Ah, I'd mostly checked out by the time that mess started, as by that point he would regularly write changelogs like "+ Alin Night 8", and—surprise!—there wouldn't be a night 8.
Yeah, there were a lot of people asking all over the place how exactly you were supposed to progress past nights 6 and/or 7 to get to the 100% definitely real night 8.
So yeah, you'd pretty much define the characters and images, then direct the engine using a simplified scripting language. Pretty cool stuff, honestly, and I appreciate how it manages to be fairly powerful while still staying out of the way.
That just puts it even more into perspective just how little he was and is doing...
I am impressed by how simple they managed to make the process of putting a vn together. I can see why there are so many projects built in Ren'Py.
From what I remember, Crome was one of the first people to openly speak out against the project. Apparently Bane ghosted him pretty early on.
I know there have been a couple of people that signed up to the $50/$100 tiers after the original people in those tiers understandably bowed out. That had to have been a pretty nasty wake-up call for them.
He was. People just brushed it off at first. I remember people arguing about why Crome was in the wrong. Some people thought he was just mad because Bane didn't hand him complete creative control of the game. Some people thought he was mad that Bane wasn't prioritizing his route above all the others. Eventually people began to realize that the construction routes just weren't being updated, either as frequently as other routes, or at all in the case of Crome. Crome's got an update in 2017, which I think was around the time he spoke out and cancelled his membership. And in that update people were asking why some of the dialogue was still just copypasted from one of the other routes. The next time Crome got an update was in 2021, and only because people specifically told him to focus on the construction routes in a poll.
Anyone that signed up to the $100 tier probably hoped that either they'd get a new route added for them, or that they'd be edited in over someone like Crome. I doubt Bane even acknowledged them.
Honestly, I think it was the exact opposite. I believe that Bane simply ignored the comments until he realized exactly what was being said. I went through the project page, and Bane actively responded to positive/neutral comments on future posts immediately after disabling non-patron comments, only for that to eventually taper off and stop entirely.
I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't even realize that non-patron comments were enabled.
He was briefly more active and started responding to comments, yes, but that's only because people on sites like Twitter and u18chan, places we know for a fact that Bane visited often, were openly discussing whether or not all of his patrons had solid grounds for a lawsuit. Construction routes being abandoned for years were brought up, and suddenly they started getting updates. The lack of the perks people were paying for, like polls, were brought up, and suddenly there were a handful of polls, one every couple months. If you told me there was more than 5 polls posted throughout the almost decade Blackgate has been on patreon, I'll genuinely be shocked. And I am almost 100% certain that the majority of the polls are from 2019 on, when people were talking about the lawsuit.
Bane's strategy has been to do as little as possible and be as vague about how much was done as possible. When he still had people working on the game with him, he'd often let them deal with any criticism. I find it very hard to believe that, at least on some level, he was, and is, unaware of what people were saying. Unless Patreon hides the option to disable public comments, I also find it hard to believe that for the better part of a decade, he just wasn't aware that the comments were public. He didn't disable them until the discussions about what he was doing began to fizzle out as people just stopped talking about a situation that clearly was not going to change. Why did he wait until after discussions died down to turn non-patron comments off? Because if he turned them off while people were actively talking about and looking at the project, they would know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he definitely was aware of at least some of the stuff being said, and just choosing to ignore and hide it. People have believed that he's just simply ignoring absolutely everything, and won't take accountability, but the handful of times he's vaguely alluded to being aware of what people think of him and the game says otherwise.
I admit, I could be wrong, but I don't believe that you can do something like what he is doing for most of a decade without being aware, at least on some level, of what people are saying.
If I were in Bane's position I'd feel like a complete piece of shit.
I think he does. He's gone radio silent where he used to be fairly active online. The stuff he does post is either an allusion to the negative perception about him, a vague statement that can be interpreted as self-loathing, or a post of something from Evangelion, in which I believe he is equating himself to Shinji (i.e. I try so hard to do what everyone demands of me, but it's still not good enough and everyone hates me regardless of how much I suffer for them.)
No matter how he feels about what he's doing, he intends to keep doing it. As bad as he may feel about himself for what he does, he doesn't feel bad enough to stop. And if I had to guess, I'd say that ignoring the people he's scamming makes it easier for him because he doesn't feel as guilty if he doesn't think about it. Not that that's an excuse, mind you.
In a way this is almost like a wake, except we're airing out dirty laundry rather than celebrating what it was.
Honestly, though, there's a certain comfort in knowing that other people feel the same way about something that you do. I think it's safe to say that a lot of the people here who are actively discussing this matter only feel so strongly about this because of how
good the game is.
It's sad that the bad outweighs the good. I think the people who aren't discussing it because of how good it was are discussing it because of how upset they are by how much Bane has taken from them and/or others. I kinda fall into both camps. Convert how much Bane got out of me into my local currency and I could have put someone through college. I mean, it's my money and it's how I chose to spend it, but had I known how things would turn out, I'd have spent it on something else. I did put myself in the position to be exploited, but that doesn't mean I can't be upset about it.
I'm not sure if you follow
Lilith's Throne at all, but the same sentiment exists among fans of that game, too. The reason people are so irritated about that game's glacial development (though at least it's making more forward progress than Blackgate!) is because it's such a unique game with an interesting premise.
I've tried it out, and I enjoyed it quite a lot. I did give the recent discussions around the game a brief look, and I saw a similar sense of irritation. As much as I enjoyed it, I thought I'd come back in a year or two and see how it's changed before playing too much and getting very invested in it. I do remember thinking, as disappointing as everyone says the updates are, at least the patch notes are more detailed than 'character updated'. I do hope that the development speeds up again, and that other projects take some inspiration from it with it's depth of customization and the turn based sex scenes. Sometimes you want something a little more interactive than the large blocks of text you get from stuff like TiTS.
