Symphonic will be released in three days. Just thought I'd mention that.

Man...it's as quiet as a ghost town around here.

That's cuz you haven't been talking.

I thought it was because we were all out getting everyone and our Grandmother to sign the petition......

I'm not sure I'll have many people nearby that I can get to sign it unfortunately.

At a minimum I shall have one page (twenty signatures) filled out. I know people who probably would be interested, but I don't often get out to see them with the obscene amounts of (mostly school-related) work I do.

I have advertised on various forums. A pretty decent amount of people seemed interested; others just showed their lack of enthusiasm. We should most-definitely have over 100 signatures in this "first wave" of sorts; in fact, we'll probably have over 200. Keep in mind; this is mostly just from the staff members, so there is no telling what the other participants may bring in to play.

What ever happened to that slashdot article? Are you currently in the process of writing up a nice revised one for us Props? We need to be as well-known as possible in order for this to succeed. If there are other places we could potentially "advertise", we might want to consider them particularly soon.

Yeah, finals are pretty much over so I'm writing it now. But like I said, we don't want to advertise too much before we can report any signatures that we may be able to get independently of that mass advertisement. The reason being that if a bunch of people get linked to the site and see no or very few signatures reported they might give up on us immediately. However, if we wait until we have a hundred or a few hundred, they may realize how serious we are and be more enthusiastic to sign. If we decide we want to send it in now though, I'll post it sooner.

Oh yeah... I forgot about that tactic. I suppose I see what you mean. Afterall, if a group of people come on over to find no signatures at all, they might get discouraged. The problem is, getting the signatures registered over with Jake might take well... quite a while. We can't really send our signatures over until we are ABSOLUTELY sure that we've obtained each and every one of them from the fans we know in our area. Then you have to consider that we then would have to mail it out; which also might take some time. It might take (and probably will take), at a minimum, a month for this process to complete.

It seems we have to talk about just WHEN we plan to submit this. It can't be too late, though we really shouldn't be doing it with no signatures obtained either. I think we need to clarify this. Any thoughts?

*edit*
It seems Saridon is still working on the artwork, actually. I didn't think he was, as I didn't hear much from him for quite some time. It seems the last few weeks have been very demanding of his time, and understandably so, and thus he has given me a report claiming that he is continuing. Here is his email:

sorry about the wait the last few weeks have been abit demanding of my time
ive got the wall 90% done and will finish it and the sig later tomorrow.

after im done with the sigs/walls just give me a email if you need any more
help with anything.

oh and with my (not much) knowlage with movie editing i could put together a
little 'promotional trailer' for the pettion for posting around/advertising.

oh and might i suggest with the pettion sending S-E of japan clips and
things of some of the other chrono projects (only one with no risk of being
shut down i.e the ones S-E already knows about or the music ones).
to show that the fans devotion to keeping the series alive, just a
thought....

It seems he has given us an opening for further assistance, as well as some recommendations. What we do with it is pretty much up to us I suppose.

He has some interesting suggestions, but I think it's safe to say any communication with SE Japan is probably not necessary, and could piss off SE America. When SE America was talking about how they'll translate and send the petition package to Japan themselves, they cited a couple reasons to do this. One such reason was the almighty "chain of command." They said for us to send the package directly to Japan would be jumping the chain of command, so likely any other communication we have with Japan at this point could also be construed as jumping up that ladder too quickly.

And on a side note, I personally like to think of *US* as being the only project with no risk of being shut down! Technically they could shoot down Symphonic, but it's just traditional that game companies typically don't shoot down musical projects. Still, if Square starts PMSing...

Square can still tell us to stop using any pictures and music from their game. Not that that would hit us very hard. They have no legal case to try to stop the petition entirely; this is completely within our citizens' rights to assemble peacefully. Now, they still might try to do it, but I don't see why they would bother. An actual remake project like Resurrection or CT:RP would affect them a hell of a lot more than a petition like this. All they would have to do is throw all the boxes they receive from us away, and then ignore Chrono Fans that get pissed at them when they say no.

This might seem like a big deal, but it's only 25,000 of us. This is something I've been thinking about. All of Square's recent RPG's went greatest hits... which means they sold over 1 million copies right (seriously, is that right or am I mistaken?)? So, if every game they're releasing ends up getting bought by 1 million fans, I wonder if they'll actually think twice about 25,000... I mean, consider the opportunity cost of this in their eyes. They could have a team working on a new RPG, which have shown them a very large amount of success lately, or they could have the team working on a franchise (that they seem to think of as dead) for 25,000 fans that "promised" they'd buy the game over the last few years.

Just food for thought. This is not taking into account little points like the fact that FFChronicles went greatest hits (and obviously Square knows this), or that Square might assume 25,000 might actually mean 17,000 because they'll assume we're getting people we know who haven’t ever heard of Chrono Trigger to sign it as a favor.

Not trying to get anyone down, just wondering what you guys think about this.

Non Sequitor- My last final is Monday, but I've been keeping busy moving out of my apartment and back to Minnesota, an effort that concludes on the 22nd. You guys mind if I don't submit the article until then?

About the article, that's fine with me. About your thoughts on the 25,000 thing, they actually wouldn't be thinking "25,000 = 17,000" or anything like that. They instead would be looking to see if 25,000 = 1,000,000.

What I mean by that is, and I've mentioned this before, when you submit ANY petition signed by a huge number of people, it is always very reasonable to assume there is territory that you haven't covered. This means that for as many signatures as you have, there are MORE people out there who would agree with your petition if they knew about it. There's some sort of statistic that when petitions are signed in the US, typically for every person who signs it, there are like 25 or 50 more who don't know about the petition but would sign if they did. Because Square is contacted by fans about the concepts of petitions on an almost-nonstop basis, you can be sure that Square knows this statistic better than I do.

So, suppose that I can cover my entire state, Texas. Let's say Michael takes ALL of Tennessee. Prop takes all of Minnesota, and so on. For illustration purposes, we'd have signatures in those states, but there are still 47 more we hadn't touched. I doubt that we will have coverage in all 50 states when this is over. Well, okay, maybe we will. But COMPLETE coverage? Guess what...there are STILL people without computers! And even if they DO have computers, they may never go to any Chrono Trigger-related website because they've grown up and moved on, but if reminded of Chrono Trigger they'd happily buy up the remake.

These are people that we are going to miss when we're out petitioning, but they do exist and Square knows it. That's why they only asked for 15 to 20,000, and that's also why I'm shooting for more. With that statistic in mind, the extra 5,000 we want to tack on takes on a whole new light, doesn't it?

Right, I thought about that, that's why I tossed in the comment about FFChronicles. There's still the question of whether Square will believe the number of potential fans represented by the 25,000 would outnumber the number of fans who would buy a new game.

I'm pretty sure it's a solid statistic that the amount of signatures in a petition is ALWAYS outnumbered by the number of people who would actually support it.

EDIT: And while we're at it, maybe 1 million IS the magic number. If you grab a calculator and take Square's number of 20,000 and multiply it by 50 people (as I was saying in my last post), it comes out to 1 mil. Hmm.

Well let's hope so. And again I'm just playing devil's advocate here, but I think it's kinda presumptuous to assume that Square goes by the same numbers your article gave. Their ratio could be as low as 1:10 for all we know.

Saridon seems to have given us a nice little Christmas present. He completed his last two tasks and sent them to me today. He made a wallpaper, as well as a signature. I'll post them for you to take a look.

Here you go:
http://www.geocities.com/msanis88/sigsandwalls.zip

The signature and wallpaper are in .psd format. I changed the signature and converted it to .jpg format so that even a person without photoshop can at least say they support the petition with the signature, just like the previous signature submission. I suggest you include the .psd version though, so that if a person WANTS to put their name, they can. If you don't want to include it in the main download, it couldn't exactly hurt to put it in the Extra Downloads. Actually, Jake, if you can, could you put the Ayla signature (in .psd format) in the Extra Downloads section? Just a thought...

Happy Holidays everybody. With any luck, perhaps I can get an Epoch. That'd be awesome.

Your link isn't working...

I'll work on that once Christmas is past, hopefully.

Probably some bandwidth problems. Give it a try later and see what happens. There really is no way I can get it to you otherwise, unless you give me your email address.

Jacob@RSJames.biz or Jacob@Jullinar.com, take your pick

EDIT: Never mind, it's not a bandwidth issue... That wasn't a bandwidth error page. They just don't allow hotlinking. I was trying to click the link instead of copy/paste it.

Hey everybody. Been a while since anyone posted around here. I guess thats because most of our job is already done. Me? I've been EXTREMELY busy. Even more so than in my previous trials. I guess that is saying alot. School work still pretty much ruling what little time I have to myself. Things are starting to get pretty serious with my Senior Project, hence even more of what little time I have has been put in to that. Regardless, I somehow managed to get a little time in to take a look at these forums.

Jake, exactly how many signatures have you received thus far? I know this is actually quite early to ask, but I'm just wondering if our advertising has done any good. I haven't advertised that much, as a recommendation from Props since we both agreed that people coming to see a petition having 0 total signatures would probably give up on the petition since they would feel it would have no chance of success. However, I do also realize that we need to have some initial signatures. As of now, I have about ten signatures. I can probably get the other ten if I manage to actually GET OUT and collect them. Unfortunately, this has been my case for all this time... which now that I look back on it... seems somewhat pathetic considering the massive period of time between the launch and this current date. How exactly have the rest of you done with your petitions? Hopefully better than myself...

Good to hear from you, Apoc. Seven here. That is, four sent in by Prop, and three that I added after I received his. You may want to try printing out a separate copy for each person to sign, give it to that person and tell them to mail it in when they've finished... That way they're the ones doing the work. (Make sure and put the master address on the back or something so they know where to mail it to.) That might work.

If you go that way, it's kinda like network marketing. You start building your network of people who build their network... You're giving them a copy and askin them to fill it up, and hopefully they're doing the same so that it duplicates. And even though we've got 20 lines per page, I don't care if it's 1 sig per page as long as the sigs come in. Anyway, hopefully that'll help ya. Good luck with your senior project. I've got two more projects I'm working on now as well, so... (Geez, I do that a lot, don't I? First the CT Flash Series, then the petition, and so on...)

That sounds like some illegal pyramid scheme or Pay It Forward one of the two. Which could it be?

The problem with having them do the work is that they wont. Even die-hard fans of the game that I know will mean to do it, but it will be pushed to the end of the list and be forgotten. Most of the work is going to have to fall on our shoulders in the circles of our friends and associates, I'm afraid. I think if we are able to collect any signatures, we should collect them ourselves and then give that person an extra, blank copy of the petition to work on. That way we wont lose any signatures due to laziness, and wont lose any due to lack of networking.