Scytale wrote:Don't do it.

Lottery tickets work for lottery trusts because the expected return value for the consumer is less than the price of the ticket. That is to say, the average return on a ticket is less than its price.

One group in Australia came across a lottery where the expected value of return was greater than the ticket price, so they decided to buy all the tickets. They won, of course, and made a profit off it.

Funny this should be brought up.

Myself and my friends had a in depth discussion on this once. The "regular" lotto, yes, you can't buy it out to win even as a billionaire. (things like the American powerball)

However, where I live we have a few "charity" lotto's a couple times a year. The prizes to these things are donated from different companies. (cars and houses and stuff). Another factor is that they only sell X number of tickets then they stop. We figured there has to be some other unseen factor stopping someone from buying this one out because even with a 200 grand investment you have very good chance of at least making your "money" back in stuff, and reasonable chance of doubling.

I think the catch was that you had to take the actual physical prizes, or a cash prize, (which was something like 80% of the actual price value). The thing was with the same money you could go out and buy slightly less amount of "stuff', without the risk of some extremely lucky individual beating you to a ticket and winning something big before you had a chance to buy them out.

edit:
Another factor is also that for much less money someone could just donate money to a charity to off set all of their income tax for that year. I am guessing that someone who could even think about buying out a lotto would be in the highest tax bracket. There are also no risk investments that someone could put the same amount of money in, and they would for sure get that money back plus some extra...

AbhChallenger wrote:

DWMagus wrote:Realistically, I think it's far too early to say he called it quits after only a month. If it had been three (arbitrary number for me), then I'd consider it. Yeah, it's been a month, but that's a bit early in my book to call it one way or another.

As I said. We won't know for sure until he says so or he shuts down the site (or simply stops paying for domain/hosting) We just got to be careful on the optimism.

Honestly, though it's VERY unlikely Josh all of a sudden just gave up on Limit Theory and ran away. It's of course always a possibly. There is always a chance he came across something and realised that he was just so far over his head that he knew he would not be able to finish. Again, VERY unlikely.

I have followed many projects from start of finish. There have been some where literally one day you have a dev talking in depth about what they are doing and how far along they are to the next where the project is closed. With big company projects this is the norm of course. However, not all of them have been big projects. So I to completely understand why there are some who fear this as a possibility.

Again, it would have been nice if Josh had posted one last post of "guys, I need to turn on radio silence mode for a time, sorry!", however, it's just not the way Josh "does' stuff. (he would need to spend a week creating some over the top video presentation where he presented the same message)

He will probably return at some point with news of the game being beta ready. In Josh's mind having this in hand will "make up" for his sudden disappearance. He has got himself to the point now where (in his mind anyways), he just can't return without anything short of beta.

Also people, I don't expect this to happen soon. We saw the state LT was in at the start of the year. Honestly, I don't expect beta until something like May. Perhaps Josh will surprise us with something earlier.. however, I won't hold my breath.

Slymodi wrote:

TheJuggler wrote:Wait, Josh abandoned the forums while i was gone?

...NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

yeah you left and Josh was like "I guess since TheJuggler isn't here I can't be here either"
good job

~Sly

Thanks Juggler... I hope your happy. *does sarcastic slow clap*

Gazz wrote:Yes, but... we can't make Josh post to it. =)

Bingo.

TheJuggler wrote:Wait, Josh abandoned the forums while i was gone?

...NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Wait,you were gone?

...NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

I for one did notice and was sad I like you Juggler

Grumblesaur wrote:

Gazz wrote:Yes, but... we can't make Josh post to it. =)

Bingo.

yes, because Josh is the only forum admin here, right?
nvmnd

jaromor wrote: yes, because Josh is the only forum admin here, right?
nvmnd

gazz is too, he just doesnt show his dark red name

also you dont need an admin for that.

i guess any of the dark-greened ones can do that

BFett wrote:Do we want Josh to post here?

Apparently, the answer is no.

Gazz wrote:Yes, but... we can't make Josh post to it. =)

Of course you can't, amirite

Zanteogo wrote:Again, it would have been nice if Josh had posted one last post of "guys, I need to turn on radio silence mode for a time, sorry!", however, it's just not the way Josh "does' stuff. (he would need to spend a week creating some over the top video presentation where he presented the same message)

He will probably return at some point with news of the game being beta ready. In Josh's mind having this in hand will "make up" for his sudden disappearance. He has got himself to the point now where (in his mind anyways), he just can't return without anything short of beta.

Assuming this is the case: That kind of stress shouldn't be what people take on all alone. Let some fans (alpha backers?) do progress reports off development builds, get some satisfaction from them discovering the stuff you did, get some testing in. Even if it further delays the beta.

The beta almost can't be good enough anyways if you go "dark" for a while directly in advance. A lot of people develop the mindset of "all this worry and anticipation, and this is it?!" while they wait. Or they drive themselves insane with trains - this is an actual condition, if I understand correctly!

Also, if the beta is just "here" one day, one might find out that a large-ish number of frustrated backers has technical issues at the same time. I guess with code that runs on both Linux and Windows this scenario is slightly less likely, but still...


PS: Nope, I'm personally not an alpha backer.

Josh had in the past shut down even the idea of him streaming. Much less allowing others to show the game for him.

FormalMoss wrote:

AbhChallenger wrote:
Hey that atleast is better than me. I spent that much to build a computer to play X Rebirth with... Ya I am dissapoint...

I'm with you there ol' buddy.
I now have an i7 3930k (6 core, 12 threads), 32 Gbytes of RAM system, that I built by hand to run X Rebirth (all because they sold me on multi-threaded CPUs).

Can you tell I'm really going to test the limits of LT?

Well no. Because LT is a mostly single threaded game.

mcsven wrote:

BFett wrote:Do we want Josh to post here?

Apparently, the answer is no.

If it's an issue, then the mods will step in.

Having a glorified "Josh status" button in the form of a thread with only mod/admin activity seems a bit overblown to me.

I followed LT for a while now via youtube and occasionally by reading this forum, and must say, that I'm really surprised by this sudden shutdown of all communications. I realize, that the daily dev-logs and super-in-depth videos were far beyond everything most other Kickstarter-funded developers deliver in terms of updates. I don't think that we should expect that level of documentation, especially when we talk about one guy without a team to share the chores with. And given how stressed out Josh seemed to be by his own expectations of quality when it came to presentation of results, I'm glad he's not pushing himself to do this any more. It's fine, really. But as lovely as trains and wild speculation about god-knows-what scenarios are, how hard could it be, to just call in once a week with a message like:

"Hey, not dead and still working on LT. Mostly AI-work atm, and some combat-refinement. Will focus on dynamic npc-factions next."

No details, just a broad summary of what's going on. Wouldn't even need a screenshot. It would dampen a lot of the speculation, even if we're not completely up-to-date in terms of the precise implementation of new feautures.

Since we don't have anything to go on except for a month-old tweet or whatever that last sign of life might have been, here goes my theory on why Josh might choose to keep a low profile at the moment:
The road to the beta was intended to be purely gameplay-focused, an intense stretch of development devoted to better expose all the existing features to the player via the UI and to create new content and fill the game-world with stuff to explore. The first two weeks seemed to have worked out well in that regard. But seeing how Josh has his expectations to his work's quality, maybe the third week didn't meet his high standards. Maybe some gameplay-mechanic didn't work out the way he intended, or he got distracted and caught himself working on architecture or tools again four days into the week (declared opposite of what RTB was supposed to be about). Both of those scenarios might have prompted him to postpone the update for a few days. Depending on how the development progressed, he could have stumbled into the next trap: Feeling that he made up for the original mishap, but that the things he had to show were really only worth one week, and not the two that had passed by that time. Maybe if he pushed the update again and tried to work even harder for a few more days, then perhaps he would have enough (by Josh's standards) results to present the next week? You see where this is going, racing his own expectations and perfectionism this could go on quite a while. Meanwhile, comments in the forums or on the KS-page stating, that they would have expected the beta for a while now and don't believe LT will ever be finished, don't exactly encourage someone like Josh to present an update, which is - in his mind - not yet as advanced as he envisioned at the start of RTB.

But I believe that, between the (vocal) edge-cases of
"The development is done and we'll never see a beta. Just move on and accept that your money's gone."
and
"Everything's fine, we'll see a playable beta any day now, you'll see. No no he's not dead, he's, he's resting! Beautiful plumage! And look: Trains!"
, there are probably a lot of silent followers like me, who might just be perfectly fine with a simple sign of life every now and again. Even if it doesn't coincide with a massive update-video or detailed explanations of every single feature that had been worked on. Until then, you'll always get posts like this one, speculating about possibilities and likelihoods of different scenarios and motives. And as time (and the radio-silence) goes on, the speculations will probably not tend to increase in positivity.

I hope, that all is well and that we'll hear some kind of progress report soon. Even if there are problems and delays. Love the idea behind the project, especially the procedural generation and the emergent behaviour it gives rise to, and intend to spend a lot of time observing the AI and dynamic world once it's been released. Best of luck!