Is this game going to Alpha or not?

I will, of course!

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Yeah I think it might even be in KS service guidelines that you only get refunds if there’s clear evidence of a scam or something along those lines.

I think people in general have the wrong idea with Kickstarter. It’s not a purchase or a pre-order, it’s not an investment. It’s a patronage. You see someone with the potential to create something you’d like to exist. You donate money so that there is a change it’s 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.

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Doesn’t matter do i get refund or not (obviously not, others be warned), either way i expressed my dissatisfaction!
Fact: false release dates shouldn’t 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 ā€˜life getting in the way’. Thats all. Team is working hard to rectify this and catch up.

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I did! And it’s 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 don’t like it don’t read it.
And don’t throw that fanboism behaviour on me, be mature!

I’m actually glad for the frank discussion :laughing: One of the benefits of this community.

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I did not know you had already PM’ed. I apologise. No need to attack me personally.

I’d be very surprised if you didn’t get a refund. Nobody wants customers that feel like they’ve been cheated, that sort of attitude tends to get spread around. I’m pretty sure they’ll 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 it’s understandably there might be a little delay.

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Actually i find that people who get refunds successfully tend to spread more bad attitude than people who don’t get a refund. People who get a refund will tend to feel more justified in their complaints and go ā€œspread 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 ā€œi cant get a refund for my donationā€ is quiet, the ā€œi 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.

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I will not get refunded, as i’ve been told but i won’t spread moaning and bad word around cos i’m not that kind of person.
I’ve expressed my dissatisfaction here and toward Keith and Flavien and i hope they’ll also learn something, to not the throw dates which are highly unrealistic baiting ppl to upgrade pledge.

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Just to clarify for everyone, we aren’t offering refunds and we’ve turned down all of the handful of requests we’ve 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 wouldn’t hesitate to provide refunds for the very reasons outlined by @Crayfish. Unfortunately, with our limited funds, we can’t offer a full-refund without taking money from somebody else’s 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 don’t have a lot of money to provide refunds. If it’s just one person here and there who happens to be unhappy, which to date is all it has been, then it isn’t a big problem. Where there’s a serious problem is if a whole bunch of people suddenly want a refund - which we can’t 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 can’t. 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 we’re very sympathetic to your frustration and understand it comes from your desire to play the game - which we appreciate. We’ve taken your feedback, and the feedback of all of our community members, to heart. While we don’t 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.

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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 don’t talk about it.
You are now in shoes of …something akin to an investor.
But quite frankly 100 bucks isn’t that much of an investment for working person.(price of two AAA titles)
(this comes from eastern european - believe me, we have lousy salaries).

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Good response @INovaeKeith, makes sense given your position.

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Ok i’m going to be all honest here so i’ll tell you from where my dissatisfaction comes;
I’ve 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 ā€œis this some kind of online fraudā€ and it made me ask refund.

Now, i didn’t 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 can’t 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 ETA’s cos not all of us know inovae and IB history.

Now take me off from your daily schedule on forum.
Thank you!

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Sorry if i insulted you!

Much more akin to buyer than investor.

Investor: ā€œHere’s money, give me more money back.ā€
Buyer: ā€œHere’s money, give me stuff back.ā€
Donor: ā€œHere’s money, do something good with it.ā€

It really depends on the mindset of the backer to know if they’re 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. They’ll still get the game and some other virtual stuff back, but they aren’t motivated by that.

Remember that it’s not an investment so that $100 is gone. Unless they plan on reselling the game and their virtual rewards to recoup that money.

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I am glad to hear the reasons. You got burned in the past with this.
And now you are careful.
And you don’t 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 past…undeservedly. Its ok to be cautious, but Inovae lost several developers right of the start which means it will take more time …but it will not take as much money per development time.

Well now…we figured that there is nothing malevolent on either side.
Both sides are just very cautious. :wink:

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 ā€œI-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 ā€œInfinity: 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 it’s 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 :smile: It was just a one-man’s week-end effort until INS was founded.

That being said, I also totally understand your frustration about delays. Though I must say, we’ve not promised anything. Verbiage is quite important if you re-read the weekly updates from earlier this year, it was always saying ā€œour goal isā€¦ā€, ā€œwe are hoping toā€¦ā€, ā€œit’ll take X months at minimumā€ etc… We’ve 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 that’s understandable, ignoring them is not gonna do us any good either.

  • When we give an estimation, it’s based on our current knowledge / situation at the time we’re giving it. As others mentionned, we’re a very small team, and we’re doing things that even AAA games are staying away from. Look at Star Citizen struggling on technical issues that we’ve 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, that’s getting into my personnal life here so I won’t enter into more details, but in summary: things happen, and with only a handful of developers, this impacts our schedule quite a bit :slight_smile:

That’s it for now - hope it helped to qualm some of your concerns. As for the ambiguity of the alpha release, that’s exactly because we don’t have a date in mind yet. We want it to be as early as possible, but it realistically won’t be before the end of this year, so we’ll 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, we’re going to do more alpha-test week-ends which will give you a chance to experience the game and give feedback about it. We’ll continue to expand the gameplay so that it can turn into a ā€œrealā€ game by the time alpha is out.

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Thanks for clearing things up!
Still unsatisfied cos of delays(it’s normal) but at the end i’m glad you didn’t refund me.
And congrats Keith on the baby!

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