few cents.
And my reward for trying to warn everyone of this immoral, abhorent disaster? Years of abuse and snotty, arrogant ignorance, because I happened to be anti-Shroud before it was acceptible for many on the forums, and here, and at good old MassivelyOP.com to realise they actually were getting personally shafted and admit it to themselves. The signs were always there though. I did my virtuous duty trying to warn you all away from harm.
Bollocks to the whole experience since though.
There’s a lot I’d like to address, but of course I don’t really wish to be banned from the forum or the game.
I do want to say that I was not trying to help Portalarium/Catnip fix their failures.
Very early on, Richard said down the road they might make a high quality leather bound version of Blade of the Avatar for people that like to collect that type of thing. I am one of those people. When Portalarium/Catnip announced they weren’t going to print a book, I remembered that special edition idea, and thought it would be something I could do.
However, to make the high quality book we wanted, we need offset printing that requires large expensive machines, so the printers want a minimum run of 1000 books, possibly $20,000 or more (we did not proceed to a final quote). I might have been able to sell a dozen of them, but would have been stuck with 988 extra books, having burnt $20K.
I could take my PDF to a local digital printer and make a cheap soft cover book, but I don’t need one of those. I bought TOR’s Sword of Midras for $6.
I should never have come out of hiding.
“I do want to say that I was not trying to help Portalarium/Catnip fix their failures.”
Let me clarify; I wasn’t suggesting that was your motivations. You were trying to do good by the gaming public, or at least those who still wanted a copy of the kind of quality book you hoped to create. In an honest kickstarter, this would have aligned you with the developers too, as they would have had the same ends in mind as well. We’d have all been taking independent paths, but all facing in the same general direction.
Where you, I, most of us went wrong was assuming that Portalarium actually had those decent motivations in mind. It is because I believe you personally, and a few others of those heavily involved were decent people with the same dream that I still hold respect for you personally to this date. No criticism of you is intended. But of Portalarium…
Well, what you’ve just described as a potential single purchaser by the way printing contract is exactly what I was spotting Portalarium should have been able to take; $20k for someone doing a good thing for fellow players is a lot of money, but Portalarium took $2m at the Kickstarter alone. I haven’t done the figures recently, but I’m guessing total income of $30m+ now? $20k out of $30m is a drop in the bucket. Yet they still can’t afford to honour the commitments to the decent backers who placed hope in them in 2013; not only in leather binding, but even to print the book at all?
However, I will raise an eyebrow towards you on one thing;
“There’s a lot I’d like to address, but of course I don’t really wish to be banned from the forum or the game.”
I have to ask… why? It must be obvious by now what the whole project really is. Why do you still fear being banned from a project that is nothing like the one you dreamed of?
I admit, I’m amazed they’re perhaps going to make it into 2019, but then I underestimated how dirty they really are; by handing the assets off to Chris Spears to run out of his bedroom, they can collapse Portalarium with all the debts, whilst avoiding having to admit the game failed personally. It’s “Lord British’s…” that the public notices, not really “Portalarium”, so they can burn down the latter to protect the former. Even where the media has become critical, they’re still not prepared to fully admit just how badly the project has gone, so the major players are still hoping they can quietly slink out the back door…
But why do you personally still cling on? I can understand somewhat, Shroud is very, very much like an abusive relationship; it’s hard to not cling to the good times, especially when you need something to deal with the bad ones… but by now surely you’ve had enough black eyes…?
It’s something I’ve done myself, so I don’t feel I’m asking of you something I wouldn’t of myself; as there were no refunds offered, I’d long ago removed any value on my Shroud account to remove as much support as I could. When the insane “jammaplaya” wrote to Portalarium demanding they shut down my account otherwise “I feel compelled to harass him until he goes insane”, and later bragged that he’d “taken everything” from me, well behind the scenes my lawyer and I were quite, quite happy to sacrifice the account itself to continue fighting to get the truth out; why worry about being banned from such a toxic game?
Again, we didn’t expect Portalarium to be so dirty as to not even have paid the AAA fees, much less refuse to turn up and leave AAA accreditation in the EULA when told to pull it… but the end result was I now have the paperwork proving I was right. That matters so much more to me than trying to protect any illusions I had in 2013 when I backed the project.
But what are you trying to hold onto though Frank? Because from my perspective, what ever goodness you can see is inside YOU, not Portalarium. You at least wanted to honestly try and produce the book. Portalarium never really did. So why give them any opportunity to disappoint you further?
I think it boils down to sunk cost. I put a lot of money in. All I really have to show for it is a very small voice in the community and if they ever do circle back around and add a good single player experience, I would be able to try to play. If they take those things from me, the money is completely wasted.
Even so, it’s unlikely I will ever try again.
I stopped giving them money at the beginning of the year. I’ve given them enough, and they haven’t delivered the incentives and rewards they offered.
Titler, I’m going to let you comment here for the time being because this is pertinent to issues you’ve raised previously. However:
…I will ask you to refrain from this sort of evangelism going forward. This isn’t an opportunity for recruitment or to coax people to walk away entirely from SotA and its developers when they aren’t prepared to do so.
>There’s a lot I’d like to address, but of course I don’t really wish to be banned from the forum or the game.
So sad you should feel this could be the result for being truthful and that others feel the source of that threat is praiseworthy.
Thanks for the extra color, Sir Frank.
I know you made SotA coins before, so having a go at the book seems in your wheelhouse 🙂
But your post on the forums did come off a bit strange, almost like you were trying to get Port/Catnip out of their jam in failing to fulfill the book. I am sure that wasn’t your intent, but it reads that way. Honestly, I hope you can make your own personal book, but am glad the bigger effort isn’t possible – because Port/Catnip trade on letting their amazing community pick up their failures or paper over them. If some people got your book, they could go “see, the people that wanted these books still found a way to get them, and everyone else that didn’t got their in game item! We did it! *Wipes hands*”
Such a sad road this game development has gone down.
@Frank;
“I think it boils down to sunk cost… If they take those things from me, the money is completely wasted.”
What evidence is there that Chris Spears, basically the only person left, is ever going to be able to provide the single player content you want?
I understand the hardship of letting go when you’ve put so much in; after Broadsword cancelled all the former staff’s free accounts behind the scenes to save money, I’d been putting in $10 every 3 months to keep my library of player written books and rares up on Europa, because I didn’t want to let the history of so many people go. But I’d log in, check it still stood, and then find I just wasn’t playing the game at all. Checking the visitors gump, the only people visiting were likely the IDOCers looking to see if it was close to falling too.
I got no pleasure from it, the wider value was minimal and realistically, nothing would change. But it was mine, and I didn’t want to let it go because I felt like I’d be letting go of part of me.
It fell this month because I was just too busy to remember to pay the $10. I should feel sad. But I just feel… nothing. It’s been effectively a dead part of me for years. I just hadn’t been able to admit it, even me.
The industry KNOWS people feel this way, and exploits it to get every last drop of blood out of you. Daily log in bonus? Don’t forget the game for a single day, even if you never actually play it. Competitive ladders? Better put a few matches in to keep your rank, even if it’s no fun. House timers, pet feeding, crop collection? It’s all the weaponization of your own internal need to keep things around in the face of fear of decay and death.
But it’s not living either.
As I say, I don’t think you’re a bad person for feeling the way you do. I also don’t think however you’re ever going to get what you want from Shroud. And you’ve seen so much of their dodgy dealings you can’t be under any illusion as to how little they care about what you want… Portalarium in fact have been actively deceptive and malicious at times. I noticed in particular their concern for one of their most ardent backers recently extends only as far as leaning on her to withdraw the negative review, not actually provide the quality of game that would have avoided even her finally giving up and posting one after all these years of missed chances…
You gave everything you could to the project, never abused the critics like the above, but there’s nothing more you can give that can make any difference. This is one sow’s ear that wants to never be a silk purse.
“…I will ask you to refrain from this sort of evangelism going forward. This isn’t an opportunity for recruitment or to coax people to walk away entirely from SotA and its developers when they aren’t prepared to do so. ”
Once more, this isn’t about evangelism; if you honestly can’t understand the value of helping someone realise they’re in an abusive relationship, whether a financial or emotional one, then you have abandoned one of the most important personal checks against the spread of suffering and horror in general; the quality of empathy.
Because all of us have parts inside of us that work against our own greater good. All of us at times need an outside voice to help regulate our own perspectives. It isn’t about winning in some claimed zero-sum game, where you must lose so I get ahead; Rather, an awareness that we all are each other’s keeper. That helping others in the way that is best for them, is a moral thing to do.
This, and always this has been my main motivation for criticizing Shroud so harshly, because I could see how it was relying upon abusive practices in order to exploit more dependency, both emotional and financial, from people who were at times obviously extremely vulnerable. One of the worst elements of the entire Shroud experience in fact has been the weaponization of the generalised lack of empathy online to try and justify nurturing hatred towards critics, in order to protect liars, scammers and outright unhinged individuals so they could continue preying upon people for their own profit. It’s not just for the RMT of course, but also for weird campaigns of hatred merely using Shroud as a flag to hide behind.
And beyond that, you don’t even get the books you were promised despite throwing so much of yourselves into the sunk cost of Shroud. I wasn’t wrong, was I? But my aim has always been to say “you deserve so much better than to be treated like that”.
If you think that’s about controlling others, you’ve completely missed the point.
You’ve also missed the reality of what trying to do that does for me personally. If I wanted the easy life, the simple win, I would never have bothered caring. I would have said, let them keep hitting you, I’m not concerned… because it wouldn’t have meant not experiencing years of insane abuse from people who can’t create, but only destroy, and I was getting in the way of their fun.
And it has not escaped my awareness that even when someone is gloating online about the harm he’s hoped he’s caused to someone who doesn’t even play the game, and had no connection to me except that she loved me, the same lack of understanding of basic human empathy has been expressed time and again. I hope none of you ever have to have some of the conversations I did. But it really is impossible to understand for some out there apparently, that people might have value people AS people, and not just as pawns in some silly zero sum online game.
The moral path is playing Life on Hard mode. But it’s the right one all the same.
And irrespective of what path you or I choose, the game still isn’t what you were promised, and never will be. Because from top to bottom, it’s been an abusive relationship. It remains the truth whether we’re ready to face it now or not. So better to face it now, wouldn’t you say? It’ll only hurt you again tomorrow if you don’t.
Two brief points to make:
One, I’ve already asked you to step off the Codex because you were turning its comments section into your personal platform and soapbox. I would just as soon not venture down that rabbit hole again.
And two, it’s all well and good to desire to help someone, but equally, it’s within the right of the other to refuse that help…and this refusal should, in general, be respected, unless the person is in imminent danger of coming to harm. You’ve said your piece, Frank has said he’s not ready to quit yet…time to drop it and move on.
It’s so weird how they ban people from Sota and Sota forums for criticizing the game. Isn’t it? I was thinking about it last night, what other gaming company does that? Could you imagine if League of Legends banned people from their forums for complaining? I can’t. I can’t imagine ANY game developer doing that. These Shroud devs, they have this small group of believers that they’re pilfering money from using fear and intimidation to maintain so no one leaves the Sota tribe. Like you’ll get excommunicated or something. “Do you want to give up this big thing you’ve built? Well, keep your mouth shut then so no one else decides to leave the tribe.” They’re taking advantage of what look like emotionally vulnerable people. That’s some fucked up shit, dude.
Of all the scummy things Portalarium has done, that’s by far and away the darkest thing.
My two cents about Titler, for what it’s worth. I love reading his comments. Whether I believe everything he says is true, or only some of it, or if I think some things are exaggerated, I have the sense that he believes everything he’s saying is true and he’s extremely passionate about it. I find that very entertaining. I also don’t think he’s crossed an uncouth line with Frank. As far as internet disagreements go, this one looks pretty tame and fairly written. They just have two different perspectives and they’re both relaying their honest and respectful opinions back and forth. It’s actually refreshing to see an honest, respectful disagreement online.
Of course, WTF, you’ve done an incalculable service for the Ultima community with this website and that truly can’t be overstated. I’m also not invested in the site the way you are, so I’m sure you know more than I do, whatever you decide is best, I’ll take your word for it. But those are my two cents.
You’re not wrong, especially here:
I don’t disagree with this assessment. My only concern, such as it is, is that in the past, this passion has led to the comments section here becoming his soapbox, his platform, and that’s not something I’m particularly keen to provide.
Despite the fact that it’s been issues with Shroud that have re-ignited it, I’m loving the fact that the comment threads here have picked up in recent months; it hearkens back to the heady days of Aiera. I love seeing all this discussion playing out. I’m just not keen on someone coming here to evangelize for his cause, as it were. Past a certain point, it’s nice to see the horse-flogging stop, and to see the discussion move off in a bit of a different direction.
On another note:
I’m honestly surprised I can still log in to the SotA forums, and I agree that this practice is as messed up as can be. I’m also not surprised; Atos, in particular, seems acutely thin-skinned, and really quite unable — or maybe unwilling — to take anything more than the most soft-pedaled, sugar-coated criticism.
It certainly doesn’t impress, to say the very least.
“Past a certain point, it’s nice to see the horse-flogging stop, and to see the discussion move off in a bit of a different direction.”
Well you’d better delete this webpage then, because it ALL seems to be about Ultima or Ultima related products. Isn’t it time for a different direction?
Sarcasm, but with a serious point of course; if we judged everything by whether someone ELSE in the audience was bored of hearing about it, no genuine change would ever occur. Indeed one of the main tactics of online debate these days is to rely upon the short attention spans of the audience, to turn them against anyone who actually does care.
The only reason I can turn something into a “soapbox” in fact is because most people have indeed given up caring, and I stand out because I have not. And that isn’t something to be proud of; it should still be the basic standard.
And you’re not allowed to reply to this, because I’m bored of hearing your responses. Sarcasm again. But again, with a point.
The nice thing about being the founder and editor of a website is that I do, in fact, get to reply to everything. Or anything I desire to, at any rate. And you know, if you’re looking for that sort of platform, domain names are cheap, and GitHub Pages offers a free website hosting solution; why not take the opportunity to learn a bit about the Jekyll blogging framework?
Why do you think I started a podcast?
The corollary to this point is that the person who persists in speaking ought to have different things to say after a while.
I don’t disagree that you care, and I don’t even think it’s a bad thing. But if you’re that badly in need of a platform, you can have one – of your own! – for a paltry cost. Seriously, it costs me $17 CAD a year to register a domain name through Google Domains, and then I can host a blog for free at that domain name using GitHub Pages and the Jekyll blogging framework. If you’ve that much to say and are that desirous of a platform, go and build your own; don’t co-opt mine to suit your needs.
SotA’s community guidelines consider threats of legal action or accusations of malfeasance against the developers on any social media to be severe infractions worthy of being permanently banned from participating in the forum and possibly the game. I think most folks that are banned were not merely critical, but voiced some sort of accusations.
I certainly feel an axe hanging over my head.
I have no problem with Titler. WtF asked us to stop, so I did.
Well, you didn’t need to stop, Frank. I just didn’t want the discussion to get derailed down the sort of rabbit hole that I found things being pulled down the last time Titler commented here.
I’ve no issue with this discussion proceeding as it will; I just don’t want to see the comments here become someone’s personal platform.
Still. What gaming company outright bans you from their game and forums for that? If it’s just pissing in the wind they’ll let it go on, just so long as it isn’t completely disruptive/vitriolic attacks/spam/etc. They have to be legitimately scared that both A. they’re doing something wrong/illegal and B. their customers are going to leave to a different/better game if they band together.
I’d say they’re legitimately concerned that they’ve done something wrong and are doing their best to avoid being held accountable.
I attribute it to gross incompetence rather than malice.
Replied above. Nothing more to add.
Following on from above; how do you explain the reality without “soapboxing”, especially when all you need to do to fight off the claims is complicate the facts beyond the average attention span of the audience, and thus encourage the audience to disconnect and not do due dilligence…?
In my own case, and in the vast majority of the bans, not only did the legal action come after the bannings by Portalarium, but I like so many was actually a positive, engaged backer of the project previously. Indeed my last public post on the forums, Majoria welcomed me back because she had no idea that my forum account was the same person as the “Titler” they’d obsessed about within their bubble. I was still the “Nemo” who had written poetry for the game, done bug testing, and so much more.
Proving they were both me means “soapboxing” a lot more detail again. I could get my archives of the lead up to being banned from the Shroud Steam forums in 2014, and show how there was already then an organised group harassing critics based around “SOTAGuy”; that there were at least two people on the official Mod account, and one was sympathetic, but the other (probably Spears I now think) was protecting the harassers and looking for excuses to ban critics…
But I can feel eyes glazing over already.
Following on from the above, in turn…
I think you somewhat underestimate the attention span of the average reader of this site. We grew up playing the Ultima games, after all; those aren’t exactly frenetic or devoid of things which the player must be attentive to at some length.
Lots of stories like this. Maybe not with the doxxing and threats that you’ve had to endure (although there have been other doxxings, to be sure), and it’s a tragedy that you had to endure those things. Setting those things aside for a moment, however, you are hardly unique in being banned from the game’s forums, in returning to those forums after a ban, in contributing content to the game, or in becoming disillusioned with the game.
What’s to prove? I doubt anyone here really doubts that you had alts on the Shroud forums, that you were known by different handles within that community. Certainly, I have alts there; I would hardly assume I’m the only one who does.
You could, for sure. And pace my other reply to you above, rolling your own website would be a great way to do that. Seriously, use Google Domains; they’re cheaper to register through, and they throw in the privacy options by default. And then spin yourself up an anonymous GitHub account and go to down with their Pages feature. I was a complete GitHub n00b a month ago, and I was still able to throw up a basic website in an hour.
Look, I’m not particularly interested in deplatforming you; I’m just keen to see you use your own platform, rather than piggyback off of mine. I love seeing lengthy comments threads here again, to be sure, but equally…a comments thread really isn’t the place for the sort of expository tell-all you’re obviously anxious to put forth.
Seriously…GitHub Pages. Give it a look.
@Titler
“What evidence is there that Chris Spears, basically the only person left, is ever going to be able to provide the single player content you want?”
None. I’d say Chris doesn’t want or care about single-player, and doesn’t plan to work on it at all. It doesn’t cost me anything to watch in case I’m wrong. Maybe with all the tools Chris plans to add, a player will craft a good story and Catnip can “steal” it.
Well this is where we need to look realistically at how Shroud has actually been built; we were promised similar tools back in 2013, that Shroud would be moddable like Skyrim, and that there would be “Asset Packs” for people who pledged at Developer (iirc?) or above. What did we actually get though?
Currently, and Portalarium/Catnip has actually admitted it relies upon a central server to sync all the combat; so you can’t now devolve the game to local clients without releasing the server back-end too. Someone, with how the tech is currently built, will have to be hosting a server as well for it even for single player.
Any local hosting is likely to also destroy the RMT market and push the last of the vultures sitting on Shroud’s corpse away. But beyond that, any truly open Questing risks the same issue in that it will directly effect the in game market; We had this issue in UO all the time, countless delays to plots we wanted to run whilst Mesanna decided whether the reward was too close to something already in game and thus influencing it’s value.
Quick history lesson, the “Fawn’s Heart” rare that is a candle in UO, is because the first draft of a heart shaped rare was rejected, I re-wrote the event to make them candles, and for some reason she took the model number from the second draft, but the title from the rejected first? Sigh…
So nope, there’s no way you’re getting player tools on the live, RMT based server without questing being limited to individual written stories ONLY.
Except… that in turn is currently based upon the classic “Text > Response” model. And those are incredibly hard to write; More quick illustrative history; UO didn’t have context flags or response delays; Someone once bricked a server (I think it was Atlantic?) by having two NPCs that relevant text triggers in each other’s response, so the server kept repeating the lines faster and faster between them, until it ran out of processing power and the players couldn’t get in. Thus two NPCs talking to each other was banned entirely.
Now I also don’t know for sure whether Shroud’s engine is able to flag that the “Sword” requires a different response to the “Sword” it allows you to click elsewhere in an NPCs conversation; when I last bothered logging in a few years back, it wasn’t able too. So try writing a story where you have to use synonyms every time because you can only say “Sword” ONCE; It’s damned hard to do decently.
Also did they ever fix the problem with NPCs being unable to take items dropped upon them? That leaves out a lot of gameplay options too; you could do a player inventory check perhaps, but the only way for a writer to be able to set that up is to have access to some of the dev tools; in UO we could pull the database identification off the item directly, and then set the NPC to trigger a response if #id was dropped onto them. We also had Green Acres to do our testing in, as well as Test Centre as a dedicated location.
But as a player, you can’t privately spawn the items on live to test it (RMT/Economy issues again), so are they going to develop the tools with a set list of pre-approved usuable items to insert into the conversation paths? I suspect that’s already far beyond Catnip’s ability… geographic location checks, to see if you’ve been somewhere? Sync to server time so you can send players out “at night”…? I just can’t see any of it.
In the end, the only hope you have is that someone who can really, really write gets a hold of the tools and tells the stories you really want to read. But they can already do that to almost the same degree with the books already in game. Or even out of Shroud entirely…
@Titler
“And you’ve seen so much of their dodgy dealings you can’t be under any illusion as to how little they care about what you want… Portalarium in fact have been actively deceptive and malicious at times.”
This is indeed what I’ve seen. Maybe all the stuff I haven’t seen will come to light, and I’ll get to understand why.
@WTFDragon
No, I’m afraid you miss the point again, although you come so very close to stating it yourself;
“I think you somewhat underestimate the attention span of the average reader of this site. We grew up playing the Ultima games, after all; those aren’t exactly frenetic or devoid of things which the player must be attentive to at some length.”
and then…
“Look, I’m not particularly interested in deplatforming you; I’m just keen to see you use your own platform, rather than piggyback off of mine.”
Right there, do you see it? It’s “your” platform. So it has to appeal to “your” interests and also thus your “attention span”.
But I deliberately didn’t state whether or not the people specifically HERE have a short span, because of course I’m just as long a fan of the series, as well as being former paid staff on some of it, so I’d be insulting MYSELF if I said Ultima fans have a short attention span. The definition of the set of “posters here” of course in turn also includes myself, as I post here occasionally too… I simply never made, and it would be ridiculous for me to make the argument you assumed I did.
Which proves the actual point I made, that if you start going down the logical line of defining “grandstanding” as challenging “their” voice, that is, defining yourself by other’s interest in, or oppostion to your own voices, then nothing will ever change because people already know what they want to listen too, and it’s largely themselves. Not you. You either accept a certain level of conflict then, or you simply don’t get to have your own voice, because others either won’t understand or refuse to let you have it.
It’s a fine line on public discourse to draw I admit; They have the right to defend their own beliefs; and not every voice is worth hearing or is supportive of the existence of diverging opinions either. There has to be some form of moderation in turn. But true progress means that we should also be challenging ourselves to listen to others, because it’s not all about us. That means then you shouldn’t be quiet just because others are bored now, because exhausting their attention span, however long or short it is, is just a statement about their values, not the validity of your cause.
And more importantly, the reason people, and corporations weaponise insularism it is because it works to silence debate and avoid hard questions; Portalarium / Catnip games are never going to host people criticising them because it gets in the way of them taking more people for more money in the future.
But should they be able to do that unchallenged? Does them getting away with it make it right? How exactly are you supposed to fight it without coming into conflict with people who don’t want to hear that Shroud was a disaster?
Put it in comparitive terms again; how many years, how many empassioned voices, over how many centuries did it take to end Slavery? Can we even really say it’s truly gone today? Slave owners didn’t want to hear about abolition then. There is still resentment for it happening today. But does that mean the abolutionists should have just shut up in the South, because it was “their” plantation, “their” society, “their” rules? We recognise many of them as heroes today in fact because they had to sacrifice far more than time and a proxy server to their cause… Would they even have the achievements we admire today if they hadn’t?
I tried to give a less potentially judgemental, more Shroud based example than that; Hence me talking of not even being recognised on the Shroud forums. It’s not even an alt, Nemo was the name under which I ran UO fishing events as a player. The videos under that name are on my YouTube channel. I pointed that out to illustrate that even basic information is very, very hard for people to track; it’s much easier to just accept hatred because you want to believe people opposed to things you love are evil. And who has time to fact check? And that trying to illustrate that in turn endangers even more resentment because then people assume you’re insulting their intelligence, instead of pointing out they hold incorrect beliefs about who you really are.
It’s the same problem, on a much smaller scale. Just because they don’t want to understand who you are, it doesn’t mean you should just willingly be quiet.
So … no, “Ultima” and “Shroud” isn’t all about you. Or me. Or anyone else. By all means define the Ultima Codex as the WhatTheFultima Codex, if that’s really closer to your perception of what you want. But for my sake, for the sake of all those who might benefit from what I know, that means “grandstanding” in turn too; Because as you said yourself, the Ultima fans, those with long attention spans are HERE apparently. So if I care for them, I should be sometimes too.
I can’t believe I need to explain this, but:
No. It’s my platform because I built it, I operate it, I maintain it, and I’m the one the papers come to if anything legally actionable happens on the site…whether or not I’m the author of the content in question.
If the site existed to cater only to my interests, it would feature Scouting-related content about as regularly as it does Ultima-related content, plus way more Catholic content than the lightweight bits that find their ways into BSV episodes. And if I were particularly dictatorial about conforming site content to my tastes, nobody would ever be allowed to disparage U9.
But none of that happens, does it?
As noted previously, I love seeing these discussions play out, but the joy of healthy comment discussion is that even when it’s about a topic we’ve covered before, the conversation has a freshness to it. It’s never the same, even if it’s about the same thing.
But that’s not what you contribute, typically. In the main, you bring the same retellings of the same events, events that transpired now five years prior. Or you try to exert a degree of pressure on those who are still willing to afford Shroud or Catniplarium a measure of goodwill, urging them to abandon such thinking.
It was fine the first couple of times. It stopped being fine when you became way too pushy over the possibility of my publishing a big exposé on the company. And this is how that started last time, and I’ve no particular desire to undertake that journey again.
Look, you’ve got a story to tell. You’ve got evidence to present. You are desirous of a platform that I really don’t see this site being able to provide you with. So I’d encourage you to roll your own domain – they’re cheap! – and spin up a GitHib account. It’s only getting easier to run your own website, and what you’re ultimately trying to achieve is really more suited to having its own home online than it is being relegated to the comment forms of a fansite that isn’t even entirely related to the game that’s at the center of the story you’re trying to tell.
>over the possibility of my publishing a big exposé on the company.
Honestly, I feel this would be interesting to read. Not that I’m suggesting you or the site do so. I’d really like to hear from involved folks, even if they were spoken to anonymously. Former employees, Travian, Black Sun, etc. I would love to read a long form piece with a view from the inside.
My attention span is pretty short, not gunna lie, I think I watched half a Titler video before I kinda zoned out. Damned cell phones. In any event, not to stir the pot, of course, of course, but I would be cool with a Titler column once every couple of weeks or once a month. I’m sure I’m not the only one that’s interested in his stories and passionate writing. Then you could contain the flood of comments to one section, or one article once in a while. You can’t deny he’s a good writer and he’s got a lot of content in him.