Reply To: BattleTech: Mercenaries – CGL does a shipping booboo? Internet rages!

[limburger 22103xp 0]

@dawfydd the annoying thing for me is that CGL don’t give any indication of progress with shipping. We are having to rely on backers reporting back that things are indeed moving along. In itself not unusual, but we have had too much info relayed to us because backers discovered it and not because anything CGL did.

I know it’s been a gigantic kickstarter, so stuff won’t be done within a few weeks, but CGL is as I said not making things less stressful.  Percentages of ‘shipped’ pledges is meaningless as it doesn’t indicate velocity in any form that could make sense.
We don’t even know if the percentage is always using the same baseline values or if they’re making things up as they go along.

For example : Their ‘everything is done’ message for one of the regions meant not what regular folk thought it would as it came with some exceptions in fine print.

Communications is where they are consistently failing, despite having hired someone who claims to be a ‘communications expert’. You set expectations with titles like that and nothing indicates it’s having an effect.

Or maybe it is having an effect and things are in an even worse state than we as outsiders realise ? *eep*

And yes … the few things that Kickstarter could / should enforce is likely the result of them not wanting to p!ss off the big companies that run multiple high profile projects. If they wanted to do good then they would have done something about it already, but it is obvious that they are a regular company who just want to make more profit. Just another reason why you should trust companies to be customer friendly, unless there’s something in it for them.

We don’t know what the lead time is for getting a kickstarter project registered and validated. I’m pretty sure it’s more than a few weeks, so any changes to policy would be delayed unless they were willing (and able) to break existing contracts (or have exceptions in place for that sort of thing). Again … it’s of no benefit to their bottom line, so I doubt it.

It would be nice if companies cared about customers instead of treating us like wallets to be squeezed, but that’s never going to happen once a company reaches a given size.

I really wonder how big their customer base really is. It definitely has to be big enough for them to risk this kind of behaviour with practically zero negative effects on their bottom line.

/

It will be interesting to see what kind of update CGL will post today of all days.
They don’t exactly have the cards (ha!) to pull any kind of stunt …