Dleatherus said:

Jeromy Walsh was brilliant in his vision and either a scammer or incompetent in executing upon his vision.

We will probably never know which it is - my own personal experience with him is that he has lied to me, threatened me, and deceived and manipulated an entire community.

I will stay way clear of any project that involves him in any way in the future

Clear and well said, thanks D.

For any of you who might know him, Dleatherus was one of the proeminent backers of Chronicles of Elyria, being one of the few whom, with a small group of people, that managed to put together a large, thriving community of hundreds of daily active players. Nowadays, his organization, formerly known as the Kingdom of Bordweall, is developing an MMO of their own (still in its early stages) named Rings of Una.

So when someone like him -- with actually more to show in terms of realizations within that community than Jeromy does --, says what he says, that goes a long way in showing how Jeromy, in his egomaniac hubris was ready to step onto and baffle even the most invested of his community base.

Launcher111 said:

I always find the kick start approach to be fascinating, they will have countless followers, why wouldn't they tap into that crowd, to assist with the game? Code, game play graphics, sure keep that more professional, but side stories, music, characters, research, concepts and the rest, could have non paid help work with them, some groups would be able to have hundreds of unpaid helpers, you see who has skill and talent, and when the game grows, perhaps bring some in.

It's like when you offer a homeless person food, they throw it at you and say “I wanted money.” its a charity case to help these games, they should take any help they can (whether help in work time, or money/resources)

A few different reasons why I think it would generally be impractical to do so:

1. Scaling an heterogenous set of complex tasks towards a single goal is a hard problem; you get diminishing returns as you add people in the mix and eventually the studio could end up spending most of their time working on coordinating the crowd-sourcing. If you don't have experienced team leads coordinating the crowd-sourced work efficiently, it can easily slow down/stall work completely.
2. Producing out good, valuable, piece of software in a timely manner, even in a paid team of professionals can be challenging; with a team of largely unprofessional and unpaid individuals, imagine how hard that must get.
3. Development practices can be challenging to standardize, and code review equally challenging to automate, all leading again to the studio spending more and more time doing code integration, debugging, sanitizing, regression, coverage, etc.
4. Non-core components might be easier to crowdsource, stuff like outreach and QA, but even then it's often been sources of problems for studios, sometimes costlier ones than those they were trying to solve in the first place.

So while I think there's some place for crowd-sourcing certain aspects of development -- especially in smaller indie, mmorpgs context – there are many pitfalls that must be considered and it should generally be used parsimoniously.

As someone who backed the game I honestly can't say I was that surprised. Even originally I thought the game idea sounded pretty ridiculous, it's like taking the weight of your average MMO and multiplying it by 100. What I was hoping would happen is the game would pare down in scale somewhat and they would come out with something. I was definitely not expecting the game to come out and be this fantastic thing it was advertised as, but I have to say it's kinda sad they crashed and burned so hard. Big thing is most early access games and crowdfunding often give you something at least, it just usually isn't the advertised final product.

Given how long it has been though and the kinda screenshots and information we see about the alpha, I wasn't terribly impressed. It seems like they spent a few years making a server and client for a walking simulator and 98% of the advertised game wasn't even starting to be implemented. I can rag on star citizen for becoming a lifetime job for some people that probably will never actually be finished, but at least it has produced something you can actually run and play and somewhat resembles a game.

I think a big problem is people like to believe in ridiculous sales pitches about games, while I knew the advertised game was hilariously out of scale, a lot of people that donated tens of thousands of dollars not only believed it wholesale, but would fight to defend the developers. It was rather amusing to see the sudden turnaround in everyone's attitude when the end message came, it went from them being free of any crime to being the worst backstabbers and scoundrels in history. Kinda sad.

Launcher111 said:
Take Elyria, im sure it has herbs and potions in it

Making very interesting points there in your post, but just to set the record straight: there is no Elyria, there's no game at all. It's not a game that failed, say, in Alpha or something – there just wasn't any game, ever.

Launcher111 said:
The type of game obviously matters, in this forum in particular are games on an enormous scale.

To the rest of your post, I agree that there are things, elements like that that you can probably crowdsource to SMEs that could save some time. I think lore and some game mechanics like the one you describe are good candidates for that.

Launcher111 said:

As Master Yoda always says (after I screw everything up again) their will be another. Different name, copied concept, hopefully a different outcome.

Why not form your own group, and build a similar game? I've seen the Elyria plans, and a video of the game, it was underwhelming on the graphics front, but the architecture, city design, he walked through the woods and found nothing of value the entire time. Not a berry bush, or animal? Runescape basically, but in runescape could cut the forests down.

Have a crazy concept the world starts empty, no towns, no happy villagers, nothing. The players must build it all.

Or to quote Field of Dreams, that old dude to Kevin Costner (iirc): “build it and they will come”. I like the idea, just not sure though the starting empty concept is that crazy, given games like Minecraft or Wurm or others I can't think of right now ?

Yesterday saw Jeromy's (next) attempt at not getting sued, most likely, with another big post full of empty words and no substance, as he's sadly become famous for: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/soulboundstudios/chronicles-of-elyria-epic-story-mmorpg-with-aging/posts/2822006​

It's also his answer to the Washington Attoney General consumer complaints that have flown his way: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/692855824858480761/704446862903738499/565820A_Soulbound_Studios_LLC_Response.pdf​

A sad man's way of dragging on the pain at the end of a sad story. If only he had the balls to actually release the statements and show us what's really inside. But no….