So, tl;dr is that this artist was sympathetic/has connections to a group of actual feminazis, and PM said she will no longer be a part of the company.
Wasn't there a similar story about some SEA artist working for Marvel whose career ended almost immediately as it began because he wrote references to Islamic extremists in an X-Men comic (involving a known Jew in-story no less)? It sure feels like that.
So, tl;dr is that this artist was sympathetic/has connections to a group of actual feminazis, and PM said she will no longer be a part of the company.
Wasn't there a similar story about some SEA artist working for Marvel whose career ended almost immediately as it began because he wrote references to Islamic extremists in an X-Men comic (involving a known Jew in-story no less)? It sure feels like that.
And remember that the reason she was let go wasn’t purely for the associations: it was because she had attached PM’s name on the SNS accounts where she had (previously or actively) associated with the problematic parties. This broke the “hey don’t associate us with this crap” clause which, again, is pretty standard in KR. All she had to do was sanitise her accounts or make a new fresh one just for her PM stuff.
Westerners can’t understand it thanks to shit like pride month and #blm encouraging mixing politics into the workplace environment. If, several years into the future, crap like this finally becomes seen as an indicator of unhinged behaviour, some of these idiots are going to have a rather rude awakening.
Looks like PM posted the update in game only, i haven't seen it in my steam news and the twitter hasn't updated. Personally I hope they drop the twitter updates and just keep to steam, official company websites, and the game to notify people about updates.
There has also been some leaked content, the map of Railway 2, Railway versions of the Crabs, and more info on Railway 2 Faelantern fight.
The new Railway "Mobius" is designed in a loop, so we might need to get a number of laps under a certain timeframe instead of hitting a minimum amount of total turns.
The mechanic for Fae Latern is that it has a lure "Fairy" body part that protects the rest of the body, meaning you all the Abno takes no health or body part damage while its out.|
When the Fairy is destroyed you can damage the Roots and Spare Lure body parts which gain +1 attack power, 2 Bind, and 3 fragile next turn.
The Spare Lure regenerates the Fairy if its alive by the turn after that the body parts were exposed, and once all body parts are destroyed the Abno enters an enraged state if it's still not dead yet.
Finally the Fairy takes damage equal to tremor inflicted to it at the end of the turn, and the Burn damage it takes is boosted by 1% per potency(up to 15%).
Jihoon has finally made an actual statement that got translated. You may find the English version here.
Copy-paste to avoid looking at the rabid twitter crowd:
[ Statement of Facts and Plan of Action ]
Hello. This is Kim Jihoon of Project Moon.
Before I start, I would like to apologize to the worker who was harmed the most by the recent controversy.
And I would like to apologize to everyone for our belated official statement on the matter.
The notice took a long time to be prepared because of the legal consultation it required.
The following are clarifications on the facts regarding the recent controversy.
This was not a case of ideological investigation or unjust firing; the decision was made based on legal judgement and advice.
The company did not take issue with the ideological alignments of the worker, nor did it give them a notice of dismissal.
We would like to clarify that the company, employees of HamHamPangPang, and the relevant individuals harmed by the actions may take firm legal action against those who have made excessive verbal abuses, spread misinformation, attacked certain individuals within the company, or involved themselves in the attack by disregarding the NDA.
There are organizations, media, and people who are creating, spreading, and repeating false information without proper verification of the facts and only based on circumstantial evidence that the company took part in ‘ideological investigation’ and ‘unjust firing’. Please note that the company and the individuals who were defamed by such actions regarding this controversy may take steps for legal actions against them.
The spread of unconfirmed claims and speculations is causing severe harm to both the worker and the employees of Project Moon.
We urge you to refrain from propagating rumors that have not been proven to be factual.
We only wish that Project Moon is able to continue making and demonstrating games as we have until now.
Once again, we apologize for causing undue concern to many people as a result of this controversy.
Thank you for reading.
Tldr;
-They will not be reinstating the artist
-She has been fired because they terminated her contract, this was not a rogue employee randomly firing her out of hate, it was an explicit decision to remove her and stop using her content (going forward)
-They stress this is a 100% legal termination they did with legal counsel, and that it was not goddamn ideology based
-They plan to and are in the process of working up lawsuits for those who spread misinformation
-Some staff apparently broke their NDA and thus they’re also going to take action against them
Thoughts? I heard through the grapevine the truck protest not only got cut short and as a result was failure and waste of money. And also the one who did it is getting sued already.
I’m curious about who broke the NDA though. I haven’t seen CKC say anything, so I guess the only offender everyone knows is the Leviathan Artist? Supposedly Mimi (Wonderlab Artist) also indirectly commented on it, but she didn’t directly quote retweeted like the former did.
Good, never cuck to public pressure, especially as doing it will almost assuredly be followed by a massive lawsuit on unlawful termination. It's better to act professionally and remove people who start leaking/inserting politics than let the rot fester.
tbh, project moon's art wasn't very good to begin with.
Idk why they wouldn't just have 1 dedicated artist making rough outlines and then fill in the details with ai. It would be way faster, cost less, and look better.
As for the firing, if this was inverted and it was a female boss with an incel male artist talking about aborting females they would of been fired 100% and no one would of cared.
tbh, project moon's art wasn't very good to begin with.
Idk why they wouldn't just have 1 dedicated artist making rough outlines and then fill in the details with ai. It would be way faster, cost less, and look better.
Huh, I always thought PM’s art was interesting enough to look at. Wasn’t bad per say but not the point I would have asked for a revamp. Being meticulously painted like that was part of the charm for me.
Though imo… anything is better than beta LC’s Sephirah. I hated that style so much and I’m kinda mad the only beta ver of LC available on Steam is that version.
As for the firing, if this was inverted and it was a female boss with an incel male artist talking about aborting females they would of been fired 100% and no one would of cared.
Someone in the replies brought up the ID artist (I’m personally unsure who it is) and how because he’s a guy, people didn’t pile on him.
Casually ignoring that dude didn’t put politics on his account, or at least didn’t put PM’s name on his account which he may or may not have said such things.
I’ve also been informed that KR (or at least, those akin to us here gossiping like old ladies at a tea party) tend to keep receipts through archives of accounts, so the best play if you’re gonna be in the industry over there is to not even start posting dumb crap.
What you say on the Internet, stays on the Internet and all that.
So far, the Rodya and Sinclair Zwei IDs are bad. It's nice to see another Gregor 3 star ID other than his G-corp one. I just hope that these don't suck.
tbh, project moon's art wasn't very good to begin with.
Idk why they wouldn't just have 1 dedicated artist making rough outlines and then fill in the details with ai. It would be way faster, cost less, and look better.
I disagree with your take on the art. Mostly because I love the art that they made for Ruina and Limbus. It's way more stylish than the generic art that AI produces or the generic and clean anime style that many other gacha games use.
While it's probably just for fanservice and convenience sake, it's interesting how the various alternate timelines still have the various sinners working together. The implication might be that they also go after the golden boughs on the behest of other organizations. I wouldn't be surprised if they do the plotline of dimensional collapse - the first dimension to get all the the golden boughs together doesn't get wiped out, and so later in game we'll actually fight alternate universe Sinners.
As someone who was lurking this drama from its start, I can admit that KJH is a lolcow material himself.
Ever since 2021 there been reviews on korean platforms of his studio and his ex-employees were complaining about him because he acted like a total manchild, threw tantrums and overworked his employees because of his perfectionist complex.
Famous youtuber and potential lolcow Pyrocynical has posted a video about both the Watson and VellMori situations. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Tvw5BeQ5XBAThe Watson part is mostly fine, but the second part is so wrong. Looks like the flames have been fanned again.
Expecting drama youtubers to look at content not in English is less realistic than waiting for pigs to fly. Of course they’d only think it’s “poor woman, misogynistic company” because that’s what EN (and clearly extremist KR people “translating” for EN) are saying.
Famous youtuber and potential lolcow Pyrocynical has posted a video about both the Watson and VellMori situations. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Tvw5BeQ5XBAThe Watson part is mostly fine, but the second part is so wrong. Looks like the flames have been fanned again.
Yeah they're everywhere
Limbus suffers this fate because the hype train from the live service formula has the same effect than the weekly updates of the previous game
Constant key-jingling and all that
As someone who was lurking this drama from its start, I can admit that KJH is a lolcow material himself.
Ever since 2021 there been reviews on korean platforms of his studio and his ex-employees were complaining about him because he acted like a total manchild, threw tantrums and overworked his employees because of his perfectionist complex.
On the contrary, I’ve been told said reviews actually reveal PM to be one of the better indie studios in KR… Which makes you really wonder how fucked the KR scene is. (Disclaimer: This isn’t a defence of KJH or PM, despite what I’ve previously posted.)
I do agree PM isn’t ready to run a Gacha or just… any mainstream game. They aren’t mentally ready or even have the manpower to fight off bullshit like the current situation. Doesn’t help the main crew mainly speaks KR and any communication with non-KR is held hostage through the translators.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the artist fired was hired because KJH liked her art and thus they never bothered a background check or a basic sanity check: that happened with Mimi and it was clear as day on her profile she was the exact kind of bullshit which would have broken the contract.
My personal guess is a fuckton of contract-related stuff (like the clause leading to Kankan’s decision to reject) stems from the behaviour Mimi had during her time with PM (ie the Merson Park incident). Look at how long it took for them to add a Macro ban to their ToS lol. Pretty sure every Gacha to-date releases with that kind of stuff in their ToS.
On the contrary, I’ve been told said reviews actually reveal PM to be one of the better indie studios in KR… Which makes you really wonder how fucked the KR scene is. (Disclaimer: This isn’t a defence of KJH or PM, despite what I’ve previously posted.)
I do agree PM isn’t ready to run a Gacha or just… any mainstream game. They aren’t mentally ready or even have the manpower to fight off bullshit like the current situation. Doesn’t help the main crew mainly speaks KR and any communication with non-KR is held hostage through the translators.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the artist fired was hired because KJH liked her art and thus they never bothered a background check or a basic sanity check: that happened with Mimi and it was clear as day on her profile she was the exact kind of bullshit which would have broken the contract.
My personal guess is a fuckton of contract-related stuff (like the clause leading to Kankan’s decision to reject) stems from the behaviour Mimi had during her time with PM (ie the Merson Park incident). Look at how long it took for them to add a Macro ban to their ToS lol. Pretty sure every Gacha to-date releases with that kind of stuff in their ToS.
Mainstream gachapiggies are also incredibly retarded and hard to please over the dumbest things. If you look at the most popular/profitable gacha games, it's Genshin/Honkai Star Rail, Arknights, etc., because to these people nothing except the presentation, and how hard they can p2w matters. Dogshit, overly verbose, usually unskippable story? Gacha system jewish as all fuck? Boring gameplay and exhausting daily grind? Who gives a shit, the characters are cute/sexy/homobait, having the best characters means you just automatically win, and the game isn't buggy. Literally nothing else matters.
I don't want to be one of those people, but yeah, PM breaking into the mainstream with Limbus attracted these gachafags, who seem to be very upset at the game being buggy, "difficult" (Yeah, I don't get it either, but apparently MD2H is too hard for a lot of people), and at PM for actually trying to balance some of the EGO like Representation Emitter instead of just putting out constant powercreep. And finally the high costs of Uptie 4, which, yeah, mostly fair, but then again, Uptie 4 only really exists to salvage some bad characters, and make good characters win very slightly more. You don't really need it to beat any content, but on the other hand you could genuinely argue that a good chunk of 4s are borderline gamebreaking, whether it be IDs or EGO.
On the other hand you have the "Don't fuck with us Project Moon fans, we haven't played the games either" side of the fanbase which, to be fair was always there to some degree, but seems to have exploded with Limbus' release, and kinda drowned out the people who actually play the games on social media. The amount of crusty fujoshis, gay shippers and troons in any place you can go to talk about the game is insane. And really funny when they get mad about coomers and swimsuits, meanwhile 80% of their post history is fucking Yi Sang x Dongrang gay porn. So of course those people are going to get outraged over a cultural issue half the world away, in a culture they have no connection to, in a language they don't understand.
Hopefully the Distortion Detective game they're working on ends up being a good singleplayer game, but at this point I don't think they can just cut off Limbus and go back to the way it was, and with the money rolling in, I don't think they want to.
Mainstream gachapiggies are also incredibly retarded and hard to please over the dumbest things. If you look at the most popular/profitable gacha games, it's Genshin/Honkai Star Rail, Arknights, etc., because to these people nothing except the presentation, and how hard they can p2w matters. Dogshit, overly verbose, usually unskippable story? Gacha system jewish as all fuck? Boring gameplay and exhausting daily grind? Who gives a shit, the characters are cute/sexy/homobait, having the best characters means you just automatically win, and the game isn't buggy. Literally nothing else matters.
Er, I’ll admit I’m a gacha regular of sorts and I keep tabs on gachas coming out.
Genshin and Star Rail are indeed mainstream in the sense they’ve been the starting point for a decent chunk of gacha newcomers. Like, completely unfamiliar with gachas as a whole kind of new. That’s how Mihoyo gets away with making them think the game’s generous with its pity then lock half the character behind dupes.
Arknights, while popular, I wouldn’t put in the same category as GI or HSR? Unlike those two there’s OG CN and Global so Global’s able to save six months in advance for what they want from CN, while GI and HSR are mostly blind as far as I know. Look to EN FGO for another example of how being split from OG server changes how F2P / Dolphins spend: they’ve got a full two years gap to plan all their meta / fav rolls out and they’re pretty dedicated.
Based on your rant, you’d actually be surprised by the amount of complaints with the recent story (on Global) being too verbose or irrelevant as a whole due to the timeline of the main story: Reed’s event - while a good character insight - doesn’t mean much as a whole, and the current ChongYue event is hard to follow / very uninteresting if you haven’t been following the entire Sui Sibling saga from the start.
AK is also pretty well known for not being coombait, but to each his own…?
To throw it back at you, Limbus’ gameplay is really, really tedious. MD2H is tough (not unbeatable), but it tends to end up stalling due to PM’s idea of Bosses always being gimmick based. Something like Yan, Xiao, or even the Blue Ensemble 1 was fine as you fought the bosses and only the bosses, either back to back or as a single Act. Respecting the gimmick made the fights faster, and that still applied to Limbus…
Until MD2H, where they decided the way to make bosses harder aside from stat boosts was removing the gimmick the bosses were built around. And they were right – but not in the good way! (Centipede is the biggest offender of this.)
I don't want to be one of those people, but yeah, PM breaking into the mainstream with Limbus attracted these gachafags, who seem to be very upset at the game being buggy, "difficult" (Yeah, I don't get it either, but apparently MD2H is too hard for a lot of people), and at PM for actually trying to balance some of the EGO like Representation Emitter instead of just putting out constant powercreep. And finally the high costs of Uptie 4, which, yeah, mostly fair, but then again, Uptie 4 only really exists to salvage some bad characters, and make good characters win very slightly more. You don't really need it to beat any content, but on the other hand you could genuinely argue that a good chunk of 4s are borderline gamebreaking, whether it be IDs or EGO.
If you want to speak numbers, Limbus isn’t even close to being mainstream especially given the examples you chose. Hell, don’t forget Limbus didn’t hit its pre-reg goals which were pretty okay numbers to aim for in a vacuum; most Limbus players were already in the PM ecosystem through LOR.
I don’t get why you’re saying that complaining about the buggy mess PM games are is a mainstream player issue – just because things can be worse, it doesn’t mean things can’t be better. PM fans are used to the jank, but I totally agree the state their games often drop in is unforgivable at times (Realisation Heart having too much power off the bat, False Throne being immortal, Realisation Funeral rarely using its gimmick page, Kromer’s passive being broken, RR1’s Kromer passive being listed despite not being in effect, etc.). I’ll take GI or AK story over broken HTML tags and basic spelling mistakes, thanks.
RE was a hated nerf because the changes to SP gain (punishing you for having max level characters by slowing your gen to a crawl, unless you were using Sun Heath or NClair) slowed the fights down by a lot, potentially to the point of being unable to EX clear in the designated 10 turns. People didn’t figure out the Higher Level = Shittier SP gain until it was too late to refund the lvl 35s done. RE and FluidFaust were the only ways to get things back to normal, especially with Dungeon resetting your SP with every checkpoint.
Uptie 4 is pretty blatant in being PM’s attempt to force players to stop hoarding shards. I agree the cost is pretty stressful for an F2P player not up to date with what’s meta. Dungeon taking ages to do thanks to above issues I mentioned + the rewards overhaul has made non-gacha shard grind a bit tougher for them too. I don’t have too many comments on the full UT4 changes for each unit but I also have to agree it’s not necessary for every unit, at the very least…
On the other hand you have the "Don't fuck with us Project Moon fans, we haven't played the games either" side of the fanbase which, to be fair was always there to some degree, but seems to have exploded with Limbus' release, and kinda drowned out the people who actually play the games on social media. The amount of crusty fujoshis, gay shippers and troons in any place you can go to talk about the game is insane. And really funny when they get mad about coomers and swimsuits, meanwhile 80% of their post history is fucking Yi Sang x Dongrang gay porn. So of course those people are going to get outraged over a cultural issue half the world away, in a culture they have no connection to, in a language they don't understand.
Where have you been lol? That’s always been the audience since LOR. (LC era wasn’t as plagued since it was pre-‘16 and the bad initial translation + very grindy gameplay gatekept these retards)
I wouldn’t say they exploded with Limbus’ release, if anything Limbus pissed off enough of the sane older players giving the old retards more space to echo off and become louder. We already know they lack the critical thinking to understand different cultures… they think Angela’s arc in LOR was well-deserved and that Ayin was nothing more than a neglectful father. It’s daddy issues all the way down – just as it’s always been in troon world.
I’d also blame the translators for keeping up the parasocial relationship the fans had with PM, but that’d be beating a dead horse on my end.
Hopefully the Distortion Detective game they're working on ends up being a good singleplayer game, but at this point I don't think they can just cut off Limbus and go back to the way it was, and with the money rolling in, I don't think they want to.
I still remember when they teased LC: Branch and LC2. The former sounded like LC meets DD with the whole “if your units die, they die in real life” stuff, the latter was another management game like LC, and both felt like the natural followup to LC in-universe. There was hype, and for very understandable reasons. PM may say they want to move away from Angela, Ayin, and the OG LC crew, but they’re literally setting Carmen up as a super mega villain again so…
I feel they’ll drop TDD not for monetary reasons, but more so they’ll claim it’s a “done” story since it tied too heavily into the Library.
I don’t get why you’re saying that complaining about the buggy mess PM games are is a mainstream player issue – just because things can be worse, it doesn’t mean things can’t be better.
I probably did word it pretty badly, but I'm not saying that it shouldn't be better. It should be better, it should always be better. My point is that I feel like how buggy and broken the game is is comically overstated by the community. Especially with how quickly most of the issues are solved, and how ready they are to throw out compensation for anything and everything. Off the top of my head, the worst bugs I can remember are a softlock in the Canto 4 dungeon, one in MD2, a couple of IDs that had fucked attack/defence values, one or two MD items just not working, and Kromer's passives. The dungeon softlocks and Kromer bugs never should've happened, and I fully understand the people upset over those, but I really do feel like the other issues aren't proportional to the amount of autism that happens over them.
This might just be a me thing, because if a game has an interesting core, I'm more than willing to tolerate jank or bugs as long as they're not genuinely gamebreaking. I've been around enough smaller budget/dev studio gacha games over the years to see people writing them off just because of lack of polish or production value, regardless of how good the actually important parts of the game are, that I just assume that most gachafags don't give a shit about anything else.
RE was a hated nerf because the changes to SP gain (punishing you for having max level characters by slowing your gen to a crawl, unless you were using Sun Heath or NClair) slowed the fights down by a lot, potentially to the point of being unable to EX clear in the designated 10 turns. People didn’t figure out the Higher Level = Shittier SP gain until it was too late to refund the lvl 35s done. RE and FluidFaust were the only ways to get things back to normal, especially with Dungeon resetting your SP with every checkpoint.
Fair, while I think Representation Emitter still did need a nerf, the SP changes at that point were extremely retarded, and poorly communicated which compounded the issue, but thankfully they were reverted in a week. And people still bring that nerf up as a reason as for why the game is going to shit.
I got nothing for the Heathcliff Bodysack nerf, that was just a fuckup from PM.
Limbus is alright as far as gacha goes. It doesn't tempt you too hard into buying shit (especially with how you can grind new characters through shards) and there is some hype for new releases, but the issue is that it is just so slow to get going. There is very little content and doing daily/weekly eventually gets tiresome, especially as the limited amount of characters will inevitably mean that there is no reason to get the new ones besides power creep. Mechanically it's okay, it's functional and satisfying, but again you need some variance for the experience.
I'm not too optimistic on how much the game will survive but I'll still keep on it, and as long as it breaks even it can run a long time.
I didn't play Arknights, but Genshin is just fuckton of content. Just exploring feels rewarding and there is a ton to see.
