July 5th

The About page has been updated. I replaced a link and also made a few edits here and there for clarity.

Moving on, the Kickstarter comments received some more words of wisdom today. First, from Dustin Deckard:

You ignore everyone here for months and months and months and only pop out whenever there's enough unrest to get the press involved. And even then, all we've got to read are renewed commitments to get another ALPHA build out at PAX, and a plan to start selling the game to schools to raise funding. Complaining about how rough it is to get work done when people are criticizing you seems silly... by my rough count, well under 5% of your backers have made any public complaints. If you want people to stop complaining, it's painfully obvious how easy it is to resolve that problem. Stop making promises you can't keep, and don't ignore the people who gave you the green light on this project. They're only asking for a tiny, tiny amount of your time once a month or so.

The other comment of today is by Peter S:

 I think Xero said it well at http://codeherocodeblue.blogspot.com/ :
"[Quoting Alex from the Colin Campbell article,] 'It's hard to respond until the release is done in a way that will address people's concerns.' [Xero responds:] Actually, no it's not. It is not hard to post weekly with, 'Hey guys, right now we're doing blahblahblah,' or a, 'Sorry guys that we said the new build would come out on May 21st, but it's unfortunately still got some kinks in it.' You do not have to directly respond to criticism, just respond."

If it still feels stressful to update us Alex, you could get someone else to do it for you. EG, Shaun Hansel (who was announced as our new community manager), anyone you know who wouldn't mind doing it; maybe even a volunteer from us backers, if that works best for you.
Honestly, keeping us updated will I think feel like a /relief/. If we're told what you're working on, and get a couple of our questions answered regularly, then the current vibe of frustration coming from actively commenting backers should substantially calm down. 

Saying nothing adds fuel to the feeling that this is a scam. Transparency fixes that. As you must have noticed, you coming on here (and talking to Colin Campbell) helps. If we could have maybe 3-5 times as much communication from you (or a representative from your team), that'd be excellent. For example, one update sometime next week, saying whatever you like, would I think be a good start. 

Sorry to end on a negative note, but: If you plan on going back to radio silence until PAX, I don't think the [small minority of] backers keeping up with the comments page, have the patience to wait through 2 months of silence. With all due respect, we've /been/ waiting, and I think our patience to endure more months of silence is wearing thin. Be well.

I won't lie, it does feel kind of cool to see a link to here over there in the comments, but I digress....

I think both comments give some good advice. The poor communication and broken promises need to be remedied. There was a period of time, albeit short, when updates were posted. That was good while it lasted.

According to the articles from yesterday, the updates ceased because some backers didn't think they were good enough, and that negative criticism discouraged further attempts. I don't think the correct solution was to stop those and ignore backers altogether. Instead, I feel the right way to go about it would've been to continue the best that could be done and ignore those who weren't satisfied.

You can't please everyone all of the time, and haters gonna hate. But all the people upset now, they're not haters. Not all of them at least.

All is not lost. It's not too late for Mr. Peake to make things right. But from the looks of the backers, it's a limited time to work with.