I met up with David | Arkadia

I'm with George on this one... I won't argue that you could call Ark a successful planet partner - besides calypso its the best one out there, they have made some decent content and are moving forward. But than again - if your point of reference is NI/RT... It's hard to judge...


Some ppl called NI successful too, until the not so great owner decided to quit (probably lost quite a lot of money as well). So yeah, I agree with George that you cannot call them successful if you haven't really seen any annual reports or anything.


Just a hypothetical question - if their situation isn't that well in numbers, how long before something bad happens? What if they cannot significantly increase the player-base? And if so, how long before the investors decide it's not worth pumping in extra money anymore? I'm 99% sure their numbers doesn't look so good, Ark's player-base is still very small and they are spending a lot of money on development.


P.S. don't forget one of the unwritten rules of business - you don't tell your customer, that are doing bad...

P.S.S. How many of you have lost in banks or investment opportunities or something like that IRL? And how many of you were told "everything is fine" up until the point of bankruptcy?

Just a note...

... that just because Dave might not be a typical CEO and cutting himself a big paycheck just because he can, says absolutely nothing about the state of the business.

The average CEO salary for a company in Singapore is around (Singaporean)$330,000 - but the low end of the scale is less than $100k and the top end is past a million.

I think I like it that the country themselves are concerned enough about their local affairs to be wary of people with low-ish CEO salaries taking regular international flights... But at the same time I put to you that I know many small-business owners who have passion and commitment to the BUILDING of their business who take home basically only the cash they actually need for the daily living and channel the rest of their income back into the business - whether that is to support salaries, asset / infrastructure finance, or whatever - those businesses are often healthier than others where the CEO's suck a huge portion off the top and then see what's left at the end of each month to pay others...

I don't choose to make any sweeping statements about Arkadia either, but I can tell you that I like the relative frequency and helpfulness of the forum posts we get on Arkadia forum from Staff and that I have always received a timely response to any personal PM I've sent to an Arkadia Staff member.

To re-iterate though:

I see no causal effect or reason for you to make the assumption that the overall company finances are "not in good shape" simply based on the salary the CEO pays himself each month.

George is a cool guy and very dedicated player. He invested quite a lot in Entropia and put lot of money where his mouth is and so did David who basically risked everything to move to Singapore and start a business there.

Not sure why George was banned on their forums. Probably a harsh decision which they should probably reconsider. We all have mood swings after all and that includes the moderators also.

Regarding the CEO pay; quite a few top CEOs refused to get paid or accepted 1$ as salary. It's a sacrifice worth doing to grow the company.

Have a look at this list. It's quite impressive:

The following people have been employed for annual salaries of one dollar:
Eric Schmidt
Meg Whitman

N. R. Narayana Murthy (Co-Founder of Infosys) [16]
Michael Bloomberg (Mayor of New York City)
Sergey Brin (Google)[17]
Larry Ellison (Oracle Corporation)
Darren Entwistle (TELUS)[18]
Richard Fairbank (Capital One Financial)[19]
Lee Iacocca (Chrysler Corporation)
Steve Jobs (Apple), also did not take any alternative form of compensation (stock options, bonus, etc.) since 2003 [20][21][22]
Richard Kinder (Kinder Morgan), also does not take any alternative form of compensation (stock options, bonus, etc.)
James Li (Syntax-Brillian)
John Mackey (Whole Foods Market), who also does not take any alternative form of compensation (stock options, bonus, etc.)[23]

Joseph Marinaccio (Slam Content)
Larry Page (Google)[17]
Vikram Pandit (Citigroup)
Mark Pincus (Zynga)[24]
Richard Riordan (Mayor of Los Angeles)[25]
Eric Schmidt (Google)[17]
Henry Samueli (Broadcom Corporation)[26]
Arnold Schwarzenegger (former Governor of California)
Terry Semel (Yahoo!)[19]
Pantas Sutardja (Marvell Technology Group)[27]
Sehat Sutardja (Marvell Technology Group)[27]
Meg Whitman (Hewlett-Packard)[28]
Jerry Yang (Yahoo!)[29]
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
Jayalalithaa, Chief minister of Tamil Nadu in India took single digit salary for 5 years

Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-dollar_salary

Futurama said:

I'm with George on this one... I won't argue that you could call Ark a successful planet partner - besides calypso its the best one out there, they have made some decent content and are moving forward. But than again - if your point of reference is NI/RT... It's hard to judge...


Some ppl called NI successful too, until the not so great owner decided to quit (probably lost quite a lot of money as well). So yeah, I agree with George that you cannot call them successful if you haven't really seen any annual reports or anything.


Just a hypothetical question - if their situation isn't that well in numbers, how long before something bad happens? What if they cannot significantly increase the player-base? And if so, how long before the investors decide it's not worth pumping in extra money anymore? I'm 99% sure their numbers doesn't look so good, Ark's player-base is still very small and they are spending a lot of money on development.


P.S. don't forget one of the unwritten rules of business - you don't tell your customer, that are doing bad...

P.S.S. How many of you have lost in banks or investment opportunities or something like that IRL? And how many of you were told "everything is fine" up until the point of bankruptcy?

Click to expand...

Well if Arkadia aint pleased with their results so far then im really worried for the whole game rather than just Arkadia. Look at Caly as an example, they dont put much energy on development (my opinion). They do their yerly migration that goes on forever, after that they will spawn a shitload of shared loot....Im sensing a robot attack in the near future...Ok Arkadia might be struggling, im not saying theyre not! But with time the will keep on growing since they put in alot of more work than other PP's.

rastamannen said:

Look at Caly as an example, they dont put much energy on development (my opinion). They do their yerly migration that goes on forever, after that they will spawn a shitload of shared loot....Im sensing a robot attack in the near future...

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I disagree. Some of the dev work on Ark is probably more noticeable, because the planet is relatively new and new features are developed, whereas on Caly you see quite a bit of changing existing features.

And how about the development of the Gateway and Camp Icarus, the new mission chains, the instances, the Egg event or Cyclops Depth?

Nisha said:

I disagree. Some of the dev work on Ark is probably more noticeable, because the planet is relatively new and new features are developed, whereas on Caly you see quite a bit of changing existing features.

And how about the development of Camp Icarus, the new mission chains, the instances, the Egg event or Cyclops Depth?

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mission = crap (that goes for all planets) Theyve had every opportunity to take this a step further but they havent. Now its just basicly kill 543543 mobs or go there do this do that. Use your imagination and see the potential in missions and compare it to what we have today.
Instances is from Arkadia as u probably know, but its a move in the right direction.
Egg event was a nice move, i agree on that one.
But missions alone today doesnt impress me at all.

rastamannen said:

mission = crap (that goes for all planets) Theyve had every opportunity to take this a step further but they havent. Now its just basicly kill 543543 mobs or go there do this do that. Use your imagination and see the potential in missions and compare it to what we have today.
Instances is from Arkadia as u probably know, but its a move in the right direction.
Egg event was a nice move, i agree on that one.
But missions alone today doesnt impress me at all.

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Well, but then your argument is rather that you do not like what has been developed than that they do not put work/energy into development.

Nisha said:

I disagree. Some of the dev work on Ark is probably more noticeable, because the planet is relatively new and new features are developed, whereas on Caly you see quite a bit of changing existing features.

And how about the development of the Gateway and Camp Icarus, the new mission chains, the instances, the Egg event or Cyclops Depth?

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Not disagreeing with your general statement....

But you cant use the Egg Event as an example of how rapidly calypso is developing..... Just saying

Nisha said:

Well, but then your argument is rather that you do not like what has been developed than that they do not put work/energy into development.

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Correct. But Im not very impressed with the "energy" that theyve put in as well.

narfi said:

Not disagreeing with your general statement....

But you cant use the Egg Event as an example of how rapidly calypso is developing..... Just saying

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Was not meant to.

Calypso is a few years older and it is bigger, so I would expect that part of the work is changing existing features or cleaning up traces of former developments that are not needed or wanted any more.

My point is that this, too, is devs' work and that it requires just as much time and energy as developing new contents.

rastamannen said:

Well if Arkadia aint pleased with their results so far then im really worried for the whole game rather than just Arkadia. Look at Caly as an example, they dont put much energy on development (my opinion). They do their yerly migration that goes on forever, after that they will spawn a shitload of shared loot....Im sensing a robot attack in the near future...Ok Arkadia might be struggling, im not saying theyre not! But with time the will keep on growing since they put in alot of more work than other PP's.

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The real question is - how fast they can grow the player-base. If it isn't fast enough... IMHO Arkadia is still far away regarding their player-base, when they can say "We are doing good, the company did profit as well last financial year", so if it takes 10 years with a small growth to reach it - will it really reach it or not?



Just my thoughts, I cannot back them up, since I haven't seen any public financial statements that could show how close to "breaking even" (or far away) are they.

Futurama said:

The real question is - how fast they can grow the player-base. If it isn't fast enough... IMHO Arkadia is still far away regarding their player-base, when they can say "We are doing good, the company did profit as well last financial year", so if it takes 10 years with a small growth to reach it - will it really reach it or not?



Just my thoughts, I cannot back them up, since I haven't seen any public financial statements that could show how close to "breaking even" (or far away) are they.

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Well I dont think EU excists after 10 years so that would be a no from me hehe.
I dont know if youve noticed this but everytime Arkadia have some big release like Treasure hunting/istances or something else Calypso answers with a 3 month shared loot event or soething else. So its not easy to be a planet partner. But if anyone can do it, they can.

rastamannen said:

I dont know if youve noticed this but everytime Arkadia have some big release like Treasure hunting/istances or something else Calypso answers with a 3 month shared loot event or soething else. So its not easy to be a planet partner.

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Arkadia's main focus should be new Arkadian born players instead of dragging over old players from Calypso so that shouldn't be an issue imho