thelee

It will be paid out on nett revenue- ie revenue after relevant deductions- not the gross revenue. If that weren't the case I would be extraordinarily surprised and question whether OEI had got decent, or any, accounting and legal advice. It will be set up to minimise payments to investors, that's just the reality of being a company rather than a charity and the investment only being shares in a product rather than shares in a company. Exactly how that nett revenue is counted and what can be deducted about it will depend on the exact definitions and terms used, but I'd bet pretty much everything I own that the 4.5 million is after they've deducted every single expense and cost they can. Fig is a pretty bad investment for sure, though I do believe that OEI did genuinely think they would get those numbers and it would be successful, as they put a decent amount of extra money in themselves. SEC filings says "gross revenue" everywhere and defines it very specifically. Granted there are some spots that to me look like typos, but the difference between "Gross revenue" and "net revenue" is pretty severe and it would be pretty bad (legally or financially speaking) if they messed it up. They do distinguish between "gross receipts" (gross revenue minus distributor's cut) and "gross revenue" but the reverse calculation that leads to 4.5m definitely accounts for the difference between gross receipts and gross revenue (it's 192.67 / (.7 * .16 * .85 / 2250)) where the ".7" is accounting for the distributor's cut. edit - Obsidian probably thought that PoE1 numbers were achievable, but the graph of the 500k break-even point is still really overly optimistic. I mean, it's completely normal practice for companies to use only optimistic assumptions in their projections, but there tends to be a reason why investors don't advise laypeople to make these kinds of investing decisions on their own.

berserker + smoke cloud is an interesting idea. i might have to test rolling one soon because that might be an easy way to trigger it (at the cost of some guile). I was talking about disoriented -> distracted because i thought i had accounted for every possible distracted effect my own hubris, since i clearly didn't think about confusion + party-friendly distraction effects.

man, i've wasted too much time on this. i guess my parting shot is that nothing anyone can say (including myself) changes the following bullet points: - Deadfire is selling less well than PoE1 - only Obsidian knows the specific numbers and the best guess we got is probably high 100k, closer to 200k - it's anyone's guess as to why it's selling less well - only Obsidian knows if Deadfire is tracking expectations or not edit: one more bullet point - fig shares has always been and continues to be a rotten deal for people. the pretty graph that showed a breakeven point at 500k-ish copies relied on an unchanging average sales price of 45 USD. any amount of discounting or international sales would significantly start reducing that sales price, and similarly stretch how many sales you'd need to hit breakeven. (if deadfire settles on an average sales price of ~26 like PoE1 you'd basically need to sell as well as PoE1 just to get your money back.) it also excludes console sales (which the PoE1 numbers include) and DLC sales. Welcome to America, buyer beware.

so i have to modify some things i said; i had to go look up the steam data leak from earlier this summer just to verify some things. A. tyranny did not sell that poorly, all things considered. the total number of players was 560k. this is not necessarily number of sales since it just counts players who have ever played the game, but for a non-crowdfunded game it's somewhat close. i don't know where i got the 60k number from. it might have been an initial release number or something. sorry about the error. B. deadfire might have higher sale counts and much lower unit sales price. i don't know why i remember something like 108k from the data leak, but the data from july 1st data leak was 200k players. a good number of this is backers and their free copies, but even allowing for that, i think 125k is on the low side of actual sales combined with sales from GoG. C. poe1 had 1.2m players. a small portion of this is backers and their free copies. it probably has a much lower per-unit sales price at this point due to all the discounted sales that have happened since its release From SEC filings (dec 2017, seven months before C above): as of the time they were written, poe1 had revenues to obsidian of about 16.5m on sales of about 900k, which accounting for a 30% distributor's cut amounts to an average sales price of 26 bucks per copy. (this excludes white march which alone contributed 2m more) Anyway, reddit calculations relies on using the base USD sales price with some discounting as a starting point. Upon going through this stuff this is a very bad starting point, actually, because this is an international game, and the base price can be as little as 14 USD for someone buying in Russia. (EDIT - I missed that Zoraptor ninja-ed me on this point above.) I think we can definitely say that there's 4.5m in gross revenue, but the actual sales is still probably going to all over the place. I think it's safe to say that we're actually closer to 200k in terms of sales including GoG than we are to 100k. Definitely slower than PoE1. Tyranny took almost two years and lots of sales to get to 560k, Deadfire is 1/3 of the way there in 1/4 of the time with minimal discounting so far... maybe it can do better? i'm actually surprised that tyranny did so well, considering that paradox themselves considered it disappointing. 560k for a niche style of a niche genre is not shabby in my book; i guess they were expecting PoE1-style numbers?

what would be the best is if there existed some AoE disorienting effect, because then you could just equip that that gives you perception resistance and it would be far more fool-proof than powder burns, sparkcrackers, or trying to get flanked/<50% health. but as far as I can tell, disorienting is extremely rare to do; mule kick maybe? you're largely left with distracted or blinded (which can be resisted down to disoriented, but that's still +50% recovery time penalty so it's not ideal).

arkemyr's dazzling lights is a "dazed" effect, no?

If it was 125K sales that's about $5m from a game that's already funded. Obsidian don't see money from sales from their other games. $5m not including DLC which tends to be higher margin or the ports to the consoles. Deadfire was rapidly developed, with a small team. I think the people in that thread took the break even total and divided it with the dividend given to get the just over 110K figure. I don't think that's how shares work, the dividend system that Fig out laid seemed a lot more complicated. Without the long tail and deep discounts, I would be surprised if a game like Deadfire would get over 300K sales. There's a lot of competition in the market place, even from Obsidian with Tyranny. the sales calculations were a bit more complicated than that and took into account the fig dividend system. the revenue is essentially known, it's the number of copies sold that is the unknown. from one of the posts: "If they sold the maximum number of shares, we'd each be getting $42.50 per share per million dollars of revenue until the investment amount is paid back." and they sold out the maximum number of fig shares so 192.67/42.5 => 4.5m revenue; depending on the unit sale prices you can get a range of sales, but people were assuming something close to ~$40 after some discounts and steam/gog's share of the cut. but definitely dividends implies 4.5m revenue, or else fig is committing financial fraud. it's important to remember that the game was fully funded on Fig, but as I've repeatedly tried to remind everyone, half of that is in the form of these fig shares, which have to be paid back through these dividends. Which is different from the $4m that PoE1 got, which was basically pure up-front profit (after kickstarter's cut and assuming that the backer rewards were extremely cheap relative to the total funding). Frankly I personally didn't expect Deadfire to do as well as PoE1 because it seems a lot of things lined up to make lightning strike for PoE1 (this was one among many, many, many, many reasons why i thought fig shares were a horrible idea for the average person), but even considering that this seems very low. Tyranny has sold only like 60k copies so far I think, so perhaps Obsidian was aware of the potentially extremely low ceiling for RTwP games, but maybe they thought the PoE IP would carry it ever higher. It basically all boils down to what Obsidian was relying on for their own financial projections. For all we know this is all in line with their internal projections. But to me it honestly seems like a miss; on top of Chris Avellone's grousing 4.5m plus 2m in unconditional up-front funding sounds like a lot but programmer salaries + benefits and office rent in California don't come cheap and that money needs to cover not just Deadfire but the next project, too.

At a certain mid-level point of AR, on PotD and upscaling, the main reason you'd go for moderate AR over cloth basically just boils down to avoiding overpenetration (because the enemy needs 12 PEN to overpen you on superb cloth, but a whopping 20 PEN to overpen you on superb medium armor), which is not nothing, but pales in comparison to the situation that boeroer and others mention that you can get significantly huge survivability boosts with heavy armor and/or AR buffs. With upscaling/PotD it's sort of an arms race against the enemy, so unless you're investing a lot in AR, as boeroer says you can eventually get away with less and less armor because you're not really keeping up enough to protect yourself much anyway and your raw health and higher action rate matters more. (i think spell damage might be easier to mitigate than enemy weapon attacks and might still mean significant utility from medium armor and such)

when it comes to pets, the party-wide effect is always weaker than the mainchar-only effect. in this case, nalvi gives you a much smaller improvement to armor recovery than epsilon or pirate cosmo (albeit it gives it to everyone). you can lean that way if you want, but this class is such a glass cannon you really want to be selfish with the armor recovery reduction. also, in more recent versions of the game (due to consumables nerf), we don't actually want too much extra resolve because it hurts our ability to distract ourself (either with powder burns or sparkcrackers). if you're not going that route, then maybe the +1 resolve is decent.

Deadfire raised more than $4m, but it came from a shallower base of backers, and a lot of it was "investors"... which you could potentially draw as similar to backers, but personally I would put it more as a speculative gamble by coattail riders/curious gamers and not necessarily an excited player base (though it could've been and these players were more interested in monetary rewards than a collector's edition box). The big difference is that the "investors" are actually supposed to be paid back from revenue, which means that of the $4m, something like half of it is actually a liability that Obsidian needs to pay off to some degree, so it's not just pure cash in the bank. Also an argument that some people are making (that I don't find altogether uncompelling) is that fig is such a small crowdfunding site that $4m on Fig is different from $4m on Kickstarter in terms of free press and marketing. Plus, all the people who are getting burned to the tune of -80% on their "investment" (maybe as "little" as -60% after another year) aren't exactly going to line up to do the same thing for a PoE3 bid on Fig. Bronze on steam is actually a meaninglessly broad result. Gold or silver meant something in terms of sales, bronze was basically awarded to everyone else who was in the top 100 or something. There was a data leak from steam some months back that was able to compute the specific number of Deadfire sales as something like 108k (I remember looking at the specific data dump just for Deadfire sales numbers). The fig dividend calculations seems to back that and confirm that not much other sales from GoG. It's possible that this is all fine and something that Obsidian anticipated, but there are indications that this is not. For example, the full VO is extremely expensive and suggests an anticipation of bigger returns. Chris Avellone (keeping in mind he seems to have an axe to grind these days so take with a grain of salt) mentioned somewhere that the expectation was that Deadfire was going to be a BG2 to BG moment in terms of sales numbers (BG2 did much better than BG I believe)--he had a tweet very recently (that I think prompted all this recent speculation) that if the MSFT takeover rumors are true, MSFT should axe all the upper management at Obsidian (Feargus and the other co-owners) and pointed to Deadfire sales as signaled by fig dividends as proof. edit - i'm an optimist, so the periodic talk about future directions for Eora makes me believe that Eora is not dead (and having your own IP is a very valuable thing), but something is going to have to change because I don't think ~200k lifetime unit sales (completely ballparking that number based on the fact that game sales are front-loaded) is going to warrant the kind of investment and support that Deadfire has/had.

Yeah, this. Can anyone explain this phenomenon to any degree? I find it totally baffling. Some areas are perfectly fine, no problems whatsoever, and some are so slow you want to go and watch paint dry for some excitement. And I mean these areas are slow without any encounters. Just walking around. This totally baffles me. Either the unity engine is plain bad or the developers in obsidian aren't doing it right. There are places with really bad performance. For example Queen's berth where Cotta party resides. If you add in stealth, the frame rate can come to a crawl. Also another biggest gripe for me about Deadfire. Many screenshots look awesome but in game they are just plain flat. for example poko kohara ruins. I didn't think there were performance issues, because I was playing on a 6-year old CPU, with a 1060, and getting mostly smooth frame rates with occasional stutters and occasional sections of low fps like arriving in queen's berth, so I was happy with it. I very very very recently (like in the past few days) built a new CPU, with an amd ryzen 2700x, nvidia 2080 ti, etc. It can play shadow of the tomb raider all settings maxed at 4k with nearly constant 60 fps. On Deadfire I get.... mostly smooth frame rates with occasional stutters and occasional sections of low fps like arriving in queen's berth... (!?!?!?!?) it leads me to strongly believe that there's something just fundamentally clunky about the unity engine being used here. I mysteriously dip well below 60fps and no graphical settings tweaks improve it. I was willing to give it a pass before because of my oldish system and budget gpu, but there's literally no excuse now. It suggests that there's something that's not GPU-bound but just fundamental inefficiencies in the game engine... given that i'm using a current-gen CPU now it doesn't even seem like it's a CPU-bound issue (like maybe they're doing random blocking I/O reads or have very inefficient algorithms that no amount of processing power can speed up, like hell maybe they're bubble-sorting everything).

you'll have to share that character build of yours, especially the bit of how you were able to do an infinite amount of damage in a finite amount of time. i think some physicists would be real interested in that for some warp drives they want to build.

high-level ship combat is really borked, unfortunately. High-level enemy surgeons are so effective that even with a full set of grapeshot-firing cannons they can heal back their deckhands real fast. there's basically no reason to just cannonball away at that point. there really needs to be a way to do more precision offense/defense; hoping to randomly take out their surgeon or hoping to randomly brace for impact when it would've been relevant is not great.

people are talking about turn-based combat, but wasn't the Dragon Age series RTwP and wasn't it pretty successful? or has the industry moved past even that? I guess I wouldn't mind Pillars of Eternity: Tactics, but it would make me really sad that my favorite genre of game is too niche for even a small independent studio to make games for. something that would be hilarious to see: JE Sawyer's PoE tabletop system is turn-based because RTwP doesn't work in pen and paper, for obvious reasons. It would be funny to see a PoE3 that adapts JE Sawyer's tabletop adaptation of PoE1/2. edit: also personally I want to visit the Living Lands or Old Vailia.

If Obsidian had unlimited resources, an interesting A/B test would be to make a PoE3 that is a "return to form" to PoE1 (back to per-rest, gritty theme, Western European fantasy theme, etc). It it does better than Deadfire, then we'd know that RTwP gamers are actually fairly conservative in their tastes. I'm not totally convinced because BG2 had a very different setting to BG's dyrwood-ian sword coast, but the games industry was very different then too so maybe there were more mainstream gamers picking it up whereas now there are a bajillion open world games with vaguely RPG/shooter/stealth elements to play.

It could also just be the sad sad fact that PoE1 benefits from being a well-hyped nostalgia kick, whereas Deadfire is more representative of the size of the "true" market for this kind of genre. It's not unprecedented; Prey was an extremely good AAA-budget System shock style game, but it did poorly in sales because it turns out however enthusiastic the fan base for that genre the broader audience isn't that interested in a System Shock game.

I don't know to what extent the parallel holds, but you might be asking slightly wrong questions there. The parallel I mean is that in the (former) music industry (since it's currently dead), the sales of your next release were very much dictated by the love people had for your previous release. In other words, if people really loved what you had previously done, you could put out some real rubbish and it would still sell like hotcakes, at least initially. This also holds in the movie industry, at least to a degree. So, assuming that I am on the right track at all, a really good question to ask would be: why were so many people so disappointed with PoE1 that they didn't want to hang around for Deadfire? I'm not so sure people are disappointed with PoE1. Im sure some are, but I don't think it's a huge percentage; my PoE1 gamefaqs guide has extremely good support despite being years old game, comparable to other guides I've written for other games with extremely good long-tail support. (Better than e.g. Dragon Age Inquisition for example) I think there is a huge marketing problem here, because I heard about PoE everywhere, but I backed Deadfire and barely heard anything about it outside of backer updates. Heck, I love RTwP genre and barely even knew Tyranny existed while it was under development. Maybe there's something to be said about having used Fig instead of Kickstarter.

This is the wrong way to look at it. The gain is very small because in optimized targeting situations spellshaping is all upside; you can do +1 PL at no loss of targets. (This is why wizard subclasses started off at +1 PL because if all you do is cast from that spell school you have virtually no downside; the problem is that PL scaling sucked for non-evokers so they bumped it up.) The downside is not even a downside; if you even get one more target it's likely worth the -5 PL. Spellshaping gives you flexibility for all upside; it doesn't force you to take penalties. Not sure i understand what you mean there. When i have spell-shaping on a chanter, when i reduce the aoe, i definitely get a loss of targets for +1PL (for example, thrice was she wronged). when reducing the aoe, definitely there are loss of targets behind the cone? correct me if i'm wrong -5PL means -15 ACC right? +1PL gains +3 ACC. Also if there is a 5% damage bonus per PL that means that's a -25% damage. no, you're thinking about character levels. -5 PL means : -5 acc, -25% damage penalty (that goes through inversions so in practice may be as little as -20%), -25% duration (same thing with inversions), -1.25 PEN and up to -2.5 projectiles. +1 PL means +1 ACC, +5% dmg, +5% duration, +.25 PEN, +.5 projectiles. all bonuses/adjustments are multiplicative. what i'm trying to say is that spellshaping is all upside. If you are in a situation where e.g. there are two enemies next to each other, then the "cost" of reducing the aoe to get +1 PL is nonexistent. If you are in a situation where expanding the aoe lets you get even one more target, then you've basically already made up for the -5 PL. spellshaping doesn't force you to do anything, so there's no real "penalty." so saying that +1 PL is measly misses the part that you can get that +1 PL with no cost in the right situations, and you're not forced to go with the smaller aoe unless you really want to. Compare that to prestige, which is an AL9 passive that grants +1 stacking PL unconditionally, and a conditional, no-downside, stacking +1 PL at AL4 seems pretty good (and you have the added flexibility of making your aoe larger, which is otherwise impossible to do with PL scaling).

BTW, there's a reddit thread where people have worked backwards from the fig dividends to guesstimate sales numbers. This would be reasonably accurate, as otherwise Fig would be committing SEC violations: https://www.reddit.com/r/projecteternity/comments/9uqx8w/first_dividend_recieve_for_poe2_fig_investing/ TL;DR: we're seeing about 125k-ish unit sales, excluding copies given out as part of backer rewards, which seems to mirror guesstimates from an accidental data leak from steam (and suggests gog is a very small proportion of sales). It took about five months for PoE1 to hit 500k copies (according to press release), and fig dividends are paid out at every six months. So Deadfire is very much underforming PoE1 by a significant degree. (The revenue picture to Obsidian might be better because revenue from DLCs don't contribute to fig dividends). (apparently chris avellone has an axe to grind against management for Deadfire. arguably using a lesser-known property like fig to fund deadfire resulted in less free marketing, even if they were able to raise a decent amount of money)

Playing with this more, it's less lame than I originally thought. First, while Vela is a low-priority enemy for enemies, as I do more battles, some enemies will target Vela. Rogue-types are the worst; frequently when I get them to low health, they will Escape way past my front lines next to Vela and start attacking her. Second, I underestimated how much I reposition my party throughout a fight. Frequently I'll have thought that Vela was back somewhere safe, and I find myself backing up and moving the front lines back as I try to keep my squishy characters safe. Wuh oh. Third, enemy bounce spells and recklessly targeted AoE are the worst. Fourth, even though you could theoretically engage combat with your mainchar really far back and then run forward, there are a decent number of encounters (including bounties) where combat starts without any chance to reposition, or there's not a lot of map space to reposition. Nekataka ambushes and ship boardings are the worst. Withdraw is definitely MVP spell here. Dodged a few gameovers with a quick Withdraw on a Near Death Vela (a sight that any parent should freak out to see). So too are push effects, but Withdraw is foolproof protection. Sometimes I wish I could just yell at Vela "come here! come here!" but I suppose her not listening to me even as battle rages on all around her is pretty accurate representation of young child behavior.

while i'm sure it's frustrating in general you really need to provide another output_log (or Player.log) as well as a save if it's still a persistent issue. developers can't magically instantly recreate whatever problem you have, no matter how severe it seems to you (especially because most people have no problem). It happened to me few times with latest patch. Where do I obtain this log? it's in the pinned thread "How to report a bug"

This is the wrong way to look at it. The gain is very small because in optimized targeting situations spellshaping is all upside; you can do +1 PL at no loss of targets. (This is why wizard subclasses started off at +1 PL because if all you do is cast from that spell school you have virtually no downside; the problem is that PL scaling sucked for non-evokers so they bumped it up.) The downside is not even a downside; if you even get one more target it's likely worth the -5 PL. Spellshaping gives you flexibility for all upside; it doesn't force you to take penalties.

yes. i don't think it works so well for non-kith who are not obviously casters (e.g. fampyr or xaurip priests); anecdotally bosses like the BoW dragon or SSS croc appear to have infinite uses of their main abilities just on a cooldown and interrupt just forces them to move on to the next one instead of burning a slot (in fact if you use spiritual ally you can literally see them with a little infinity symbol over their two abilities); however even in those cases there are a few that appear limited (like BoW's llengrath's safeguard or SSS's robust) that you can cancel out with an interrupt but those are the exception. be warned though that enemy casters, like you, have the option of just using a remaining spellcast to try the same thing again. anecdotally a lot of casters I fight really want to cast Arcane Dampener, so if you interrupt one, chances are they'll try again later or even immediately. If you interrupt that one as well then they have nothing left. edit to add: even if you don't interrupt the actual cast, if you do an interrupt oftentimes you'll "reset" the AI script so while they still have the cast available they'll move on to doing other things for a little bit before trying it again.

Xoti always melee for me. It's also best to turn her evil for the damage bonus? Especially with her lantern. Her sycthe i find it useless though. If not mistaken, she deals better damage unarmed. Alwayse use willbreaker on her. The fort debuff helps Force of Anguish and also her reaper scythe ability. I only use it to interrupt. Her monk subclass suxs as it needs +1 resource. I don't use much of her wound abilites. As a monk there's versatility. But i tend to use her to max intellect for her duration buffs. single-class monks will virtually always deal more damage unarmed than with weapons. I do keep her scythe around for PEN issues (though most of the time i just steal it for one of my other characters). personally in terms of upgrade, i think there's a lot to be said for a relatively rare, multiplicative spell resist bonus instead of a tiny damage bonus that gets additively combined with the bajillions of other damage bonuses you get by end game.

With microtransactions! "Your wizard is about to be hit with an interrupt, losing their spell. Do you want to spend 100 coins or buy 1 gem to give yourself concentration?" that would be the darkest timeline