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Basically The Repopulation was a crowdfunded sandbox MMO that began development in 2009 on the Hero Engine (the only engine viable for this kind of project to an indie team at the time) serving as a successor to Star Wars Galaxies. Things were going well up until approximately a year before launch (late 2015) when Idea Fabrik showed signs of financial instability and missing several deadlines for updates to the engine. Servers went down for a couple days because someone didn't pay the bills, then A&BT (the developers of The Repopulation) basically said "we're paying these guys 30% for service that they can't even maintain? gently caress that, we're going to move to Unreal Engine 4. We're going to give backers a survival game based on UE4 that will keep backers busy and serve as a base for the UE4 version of The Repopulation. We'll show you something before the end of 2016" Anyways, January 1st came, they said they'd have an announcement soon. Fast forward to now and the company that is cited for the game's downfall is now the new owner and it's launching in the first quarter of 2017. quote:Idea Fabrik PLC acquires from Above and Beyond Technologies, Inc. the Science Fiction Sandbox MMORPG "The Repopulation", a craft and combat game, to bring it online in the first quarter 2017. Also this thread will double as the live thread if anyone bothers to play it. I know a lot of you backed it or bought it when it went to Steam Early Access. At least it kind of has a future now that this will serve as the showcase for Hero Engine?
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Jan 14, 2017 06:32
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there's already a game that showcases the Hero Engine - SWTOR. It shows that the Hero Engine is poo poo.
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Jan 14, 2017 07:43
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neurotic posted:there's already a game that showcases the Hero Engine - SWTOR. It shows that the Hero Engine is poo poo. Bioware bought Hero Engine back in 2007 and started heavily modifying it when it was in alpha and that's what is being used in SWTOR to this day. What Repopulation uses isn't nearly as bad...But yeah Hero Engine is poo poo
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Jan 14, 2017 07:58
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Are we at the point where devs should pay the OP to not make threads about their games? it seems like a kiss of death.
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Jan 14, 2017 17:59
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Byolante posted:Are we at the point where devs should pay the OP to not make threads about their games? it seems like a kiss of death. I fail to see the relationship. I like to think I have a pretty good track record.
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Jan 14, 2017 23:38
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Alexander DeLarge posted:I fail to see the relationship. I like to think I have a pretty good track record. You don't.
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Jan 15, 2017 00:14
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You super extra don't. But unrelated to ADL OPs, I don't see how the people who make MMO engines making an MMO, that was already being developed by a really smart team, is going to go well at all. Above and Beyond were handling things really well, making a lot of smart decisions about what "SWG 2.0" meant, and I don't see that continuing under the Hero Engine peoples development. RIP.
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Jan 15, 2017 03:21
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I thought the whole point of their survival game was to transition the game to UE4 instead of Hero Engine.
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Jan 15, 2017 05:35
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Alexander DeLarge posted:I fail to see the relationship. I like to think I have a pretty good track record. Nope. E: You should make a thread about Thermite or whatever that goon made anime game is, since you're literally the Game Reaper.
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Jan 15, 2017 05:55
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Anticheese posted:I thought the whole point of their survival game was to transition the game to UE4 instead of Hero Engine. It was. Apparently they're still going to be working on Fragmented (which as far as I know was DoA, even in the crowded field of survive-em-ups). Presumably something happened between the whole legal dispute when Idea Fabrik had money issues and they somehow ended up with control of The Repopulation. I doubt we'll ever really know what happened.
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Jan 15, 2017 06:27
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So Idea Fabrik took the repopulation servers offline to coerce A&B into selling to them? gently caress that.
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Jan 15, 2017 08:12
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Alexander DeLarge posted:I fail to see the relationship. I like to think I have a pretty good track record. We show that some customers systematically purchase new products that flop. Their early adoption of a new product is a strong signal that a product will fail - the more they buy, the less likely the product will succeed. These customers, whom we call ‘Harbingers’ [of failure], prefer products that other customers do not want.... Our findings challenge the conventional wisdom that positive customer feedback is always a signal of future success. The possibility that firms are encouraged by Harbingers’ purchases during pilot market tests may help to explain the high failure rate for new products. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2420600
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Jan 15, 2017 10:39
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I'm glad to hear that a group of developers that had no idea what they were doing transferred it over to another group of people that have even less of an idea of what to do. What can possibly go wrong?
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Jan 16, 2017 00:32
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We have been telling alex for years he is poo poo, his threads are poo poo, the games he likes are poo poo, but he seems like one of those guys that thinks people are talking to him so they like him and are just joshin. Also the repopulation is poo poo.
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Jan 16, 2017 00:37
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So The Repopulation was an MMO that existed: it was not great, even to the extent that it wasn't finished. In fact, it was mainly dumb. It was made on the Hero Engine, and was probably the only Hero Engine game to even open to players other than SWTOR. It was proof that the bioware austin didn't just do dumb bad thigns but the hero engine was actively terrible and worthless. But aside from being slow, muddy trash because the hero engine was trash, it was also a very bad game because it tried to cargo cult SWG's crafting without even remotely understanding it (and also having the problem that the hero engine doesn't seem to support anything approaching dynamic worlds, so the player towns and harvesters operated on pre-placed areas). So then the company that made Hero Engine, Idea Fabrik, told Above & Beyond Software, the authors of The Repopulation and the only developer paying royalties at this point, that they needed to pay them more or Idea Fabrik would go out of business. A&B said, no, we're not going to do that, also our contract says that you have to give us the source if you go out of business so we can self-host. Idea Fabrik said, sure, it says that, but you can't afford a lawyer so pay me. A&B instead chose to shut down the Repopulation, take a side-trip to develop the tech on UE, and raise cash with a survival game in the meantime. Idea Fabrik started spinning down their operations. The problem is that, again, A&B don't make good games, so their game Fractured, even in the context of half-finished survival clones, was extremely bad. And even people who liked the repopulation & got fractured for free started leaving negative reviews. A&B also didn't apparently communicate what was going on to most owners at all, so people thought moving from repop to fractured was some kind of cash grab(???). So the entire plan failed. They've now apparently sold the repop to Idea Fabrik, probably for basically nothing, just to get the game online again. I expect this to go extremely poorly.
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Jan 16, 2017 00:44
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i love early access indie sci-fi survival crafting mmo games that only have the word ~potential~ as their only selling point. and i really love when the game was taken from a company that was borderline bankrupt to a new company that is borderline bankrupt.
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Jan 16, 2017 00:59
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Man I was looking forward to this and I really hope this isnt the kiss of death that it obviously is going to be.
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Jan 16, 2017 02:12
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well spoiler alert, this is going to be a pile of poo poo
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Jan 16, 2017 02:34
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What is 'cargo cult' ?
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Jan 16, 2017 05:18
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insulated staircase posted:What is 'cargo cult' ? It's a reference to the practices of some indigenous cultures who have had little contact with the outside world but whose land was used by more technologically developed nations in some war or other. Sometimes in these cultures, during crises, groups trying to Make Our Island Great Again will erect symbols of wartime associated with the economic prosperity of war cargo and the social closeness of a shared external threat. This involves doing things like building runways, air towers, and even mockups of things like anti-air fortifications and handheld radios. In common parlance, it refers to concentrating on replicating symptoms of a success instead of understanding & replicating a success. Specifically here, The Repopulation's crafting system is aggressively complicated, includes a wide variety of interdependencies, and replaceable materials that impact the output stats. However, things like place-anywhere harvesters and stat-randomized materials don't exist, creating extremely straightforward & infinitely-repeatable critical paths for best gear. They try to paper over this by making recipes so drawn out and overcomplicated that it's not 100% clear what the critical path is. However, by the time the repopulation shut down, a handful of spergs had ground to max in every crafting profession & were pumping out the best-possible gear and dumping it onto the auction house, skipping interdependency entirely. Since crafting skills had massive verticality (even the most basic materials were 10x better when made from a top-flight crafter instead of a pleb, and that made a huge different in the final product), a thing that SWG INTENTIONALLY avoided, there was no real way for anybody to even participate in the economy without pumping in hundreds of hours into the game.
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Jan 16, 2017 07:31
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Oh and even if you did pump a ton of time grinding up harvesting so you could harvest the best stuff, there was also massive verticality in the combat system, and the best resources were next to level 100 murder-beasts, so you had to spend hundreds of hours grinding up combat to gather. You know, just like star wars galaxies.
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Jan 16, 2017 07:34
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30.5 Days posted:It's a reference to the practices of some indigenous cultures who have had little contact with the outside world but whose land was used by more technologically developed nations in some war or other. Sometimes in these cultures, during crises, groups trying to Make Our Island Great Again will erect symbols of wartime associated with the economic prosperity of war cargo and the social closeness of a shared external threat. This involves doing things like building runways, air towers, and even mockups of things like anti-air fortifications and handheld radios. In common parlance, it refers to concentrating on replicating symptoms of a success instead of understanding & replicating a success. 
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Jan 20, 2017 00:08
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Jan 20, 2017 00:23
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Jan 20, 2017 00:24
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Jan 20, 2017 00:24
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Looking good
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Jan 20, 2017 01:26
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 Well hello there.
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Mar 17, 2017 08:20
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Wow. The servers are actually up, wonder how long this will last this time around.
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Mar 17, 2017 16:09
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Haven't even bothered reinstalling since they haven't applied the December 2015 patch yet.You would've thought they'd launch with that since the devs had it ready (but couldn't apply it since the Hero Cloud servers were shut down or something). They said they'll apply the update soon so I'll check it out in 2 weeks.
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Mar 17, 2017 21:38
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Stumbled upon this game the other day. Not sure about how long it's going to be around given what happened last time. Spend the $20 burning a hole in my pocket on weed or this? That's the question.
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Apr 1, 2017 21:17
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Pugzilla posted:Stumbled upon this game the other day. Not sure about how long it's going to be around given what happened last time. I'd rather spend $20 on used chewing gum than spend on this heaping pile of trash. Definitely go with the 
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Apr 1, 2017 21:51
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Pugzilla posted:Stumbled upon this game the other day. Not sure about how long it's going to be around given what happened last time. It's not possible to purchase it right now as far as I know. Also, it's really not a heaping pile of trash, it's quite well thought out and pretty interesting. It just needs a lot of work, being an alpha release and all.
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Apr 2, 2017 16:36
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ModeSix posted:It's not possible to purchase it right now as far as I know. It's been in development for 8 years and has gone nowhere.
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Apr 3, 2017 09:31
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Yeah but this this time it'l be different 
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Apr 3, 2017 13:11
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Elmon posted:Yeah but this this time it'l be different I don't know how many times I have seen this sentiment in 'new pvp full loot sandbox mmo' threads but I wish I had a dollar for each one
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Apr 4, 2017 03:22
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