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2014/09/10 00:24:05
Subject: Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
Cruentus wrote: Yup, the legs were backward. I switched them around, they look much better, thanks for that.
I'll have to find some ABS glue, any suggestions? I don't want to have these buggers falling apart on me.
several companies make an ABS glue for ABS models, check your local modeling or craft store Tamiya is a good brand, also a product called Plastruct (never used it before), there is also stuff called MEK but it is very strong(smell). some say Testor's can be used on ABS but I've found that not to always be true, with the model getting pitted and falling apart after time.
Also was wondering if the legs were on backwards so he could see where he was
Note that if the hardware store has "MEK substitute" it's ethyl acetate, not MEK. Not quite as strong.
I prefer MEK because you can buy a quart for ten bucks and have it last you the year. Note that it is a liquid, and you'll need to use a natural hair brush to apply it.
2014/09/10 13:37:35
Subject: Re:Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
Great news, everybody! They're shipping 200 orders a day... over in the mantic KS thread. Are we up to 200 orders in two weeks yet???
Spoiler:
.Mikes. wrote: Ronnie dropped by the Containment Protocol facebook group this morning and left this message in a discussion:
hi guys we are getting through about 200 orders per day (more if they are small, less if they are big - and some a VERY big) so we still have about 6 days more of orders - about 1000 left . I also have a pile of thank you notes to sign! We are getting through them but 5000 orders is taking a while! Thanks for your patience.
If you take a work day to be ten hours, that's one order completed every 3 minutes. Even if you consider that overtime will almost certainly be included, that's impressive.
An interesting post with an inside yet outside POV on what went wrong with TSR and D&D many years ago... I suspect a few things might ring a bell here.
If you find this article useful, please share it with your friends!
In the winter of 1997, I traveled to Lake Geneva Wisconsin on a secret mission. In the late fall, rumors of TSR's impending bankruptcy had created an opportunity to made a bold gamble that the business could be saved by an infusion of capital or an acquisition with a larger partner. After a hasty series of phone calls and late night strategy sessions, I found myself standing in the snow outside of 201 Sheridan Springs Road staring at a building bearing a sign that said "TSR, Incorporated".
Inside the building, I found a dead company.
In the halls that had produced the stuff of my childhood fantasies, and had fired my imagination and become unalterably intertwined with my own sense of self, I found echoes, empty desks, and the terrible depression of lost purpose.
The life story of a tree can be read by a careful examination of its rings. The life story of a corporation can be read by a careful examination of its financial records and corporate minutes.
I was granted unprecedented access to those records. I read the TSR corporate log book from the first page penned in haste by Gary Gygax to the most recent terse minutes dictated to a lawyer with no connection to hobby gaming. I was able to trace the meteoric rise of D&D as a business, the terrible failure to control costs that eventually allowed a total outsider to take control away from the founders, the slow and steady progress to rebuild the financial solvency of the company, and the sudden and dramatic failure of that business model. I read the euphoric copyright filings for the books of my lost summers: "Player's Handbook", "Fiend Folio", "Oriental Adventures". I read the contract between Gary and TSR where Gary was severed from contact with the company he had founded and the business he had nurtured and grown. I saw the clause where Gary, forced to the wall by ruthless legal tactics was reduced to insisting to the right to use his own name in future publishing endeavors, and to take and keep control of his personal D&D characters. I read the smudged photocopies produced by the original Dragonlance Team, a group of people who believed in a new idea for gaming that told a story across many different types of products. I saw concept artwork evolve from lizard men with armor to unmistakable draconians. I read Tracy Hickman's one page synopsis of the Dragonlance Story. I held the contract between Tracy and Margaret for the publication of the three Chronicles novels. I read the contract between Ed Greenwood and TSR to buy his own personal game world and transform it into the most developed game setting in history - the most detailed and explored fantasy world ever created.
And I read the details of the Random House distribution agreement; an agreement that TSR had used to support a failing business and hide the fact that TSR was rotten at the core. I read the entangling bank agreements that divided the copyright interests of the company as security against default, and realized that the desperate arrangements made to shore up the company's poor financial picture had so contaminated those rights that it might not be possible to extract Dungeons & Dragons from the clutches of lawyers and bankers and courts for years upon end. I read the severance agreements between the company and departed executives which paid them extraordinary sums for their silence. I noted the clauses, provisions, amendments and agreements that were piling up more debt by the hour in the form of interest charges, fees and penalties. I realized that the money paid in good faith by publishers and attendees for GenCon booths and entrance fees had been squandered and that the show itself could not be funded. I discovered that the cost of the products that company was making in many cases exceeded the price the company was receiving for selling those products. I toured a warehouse packed from floor to 50 foot ceiling with products valued as though they would soon be sold to a distributor with production stamps stretching back to the late 1980s. I was 10 pages in to a thick green bar report of inventory, calculating the true value of the material in that warehouse when I realized that my last 100 entries had all been "$0"'s.
I met staff members who were determined to continue to work, despite the knowledge that they might not get paid, might not even be able to get in to the building each day. I saw people who were working on the same manuscripts they'd been working on six months earlier, never knowing if they'd actually be able to produce the fruits of their labor. In the eyes of those people (many of whom I have come to know as friends and co workers), I saw defeat, desperation, and the certain knowledge that somehow, in some way, they had failed. The force of the human, personal pain in that building was nearly overwhelming - on several occasions I had to retreat to a bathroom to sit and compose myself so that my own tears would not further trouble those already tortured souls.
I ran hundreds of spreadsheets, determined to figure out what had to be done to save the company. I was convinced that if I could just move enough money from column A to column B, that everything would be ok. Surely, a company with such powerful brands and such a legacy of success could not simply cease to exist due to a few errors of judgment and a poor strategic plan?
I made several trips to TSR during the frenzied days of negotiation that resulted in the acquisition of the company by Wizards of the Coast. When I returned home from my first trip, I retreated to my home office; a place filled with bookshelves stacked with Dungeons & Dragons products. From the earliest games to the most recent campaign setting supplements - I owned, had read, and loved those products with a passion and intensity that I devoted to little else in my life. And I knew, despite my best efforts to tell myself otherwise, that the disaster I kept going back to in Wisconsin was the result of the products on those shelves.
When Peter put me in charge of the tabletop RPG business in 1998, he gave me one commission: Find out what went wrong, fix the business, save D&D. Vince also gave me a business condition that was easy to understand and quite direct. "God damnit, Dancey", he thundered at me from across the conference table: "Don't lose any more money!"
That became my core motivation. Save D&D. Don't lose money. Figure out what went wrong. Fix the problem.
Back into those financials I went. I walked again the long threads of decisions made by managers long gone; there are few roadmarks to tell us what was done and why in the years TSR did things like buy a needlepoint distributorship, or establish a west coast office at King Vedor's mansion. Why had a moderate success in collectable dice triggered a million unit order? Why did I still have stacks and stacks of 1st edition rulebooks in the warehouse? Why did TSR create not once, not twice, but nearly a dozen times a variation on the same, Tolkien inspired, eurocentric fantasy theme? Why had it constantly tried to create different games, poured money into marketing those games, only to realize that nobody was buying those games? Why, when it was so desperate for cash, had it invested in a million dollar license for content used by less than 10% of the marketplace? Why had a successful game line like Dragonlance been forcibly uprooted from its natural home in the D&D game and transplanted to a foreign and untested new game system? Why had the company funded the development of a science fiction game modeled on D&D - then not used the D&D game rules?
In all my research into TSR's business, across all the ledgers, notebooks, computer files, and other sources of data, there was one thing I never found - one gaping hole in the mass of data we had available.
No customer profiling information. No feedback. No surveys. No "voice of the customer". TSR, it seems, knew nothing about the people who kept it alive. The management of the company made decisions based on instinct and gut feelings; not data. They didn't know how to listen - as an institution, listening to customers was considered something that other companies had to do - TSR lead, everyone else followed.
In today's hypercompetitive market, that's an impossible mentality. At Wizards of the Coast, we pay close attention to the voice of the customer. We ask questions. We listen. We react. So, we spent a whole lot of time and money on a variety of surveys and studies to learn about the people who play role playing games. And, at every turn, we learned things that were not only surprising, they flew in the face of all the conventional wisdom we'd absorbed through years of professional game publishing.
We heard some things that are very, very hard for a company to hear. We heard that our customers felt like we didn't trust them. We heard that we produced material they felt was substandard, irrelevant, and broken. We heard that our stories were boring or out of date, or simply uninteresting. We heard the people felt that >we< were irrelevant.
I know now what killed TSR. It wasn't trading card games. It wasn't Dragon Dice. It wasn't the success of other companies. It was a near total inability to listen to its customers, hear what they were saying, and make changes to make those customers happy. TSR died because it was deaf.
Amazingly, despite all those problems, and despite years of neglect, the D&D game itself remained, at the core, a viable business. Damaged; certainly. Ailing; certainly. But savable? Absolutely.
Our customers were telling us that 2e was too restrictive, limited their creativity, and wasn't "fun to play'? We can fix that. We can update the core rules to enable the expression of that creativity. We can demonstrate a commitment to supporting >your< stories. >Your< worlds. And we can make the game fun again.
Our customers were telling us that we produced too many products, and that the stuff we produced was of inferior quality? We can fix that. We can cut back on the number of products we release, and work hard to make sure that each and every book we publish is useful, interesting, and of high quality.
Our customers were telling us that we spent too much time on our own worlds, and not enough time on theirs? Ok - we can fix that. We can re-orient the business towards tools, towards examples, towards universal systems and rules that aren't dependent on owning a thousand dollars of unnecessary materials first.
Our customers were telling us that they prefer playing D&D nearly 2:1 over the next most popular game option? That's an important point of distinction. We can leverage that desire to help get them more people to play >with< by reducing the barriers to compatibility between the material we produce, and the material created by other companies.
Our customers told us they wanted a better support organization? We can pour money and resources into the RPGA and get it growing and supporting players like never before in the club's history. (10,000 paid members and rising, nearly 50,000 unpaid members - numbers currently skyrocketing).
Our customers were telling us that they want to create and distribute content based on our game? Fine - we can accommodate that interest and desire in a way that keeps both our customers and our lawyers happy.
Are we still listening? Yes, we absolutely are. If we hear you asking us for something we're not delivering, we'll deliver it. But we're not going to cater to the specific and unique needs of a minority if doing so will cause hardship to the majority. We're going to try and be responsible shepards of the D&D business, and that means saying "no" to things that we have shown to be damaging to the business and that aren't wanted or needed by most of our customers.
We listened when the customers told us that Alternity wasn't what they wanted in a science fiction game. We listened when customers told us that they didn't want the confusing, jargon filled world of Planescape. We listened when people told us that the Ravenloft concept was overshadowed by the products of a competitor. We listened to customers who told us that they want core materials, not world materials. That they buy DUNGEON magazine every two months at a rate twice that of our best selling stand-alone adventures.
We're not telling anyone what game to play. We are telling the market that we're going to actively encourage our players to stand up and demand that they be listened to, and that they become the center of the gaming industry - rather than the current publisher-centric model. Through the RPGA, the Open Gaming movement, the pages of Dragon Magazine, and all other venues available, we want to empower our customers to do what >they< want, to force us and our competitors to bend to >their< will, to make the products >they< want made.
I want to be judged on results, not rhetoric. I want to look back at my time at the helm of this business and feel that things got better, not worse. I want to know that my team made certain that the mistakes of the past wouldn't be the mistakes of the future. I want to know that we figured out what went wrong. That we fixed it. That we saved D&D. And that god damnit, we didn't lose money.
Thank you for listening,
Sincerely,
Ryan S. Dancey
VP, Wizards of the Coast
Brand Manager, Dungeons & Dragons
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2014/09/10 13:53:49
2014/09/10 16:37:41
Subject: Re:Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
warboss wrote: Great news, everybody! They're shipping 200 orders a day... over in the mantic KS thread. Are we up to 200 orders in two weeks yet???
Spoiler:
.Mikes. wrote: Ronnie dropped by the Containment Protocol facebook group this morning and left this message in a discussion:
hi guys we are getting through about 200 orders per day (more if they are small, less if they are big - and some a VERY big) so we still have about 6 days more of orders - about 1000 left . I also have a pile of thank you notes to sign! We are getting through them but 5000 orders is taking a while! Thanks for your patience.
If you take a work day to be ten hours, that's one order completed every 3 minutes. Even if you consider that overtime will almost certainly be included, that's impressive.
An interesting post with an inside yet outside POV on what went wrong with TSR and D&D many years ago... I suspect a few things might ring a bell here.
If you find this article useful, please share it with your friends!
In the winter of 1997, I traveled to Lake Geneva Wisconsin on a secret mission. In the late fall, rumors of TSR's impending bankruptcy had created an opportunity to made a bold gamble that the business could be saved by an infusion of capital or an acquisition with a larger partner. After a hasty series of phone calls and late night strategy sessions, I found myself standing in the snow outside of 201 Sheridan Springs Road staring at a building bearing a sign that said "TSR, Incorporated".
Inside the building, I found a dead company.
In the halls that had produced the stuff of my childhood fantasies, and had fired my imagination and become unalterably intertwined with my own sense of self, I found echoes, empty desks, and the terrible depression of lost purpose.
The life story of a tree can be read by a careful examination of its rings. The life story of a corporation can be read by a careful examination of its financial records and corporate minutes.
I was granted unprecedented access to those records. I read the TSR corporate log book from the first page penned in haste by Gary Gygax to the most recent terse minutes dictated to a lawyer with no connection to hobby gaming. I was able to trace the meteoric rise of D&D as a business, the terrible failure to control costs that eventually allowed a total outsider to take control away from the founders, the slow and steady progress to rebuild the financial solvency of the company, and the sudden and dramatic failure of that business model. I read the euphoric copyright filings for the books of my lost summers: "Player's Handbook", "Fiend Folio", "Oriental Adventures". I read the contract between Gary and TSR where Gary was severed from contact with the company he had founded and the business he had nurtured and grown. I saw the clause where Gary, forced to the wall by ruthless legal tactics was reduced to insisting to the right to use his own name in future publishing endeavors, and to take and keep control of his personal D&D characters. I read the smudged photocopies produced by the original Dragonlance Team, a group of people who believed in a new idea for gaming that told a story across many different types of products. I saw concept artwork evolve from lizard men with armor to unmistakable draconians. I read Tracy Hickman's one page synopsis of the Dragonlance Story. I held the contract between Tracy and Margaret for the publication of the three Chronicles novels. I read the contract between Ed Greenwood and TSR to buy his own personal game world and transform it into the most developed game setting in history - the most detailed and explored fantasy world ever created.
And I read the details of the Random House distribution agreement; an agreement that TSR had used to support a failing business and hide the fact that TSR was rotten at the core. I read the entangling bank agreements that divided the copyright interests of the company as security against default, and realized that the desperate arrangements made to shore up the company's poor financial picture had so contaminated those rights that it might not be possible to extract Dungeons & Dragons from the clutches of lawyers and bankers and courts for years upon end. I read the severance agreements between the company and departed executives which paid them extraordinary sums for their silence. I noted the clauses, provisions, amendments and agreements that were piling up more debt by the hour in the form of interest charges, fees and penalties. I realized that the money paid in good faith by publishers and attendees for GenCon booths and entrance fees had been squandered and that the show itself could not be funded. I discovered that the cost of the products that company was making in many cases exceeded the price the company was receiving for selling those products. I toured a warehouse packed from floor to 50 foot ceiling with products valued as though they would soon be sold to a distributor with production stamps stretching back to the late 1980s. I was 10 pages in to a thick green bar report of inventory, calculating the true value of the material in that warehouse when I realized that my last 100 entries had all been "$0"'s.
I met staff members who were determined to continue to work, despite the knowledge that they might not get paid, might not even be able to get in to the building each day. I saw people who were working on the same manuscripts they'd been working on six months earlier, never knowing if they'd actually be able to produce the fruits of their labor. In the eyes of those people (many of whom I have come to know as friends and co workers), I saw defeat, desperation, and the certain knowledge that somehow, in some way, they had failed. The force of the human, personal pain in that building was nearly overwhelming - on several occasions I had to retreat to a bathroom to sit and compose myself so that my own tears would not further trouble those already tortured souls.
I ran hundreds of spreadsheets, determined to figure out what had to be done to save the company. I was convinced that if I could just move enough money from column A to column B, that everything would be ok. Surely, a company with such powerful brands and such a legacy of success could not simply cease to exist due to a few errors of judgment and a poor strategic plan?
I made several trips to TSR during the frenzied days of negotiation that resulted in the acquisition of the company by Wizards of the Coast. When I returned home from my first trip, I retreated to my home office; a place filled with bookshelves stacked with Dungeons & Dragons products. From the earliest games to the most recent campaign setting supplements - I owned, had read, and loved those products with a passion and intensity that I devoted to little else in my life. And I knew, despite my best efforts to tell myself otherwise, that the disaster I kept going back to in Wisconsin was the result of the products on those shelves.
When Peter put me in charge of the tabletop RPG business in 1998, he gave me one commission: Find out what went wrong, fix the business, save D&D. Vince also gave me a business condition that was easy to understand and quite direct. "God damnit, Dancey", he thundered at me from across the conference table: "Don't lose any more money!"
That became my core motivation. Save D&D. Don't lose money. Figure out what went wrong. Fix the problem.
Back into those financials I went. I walked again the long threads of decisions made by managers long gone; there are few roadmarks to tell us what was done and why in the years TSR did things like buy a needlepoint distributorship, or establish a west coast office at King Vedor's mansion. Why had a moderate success in collectable dice triggered a million unit order? Why did I still have stacks and stacks of 1st edition rulebooks in the warehouse? Why did TSR create not once, not twice, but nearly a dozen times a variation on the same, Tolkien inspired, eurocentric fantasy theme? Why had it constantly tried to create different games, poured money into marketing those games, only to realize that nobody was buying those games? Why, when it was so desperate for cash, had it invested in a million dollar license for content used by less than 10% of the marketplace? Why had a successful game line like Dragonlance been forcibly uprooted from its natural home in the D&D game and transplanted to a foreign and untested new game system? Why had the company funded the development of a science fiction game modeled on D&D - then not used the D&D game rules?
In all my research into TSR's business, across all the ledgers, notebooks, computer files, and other sources of data, there was one thing I never found - one gaping hole in the mass of data we had available.
No customer profiling information. No feedback. No surveys. No "voice of the customer". TSR, it seems, knew nothing about the people who kept it alive. The management of the company made decisions based on instinct and gut feelings; not data. They didn't know how to listen - as an institution, listening to customers was considered something that other companies had to do - TSR lead, everyone else followed.
In today's hypercompetitive market, that's an impossible mentality. At Wizards of the Coast, we pay close attention to the voice of the customer. We ask questions. We listen. We react. So, we spent a whole lot of time and money on a variety of surveys and studies to learn about the people who play role playing games. And, at every turn, we learned things that were not only surprising, they flew in the face of all the conventional wisdom we'd absorbed through years of professional game publishing.
We heard some things that are very, very hard for a company to hear. We heard that our customers felt like we didn't trust them. We heard that we produced material they felt was substandard, irrelevant, and broken. We heard that our stories were boring or out of date, or simply uninteresting. We heard the people felt that >we< were irrelevant.
I know now what killed TSR. It wasn't trading card games. It wasn't Dragon Dice. It wasn't the success of other companies. It was a near total inability to listen to its customers, hear what they were saying, and make changes to make those customers happy. TSR died because it was deaf.
Amazingly, despite all those problems, and despite years of neglect, the D&D game itself remained, at the core, a viable business. Damaged; certainly. Ailing; certainly. But savable? Absolutely.
Our customers were telling us that 2e was too restrictive, limited their creativity, and wasn't "fun to play'? We can fix that. We can update the core rules to enable the expression of that creativity. We can demonstrate a commitment to supporting >your< stories. >Your< worlds. And we can make the game fun again.
Our customers were telling us that we produced too many products, and that the stuff we produced was of inferior quality? We can fix that. We can cut back on the number of products we release, and work hard to make sure that each and every book we publish is useful, interesting, and of high quality.
Our customers were telling us that we spent too much time on our own worlds, and not enough time on theirs? Ok - we can fix that. We can re-orient the business towards tools, towards examples, towards universal systems and rules that aren't dependent on owning a thousand dollars of unnecessary materials first.
Our customers were telling us that they prefer playing D&D nearly 2:1 over the next most popular game option? That's an important point of distinction. We can leverage that desire to help get them more people to play >with< by reducing the barriers to compatibility between the material we produce, and the material created by other companies.
Our customers told us they wanted a better support organization? We can pour money and resources into the RPGA and get it growing and supporting players like never before in the club's history. (10,000 paid members and rising, nearly 50,000 unpaid members - numbers currently skyrocketing).
Our customers were telling us that they want to create and distribute content based on our game? Fine - we can accommodate that interest and desire in a way that keeps both our customers and our lawyers happy.
Are we still listening? Yes, we absolutely are. If we hear you asking us for something we're not delivering, we'll deliver it. But we're not going to cater to the specific and unique needs of a minority if doing so will cause hardship to the majority. We're going to try and be responsible shepards of the D&D business, and that means saying "no" to things that we have shown to be damaging to the business and that aren't wanted or needed by most of our customers.
We listened when the customers told us that Alternity wasn't what they wanted in a science fiction game. We listened when customers told us that they didn't want the confusing, jargon filled world of Planescape. We listened when people told us that the Ravenloft concept was overshadowed by the products of a competitor. We listened to customers who told us that they want core materials, not world materials. That they buy DUNGEON magazine every two months at a rate twice that of our best selling stand-alone adventures.
We're not telling anyone what game to play. We are telling the market that we're going to actively encourage our players to stand up and demand that they be listened to, and that they become the center of the gaming industry - rather than the current publisher-centric model. Through the RPGA, the Open Gaming movement, the pages of Dragon Magazine, and all other venues available, we want to empower our customers to do what >they< want, to force us and our competitors to bend to >their< will, to make the products >they< want made.
I want to be judged on results, not rhetoric. I want to look back at my time at the helm of this business and feel that things got better, not worse. I want to know that my team made certain that the mistakes of the past wouldn't be the mistakes of the future. I want to know that we figured out what went wrong. That we fixed it. That we saved D&D. And that god damnit, we didn't lose money.
Thank you for listening,
Sincerely,
Ryan S. Dancey
VP, Wizards of the Coast
Brand Manager, Dungeons & Dragons
Bah! WotC wishes they were Palladium Books!
2014/09/10 16:54:09
Subject: Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
Pfft... TSR are light weights. WOTC marked down books from the late 1980s as worthless when palladium is making a killing selling books from that same era as modern up to date titles for their best selling RPGs 15 years AFTER that wotc knowitall made that statement! What wotc didn't know what they were talking about. What do they know with their millions of active players? You just need 200-300 hardcore players to buy 1-4 copies of each product mindlessly. That is how palladium has thrived since that small company WOTC that palladium sued in the early 1990's made the statement I quoted. Siembeida uber alles!
2014/09/10 17:12:45
Subject: Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
warboss wrote: Pfft... TSR are light weights. WOTC marked down books from the late 1980s as worthless when palladium is making a killing selling books from that same era as modern up to date titles for their best selling RPGs 15 years AFTER that wotc knowitall made that statement! What wotc didn't know what they were talking about. What do they know with their millions of active players? You just need 200-300 hardcore players to buy 1-4 copies of each product mindlessly. That is how palladium has thrived since that small company WOTC that palladium sued in the early 1990's made the statement I quoted. Siembeida uber alles!
Wait, what, PB sued WotC?
2014/09/10 17:23:29
Subject: Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
Yup... before MTG came out. One of WOTC's first products was a book that had characters/monsters in it for multiple different game systems including Palladium's (which was one of the most popular ones in the industry at the time). Palladium's long held views on "you can't convert anything into or out of our system or we'll sue you!!!" kicked in and they sued. WOTC had to initially develop MTG under a separate company because they didn't want Palladium to get their greedy claws into it's rights as payment in case Palladium won.
Or, you know.. he can read the accurate details you linked instead of my swiss cheese memory recollection of it from many years ago! Ninja'd by an Google and Vitae!
This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2014/09/10 17:28:42
2014/09/10 17:37:19
Subject: Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
warboss wrote: Yup... before MTG came out. One of WOTC's first products was a book that had characters/monsters in it for multiple different game systems including Palladium's (which was one of the most popular ones in the industry at the time). Palladium's long held views on "you can't convert anything into or out of our system or we'll sue you!!!" kicked in and they sued. WOTC had to initially develop MTG under a separate company because they didn't want Palladium to get their greedy claws into it's rights as payment in case Palladium won.
Or, you know.. he can read the accurate details you linked instead of my swiss cheese memory recollection of it from many years ago! Ninja'd by an Google and Vitae!
I don't know, I think of yours as being more to the point.
2014/09/10 20:41:05
Subject: Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
I'm a little surprised we haven't seen more Core boxes on the market yet. Especially with one going for $200.
Even if they go for half that, selling boxes for $100 only to get them again for $65 later is a pretty sweet deal. I suppose whether or not the several month (or more) wait just to make $30-40, plus the effort of shipping such a thing might outweigh ones desire, but the potential to double ones money would appeal to some at least.
Maybe the cores are still being worked on. Ugh.
I'm not expecting it, but man, they could really do to knock this weeks update out of the park at this point. Far too much dangling when they should be well underway.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2014/09/10 22:14:21
2014/09/10 22:38:11
Subject: Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
Forar wrote: I'm a little surprised we haven't seen more Core boxes on the market yet. Especially with one going for $200.
Unless the single box does represent a significant portion and the few reports of orders shipped and received represent a good portion of what they've actually sent out. It is, I admit, a bit tin foil hat theory but that kind of thinking has in hindsight been much more predictive of Palladium's efforts and progress rather than any kind of logic.
2014/09/10 22:40:55
Subject: Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
If you (any of you) owned PB, what would you (as the owner of PB, not as a frustrated customer complaining on the internet) do at this point to rehabilitate your relationship with your customers?
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2014/09/10 22:41:10
Manchu wrote: If you (any of you) owned PB, what would you (as the owner of PB, not as a frustrated customer complaining on the internet) do at this point to rehabilitate your relationship with your customers?
Toss Max and/or Miyra into the Battlecry shipments.
Manchu wrote: If you (any of you) owned PB, what would you (as the owner of PB, not as a frustrated customer complaining on the internet) do at this point to rehabilitate your relationship with your customers?
Toss Max and/or Miyra into the Battlecry shipments.
The first resin then metal because resin making is hard models? I doubt it. If you're asking for a free model or two, you'd have more luck with a plastic one not already included that they can have the factory pump out a few thousand of much easier like the vf-4. It was at least a "planned" possibility (if you can call the pre/during ks efforts actual planning as opposed to wishlisting). To answer Manchu's question, nkthing at this point beyond cyp's suggestion of a token two pack of models to pledgers at battlecry and up. If I were the evil overlord of palladium, I'd simply try to do better the next time and turn the current mess into one giant learning experience in the hopes of promising less and planning/delivering more during the next ks.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2014/09/10 23:01:37
2014/09/10 23:13:05
Subject: Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
Manchu wrote: If you (any of you) owned PB, what would you (as the owner of PB, not as a frustrated customer complaining on the internet) do at this point to rehabilitate your relationship with your customers?
Announce a complete and total overhaul of the Palladium RPG system. Alpha testing to begin just *after* the final Robotech shipments go out to the backers.
If PB wanted to let people know in a dramatic fashion that they were no longer slumbering in a stupor, relying on their past successes, I can't think of a better way than the above.
2014/09/10 23:14:51
Subject: Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
Manchu wrote: If you (any of you) owned PB, what would you (as the owner of PB, not as a frustrated customer complaining on the internet) do at this point to rehabilitate your relationship with your customers?
Its a hard question to answer because I just cant picture myself as an owner of a company that would have let it come this far.
If for some reason I just inherited the company and was now in control I would do a full staff assessment, fire most of them and rebuild the brand name with new (quality) people.
The brand can still be strong (as evidenced by the $$$$ brought in by the KS), it just needs the right people and getting rid of the wrong people would send a clear indication of a 'clean slate' mentality to customers which I think would go a long way to getting a second chance from them.
2014/09/10 23:25:28
Subject: Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
Forar wrote: I'm a little surprised we haven't seen more Core boxes on the market yet. Especially with one going for $200.
Unless the single box does represent a significant portion and the few reports of orders shipped and received represent a good portion of what they've actually sent out. It is, I admit, a bit tin foil hat theory but that kind of thinking has in hindsight been much more predictive of Palladium's efforts and progress rather than any kind of logic.
Distributors gotten them yet?
2014/09/10 23:35:26
Subject: Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
1. I would publicly fire NMI from moderating the forums and post it on You-Tube.
2. I would then hire the best PR person I could possibly find.
3. I would do whatever that guy said and eat crow to show my prospective customers that I indeed did not despise them and really, genuinely care about their business.
I really believe that this would be a step in the right direction.
2014/09/10 23:41:03
Subject: Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
But frankly, it's not just about 'sweetening the deal'. It'd be about fixing communications. They do weekly updates (when Wayne isn't unavailable... note: fix that Wayne is the only person who can do updates) but they rarely say anything concrete. It always feels slimy, like they're trying to weasel word things. It is entirely possible to communicate with people in a fashion that gives actual info while also recognizing that international shipping is kind of a huge thing and takes a ton of stuff going right, and sometimes it starts going wrong.
When things go wrong, say so, explain what happened, what is being done to rectify them, and what will be done in the future to prevent such things from happening again.
Some extra figures would be nice, don't get me wrong, but some transparency and treating us like adults would go a long way to rebuilding their now well deserved reputation for delays and poor communications.
2014/09/11 00:24:56
Subject: Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
Manchu wrote: If you (any of you) owned PB, what would you (as the owner of PB, not as a frustrated customer complaining on the internet) do at this point to rehabilitate your relationship with your customers?
Sining summed it up best with the insurmountable problem being the guy in charge.
But assuming Mango's hypothetical inheritance concept, here goes. In no particular order.
- Fire or reassign anyone in management positions. If they have an active creative role (writer, artist, editor, game design), they can keep that job (for now). - Re-evaluate the RPG lines, and assign someone to be responsible for each retained. Getting bogged down in minutiae seems to be one of Kevin's big mistakes. - Remove NMI, give instruction to the remaining Moderators. Get people in who are fans of the product, but not fanatical. Fanatics do more harm than good. Revamp the forums to remove anachronistic crap (like Help Save Palladium Books subforum being the third link, and other archaic/outdated/irrelevant Forums). Promote discussion. Don't have to read everything, but occasional drop-ins shouldn't be difficult. If you and your staff hate going on the Forums, why should anyone else? - Scrap the current release schedule. Completely. Work out which products are priorities, and work out a realistic timeframe for completion. Then tack on 3-4 months. Then commit, behind the scenes, to completing them. Do not start a new project until at least one current one is near completion (and by that, I mean art done, text done, just editing, layout, printing and shipping to go). - For work done by freelancers, sure, commission that work. But it doesn't get announced publicly until it hits "near completion" as specified above. - Completely revamp the online presence and attempt to shed the Luddite perception. Have easily accessible communication methods (specifically EMail). Reliance on phone/fax/snailmail just seems unproductive. - Regarding RRT, announce a new commitment to online communication, AND KEEP TOIT. Being silent for 3+ weeks, apologizing for the silence, then being silent for 3+ more weeks, is just bad. Remove the flowery rhetoric. Be more active with show, don't tell. If a hiccup happens, explain what, why, and how it'll be fixed. Basically, everything Forar said. You don't have to read every post. You don't have to spend days on it. But a commitment of an hour a week composing an Update that addresses things, isn't f'n difficult.
That'd be a start. It'd be a daunting task, not so much because of the work involved, but because so much of that work is backpeddling prior mistakes, rather than building from the ground up.
EDIT: Just some off the top quick fixes for RRT. Regarding the blast template, instead of "Ooops, our bad", "Wave 1 will come with the unpainted template, but we'll send out a correct one in Wave 2". Because, come on, it'll cost them bugger all. Regarding the current apparent (but unknown) delay in shipping out BattleCry's, if it's as Forar/Kendachi speculate, and they don't have BC kits, offer to send out First Contacts to the first X people to ask, and give them the balance of their BC's in Wave 2. Sure, that might look like a sucky deal, having to wait until Wave 2, but given some people might not get their Wave 1 orders until end of year or later, they might be willing to get their stuff earlier, without it really disrupting shipping. Because if the First Contacts are just waiting in the warehouse until Container 2 arrives, well... that's pointless. Sure, they're "jumping the queue, but if it's just changing those backers dates, without affecting the rest, I'd consider that a win. Sure, some people would be unhappy, but you're moving product to backers. And in the end, isn't that the point?
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2014/09/11 01:12:09
2014/09/11 02:06:40
Subject: Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
Manchu wrote: If you (any of you) owned PB, what would you (as the owner of PB, not as a frustrated customer complaining on the internet) do at this point to rehabilitate your relationship with your customers?
Hand the keys over to Jon Paulson for robotech, burn the Internet site and all records of its existence, open new website with fan suggestion and polls to see which system to prioritize for revamp. Hire digital sculptor to design miniatures based of the lines.
And fo the love of god put KS out to pasture.
LOL, Theo your mind is an amazing place, never change.-camkierhi 9/19/13
I cant believe theo is right.. damn. -comradepanda 9/26/13
None of the strange ideas we had about you involved your sexual orientation..........-Monkeytroll 12/10/13
I'd put you on ignore for that comment, if I could...Alpharius 2/11/14
2014/09/11 02:10:22
Subject: Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
"They reckon you've got concussion - I couldn't give a tart's furry cup if half your brains are falling out. Don't ever waltz into my kingdom acting king of the jungle." - Gene Hunt
2014/09/11 02:16:39
Subject: Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
"They reckon you've got concussion - I couldn't give a tart's furry cup if half your brains are falling out. Don't ever waltz into my kingdom acting king of the jungle." - Gene Hunt
2014/09/11 07:50:49
Subject: Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
Now that is what I would have done for the first step, only with KS as the recipient!
"Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes…then all of this…all of this…was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars." Commander sinclair, Babylon 5.
Bobtheinquisitor wrote:what is going on with APAC shipping? If Macross Island were real, they'd be the last place to get any Robotechnology.
2014/09/11 11:48:03
Subject: Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
I don't have a lot of experience with PB other than the Robotech Tactics issue, so I can only explain what I would do if I suddenly found myself running that.
First, apologize for the mishandling and treating my customer base like they were friends, rather than valued customers.
I would become very transparent with my decision making, and accept the feedback being given
I would open the forums up for feedback on gameplay, rules development, and expansion ideas.
I would be honest, and not appeal with the sympathy card and simply state things as they are and tell my customers what direction I was going after evaluating the situation.
Mainly just treating the people who keep me in business with what they deserve, more respect.
2014/09/11 13:03:51
Subject: Robotech Kickstarter Funded at $1.44 Million!
Manchu wrote: If you (any of you) owned PB, what would you (as the owner of PB, not as a frustrated customer complaining on the internet) do at this point to rehabilitate your relationship with your customers?
Say I suddenly owned PB.
First there would be much rejoicing since the prior owner's behavior would be the source of many complaints.
I would post some kind of "commitment" to my customers:
1) Straight talk: do what we say, say what we do.
2) Open up better dialogue with customers, start with dropping a questionnaire in with the kickstarter backer kits of what we would like to see as the next product AND any sent back got their choice of the Max or Miyra model sent to them.
3) Set some rule for myself to participate in the forums on occasion to let the fans know I am there and listening (as well as accessible).
4) List plans on how we will get our expertise in-house up for miniatures and commit to it further (plastic Rifts models coming up!).
5) Look at flogging our IP (Halloooo! Fantasy Flight Games! could we talk???). Computer/console/tablet games.
6) Review the staff, see if some of the past "issues" are from them as a personality or they were just taking orders.
7) Review publishing methods and modernize the layout process for the RPG systems. HEY! New editions with fixes and cleanups on EVERYTHING money in the bank and not have to create huge new stuff! Look at streamlining the RPG system without throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
8) Commit to a Robotech tactics campaign package, I really think if an FFG made item, with counters and small models and modular maps a bit like Settlers of Catan in a nice pretty board-game like box, would be fantastic.
9) Look hard at making a competition package for local hobby stores (throw in when > $XXX of Robotech Tactics stuff is ordered for the first time).
10) Bit of an extension of "flogging the IP" but maybe licensing/endorsing with other companies for products of our IP (clothing, terrain builders, storage systems).
11) Set aside a space at corporate headquarters for gaming: be able to keep customers at hand, have them available. I could see dropping in and having "Beta test night" with free trinkets as bribes to play our half-baked ideas.
12) Commit to a more "genteel" means of protecting our IP: rather than a nasty takedown letter it would be "You are making use of material we think is ours. Please review and see if you agree and take steps. Give proper credit to Palladium intellectual property and anything you still want to use beyond that can be licensed or needs to be taken down. You have 30 days to make adjustments and we can discuss further. Thank-you for your cooperation." Then ugly lawyer stuff happens after...
... Gah! suddenly I seem to have many ideas.
Dialogue should have the tone of equals with a respect for the customer opinion.
Value for money and managing expectation would probably be the main focus of the new company.
A revolution is an idea which has found its bayonets.
Napoleon Bonaparte
