I just took my first look ever at the Valiance Online website. My thoughts:
1. Their website just looks cooler than this one, to me, for some reason. It's probably the fact that their logo is red white and blue, and shiny, and that they use "white letters on dark background" for everything. I think that looks better at night or in a dark room, which is where I usually am when playing/reading forums. (Is there a way to change background color and text color on this forum? Like in my personal settings I mean...)
2. They DO have a way to donate, right there on their webpage. People clearly haven't donated a whole lot so far, as compared to the CoT Kickstarter. As of this post they've got $4,829.00. I think my current desktop computer cost about that, actually.
3. The Valiance Kickstarter had a goal of only $150k and still whiffed, raising only $34k or so in pledged donations before it got cancelled.
4. Apparently some former CoH people (Ron Friedman, whomever that is) are consulting for them.
5. Despite having like no money, they claim they'll have an alpha test soon. WTF?
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Say, as a volunteer effort, is it legally possible to hire an outside consultant or consulting firm to do stuff for you? Like could you just drop XXX dollars on someone to pay them to make all of the the Mogul buildings as a paid consulting gig?
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Valiance Online was a game already in production before they switched it to a Superhero MMO. So a lot of the ground work was already finished. They are also a full studio with their own game engine. So head start, professional skills, and if not fully funded partly funded by the studio company.
There is a reason they getting a game out earlier. Back at the start of the Plan Z projects, there was even some talk of seeing if the two ideas can be messed togeather. However, the business side of things didn't work out so Missing Worlds Media went on its own to form City of Titans.
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Personal rules of good roleplay
1.) Nothing goes as planned.
2.) If it goes as planned it's not good RP
Yeah - Valiance was going to be a fantasy MMO originally IIRC - it was already in development when they switched to a supers MMO.
Also - regarding Valiance's webpage: their current one is at least the second one - their first one (or at least the one before the current) did not have nearly as much polish. I'm willing to bet that the current site for CoT is not going to be the final one. Plenty of time to get a more professional - looking one made between now and beta.
I can't imagine that there would be a law against such business arrangements.
In regards to VO's website. To me the main point of them looking more professional is due to the amount of general information about the game and game-world on their front-page, compared to CoT's one where it's essentially just a news-feed. Sure the styling and color choices do help a lot in this case but I don't think it would look that professional if it was content-wise the same as CoT's.
Yeah, and, unlike CoT, Valiance is at a later stage in development where they have that information and are ready to release it. We'll get there :).
FIGHT EVIL! (or go cause trouble so the Heroes have something to do.)
Actually, having navigated that site a little more, though the front page looks good, there's actually a lot of links on there to empty pages. Like the "blogs" link.
R.S.O. of Phoenix Rising
Yeah, as shiny as their site is, it's super broken and undermaintained ;)
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