New Terms of Service

[Collector]

The things you can learn.

[Sanguinesun]

In That Last article it says "The company intends to use the the funds to further grow its worldwide online games business."

This was in 2012. Using money from a Canadian Teachers Pension Fund that invested in Trion. Now we know all of those offices have been closed. I guess we know why the Teachers Pension is underfunded. They made a bad investment and in about 1 year managed to blow 85Million +.

Now when you look at the runaround Trion gives the other guy it is showing a consistency of Failure. What ever happened to End of Nations and the Red Door? We never hear anything about ArcAge, they refuse to talk about it when people ask.

So when you have a regular joe like us, we don't have any powers. For those 1000's of people who bought the season pass who will never see 5 DLCs in the first year what recourse do they have? Now I hope the game lasts long enough to release 4 more DLCs because Trion has been obviously mismanaged before Scott took over to the point he had to shut down all those external operations and I am guessing silently close down other projects.

If I was a share holder I would want to know all of these details. As a player it gives me no confidence that the season pass is worth it, because the expectation is not just 5 DLCs but that there will be a community to share it with and a game that is expanding in content to keep me playing between them, not just logging in for a week after the DLC to exhaust the limited DLC to see most of the community disappear again. Trion would run legal circles around any kind of action by anyone.

I believe that is why they closed their EU locations because in the EU consumer protections laws give power to the consumer and the run around is not as easy to do. With no offices over seas it all has to go though the US system which protects the company and does not serve the consumer.

All of this that Sanguinesun is pointing out is showing a consistent retraction by Trion and a lack of good faith in it's operations as it relates to customers and we see this constantly and not just at the level beyond player access.

The question is: Is $40 really that big of a deal to anyone who paid for the season pass?

Answer #1: No, it's cheaper that 2 people going to see a movie on opening night with popcorn and drinks. We probably spend $40 a week on useless stuff

Answer #2: It's not about the money, it is about a company making a commitment and not owning up to the fact they can't meet their commitment and appear to be acting dishonestly or with out respect to their customer base.

What should Trion do? Regardless of the answer above.

Should Trion come out and admit they are broke and with out adequate resources to produce the remaining DLC's within the time frame they produced?

Should Trion give us an accounting of where they are at with each DLC and their projected time lines and ask us to trust in them to produce based on their schedule?

Should Trion just refund everyone's $40 and charge $10-$20 for each DLC and let us buy the ones we want as they are released as an act of good faith to rebuild the public trust?

Does it even matter what Trion does anymore there is already enough bad feelings going around? What ever they say is going to be a lie?

I do believe that Scott is working to get Trion back on its feet. He has had to make some big decisions that I am sure don't look good on the surface but take Trion out from the deep red and closer to the black. I think he has the players interest at heart to a point. What Trion needs is a communications team that works with a PR/Marketing department that doesn't make us all feel the way we do, does avoid good questions that have answers, doesn't pervert their own rules to suit their needs and wants and deals with the community as adults and not like petulant children. Though I accept there are some in the community that act no better.

Where Trion is failing in my opinion is in the community. I think a lot of the public trust has been lost not because of Scott's choices to close some offices. I think it is because of how we all had to find out about them, from every source other than Trion. We feel we have been repeatedly blind sided by bad news when the opportunity for a positive presentation is continually missed.

The wrong people were fired. That is why the community is suffering and as a result Trion is as well.

But that is just MY personal opinion.

Well said.

On the front concerning the EU offices and support, there's more to be said. After they were closed, Dahanese announced, then kited for over a month how support for the German and French players for Defiance and Rift were going to be helped. -That- signifies the lack of consideration post CEO change imo.

How bad it is? Well, to give you a painfully sad example, on the Rift forums since the collapse of the Russian support for the game, Greg posted a sticky on how Russians can get support... in English. I've not been back to Russia since I home stayed there '92 but Im fairly sure a Russian language explanation would've been more reflecting considerations for em.

This is all part of the continued pattern of the comedy of errors of how the community relations of not just Defiance but Rift as well is mishandled in conjunction with those things Beck pointed out.

Does it even matter what Trion does anymore there is already enough bad feelings going around? What ever they say is going to be a lie?

I hate to say it but very little can be done at this point since Scott's decisions to maintain/support the afore spoken of management and implementation.

The responsible department(s) would have to undergo a complete change of mission/purpose, personnel, and corporate culture in order for any real true and meaningful result to trickle back down to the players. There isnt a desire to nor resources for such change.

[Deunan]

Did you read the complete document or are you just basing your opinion on reading a few lines or skimming? If you had read it in its entirety you would see all the remedies Van Canaghem offered.

I read the complaint. Until the investment bank interceded Van Caneghem was simply regurgitating his same unilateral changes to the NDA requirements with slightly altered verbiage. Notwithstanding that the investment bank did seem to provide a workable solution, Van Caneghem could have accessed the documents if he simply signed the NDA and offered up his counsel and financial advisors for approval to enter into separate NDA's which is a far simpler mechanic than introducing a data room over which a third party exercised control. In other words he never even bothered to attempt to roll the dice and see how things worked out under the conditions of the NDA.

Corporations can be completely unyielding in their due diligence requirements to protect confidential information. When we sent in a due diligence team for a tender offer bid for a software technology service provider the team had to physically visit a room under lock and key by the underwriter. Our firm not only had to sign a similar NDA, but have our advising accounting firm and advising law firm sign identical NDA's as part of the due diligence team. Our team couldn't copy a single page of any document. All the team could do was review documents and take notes. There were associates from the underwriters constantly watching them. Technically the team had the ability to request copies of a document but every single request we made was denied. This is simpy how things work depending on the kind of transaction one is attempting to facilitate and the nature of the business of the corporation.

Van Caneghem settled the case on confidential terms so there's no way to know what happened here but for all we know he might have simply had his due diligence conducted under substantially the same NDA. It's worth noting that at the time this happened, Trion Worlds had no revenue streams. Any valuation would have been based largely on its intellectual property. We haven't seen anything to date but at the time the corporation was purportedly working on IP assets such as its "Red Door" which was technology designed for licensing out to other game developers. That kind of tech in development puts the corporation in a very similar situation with our target bid mentioned above (worse actually because it's still in the development stage and there were no revenue streams). Bear in mind that the tender offer bid was directly between the corporation and us as one of many prospective bidders. Why would a corporation be any less unyielding so an estranged former insider stockholder could sell there shares to an outsider?

We know as a matter of fact that Trion was not in the red as it couldn't have sustained itself for another 2 years without financing if it was. We also know that it had a negative revenue stream at the time. Any prospective purchaser would know this as well. Common stock in a privately held corporation with three Series Preferred Stock financing rounds is not going to be marketable as a general rule of thumb and even more so because these kind of issues come up in trying to establish valuation for this kind of corporation at the stage where it was at the time. This is why it's uncommon to see a stockholder like Van Caneghem even attempt to sell his stock before an IPO or as a piggy back onto a subsequent round of private financing. In most situations the only viable exit strategies for a common stockholder in a corporation like this is to hope for a buyback round, an IPO, or acquisition by a publicly held corporation in which the stockholder gets cash, an exchange for publicly marketable securites of the purchaser, or some combination of both. Otherwise the stockholder is simply out of luck and takes the loss when the corporation goes under.

[Deunan]

Indeed. Even the guy's lawyer according to the revised NDA they wanted him to sign wouldn't be able to be privy to any information.

The point overall Deunan seems to try to misdirect from was that they gave him a considerable run around and he had to eventually file the suit. The relation thus is the OP thinking that a typical player will be able to attempt any accountability over the TOS discrepancies is futile when you see how Trion would play the legalese run around otherwise. Hence, only accountability that they can hope to even remotely have is through the court of public opinion continuing to erode any vestiges of positive rep and the karma of Trion's digging they own deep hole with their continued lack of considerations for Defiance et al.

At least though Deunan was correct about the 2012 Equity financing. They completed another 85 million one by January of 2012:

http://www.finsmes.com/2012/01/trion...+%28FinSMEs%29

I got a lot more than that correct. Regarding the TOS, as already mentioned it's subject to unilateral amendment and changing TOS without notification is commonplace with service providers. Trion has its issues but this all still remains a tilt at windmills.

[Liquidacid]

meh all TOS pretty much read the same (not that they will always be held up or honored in court)

"we, the company, are always right and can do/change whatever we want at any time... suck it"

[Deunan]

This was in 2012. Using money from a Canadian Teachers Pension Fund that invested in Trion. Now we know all of those offices have been closed. I guess we know why the Teachers Pension is underfunded. They made a bad investment and in about 1 year managed to blow 85Million +.

The investment hasn't even been realized as a loss. It wasn't $85 million. The Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan co-invested in the round. An already existing investor funded a significant part of that round. It's also only a microfraction of a percentage point of the Plan's assets. The shortfall, which was thousands of times the size of its investment in Trion was the result of undererstimating projected pension costs, not underperformance of its portfolio.

If I was a share holder I would want to know all of these details.

But you're not and who's to say they don't know? I don't have a lot of sympathy for institutional investors and neither should anyone else. They're big boys and if an investment turns sour they have to wear their big boy pants and bear the loss. It's the responsibility of the assigned portfolio manager to keep informed of what's going on in an investment target. That's why many of the investors have board of director seats delegated to them or board advisors who can attend meetings and review items submitted to the board. If they didn't know any of these things were or are happening that's they're cross to bear, but how a company treats its shareholders versus how it treats its customers doesn't necessarily correlate and only makes for a poor and misleading analogy

All of this that Sanguinesun is pointing out is showing a consistent retraction by Trion and a lack of good faith in it's operations as it relates to customers and we see this constantly and not just at the level beyond player access.

How a corporation handles the management of disclosure of confidential information to a shareholder and third parties bears no relation to lack of good faith in its operations as it relates to its customers. It's apples and oranges because there are considerably different factors involved. That's not to say that there is or is not a lack of such good faith with the customer base, only that the Van Caneghem action bears no relation to it.

[SammyGurl]

I read the complaint. Until the investment bank interceded Van Caneghem was simply regurgitating his same unilateral changes to the NDA requirements with slightly altered verbiage. Notwithstanding that the investment bank did seem to provide a workable solution, Van Caneghem could have accessed the documents if he simply signed the NDA and offered up his counsel and financial advisors for approval to enter into separate NDA's which is a far simpler mechanic than introducing a data room over which a third party exercised control. In other words he never even bothered to attempt to roll the dice and see how things worked out under the conditions of the NDA.

Corporations can be completely unyielding in their due diligence requirements to protect confidential information. When we sent in a due diligence team for a tender offer bid for a software tehnology service provider the team had to physically visit a room under lock and key by the underwriter. Our firm not only had to sign a similar NDA, but have our advising accounting firm and advising law firm sign identical NDA's as part of the due diligence team. Our team couldn't copy a single page of any document. All the team could do was review documents and take notes. There were associates from the underwriters constantly watching them. Technically the team had the ability to request copies of a document but every single request we made was denied. This is simpy how things work depending on the kind of transaction one is attempting to facilitate and the nature of the business of the corporation.

Van Caneghem settled the case on confidential terms so there's no way to know what happened here but for all we know he might have simply had his due diligence conducted under substantially the same NDA. It's worth noting that at the time this happened, Trion Worlds had no revenue streams. Any valuation would have been based largely on its intellectual property. We haven't seen anything to date but at the time the corporation was purportedly working on IP assets such as its "Red Door" which was technology designed for licensing out to other game developers. That kind of tech in development puts the corporation in a very similar situation with our target bid mentioned above (worse actually because it's still in the development stage and there were no revenue streams). Bear in mind that the tender offer bid was directly betwen the corporation and us as one of many prospective bidders. Why would a corporation be any less unyielding so an estranged former insider stockholder could sell there shares to an outsider?

We know as a matter of fact that Trion was not in the red as it couldn't have sustained itself for another 2 years without financing if it was. We also know that it had a negative revenue stream at the time. Any prospective purchaser would know this as well. Common stock in a privately held corporation with three Series Preferred Stock financing rounds is not going to be marketable as a general rule of thumb and even more so because these kind of issues come up in trying to establish valuation for this kind of corporation at the stage where it was at the time. This is why it's uncommon to see a stockholder like Van Caneghem even attempt to sell his stock before an IPO or as a piggy back onto a subsequent round of private financing. In most situations the only viable exit strategies for a common stockholder in a corporation like this is to hope for a buyback round, an IPO, or acquisition by a publicly held corporation in which the stockholder gets cash, an exchange for publicly marketable securites of the purchaser, or some combination of both. Otherwise the stockholder is simply out of luck and takes the loss when the corporation goes under.

I have no idea if your even speaking english

[DIS]

You people need hobbies. NEVER have I seen this much fuss over a TOS for a video game. If you don't like Trions shady ways of doing business, do not do business with them.

[Liquidacid]

You people need hobbies. NEVER have I seen this much fuss over a TOS for a video game. If you don't like Trions shady ways of doing business, do not do business with them.

but if they did that they couldn't waste tons of time complaing and arguing over it