I will, of course!
Yeah I think it might even be in KS service guidelines that you only get refunds if thereās clear evidence of a scam or something along those lines.
I think people in general have the wrong idea with Kickstarter. Itās not a purchase or a pre-order, itās not an investment. Itās a patronage. You see someone with the potential to create something youād like to exist. You donate money so that there is a change itās created, and if it is, you usually get special access to it.
Pre-ordering a game means it already exists. Kickstarter projects are still in the concept stage.
Doesnāt matter do i get refund or not (obviously not, others be warned), either way i expressed my dissatisfaction!
Fact: false release dates shouldnāt be thrown around easily baiting backers to pledge more money.
Now lets see will alpha be in Q1 2018!
Why not just PM @INovaeKeith and discuss this in private so your issue/s can be resolved.
The game is delayed due to ālife getting in the wayā. Thats all. Team is working hard to rectify this and catch up.
I did! And itās not me enforcing this disscusion, i would stop at first comment, i just replied to comments made towards me.
Also disscusions are made to disscus, if you donāt like it donāt read it.
And donāt throw that fanboism behaviour on me, be mature!
Iām actually glad for the frank discussion
One of the benefits of this community.
I did not know you had already PMāed. I apologise. No need to attack me personally.
Iād be very surprised if you didnāt get a refund. Nobody wants customers that feel like theyāve been cheated, that sort of attitude tends to get spread around. Iām pretty sure theyāll refund your card as soon as they get around to it so you can be on your way. Both the lead developers have been very busy so itās understandably there might be a little delay.
Actually i find that people who get refunds successfully tend to spread more bad attitude than people who donāt get a refund. People who get a refund will tend to feel more justified in their complaints and go āspread the wordā, and when a game presents signs of progress they are encouraged to justify their refund decision by bad-mouthing the game. While the story of āi cant get a refund for my donationā is quiet, the āi got a refundā is quite loud and can be viral.
Paying people their pledge back is a bad PR move as well as a bad financial move.
I will not get refunded, as iāve been told but i wonāt spread moaning and bad word around cos iām not that kind of person.
Iāve expressed my dissatisfaction here and toward Keith and Flavien and i hope theyāll also learn something, to not the throw dates which are highly unrealistic baiting ppl to upgrade pledge.
Just to clarify for everyone, we arenāt offering refunds and weāve turned down all of the handful of requests weāve received since the completion of our Kickstarter per our Terms of Use and the Terms of Service for Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. The one exception to this is backers who have pledged through IndieGoGo - they automatically receive a 10 day grace period, provided by IndieGoGo, during which they can request a full refund before their pledge is allocated towards the development of the game.
We spent a lot of time discussing this early on. If we had more money we probably wouldnāt hesitate to provide refunds for the very reasons outlined by @Crayfish. Unfortunately, with our limited funds, we canāt offer a full-refund without taking money from somebody elseās pledge and we felt that would be wrong. Even if we were to offer refunds for the pledge amount minus the payment processing fees we donāt have a lot of money to provide refunds. If itās just one person here and there who happens to be unhappy, which to date is all it has been, then it isnāt a big problem. Where thereās a serious problem is if a whole bunch of people suddenly want a refund - which we canāt afford. If other people have already been offered refunds then that makes a bad situation worse because now they will be rightfully upset that other people were able to get refunds but they canāt. Because of this we decided from the very beginning we would not be offering refunds unless our financial situation changed in some significant and unexpected way.
We do sincerely apologize for this inconvenience, as I explained in my email weāre very sympathetic to your frustration and understand it comes from your desire to play the game - which we appreciate. Weāve taken your feedback, and the feedback of all of our community members, to heart. While we donāt always respond we are always reading and the things that get discussed on these boards, Twitter, and Discord do affect how we make decisions about the future of this game and the company.
woow woow hold on.
Game is not developed for that long.
10 years took single person to create something absolutely unique. Which nobody else was able to do.
That something is basis for game to be made on.
There was no game developed until Kickstarter.
Forget what you have learned from big studios. This is not big studio ala Ubi or EA.
There are no managers that will blow the money on fancy cars or something.
They are completely upfront about everything they did each week. Even if it is boring they say what they did.
Ignore any date. Even big studios miss them always.
EDIT:
What you see here is what is always hidden behind PR. Same goes around in Big studios, but they donāt talk about it.
You are now in shoes of ā¦something akin to an investor.
But quite frankly 100 bucks isnāt that much of an investment for working person.(price of two AAA titles)
(this comes from eastern european - believe me, we have lousy salaries).
Ok iām going to be all honest here so iāll tell you from where my dissatisfaction comes;
Iāve read on few places that game is in development for 10 now and since i pledged i listened about free-alpha weekends will be in a few weeks and alpha in two months now reaching Q1 2018 so at the moment i started thinking āis this some kind of online fraudā and it made me ask refund.
Now, i didnāt know that 10years Flavien worked on engine all by himself so if that is true i find him programming freak genius given look at game and recent network code capabilities that other big studios with big teams canāt handle.
(Yes Keith did also other amazing things and art team)
That is me trusting your words, will be sure once i play the game.
My frustration aboit delays is still here and i still think they should be more careful estimating ETAās cos not all of us know inovae and IB history.
Now take me off from your daily schedule on forum.
Thank you!
Sorry if i insulted you!
Much more akin to buyer than investor.
Investor: āHereās money, give me more money back.ā
Buyer: āHereās money, give me stuff back.ā
Donor: āHereās money, do something good with it.ā
It really depends on the mindset of the backer to know if theyāre a Buyer or a Donor. People who just want the game and gave $20 are Buyers. People who just want the game to succeed and gave $100 are Donors. Theyāll still get the game and some other virtual stuff back, but they arenāt motivated by that.
Remember that itās not an investment so that $100 is gone. Unless they plan on reselling the game and their virtual rewards to recoup that money.
I am glad to hear the reasons. You got burned in the past with this.
And now you are careful.
And you donāt want to be burned again.
That is absolutely understandable.
From some of our side. We are afraid that when people see that game is really Work in progress state.
They could potentially spread a bad word about it. (undeserved doom and gloom) And that can spread as it did in the pastā¦undeservedly. Its ok to be cautious, but Inovae lost several developers right of the start which means it will take more time ā¦but it will not take as much money per development time.
Well nowā¦we figured that there is nothing malevolent on either side.
Both sides are just very cautious. 
It essentially started as a hobby project for me, on which I worked on in my spare time during my week-ends around 2004. I built the engine until 2010 when I met Keith and together we founded āI-Novae Studiosā. We continued to work on the technology for a few years, sometimes part-time, sometimes full-time ( funded on our own savings - both Keith and I have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of our own into this company so far ), until 2015 when we went to Kickstarter for our game āInfinity: Battlescapeā, which is our first funded professionnal project.
The confusion often comes from people uninformed about history of our company and projects and who bundle together Battlescape with my previous hobby project, which is kind of mixing apples and oranges ( hobby vs built as a company ). The engine DID take 10+ years to get to this stage, that is truth, but itās not like it got a full funded team of dozens of programmers working on it during all this time, if you see what I mean
It was just a one-manās week-end effort until INS was founded.
That being said, I also totally understand your frustration about delays. Though I must say, weāve not promised anything. Verbiage is quite important if you re-read the weekly updates from earlier this year, it was always saying āour goal isā¦ā, āwe are hoping toā¦ā, āitāll take X months at minimumā etc⦠Weāve never announced a firm date for the alpha, and the few times we did give a date for something, like for this latest patch ( or the alpha week-end in last january ), they were pretty much respected.
Something everybody must realize is that:
-
Not giving time estimations at all is impossible: people are constantly asking, even roughly, a timeframe. They need answers. People get impatient and thatās understandable, ignoring them is not gonna do us any good either.
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When we give an estimation, itās based on our current knowledge / situation at the time weāre giving it. As others mentionned, weāre a very small team, and weāre doing things that even AAA games are staying away from. Look at Star Citizen struggling on technical issues that weāve essentially solved. A lot of the work needs strong R&D, which is very difficult / if not impossible to evaluate precisely. Things can happen IRL too - Keith had a baby a few days ago, and on my side I relocated in June, which wasted far more time & energy than I anticipated - mostly thanks to various third-parties messing up, and me getting in conflict with my Internet provider ( who was still billing me at the old address ) and a furniture provider which scammed me and had to be legally threatened. Well, thatās getting into my personnal life here so I wonāt enter into more details, but in summary: things happen, and with only a handful of developers, this impacts our schedule quite a bit

Thatās it for now - hope it helped to qualm some of your concerns. As for the ambiguity of the alpha release, thatās exactly because we donāt have a date in mind yet. We want it to be as early as possible, but it realistically wonāt be before the end of this year, so weāll probably get into 2018 before it happens. But who knows; most of the technical issues have been solved now and iteration on gameplay could go faster than anticipated, even though experience tells us the opposite usually happens. Meanwhile, weāre going to do more alpha-test week-ends which will give you a chance to experience the game and give feedback about it. Weāll continue to expand the gameplay so that it can turn into a ārealā game by the time alpha is out.
Thanks for clearing things up!
Still unsatisfied cos of delays(itās normal) but at the end iām glad you didnāt refund me.
And congrats Keith on the baby!
