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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:I don't think Siembieda knows how anything works.
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Feb 28, 2018 18:52
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Siembieda was a known cheating micromanaging rear end in a top hat long before the robotech kickstarter and I really kind of have a hard time feeling sorry for the latest crop of people he's ripped off. I mean I do feel sorry for them, I guess, but there were goons warning people at the time of that kickstarter, and everything that has happened since then has been absolutely Classic Siembieda Bullshit. A class action lawsuit would definitely succeed, but will need probably something like a quarter to a half a million dollars to pay for it, and most likely the sum total of Palladium's liquifiable assets would not amount to enough to pay off the attorney fees, much less pay back the kickstarter backers. Maybe if Palladium's IP can be sold for a reasonable chunk of money, but I dunno if any other companies are just desperate to get a hold of RIFTS IP or not. Probably not. I don't think a suit is going to happen, really. It's cool people are organizing on facebook but class action suits are not simple, and it may be difficult to convince any capable experienced law firm to take one on without evidence that Palladium has the assets to make it worth their while. And of course the goal of most class action lawsuits is to get a settlement, not to actually litigate through an entire trial, so it's not even really "what are all of Palladium's assets worth when liquidated" but rather "what could Palladium plausibly be willing to give up to settle the case" and the answer to that is probably pathetically little.
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Feb 28, 2018 19:37
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I flat out do not believe a lot of the stuff in that update. They say that Ninja Division had already made a miniatures game, but then was taken completely by surprise by the fact that plastic molds can't do undercuts? That's obvious bullshit.
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Feb 28, 2018 19:46
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If nothing else, I could see Pinnacle picking up the Rifts IP and toting it around with their Savage Rifts line--they already created a stupendously more playable Rifts than Palladium did.
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Feb 28, 2018 19:47
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Leperflesh posted:A class action lawsuit would definitely succeed, but will need probably something like a quarter to a half a million dollars to pay for it, I'd contribute to a kickstarter that promised to get Siembieda out of the industry, and $500k would probably fund faster than you think. E: Especially if the stretch goals were set as restitution to specific people he's burned.
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Feb 28, 2018 19:51
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From all accounts he's a default grandpa when it comes to computers. As for lawsuits, I wouldn't expect much blood from that stone.
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Feb 28, 2018 20:14
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Leperflesh posted:Siembieda was a known cheating micromanaging rear end in a top hat long before the robotech kickstarter and I really kind of have a hard time feeling sorry for the latest crop of people he's ripped off. I mean I do feel sorry for them, I guess, but there were goons warning people at the time of that kickstarter, and everything that has happened since then has been absolutely Classic Siembieda Bullshit. Thankfully, I ignored all promises of stretch goals and add ons and pledged for and got exactly what I wanted. One big box full of retreated Battletech mechs, admittedly somewhat annoying to assemble, because Kevin is a loving moron, but usable in service to a different, decent game.
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Feb 28, 2018 20:41
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Guy Goodbody posted:I flat out do not believe a lot of the stuff in that update. They say that Ninja Division had already made a miniatures game, but then was taken completely by surprise by the fact that plastic molds can't do undercuts? That's obvious bullshit.
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Feb 28, 2018 21:58
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Evil Mastermind posted:Bill Coffin's old RPGNet posts about working at Palladium had a bunch of stuff about how nothing was ever Kevin's fault and it was everyone else failing him. He claims Ninja Division was handling this stuff but I can totally see him cutting corners without consulting Ninja Division, both done to save money because he's a cheapskate. Although they were partners and Ninja Division is well known for being terrible, he's totally the type to keep them as out of the loop as possible for his own ego and personal profit margin. He has to get back those old Star Wars figures somehow I guess.
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Feb 28, 2018 22:30
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Leperflesh posted:Siembieda was a known cheating micromanaging rear end in a top hat long before the robotech kickstarter and I really kind of have a hard time feeling sorry for the latest crop of people he's ripped off. I mean I do feel sorry for them, I guess, but there were goons warning people at the time of that kickstarter, and everything that has happened since then has been absolutely Classic Siembieda Bullshit. A friend of mine lost $200 in this fiasco. We talked about it. He an old gamer, an old Robotech fan, he knows all about Palladium's weird escapades... but he still plunked two hundred clams down. I feel for him, I really do, but at the same time I have to force myself not to ask why the gently caress he put his hand in the fire if he knew he was almost certainly going to get burned.
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Feb 28, 2018 23:11
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Guy Goodbody posted:I flat out do not believe a lot of the stuff in that update. They say that Ninja Division had already made a miniatures game, but then was taken completely by surprise by the fact that plastic molds can't do undercuts? That's obvious bullshit. What prevents plastic molds from doing undercuts? I ask because I know very very very little about injection molding, not even knowing what undercuts were until reading this post and watching vids about them to figure out what they are. I'm curious is all.
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Feb 28, 2018 23:21
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FirstAidKite posted:What prevents plastic molds from doing undercuts? here's a thing I found on google image search. Pretend that where ti says clay it actually says plastic. If you try to pull a plastic object out of the molds in examples A or B, the plastic will break. Or maybe bend or get deformed, but either way it's not coming out cleanly. That's why miniatures come in multiple pieces, so that you can have complex three dimensional miniatures, but each individual piece has no undercuts. 
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Feb 28, 2018 23:47
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Yeah, imagine that mold is made of steel and you can see why you can't do it with plastic. Resin uses rubber molds so you can get nice undercuts from them.
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Feb 28, 2018 23:53
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Yeah, the way around it is doing multi-part models which most people won't do since board games need to be playable straight out of the box. The only KS I've seen with people doing both is The Other Side and they're doing multipart and assembling in house before they ship them out.
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Mar 1, 2018 00:09
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:Yeah, the way around it is doing multi-part models which most people won't do since board games need to be playable straight out of the box. The only KS I've seen with people doing both is The Other Side and they're doing multipart and assembling in house before they ship them out. More Kickstarter big minis games are doing it than you might think. I've gotten a couple where I was very unhappy to find that I had to assemble the miniatures, because they never once said that would be the case during the Kickstarter and I wouldn't have backed if they had. I got through it because although I am not a miniatures fan myself, I have friends who game with me who do the hobby stuff and helped out. Anymore I'm just really reluctant to give money to any project that's trading heavily on the drat things. Even if it otherwise seems like a cool concept that hits my sweet spots.
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Mar 1, 2018 01:11
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Yeah, Cthulhu Wars and Gods Wars do the exact same thing with their hugeass figures. Which, incidentally, is why Gods War is behind schedule. Its molds turned out to be even more absurdly complicated than their original estimates.
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Mar 1, 2018 01:12
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:Yeah, the way around it is doing multi-part models which most people won't do since board games need to be playable straight out of the box. The only KS I've seen with people doing both is The Other Side and they're doing multipart and assembling in house before they ship them out. Be fair, single piece Gerwalk models would be terrible
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Mar 1, 2018 01:16
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Bieeanshee posted:A friend of mine lost $200 in this fiasco. We talked about it. He an old gamer, an old Robotech fan, he knows all about Palladium's weird escapades... but he still plunked two hundred clams down. I feel for him, I really do, but at the same time I have to force myself not to ask why the gently caress he put his hand in the fire if he knew he was almost certainly going to get burned. I'm not an old gamer, had never heard of Palladium or Siembieda before the KS, and don't remember receiving any flashing warning lights posts about the project here before I backed it, but plenty of them once the first troubles started a year later. I'm out about the same amount of money.
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Mar 1, 2018 04:02
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The thing is, you can design plastic minis to have fewer undercuts, it just requires making compromises in your design. Kevin Siembieda is incapable of making compromises. It has to be his way, always, no matter what, 100%. This is probably why all the minis had to be made in a dozen parts or whatever. Somehow, Battletech put out a box set with a bunch of mech minis that are single-part molds (along with a single fancy multi-part mini). But those single-part minis aren't as spectactular, they're just sort of OK game pieces. Another thing is that if Kevin already had files in a particular format, and his manufacturer said "we can't use that format" there was an alternative to totally re-doing/converting all the minis at huge expense: shop around and find a manufacturer capable of using that file format. This, again, would have required some kind of compromise, in addition to having some kind of loving business sense, both of which are antithetical to Kevin Siembieda's psyche.
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Mar 1, 2018 04:29
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Is there something particular about plastic that prevents them from using side actions? Or is it a case where the mold would have been far too complex to the point that even side actions wouldn't make it doable? Do rubber molds not work with plastic? Would 3D Printing have been more feasible? Sorry to bombard with all these questions 
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Mar 1, 2018 04:53
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Injection molded plastic uses very hard steel molds. This is necessary because the plastic is injected at both high temperature, and high pressure. That said, they absolutely can and do use all sorts of clever tricks to deal with undercuts, including multipart (more than two part) molds. poo poo can get very complicated, though.  And thus, expensive. Complex molds have to be carefully designed by highly experienced people who cost lots of money, and the smaller the production run, the more of a percentage of those costs has to be placed on each part produced. e. I have little to no doubt that Siembieda thought they could design their mechs with total artistic freedom, and then have them just get made, easy peasy. Whereas competent experienced outfits explicitly design their minis for manufacturability. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 05:01 on Mar 1, 2018 |
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Mar 1, 2018 04:59
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I would absolutely love if that mold you posted only made like...sporks or something lol
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Mar 1, 2018 05:03
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Here's an example of a four-part mold from The Gods War. For a head. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUFxuvdUazk
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Mar 1, 2018 05:06
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3D printing is only viable for prototyping, it takes a few hours to print out one 28mm figure (that then needs to be checked for faults), the machine Leperflesh linked can pump out an entire sprue every few seconds and keep doing it all day.
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Mar 1, 2018 05:07
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Bear in mind Palladium has nobody familiar with 3D modeling or miniatures sculpting - the sculptors credited in the final game all seem independent freelancers, from which ones I could track down. Ninja Division is intensely opaque about the talent they use, though, so it's extremely hard to tell if there's any overlap; ND isn't even credited or mentioned in the final rulebook. A team called "Big Idea Miniatures" is credited, but all I can find on them otherwise are some obscure credits in Fantasy Flight and Games Workshop games. Edit: It could be that ND got to walk away with their designs or models, which would certainly explain that all. Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 05:40 on Mar 1, 2018 |
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Mar 1, 2018 05:37
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So I hear some people are using PayPal to invoice refunds from Palladium. Given the nature of online commerce I'd be surprised if anything actually comes of it, but I'd be interested if anyone knowledgeable about such things has some insight. I assume Kevin will probably either ignore all such requests or, worse, vigorously contest them through whatever methods PayPal affords.
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Mar 1, 2018 07:47
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That Old Tree posted:So I hear some people are using PayPal to invoice refunds from Palladium. Given the nature of online commerce I'd be surprised if anything actually comes of it, but I'd be interested if anyone knowledgeable about such things has some insight. I assume Kevin will probably either ignore all such requests or, worse, vigorously contest them through whatever methods PayPal affords. You can invoice through PayPal but it's not binding and I believe PayPal will take their cut out. I think small claims court may be an interesting avenue, actually. Not sure what the laws are if it crosses jurisdictions though.
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Mar 1, 2018 16:49
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dwarf74 posted:Best to abandon hope now, friend. You are never seeing money back without legal action or a state attorney general who feels like dealing with the nightmare. If it crosses state lines, which it almost certainly does, I believe it becomes federal, which means I don't think it can be small claims.
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Mar 1, 2018 16:52
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Mors Rattus posted:If it crosses state lines, which it almost certainly does, I believe it becomes federal, which means I don't think it can be small claims.  And yeah you're probably right. I think the times this has worked against a corporation, said corporation has had some physical presence in-state.
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Mar 1, 2018 17:02
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This is why I only buy artisanal, local robotechs
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Mar 1, 2018 17:02
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I would be shocked if Palladium Books still has a significant amount of money to sue for at this point. One could definitely pursue class action as far as I'd know, but the end result would be largely vindictive - you wouldn't get much back if anything, but you might really damage or (less likely) destroy Palladium Books as an entity. Which I'm sure sounds like a fine idea to some folks, of course, but I'm not convinced it's practical. Granted, only Siembieda & co. really know what they have in the bank, but there isn't a lot of precedent for Kickstarters getting sued yet, and as far as I know it's usually for the obvious reason that the money is gone and not coming back. Most of the spare money probably went into all those Wave 1 boxes he's looking to ship out, that he hoped would be sold to move the project forward... but with the reputation of the whole project, ironically, that wasn't likely to ever happen. It's an ugly Catch-22 they bound themselves up in, and the backers are likely the ones ultimately paying the price. Right now the question is how much damage has been done to Palladium Books' reputation, but they've survived so much that you'd expect would sink any other company that I'm not convinced this will end them. It might lessen them, certainly, and it's a flaming torch set to any future crowdfunding efforts they do, but I'd be surprised if this is it. Siembieda is so tied to Palladium Books as an identity that I don't think he'd willingly put an end to it. But then, I didn't think he'd license out Rifts to another system, so I definitely can be wrong.
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Mar 1, 2018 17:39
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The Warsaw Uprising Kickstarter has about an hour left, and they're a little over a hundred pounds away from their last stretch goal, a guy on a motorcycle
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Mar 1, 2018 19:47
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Someone more familiar with 3D modelling software than I am please explain how they weren't able to convert .stl files into something else. Like....everything is capable of reading STL files*. I am pretty sure I can poo poo out some procedurally generated 3D object in OpenSCAD, export it as an STL, open it in Blender, modify it or do whatever and then probably export it to any number of other file types, all for free, in like fifteen minutes, while watching Netflix on my other monitor. You need to set a unit scale but past that what's the hold up on the technical side? *Literally everything, I mean the basic file standard supports human-readable ASCII. Rockman Reserve fucked around with this message at 20:38 on Mar 1, 2018 |
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Mar 1, 2018 19:52
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food court bailiff posted:Someone more familiar with 3D modelling software than I am please explain how they weren't able to convert .stl files into something else. Like....everything is capable of reading STL files. I am pretty sure I can poo poo out some procedurally generated 3D object in OpenSCAD, export it as an STL, open it in Blender, modify it or do whatever and then probably export it to any number of other file types, all for free, in like fifteen minutes, while watching Netflix on my other monitor. You need to set a unit scale but past that what's the hold up on the technical side? I was wondering this too.
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Mar 1, 2018 20:06
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Mors Rattus posted:If it crosses state lines, which it almost certainly does, I believe it becomes federal, which means I don't think it can be small claims. If a lawsuit doesn’t involve an explicit question of federal law, it cannot be tried in federal court unless the amount in controversy exceeds $75K and none of the parties on one side of the suit are residents of the same state as any of the parties on the other side. A state court will look to its own civil procedure code to decide whether or not it has jurisdiction over a case. As a matter of federal constitutional law, the only limit on whether a particular party can be sued in a particular state’s courts is whether that party has the necessary minimum contacts to justify it. For Palladium, that would mean asking whether it had pervasive contact with the forum state (as it would have in Michigan) or whether it had enough limited contact regarding the subject matter of the dispute with the forum state (e.g. by advertising or knowingly reaching out into another state to do business).
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Mar 1, 2018 20:09
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In non-Palladium news the people behind The Veil have a new cyberpunk rpg on Kickstarter, Hack the Planet, using Blades in the Dark. It's heavily based on climate fiction, a genre of sci fi imagining how climate change will affect the future. Instant back from me. I am so down for this.
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Mar 1, 2018 20:35
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Whatever happened to that RPG where you get superpowers from numbers stations, so the logical conclusion is to team up with christian militias to fight the man?
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Mar 1, 2018 20:58
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It funded.
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Mar 1, 2018 21:10
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I'm not saying the shoe fits, just that there's a squeaking noise for those who pay attention. That's fair. I didn't realize that ND was doing so bad on their later releases. After 20+ years of being a Palladium fan and then mostly an interested observer, I find it's too easy to just dump all the blame on Kev's shoulders.
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Mar 1, 2018 21:14
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food court bailiff posted:*Literally everything, I mean the basic file standard supports human-readable ASCII. Yeah - this doesn't make any sense to me either. I understand incompatibility between 3d software at a higher level - rigging, shaders, animation, even normal mapping - but it doesn't make sense at the geometry level, which is mostly all that's needed here.
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