I'm usually not one to comment on forums, but after a friend of mine shares this thread with me I had to speak out. I entertained the idea of supporting Greedmonger for a long time, and I know someone personally that has his own MMO tech that tried to help Greedmonger just as he has helped Valiance Online. He has been getting his game ready for a pre-launch right now, and has always been very enthusiastic about helping other indie MMO developers, because he has worked on them professionally and knows the struggles. Look at what his company did for Project Gorgon, and you'll see how much they could have done for Greedmonger. He never went into details with me about how things feel through, but I wish they would have took him up on his offer. Seeing this game come crashing down the way it has really sucks to me. I'm a coder from the Unity community, and I was honestly going to invest in some land during the Greedmonger Kickstarter efforts. However, I saw one thing that immediately killed it for me, and it was James Proctors attachment to the project. I'm not one to insult someone publicly, but I've been in the Unity community since its inception, and I've seen James flip from project to project, claiming to program this and that, and all he has done is taken free assets or purchased Unity Assets and modified someone's code or art to create something slightly different. It's been going on for years, a few searches of "James Proctor Unity3D" would have saved Jason and the countless investors of Greedmonger. Had I not frequented the Unity 3D forums as much as I had, I'd be out of 500 dollars right now, because I don't often do research before pledging to most projects.
Unfortunately for the Greedmonger community, if they are counting on James to finish this game, it will NEVER be finished. James does not know how to program, and I had to register here to tell people that. Not only because I feel I would have been 500 dollars in debt to this project had I invested, but because as an indie developer I've seen how failed deliver on crowdfunded projects have hurt us and created a negative reactions from would-be investors for other indie products. I'd be so angry right now had I invested, that I just had to post here and share what I know. A lot of people have put a lot of the blame on Jason, and I'm not saying he is without blame, because before taking people's money he should have had an understanding of what he promised to do. Just taking someone's money, and saying, "Let's see if I can do this" with no idea of what you are doing is just wrong; no excuses, no exceptions. I saw his interviews with Markee Dragon where he just kept saying Ultima Online this and Ultima Online that, and there was really no immediate correlation between Greedmonger or Ultima Online. Greedmonger was expected to have player-driven everything, but so does many other games. Why use Ultima Online as a reference? Was it to garner nostalgia-driven support? So a lot of unworthy hype was drummed up by Jason, with nothing in-place to support the functionality of his ideas.
In further regards to James, I know many developers from the Unity community that have worked with James Proctor, and every single one has talked about how James unexpectedly, and abruptly abandons projects; many say he never even delivered any original code. Even the zombie game he was accused of sharing was just the default version of a Unity Asset Store package. I personally feel that Jason's biggest mistake is trusting James, a guy with no leadership or programming skills to work as the Project Lead and Programming Lead. I honestly believe that Jason spent all the Kickstarter funds on Greedmonger, chasing James' dreams and buying everything James said he would need, because Jason had no idea what was needed. Jason was a financier with no idea of how the game development process works, so he was just dumping money into James' lavish turn & burn process . I mean they went from Unity 3D to Hero Engine, an engine James was using for years claiming to be making Rise of Heroes (only to show off default in-game content that comes with the engine), back to Unity 3d in under a year. It was because James couldn't find anything in the Unity Asset Store that he could salvage to make an MMO, so he switched to Hero Engine which is essentially an MMO maker. Then he noticed Hero allowed you to use their content much easier than making your own content. However, they have a license agreement that prevents users from releasing or selling anything with their content in it. Once Atavism was released for Unity, he saw a sure-shot way of jolting back to Unity to use another coders work without having to actually code. He noticed that in order to use it properly you needed actual knowledge of server-handling, as well as more money to invest in the plugins, and tools to add what Greedmonger needed to operate as promised. So he even went as far as trying to leverage negotiations with Atavism's Lead Programmer to get those components made for Atavism under the idea that they'd advertise Atavism with Greedmonger to help Atavism with PR. When things didn't go as planned, James started slandering the product and was banned from the forums. It's all public too, do your research on the Atavism forums. To this day, he has never shown anything of his own making. Even the break-out meets space-invaders game someone showed earlier was part of a free Unity tutorial that was shared at a game developer presentation; the source was later released online.
As I said I don't usually do the forum thing, but after seeing this and reading it for a while, I felt obligated to say something. Seeing a few people on the Greedmonger Facebook, and official forum entertaining the idea of the project actually coming to fruition compelled me to finally say something here. Once again, James is not a programmer, he gathers code from various assets and tutorials in an attempt to make various products. Unfortunately there is no true "MMO-maker" that can be bought, that is capable of doing what he was trying to do. I've fulfilled my personal obligation, I hope investors of the project find some form of recompense in the future.
