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

[jamescutts 6936xp 1]

I see this very much as a Catalyst problem rather than a Kickstarter problem, of 90 projects I’ve had one failure and the closest mess to this one was the Joan of Arc Kickstarter from Mythic, but that landed smack in the middle of the event. Catalyst like Mythic appear to entrapping themselves in a self made ponzi scheme, be it intentional or not. They have 4? 5? ongoing Kickstarter campaigns, that feels a lot for a self proclaimed “small” company.

I very nearly also sold off all mine too @sundancer so i can understand that, but I kept it in part because I actually like BattleTech and I now have more than enough stuff to last me years. What this campaign has done for me and im sure it has done for a lot of others is put me off ever buying another Catalyst product, something I would have done as I had my eye on levithans when that hits retail and probably more battletech.

Instead they have just alienated me by their shoddy running of this campaign, particularly the communications and logistical errors, I can forgive and expect delays but the communication has at times bordered on outright lies , couple that with the attitude to shut down anyone comments that are not positive really gives a bad impression of the company. The comments on their recent campaign for frostpunk say it all, Catalyst where reporting those who where sharing past experiences as a way to censor them, thankfully Kickstarter reinstated those comments to be followed by a post from Catalyst saying people “were ruining the campaign for others”.

@limburger I hope you get your stuff soon, it looks like everyone is very slowly getting their stuff but I can very much feel the frustration!

[limburger 21920xp 1]

@sundancer I’m not surprised. When you go that big you really want it to take off, but when the energy is soo negative all it does is remind you what a disaster this kickstarter has been.

@jamescutts I agree. This very much CGL’s own doing. There’s nothing Kickstarter could have done to ‘fix’ this once they gave them their funds. It would be nice if they could do something, but I doubt it would be practical.

CGL don’t make it easy to feel sorry for them that’s for sure. They’re not doing anything to make the wait bearable with stunts like that Battletech Gothic thing (and starting new kickstarters). I  get that technically this one is ‘done’ from their point of view (everything is supposedly at the hubs and en route to backers), but as a backer I feel insulted to see this cavalier (sp?) attitude.

I just got an email that Crooked Dice are shipping their kickstarter to me.
So that’s the 3rd kickstarter that may arrive before this one does.
Port Royal is somewhere en route, which is annoying but there’s hope it may arrive ‘soon’ still. However I have already contacted them about the situation, so one way or another it’s getting resolved. They may not be operating at the same scale as CGL, but they do know what they’re doing as their other kickstarter is not disrupting their work.

I will be waiting patiently … and you can bet I will be posting an update once my stuff arrives.
Wether that’s in time for spring clean 2025 or 2026 is something only CGL knows. 🙂

[tankkommanderParticipant 6441xp 1]

Kickstarter could, and should, have stopped CGL starting more projects before fulfilling the current batch. They can see the comments, they can see CGL abusing the ‘report’ function, they can see how late they are, they can see that they lied about shipping costs….and they do nothing.

So this debacle means I will never back anything from CGL, and will never back anything on KS.

Eventually we might see consumer protection laws extended to KS to stop they making free money from scams. Until then I am just going to wait for stuff to appear in retail.

[dawfyddParticipant 12386xp 1]

Kickstarter *had* the chance to enforce what were some pretty decent rules & penalties towards creators who either launched multiple projects to feed one after another, or those who did not make a good faith effort to fulfill their stated obligations. But after a bunch of high-earning projects (the first Zombicide comes to mind, and I *think* Star Citizen) those T&C’s were loosened up massively as the likes of CMON began treating the platform more like a pre-order service for their products (admittedly this *can* only be how things appear to the backers – a number of companies have gone to great lengths to explain that whilst it may *look* like they are bringing a finished product to the platform with no need to crowdfund, the funding is often speeding up the cycle they can release in, from years to months). I’m 1500 projects+ at this point, anything from a quid to hundreds of pounds depending on the project and my interest/available funds. In 15 years I’ve had maybe 20 that failed to fulfill or fully fulfill, and only one of those (the infamous Robotech RPG Tactics from Palladium) has made me angry at the dev. Kickstarter gets something like a 10-20% slice of whatever a campaign brings in, and they chose the road paved in greenbacks.

Now, all that being said, I do agree that Catalyst have not done themselves any favours with the management & communication of Mercenaries over the last 10 months, but I’m not convinced that it has been due to malicious intent. Frustratingly we may never know just why things went so awry during fulfillment and how shortages in product were not flagged sooner, but at this point the majority of folks *do* appear to have received their rewards (@limburger that is not in anyway to minimise how yourself and other folks who are still waiting must be feeling right now). I don’t however think that CGL are in anywhere near the sorts of dire straights as Ninja Division and Mythic Games found themselves in when their respective houses of cards came tumbling down on them. I suspect that with the Voltron and Frostpunk RPG projects CGL are under the gun due to them being licenced projects and had time limits in place by which they had to have the projects launched or else they would lose the rights and associated development costs. Neither project is of any interest to me, but i am willing to give them some benefit of the doubt. Leviathans does at least seem to be moving, just very slowly.

Ironically the tabletop games company that I *think* has the best approach right now is Monolith. Ironic as back when they and Mythic went their separate ways post-the first Conan campaign most assumed that the issues with the end product were on Monolith’s side but Mythics demise would suggest they were somewhat scapegoated. But their current model of wanting to hold off launching a campaign until everything is ready to go to manufacturing so that it just requires that crowdfunding to get it going seems to be working for them quite well.

Also worth bearing in mind that Battletech does seem to have legs to it given how much non-KS product CGL have announced. Admittedly getting hold of it outside the US remains a pain in the proverbials (he says having just received copies of the Hinterlands & Kurita books he had to order from Amazon US…), but compare to how the game looked pre-2020. Battletech was still going but it was niche as hell my dudes. It was a struggle to find anything outside the US or Germany. Now? My local FLGS has books & boxsets, and multiple webstores carry the line.

Sorry, starting to ramble now as I’ve just had my meds for the night.

Just….. be cool folks. Be cool…..

[sundancer 43384xp 1]

I think @dawfydd said it just right. And yes, Star Citizen is one of those that kicked down the flood gates.

[limburger 21920xp 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 …

[tankkommanderParticipant 6441xp 0]

Looks like CGL just threw RoW under the bus again on the Leviathans KS. Rushed stock to US ahead of tariffs, leaving everyone to be delivered from China but no plan or contracts in place to actually do this.

Throw stuff on the back of a mule and send it up the silk road?

[limburger 21920xp 0]

after skipping last weeks’ update … they posted one this week:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cgl/battletech-mercenaries/posts/4358288

claiming that ‘wave 3’ is ‘almost complete’  USA

Wave 1+2 in EU are ‘almost finished’

and (surprise surprise) there’s a wave 4 for the USA (ie : still not done despite getting priority).

Did I mention that they’re still having issues with stock that’s still missing items ?

Yep …

And another miracle : after receiving a mail telling me things would indeed be shipping … their local logistics partner is telling me that I got two packages incoming on friday. I will know more by tomorrow.
They’ve chosen the worst delivery company they could by picking one whose nearest pickup point would be on some industrial location 2 KM from my home. So much for ‘premium’ shipping.

//

Their other kickstarters are soo screwed with the tariffs that are on and off again whenever the orange cheetoh feels like it.
Regular companies could handle that, but I doubt CGL could.

I’m kind of hoping they go down in flames … (it would suck for the backers without their pledges though)

 

[limburger 21920xp 1]

// personal update

Good news : I got Battletech Mercenaries delivery today.

Bad news ?

Two card board boxes, which according to the tracking mail ought to have a total weight of 10 KG, were missing about 4 KG worth of contents.

Amongst the missing contents … is the flockin’ Battletech Mercenaries box itself (as well as the other starter sets I had ordered).

The local delivery service has listed both packages as ‘delivered’
I’ve already contacted QML, GamesQuest and GLS (the local logistics company doing the actual delivery).
GamesQuest is indicating a 6 day wait before I get an answer.

I wasn’t expecting much … but I was hoping that the final leg of this ordeal would complete without issues.

// — edit —

QML was the first to respond and ask for additional details. I’ve done inventory and got about a dozen items ‘missing’, which are mostly the rules and a mappack.

I’m hoping it simply is a package that had no tracking mail sent to me, but I’ve done all I can so now we wait.

GamesQuest responded and as expected they redirected me to QML.
Mystery heavy package incoming from Qamesquest tomorrow. It could be a different kickstarter, but it could be the final bits of Battletech. We shall see if this is the end of the saga for me.

I’ve never seen a kickstarter so mismanaged as this one.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the issue with packages is in part due to how CGL managed this thing.

I guess I’m getting my money’s worth out of my shipping costs 🙂

So far received :
– one big box containing the salvage boxes and expansions
– one small cardboard box full of air … with the Alpha Strike starter set (hilarious inefficient packaging to be sure)

Expecting a big box tomorrow with practically all the starter sets and rules for the game that looked interesting ages ago.

// — edit —

Incoming package was indeed the box with the ‘missing’ bits.
Hereby the saga has ended for me as well.

It will be interesting to see when/if CGL posts more updates and if they are ever going to do a post mortem of this disaster.

They literally dropped the ball and fumbled for recovery at multiple stages within this project.
You’d think this is their first time running a crowdfunded project …

• This reply was modified 1 month ago by  limburger.
• This reply was modified 1 month ago by  limburger.
• This reply was modified 1 month ago by  limburger.

[sundancer 43384xp 1]

A fresh update from CGL:

UK: Wave 3 is complete. Exclusivity has ended, though we will still wait on street dates for all of Europe until EU fulfillment is complete and their exclusivity period ends.

EU: Wave 3 has begun as well as retailer shipments this week.

Wave 4: Final Wave
We will be locking orders for Wave 4 on April 22nd.

So by the looks of it this is actually drawing to a close now? Anybody here still missing stuff from their KS pledge? Is OTT now good? Will CGL find a way to fumble it again?

STAY TUNED!

[limburger 21920xp 1]

reading through the comments CGL still finds ways to f*ck things up.

Australia still not completed that’s for sure.

One of the challenge coins (I guess I got lucky by not picking that one?) is still MIA for some people.

Their Frostgrave Punk RPG kickstarter is reaching its end, so …

[grantinvanman 2502xp 0]

Coins … missing.

[limburger 21920xp 0]

I doubt they are “missing”
I’d suspect that they are one of many things CGL failed to order enough of because they fcked up the order sheet that got exported from Backerkit.

I’ve never seen any company have too few items to use for pledges.
I’ve seen companies have issues due to 3rd parties not delivering things on time, but the ones that suffered from such issues tended to learn from the experience and fix it in their next kickstarter.

CGL hasn’t done any of these things.
If anything they appear to increase the number of issues with each and every kickstarter they do.

I suspect it’s because once they sign off on a contract they expect their third party contacts to manage everything while they sit back and count the money.

In reality you tend to need more project management for everything outsourced, because if there’s no punishment for late delivery then those doing the work are not going to push more profitable business before yours.

You may have handed of the work, but you never hand over the responsibility for completion.

[limburger 21920xp 0]

Oh goodie … CGL has dared to post another update.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cgl/battletech-mercenaries/posts/4374336

This time they’re claiming that ‘wave 3’ in the EU is ‘complete’, while at the same time mentioning that they’re flying in additional bits that were missing.

I’m guessing they’re using a weird ‘definition of done’ that marks things as ‘complete’ while there’s still work to be done.

It would explain everything about this kickstarter though …

[sundancer 43384xp 0]

This time they’re claiming that ‘wave 3’ in the EU is ‘complete’, while at the same time mentioning that they’re flying in additional bits that were missing.

Read: “Everybody got send something so the wave is complete and the rest is ‘detail work'”

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