- Thread starter 7767
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- Aug 2, 2019
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Bro, it's been over a decade. A fucking decade. In that time Echo team manages to complete echoes, adastra, and arches. Smoke room probably hit the half way point in terms of development. Dyne finished all 5 main routes of Extracurricular Activities. Along with making epilogues for them and giving us two extra routes. People aren't ragging on poor wittle bane for no reason. He's an incompetent fraud. who wasted the time and money of the people around him. Burnt bridges with the echo team cause of his incompetence and has yet to finish a single route. The updates he's puts out are not even 5 minutes long or if there is anything in the updates all. He stopped interacting with his fanbase years ago when they started asking questions about the development and lack of assets being added. Gruff is the only one who has emotes and poses and he doesn't have a full set of sprite work.
He does a double "update" and you have a 50% chance of nothing being in the update. It's gotten so bad that there are people who will actively decompile the game to make sure if anything has actually been added to the game and if there is they will list the actual changes and or added word count to each new update. The real sad thing is that that Blackgate was a catalyst for alot of furry VNs popping up and it being left behind to rot cause it was mishandled hurts.
He does a double "update" and you have a 50% chance of nothing being in the update. It's gotten so bad that there are people who will actively decompile the game to make sure if anything has actually been added to the game and if there is they will list the actual changes and or added word count to each new update. The real sad thing is that that Blackgate was a catalyst for alot of furry VNs popping up and it being left behind to rot cause it was mishandled hurts.
- Aug 2, 2019
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Uh I'm not going to go through every single update and tell you word for word what has changed, that's stupid and would take an incredible amount of time. You're free to try it and tell me what HASN'T been changed since you're SO confident in saying nothing has changed.
I can because unless the patch notes are 100% false, and if they were then it's clear cut case of fraud and there hasn't been any lawsuit that I'm aware of for such a huge allegation. So again show me was HASN'T been changed and then we can talk
I'm not gonna pretend that I know everything about this, but could you provide those notes and of anyone else who can veried what this person did? I just need to see that because this can be a he said/she said thing. Not accussing you of anything just that these things are easy to fake, I did use to follow so I'm aware of a short period where the dev went back and redid almost everything about the story after a long haitus. It was shortly after that I stopped following it closely because of slow it went by
Just press the link in my comment? It lines up well with my experience with the game, but you're free to check if its accurate yourself of course. Either way, the point still stands that the amount of nights and artwork that have been added is unacceptable, even if you could prove that the updates aren't intentionally without progress.
I've come to realize that I've been pushed into defending my position while I only wanted to vent at the guy that made the game relevant again and thus perpetuating the scam. I'm not convinced that proving my position will harm the scam in any way, so I'm not responding any more comments that want me to prove my position.
- Apr 3, 2020
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Bane is smart enough to make the patch notes vague enough that you can't actually tell what was added/changed. "Changes to route X night Y" only means that on some level there were changes made. He's been double charging for updates by splitting the update in 2, and posting them within hours of each other. And for a long time those changes were just rewording things already in the game. And, "changes made" is vague enough that rewording things counts. His patch notes are not 100% false, but they are 100% deceptive. And they have been for years.
I mean, on April 1st this year, Gruff's route had updates to night 8, 9 and 10. January 1st this year, Gruff got an update to night 10. A year before that, Gruff got an update to night 10. That's all the patch notes say.
The simple truth is that it's easy to start writing a big project, a little harder to work on it consistently, and tough to finish it. There comes a point where you have to be able to push past burnout to finish and not everyone can do it.
If it's not finished by now it's probably not going to finish. Endlessly tweaking is a sign of writer's block.
- Jan 29, 2019
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Did you even read the post just above yours?
Blackgate is not a "writer's block" situation,
The developer actively deceiving / manipulating people into paying him money for nothing.
NOT a single developer whose intention is "Develop a game" would do something Blackgate's dev is doing, even when they enter "writer's block".
They either abandon / go into hiatus / end abruptly, like most projects does;
or actively seeking solutions, Like Lustful Desires
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- Apr 3, 2020
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I 100% agree that it's probably never going to finish. Darkgem and the editors jumped ship years ago. The merch thing went nowhere. Bane has completely distanced himself from the audience and project. The only thing he hasn't stepped away from is access to his patrons wallets.
I'd be willing to give Bane the benefit of the doubt with it being a writer's block issue, but he's proven he's not worth it. Writer's block may lead to endless tweaking, but not half a decade of silence and deception.
I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt in assuming that he hasn't accepted that he's not going to finish yet and tells himself that the endless tweaking is going somewhere. This is the stage where he'd have to have the wherewithal to push through even now that it's not fun anymore and it's fairly clear by now that he doesn't have that in him. It may be something of a grift for him to keep his patreon open, but anyone who's still hanging on must be sharing in his delusion that he'll complete it.
It also takes a certain kind of person to maliciously string people along with a grift and I don't get that vibe here. Those sorts usually cut and run, starting new projects that they don't intend to finish to get a new wave of support to milk.
I have to disagree, this whole situation surely seems as an intentional ploy from Bane to get as much money as possible from Blackgate's corpse. People among his patrons have given clearly their opinions with comments on his posts since the moment they realized the project wasn't progressing, he didn't respond a single one, something he actually did before way back then.
Keep also in mind that Bane has access to it's patreon revenue chart, he has to have noticed the steady decline from earnings and patrons since 2017. A quick glimpse at his Patreon during 2016 using Wayback you can see his earnings where well above 3k per demo, right now they don't break the 300$ mark. At some point after Bane started posting 2 demos at the beginning of the month, but having the same amount of
It does sound like he's doing some scuzzy things in trying to keep it afloat, but just reading it will tell you that this is the guy's baby and he doesn't want to let go of it even if he should.
It's kind of like how Togashi or Miura, back when he was still alive, were releasing a handful of chapters of hunter x hunter and Berserk every few years. Yeah, the series were technically still being worked on, but clearly neither was going to finish.
- Apr 3, 2020
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Ok, I strongly disagree with you there. Being a mangaka is a full time job, working for a company that pays you a salary. They get paid to make their projects. With manga, there's no guarantee that it will be a long running, successful series, because the company that publishes it determines whether or not that manga can continue. If you dick around, the company gets rid of you, because you are there to make them money, so you will work, and you will work hand until they tell you you can stop. The company has made no promise to the consumer, and the author can't make promises to the consumer. Artists like Miura and Togashi are exceptions to the rule because they have put out work that has been extremely well received for decades. Companies will let them take longer because a) they know it will be good quality work, and b) people will pay a lot of money for it.
Bane is just someone who got a project crowdfunded. And a big part of that process involved telling people that there will be a finished product, and that if they help fund it, they will get special perks as the game is worked on and/or when it is finally released. There is a very clear promise made to the consumer. One that, in this case, is not being delivered on. Unlike Miura and Togashi, Bane does not have a decades long history of very well received work that people would be happy to pay for once it is released. Bane has a lot of customers who are pissed off because they never got what they paid for.
He is doing scummy things, but not to keep the project afloat. If his goal was to keep it afloat, he's failed miserably.
Honestly, I think you're wasting your time. He has to know it's going nowhere. Because he did briefly attempt to return and 'properly' work on the game for a while. If I remember right, it didn't last very long. It fizzled because he did too little, too late. And he knows that.
I also remember there being discussions at the time about whether or not the top-tier patrons, specifically Chrom, had any legal ground to stand on to sue Bane for the state of the project. Because people were pledging for perks that were not received, like the promised streams and access to wips, and even the patron characters' routes had, at that time, been completely abandoned with no one able to contact Bane in any way. Suddenly, he returned to try to fix things, and there were no double updates and the patron routes were updated again. I don't believe that was a coincidence.
His patreon is, at best a grift. And the patrons he has left are new people who aren't aware of the shitshow, old people who are wealthy enough and/or don't care enough to leave, or people who forgot they pledged.
- Apr 3, 2020
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Technically, yes. Actually, it's been dead since like 2018.
That's why I made the comparison. Blackgate was very well regarded for a long time and now it's just coasting on its former success in the same way and getting the same 'special treatment' by those who still believe in it despite the fact that the writing is clearly on the wall.
- Jan 29, 2019
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It's baffling you even mention Miura and Togashi, Insulting them by comparing them to "Bane the Grifter".
Miura were working hard into creating the excellent pieces in his vision, might be slow, but he never stopped;
Togashi doesn't actively try to deceive anyone. When he's not working on Hunter X Hunter, he let it known / not asking money for it. Even when sometimes the art quality dip horribly, the story / work is still there.
Bane is actively swindling, faking "change-log", double-dipping Patroen money, deliberately not deliver what he was paid for, FOR 5 years now: If Bane is really genuine, he wouldn't hv done any of this.
Sorry, Bane's not "endless tweaking" the contents, he's "endless tweaking" the changelog - aka Deceiving simple minds.
Such a broken logic.
Don't even know what you try to achieve by "giving him the benefit of the doubt".
The project is dead, the dev is long gone.
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- Aug 2, 2019
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Never will i be able to see how rotis, krane, and gruff's stories end. Maybe someone who actually gives a damn can strong arm bane into handing over the rights to the project so they can reboot it.