Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Getting access to ADOM prereleases

Hi everyone!

In the past couple of weeks there were a decent amount of requests by folks who either missed the crowd funding campaign or then didn't have any available funds to enter it to get access to the prerelease program for ADOM Classic. Now there is a way...
Important: It is no longer possible to buy ADOM prerelease access. I'm keeping this post alive for historical reasons but the instructions below no longer are valid. Do not try to buy into this! If you do I will regard your submission as a donation but not follow up by providing prerelease access! Thanks for listening!

Please make sure that you read the following text very closely and understand all steps. Entering more people into the prerelease program requires me to do this manually and I'd like to avoid another round of mail- and FB-based "hotline support" as such activities really distract from programming ADOM Classic ;-)

Here are the rules (that no longer work, see above):
  1. Determine the amount of money you need to donate (see below).
  2. Donate the money via Paypal to thomas.biskup(at)gmail.com.
  3. Send an email to creator(at)ancientdomainsofmystery.com (and no other address!) containing the headline "Buying into the ADOM prerelease program", your first name, your last name, the email address under which you donated and your current email address.
(replace the "(at)" with "@" in the text above). Once the money appears on my account I will give you access to the prerelease program. Please give me a day or two of time up to ten days of time to enable access as I'll be doing this only during my breakfast ADOM preparations and not all day ;-) (and I had to learn that sometimes Paypal takes a while to process stuff, and I'm back at work and things are hectic as usual and... sorry for needing more time but experience so far shows that one or two days were not realistic).

How much to donate?

This depends on whether you already are a donor to the ADOM crowd funding campaign or not:
  1. If you donated as either a "Villager" or a "Seeker" (the only two donations levels without prerelease access) you will need to donate $30. In this case you must provide your full name and the email address you used to donate to the campaign.
  2. If you have not donated to the Indiegogo Crowd Funding campaign you will need to donate $40.
Why so much?

To be honest: I try to be fair to existing donors. I know from a number of conversations during the crowd funding campaign that quite a few people had to save in order to be donate. Making the entry level too cheap would be unfair to them. Thus I decided to differentiate by current donor status. Please don't start any discussions about the fairness of these levels (with me) - it seems fair to me and I won't change the decision as this again would cause problems with people who donate.

What do I get?

Nothing anymore. See above.

Access to all ADOM Classic prerelease versions that we create. Roughly we try to have one new version per week, sometimes it's a couple of days, sometimes two weeks or more (there must be enough interesting stuff to make it worthwhile to release a new version).

Please note that you are not allowed to distribute prerelease versions or give access to third parties.

Please note also that you do not get access to Steam prerelease versions (or full versions for that matter). Access to Steam release betas is limited to the original crowdfunding donors of $40+ level.

What happens if I make a mistake?

If it's easy to clean up we'll do that. Otherwise I'm grateful for your donation. Note that I'd prefer to spend my time programming ADOM and not postprocessing donations ;-)

31 comments:

  1. Will you still keep releasing old prereleases to public? I thought donors would get only time advantage over non-donors , so eventually we will all be able to play them, am I correct?

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  2. The final release at the end of the development cycle definitely will be public. We also expect more than one final release (probably one with the basic promises from the campaign and at least one more with the advanced stuff). We have not yet decided whether there will be more intermediate releases (like p3 and p5) but the probability is not very high for more.

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  3. I have a question, which I'm asking here for understanding, not to try and get you to change your mind. Why do you think it is only fair if you charge *more* than would've been required during the campaign? I.e. the minimum to gain access to prerelease during the campaign was $25. Why would it be *un*fair to the donors to charge _that_ amount for this after-campaign release access, and why would fairness instead require a _higher_ charge of $40? Just trying to understand...

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    Replies
    1. #1: As I tried to explain... I had quite a number of discussions with people who during the campaign really had to save money and forfeit other things in order to get the money together... even $25. IMHO it would be pretty unfair to them (who might have had it easier later on) to just say "ah, no problem, come later, pay the same and forget about the people who really fought to be a part of the campaign).

      I was extremely impressed by some people who obviously are not rich but value the game so highly that they are willing to sacrifice other things. Luckily no animals or children seem to have been harmed though ;-) (yeah, in some cases I asked about that ;-) ).

      #2: The crowd funding campaign by definition was a limited offer and by definition most limited early offers increase in price once the limited offer is over. Usually.

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    2. How is "paying the same" tied up with "forgetting about the people who really fought to be a part of the campaign"? Is it because those who "really fought for it" were motivated because they thought it was something special, and so having the same price afterwards would make it less special?

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    3. I think re-opening access to the pre-releases after the campaign has finished, and sorting these people out manually, is pretty generous of Thomas.

      He is trying to make this process accommodating to all, including those who forgot or made a mistake. This isn't an easy task, is even less-easy to define fairly. Delving into the decision-making process serves no-one - it just takes away from ADOM devopment time.

      It's not as if there aren't previous, and very playable, versions of the game to play if one choses not to participate.

      Delete
  4. Hello there!
    I donated 40$ to get access to the prereleases of ADOM couple of days ago, but I didn't get any answer. I think there can be some problems, maybe you didn't et this mail, or it was markes as spam. You can contact me under: egeikkjenorsk(AT)gmail.com

    Daniel Salwerowicz.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Just to make sure my return mail didn't got. You have been activated. Please go to the self service portal and follow the instructions there.

      Delete
  5. Just to let you know, 'user(at)foo.com' is just as screen-scrapable as user@foo.com these days. In fact, just about none of the bots that are scraping for email addresses will miss that.

    If you want to put up an email address that won't get snaffled and eventually used against you, you might try making an image of it. (They haven't started using OCR yet.) Or you can use more circumlocutions ("user.foo.com, replace the first dot with an @" or whatever).

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  6. Hello Thomas,

    Great work on keeping ADOM going. I've been loving the game since the start. And was happy to help with early monster descriptions.

    I sadly didn't find out about the Indiegogo campaign until it was too late. If I'd have known I would have definitely thrown in some extra for some of those bonuses. Would it still be possible to get any of the higher donation perks? Specifically getting a special monster created?

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  7. I think $40 is totally reasonable. I think you are right: early donors made a commitment to you, and showed a lot of faith, and it undermines that to now give it away at the same price.

    Kudos to you for doing what you think is right.

    I would happily donate $40 (And will) but am a bit broke right now.

    I have a (somewhat unrelated) question:

    What is currently ADOM? Jade, Adom II formerly known as Jade, Adom, Adom Classic, Adom 1, Adom 1.2.0p11, Adom .3, etc, I'm just not sure anymore what is what.

    I am thinking:
    there is the original Adom available for download in 1.2, several years old now
    Adom II: Currently available as Adom .3, right?
    Jade: Early development on Adom II, runs in Java, a little wonky
    Adom 1.2.0p11: updates to the original Adom? also called "Adom Classic"?

    Basically there are two projects:
    old Adom
    super early version of Adom II as .3
    updates to old Adom called 1.2.0p11 which you can only download if you are a donor

    IS that correct? Sorry for my confusion, there are just a few blogs, websites, etc, related to Adom now, and I get confused navigating them!

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  8. @David Streever: After names got a bit confusing I nowadays try to use the following naming conventions:

    The original ADOM still is called ADOM (or sometimes "ADOM Classic").

    The followup game is always called ADOM II (formerly it was called JADE but I decided to unify names).

    So when you read older stuff there might be different names. Whenever you find a version called ADOM 1.2.something it's the original ADOM.

    You never should read about a version ADOM 0.3.something (nowadays) as official ADOM releases started with 0.4 so many years (19?) ago. ADOM II is currently at 0.3.2 (which shows that it's still pretty raw and incomplete).

    Cheers!
    Thomas

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  9. @Adam Taylor: You now only can buy into prerelease access. The other perks are closed.

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  10. Do the prreleases come out in the Mac OS version as well? I would like to participate, but I'm Mac-only user.

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    Replies
    1. Yes, all the versions supported at http://www.ancardia.com/download.html are being created for each and every closed prerelease.

      Delete
  11. Hi Thomas, is there any way to hide the 'prerelease' warning when starting ADOM?

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    Replies
    1. I guess it's a luxury; I already know that it's a pre-release and don't want to press Enter one more time to actually start the game.

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  12. So since I missed that the crowd funding happened I need to play 40$ to get it? And then pay even more if I want the deluxe variant later on?

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    Replies
    1. Something like that. Right now prerelease access only is available if you either belonged to the crowd funding supporters or if you enter by paying now.

      We have not yet decided on how the Deluxe pricing model will be - difficult topic. So I just can't comment on that one for now.

      Naturally there always will be a free version of ADOM - that won't change!

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    2. So you want more than 40$ total to get the entire game? Please offer a final one-pay price for those of us that don't like to be dlc & nickled and for transparency.

      To be clear 40$ doesn't get you the full game, just a temporary beta pass?

      Delete
    3. If you want to have access to prereleases, it's $40, yes. No way around that. Later on there will be both the free version and some kind of commercial Deluxe version. Details regarding Deluxe have not yet been decided and surely won't be in the next couple of months.

      Delete
  13. Hi,

    I donated 40$ to get access to prerelease program couple days ago, but i didn't get answer yet. Just to make sure it was not marked as spam.

    Also thanks for giving us the opportunity to still buy into the prerelease program :)


    Cheers,

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm so sorry. It was. I really need to get better at finding these things more consistently. You by now should have received a confirmation mail and your account has been cleared. Sorry again for the problem :-(

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    2. I think this also happened to me.

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  14. I assume you have to pay $30 even if you donated for both 'Seeker' and 'Villager', no?

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    Replies
    1. Err... interesting case. But according to #1 above: yes.

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  15. This is something of a strange request...but is it possible to make my donation in the USD value of Bitcoin? I've used BTC for some time now, but I have never dealt with Paypal, and I'm paranoid about having my CC info online

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  16. I'll buy when you set a final price for the deluxe edition. I don't trust you to not make pre-release players spend another $40 for the deluxe version, and if it is that much i'll wait til a steam sale.

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  17. Just to let you know, with no intention of creating any discussion, I would have bought in were it not for the price you settled on based on your personal philosophy. It's up to you if that's the decision you want to make, just registering that it turned me away.

    I know people like the feeling of getting something exclusive but to me that just creates resentment a sense of division. I know this is standard for crowd sourcing games and it's the reason they lose good will with me and I decide not to give them my business, it's natural to dislike the "sorry, you didn't get here soon enough so you'll have to pay a penalty to get access to the shiny toy this group are enjoying" - it made me think "forget it then, I don't actually need this".

    It creates a bad consumer/seller relationship from the get go and I can't be the only one it's turned away. You don't have to change your mind, just know that you've probably stunted the success of the project.

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  18. Is there still a donation that gives us access to the full steam game? It seems that now we need to donate twice...do I just wait for the steam release to donate? I read somewhere that it will be released next Christmas. I don't care how fair this system is...we all had the opportunity months ago. Thank you, I'm looking forward to seeing the progress you've made.

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