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Author Topic: KS for Confrontation 'Resurrection' April 17th  (Read 57181 times)

Offline robh

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Re: KS for Confrontation 'Resurrection' April 17th
« Reply #180 on: May 13, 2018, 12:36:26 PM »
Don't get me wrong, I'm worried... but I don't go to Vegas often... and I feel the odds are better... a little gamble is worth the reward here to me.

I hope it works out for you. To treat it as a gamble is the right attitude for any Kickstarter, not just this one.
At this stage who knows, they could confound all the sceptics.

Offline The Voivod

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Re: KS for Confrontation 'Resurrection' April 17th
« Reply #181 on: May 13, 2018, 12:42:52 PM »
Quote
Maelstrom was very different though. That was an emergency move to try and sakvage something from what was the result of a move by Wayland, who had bought debt from Wyrd and then called it in. At that time Maelstrom was one of their leading competitors.

I don't know those specifics. All I know is they where still taking money from people, when they allready knew they couldn't deliver.
I'm not saying SD is pulling the same stuff here. I was just saying that if a product has a controversial past it's not a given that the product will be abandoned by the public.
'Mercy? I am far to brave to grant you mercy.'

Offline gibby64

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Re: KS for Confrontation 'Resurrection' April 17th
« Reply #182 on: May 13, 2018, 03:26:06 PM »
Everyone keeps mentioning Ludik Bazare  as a company involved and this Kickstarter... it's not one of the guys with this Kickstarter was the owner of   Ludik Bazare... totally separate company and they just shut the company down... they didn't screw anybody they didn't do anything wrong it just wasn't feasible anymore and they shut it down. I have several LLCs with my name on it that have nothing to do with each other. if I start to think one isn't feasible anymore I'll shut it down. I don't understand why it would have anything to do with one of my other companies though. people are giving us this a bad rap because  Ludik Bazare is shutting down their company even though there's not one person that said they've ever lost money with  Ludik Bazare. That whole arguments just not valid with me I see why they keep wondering why everyone's so worried about a company that's not involved.
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Offline robh

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Re: KS for Confrontation 'Resurrection' April 17th
« Reply #183 on: May 13, 2018, 04:31:01 PM »
There are people out of pocket as a result of Ludik going bankrupt. They sold a series of "club" discount schemes that were still valid at the time they stopped trading. The people holding those were not able to use them during the closure and will not be refunded for that time or the remaining months of the current membership period.
Also there are still people awaiting refunds for items they purchased in the closing sales that were actually out of stock when the sale was accepted. It was discussed during the kickstarter.

Although in fairness I got a portion of my final order with them refunded as figures I bought were out of stock, but that was right at the beginning of the sale period.

Offline ced1106

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Re: KS for Confrontation 'Resurrection' April 17th
« Reply #184 on: May 14, 2018, 02:52:32 AM »
Everyone keeps mentioning Ludik Bazare  as a company involved and this Kickstarter... it's not one of the guys with this Kickstarter was the owner of   Ludik Bazare... totally separate company and they just shut the company down... they didn't screw anybody they didn't do anything wrong it just wasn't feasible anymore and they shut it down. I have several LLCs with my name on it that have nothing to do with each other. if I start to think one isn't feasible anymore I'll shut it down. I don't understand why it would have anything to do with one of my other companies though. people are giving us this a bad rap because  Ludik Bazare is shutting down their company even though there's not one person that said they've ever lost money with  Ludik Bazare. That whole arguments just not valid with me I see why they keep wondering why everyone's so worried about a company that's not involved.

Wait. What? SD and Ludik Bazare are owned by the same guy, Piotr Borowski. They're even at the same address. AFAIK, LB is an online store. You're telling me it's not "feasible" to run an online game store?? Dunno about you, but I'd rather fund a guy who can run a business, rather than shut it down. KS is not a store -- and it's not a secured loan, either. If SD also "isn't feasible anymore", backers will be last in line in getting any of their money back, although I'm sure they'll be happy to know that the SD employees, such as Joss and Piotr, will have gotten their salaries from backer KS funds. Also, Sarouan, on Dakka, said about Joss, the miniature guy "well known" in France, "And let's not forget that the game Alkemy that he designed made their first company, Kraken Editions, bankrupt."

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Offline Condottiere

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Re: KS for Confrontation 'Resurrection' April 17th
« Reply #185 on: May 14, 2018, 04:42:31 PM »
HaleysRedComet post from c.2 hours ago: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/996665814/confrontation-classic-the-legendary-skirmish-game/comments?cursor=20439538#comment-20439537

In case it's deleted or forgotten:
Quote
So, let's think about this. I, and I believe most people here, want the return of Confrontation. CMON dropped the ball on this when they held the rights. They teased Phoenix edition through a different project and never delivered on that, and now SD holds the IP rights and plans to bring the game back via Resurrection. So far, so good, I think. We got a company who is actually doing some work to bring the brand back. Awesome.

OK, so back in early 2017 SD announces that Classic and Ressurection will be something they are working on, and at some point Classic will be a Kickstarter project. Awesome. I'm jazzed about this, I love this game and the minis and can't wait to see how SD does with it. Then... not a lot happens. As the project draws closer there is a poll for characters to be included with the pledge, actually pretty cool. Get the community involved, good idea. But then...

Mostly silence from SD. People, in general, don't get responses to questions on the FB. One thread in particular had a ton of pretty basic questions - what's the pledge structure, etc... - but the only question that was answered was someone asking for SD's Twitter account. So, we know SD is seeing these questions but ignoring them. I'm not saying I was expecting detailed answers, but a simple "Wait and see" or "This is the basic idea" would have been nice. This would be a trend that SD continues to this day - they mostly don't respond to social media inquiries.

Anyway, the KS launches and funds in 2 hours. It raises about 650K Euro. Awesome. But then... people start asking questions and looking closer at things. The minis will be PVC with ABS weapons, similar to what Wrath of Kings does. Personally, this doesn't make too much sense to me, as my metal Confrontation minis tended to have stability issues with ankles more than anything else. But, this is the project SD wants to do. So, we will have PVC and ABS. The issue of quality comes up again and again. It's answered, but because a prototype isn't shown people don't believe it. We are told to trust SD, many backers do because they've delivered on their RPG projects before. SD posts and update saying they can be trusted because they've made products before. OK.

So, we are 3 days from the end of the project and it is down to about 461K Euro right now. That's nearly 200K lost and about 66% of what it was at the height of funding. What happened? Here's where I am going to get really critical: Sans Detour barely worked on this project.

The project launched with over a year of planning able to go into it. What we saw was pictures of the old Rackham minis - the same ones used in their catalog and on the mini's cards. There's even art used in a few situations instead of miniature images. That's weird. Not a single model was ever cast by SD. They're offering a resin pledge, people thought maybe SD made some of those minis. Nope, I confirmed that they were leftover from old Rackham. SD then doubles down on this and states that they are unable to produce a mini they have made, that it is cost prohibitive. I have never seen a single miniature company using KS that has said this. So then people start asking to see how they will scan the masters into a computer, as SD stated they will do this to make molds. Nope, again. So we are left to conclude that Sans Detour has not done -any- work prior to the KS campaign to show people what they plan to produce. They said they've made calls to factories. That seems like it is enough for some people.

Then, we get into the weird grey area of how business ownership and partner companies. In an update, Sans Detour stated they would use Ludik (with whom they share an owner and address) for logistics on this project. They stated that, if Ludik were to go under, they wold simply switch to a different company. So, in a comment, it was disclosed that Ludik is now controlled by a liquidator. I don't know how this wasn't known before, it's a huge red flag. Then, we also find out that Stellar Licensing, the company who owns the IP, only owns the Confrontation IP as their single asset and is owned by the financial Director of SD. Again, kind of weird.

So - in the year leading up to this project, the only prep work done was to photoshop existing images together, make a choice of minis featured, and contact factories. That is, observably, the only work done by SD leading up to what they hoped (looking at the stretch goals) would be a million Euro+ project.

This brings us to the current situation. Sans Detour, the account, is barely involved with getting information out. Instead, Joss - the project manager - has his own account and comments, while other collaborators - who are friends of the project and not SD employees - also give official information. The collaborators get all their info from SD directly, so if they don't have the answer to a question and want to answer it, they have to ask someone. Fine so far. But - we have seen that some of the collaborators have berated and ignored people who have questions or concerns about the project. It's also apparent that there is no native English speaker who works on this project, which sometimes causes misunderstandings. It's a small issue, but for a company to launch a large project in English without a native speaker seems like a mistake.

It also came out that SD was not able to produce game play videos of the game they are pitching, which was a request frequently asked of them. I asked a collaborator about this and was told that there are only 2 players around their office and they had no time to record. I don't see how, in the year they had to prepare for this, they couldn't run through a game and take pictures or record. That doesn't add up to me, and makes me think this project wasn't taken seriously by SD from the start.

It would appear that SD thought it could put together a project for a game that hasn't been produced in about 10 years and expect that people would be willing to buy a 300 Euro box of minis without even seeing how they might look in the material they will receive them in. Next to no prep work was done, and SD seems to be happy with the fact that it passed it's goal at all despite the fact that it lost 1/3 of it's funding so far. SD plans to launch a new edition of Confrontation next year sometime. No one has seen any work that has gone into that so far, so we are left to conclude that as much effort will go into that project as went into their current one. Which is to say - not much at all.

Offline robh

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Re: KS for Confrontation 'Resurrection' April 17th
« Reply #186 on: May 14, 2018, 11:05:11 PM »
.......and just when you think they couldn't do anything more stupid they have just sent out a spam "Back our Kickstarter" email via Ludik Baazar.
You know, that bankrupt company they are not connected to at all, honestly, really, not at all.....

Another couple of grand down and they will be eating into the money they took on day 1, at close to €445k now.

The words piss up and brewery come to mind.

Offline beefcake

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Re: KS for Confrontation 'Resurrection' April 17th
« Reply #187 on: May 15, 2018, 07:56:48 AM »
Yeesh,
Lost 25000 yesterday!


Offline Cubs

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Re: KS for Confrontation 'Resurrection' April 17th
« Reply #188 on: May 15, 2018, 09:04:39 AM »
In case it's deleted or forgotten:

That is .... terrifying. If I had backed this, I'd be pulling out faster than a Cardiff bus driver (I cleaned that one up considerably). Having it put down blandly like that must surely fire off alarms in people's heads, when they realise they are paying someone who has done absolutely nothing to prepare for actually delivering a product.
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Offline beefcake

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Re: KS for Confrontation 'Resurrection' April 17th
« Reply #189 on: May 15, 2018, 09:13:57 AM »
That is .... terrifying. If I had backed this, I'd be pulling out faster than a Cardiff bus driver (I cleaned that one up considerably). Having it put down blandly like that must surely fire off alarms in people's heads, when they realise they are paying someone who has done absolutely nothing to prepare for actually delivering a product.
You did very well. My eyes widened at the fact the comment was clean.

Offline mcfonz

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Re: KS for Confrontation 'Resurrection' April 17th
« Reply #190 on: May 15, 2018, 09:50:19 AM »
Yup, this all looks rather dodgy.

Liquidators were in at Ludik last year - why would you even plan to use them as distributors if you knew that?

Then you add in that there are like three names and they are all linked to the different businesses and all situated in the same building.

Sorry but this is all dodgy as hell. What worries me more, is that if they haven't even got as far as scanning them in and running a test print - how on earth do they know how much it will cost?

I'm assuming this is going to be produced in China - if so, how much contact have they had so far - again, look at other KS campaigns that have suffered huge delays despite having good prior correspondence with the factory in China etc.

Seriously, the people trying to play all of this down will be as guilty as the creators should this sink with people's money lost to the ether.
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Offline beefcake

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Re: KS for Confrontation 'Resurrection' April 17th
« Reply #191 on: May 15, 2018, 10:18:49 AM »
With the amount they promise I imagine they will try to use the cheapest possible PVC molds etc they can get (If it will cover it) and this will yield rather sub par miniatures to say the least. Just conjecture mind you.

Offline nic-e

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Re: KS for Confrontation 'Resurrection' April 17th
« Reply #192 on: May 15, 2018, 11:30:29 AM »
With the amount they promise I imagine they will try to use the cheapest possible PVC molds etc they can get (If it will cover it) and this will yield rather sub par miniatures to say the least. Just conjecture mind you.

My thinking was that they'd churn these out like cheap toy soldiers in a cheap mould.
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Offline robh

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Re: KS for Confrontation 'Resurrection' April 17th
« Reply #193 on: May 15, 2018, 04:37:55 PM »
It now seems that SD are playing hardball with backers by refusing to allow upgrades in the Pledge Manager, if you want resin later you have to have a minimum of the big box pledge now and if you if you only have a €1 you cannot upgrade to either big box or resin.

Basically trying to extort anyone with a slight interest to put up and shut up with the €300 euros.

Totally obvious now they are desperate to get the funds in immediately, and obviously not for anything related to this Kickstarter.
I think this has passed from risky project to downright cash grab scam.

Offline Coenus Scaldingus

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Re: KS for Confrontation 'Resurrection' April 17th
« Reply #194 on: May 15, 2018, 05:33:00 PM »
Don't think I've seen that strategy before.

Ah, and they've now dropped below the funding they made on the first day. Reckon they can manage to get below 400k, if they keep up their great work.
~Ad finem temporum~