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[Karlito]

The terms of use are pretty clear, a creator who fails to complete their project or fulfill rewards can still limit their liability if among other things,

they offer to return any remaining funds to backers who have not received their reward (in proportion to the amounts pledged), or else explain how those funds will be used to complete the project in some alternate form. [emphasis mine]

[i2amroy]

TL/DR: While there may be any number of valid reasons to question Josh's competence, determination, or whatever at this point, the AI issue - as presented here - is not one of them.

I'd like to iterate again that as both a backer (so having read the posts on the official forum) and as a Computer Science guy that the very fact that he even managed to figure out what the problems are is a huge good thing in his favor. The type of problems that he was running into are some of the most impossible ones to debug, and I've seen professional programmers with years of experience under their belt brought down by lesser bug in the same category before. The problem he has run into is a tough one, and the steps that he appears to be taking to solve it certainly appear reasonable in my experience.

His decision to go totally silent? That might be something you could get him on, but the aforementioned AI issue is definitely not a thing to do so with.

And as for "refunds"? Honestly I've backed both Shantae: Half-genie Hero and Mighty No. 9 almost an entire year before I backed TWS, both of which are being worked on by dedicated teams of people all of whom had large amounts of experience in the worlds of game development, and you know what? Neither has yet to come out officially. I've still got at least another year or so of waiting before I even start to worry about a potential refund.

[nenjin]

Perspective is nice. Hell, I backed River City Ransom like 2 years ago and you know what? It only got a ramshackle playable alpha to people in the last couple months, that is just like 2v2 and beating up dummies instead of, you know, actual levels to play.

[Cruxador]

"Other development is worse" isn't really an argument in anyone's favor.

[i2amroy]

"Other development is worse" isn't really an argument in anyone's favor.

No, it's an argument that unrealistic expectations for a semi-amateur tiny team are unrealistic. It's like demanding that a college basketball player try and throw a 95% season free throw ratio when the top professional players are only throwing in 92% range. If professional groups of software engineers with combined decades of game development under their belt are taking twice as long as TWS has before they have anything to show for it than I'm not going to expect a small handfull of people on their first real large scale software project to do better than that.

This is not to say that the lack of communication is good, simply that I'd give them plenty of more time before I'd start to demand a refund.

[Neonivek]

I've rarely seen Kickstarters better then this game frankly.

It is far more typical for nothing to be said unless they are doing a "Endless Alpha" style. Which is definitely not what TWS is trying to do.

Any game that doesn't really focus on constant alphas will always leave news for months or even a year between.

Divinity Original Sin 2: Three months between updates... Of which all the updates are not game related (so 9 months without any real news)
Battletech: Three months, no gameplay update

What are these kickstarters people are part of that update so constantly that aren't... well... not very good. Starbound? Are we going to base the quality of TWS on how Starbound is being developed?

The people who trolled the entire fanbase and then banned them if they responded to it? The development team that jumped ship?

Ok... How long has it REALLY been since the last update in TWS. Hit me. It says November but apparently it updated more recently.

[Serenseven]

Last public (Kickstarter) update: November 2
Last development update from the actual developer: December 21
Last development update through me as communications liaison: January 9
The quoted post from Fenicks on the unavailability of refunds: February 16

Taking January 9 as the date communication with Josh was lost, the lines have been dead for 40 days.

[Puzzlemaker]

40 Days isn't that long.  Guys need to chillax.

[ndkid]

"Other development is worse" isn't really an argument in anyone's favor.

No, it's an argument that unrealistic expectations for a semi-amateur tiny team are unrealistic. It's like demanding that a college basketball player try and throw a 95% season free throw ratio when the top professional players are only throwing in 92% range. If professional groups of software engineers with combined decades of game development under their belt are taking twice as long as TWS has before they have anything to show for it than I'm not going to expect a small handfull of people on their first real large scale software project to do better than that.

This is not to say that the lack of communication is good, simply that I'd give them plenty of more time before I'd start to demand a refund.

For this metaphor to work, it'd require that every college recruit boast about how they're going to have a 95% fee throw percentage, and when they actually end up shooting about 50% from the line, they stop showing up to practice and stop doing press interviews.

There are some semi-amateur teams that are good at scaling, doing consistent releases, and having consistent communication. Some of them can't handle interacting with people once even every few months.

[ThtblovesDF]

40 Days isn't that long.  Guys need to chillax.

If you vanish and don't give a single text, phone, sms, paper or other message as to why, would you like people to wait 40 days for your bloated corpse to show up or get curious after 2 weeks? Clearly, I'm playing it up to prove a point, but there really is a shameful lack of communication.

Anyway, I'm worried that our dev is stuck in a desire for perfection, previous videos and development posts have shown that he wants to really statisfy the public when he releases something - at the cost of time.

[Delta Foxtrot]

40 Days isn't that long.  Guys need to chillax.

Consistent communication would go a long way towards managing the doom and gloom some people seem to be having. "Still working on that bug" every two weeks or whatever, and I'd be happy. Or maybe I'm just spoiled by Toady. No matter how long it takes between versions, no-one ever asks if DF is dead.

[TempAcc]

The gaps between DF versions have been of more then one year before, yet the idea of DF being dead never came up apart from one or two fearmongering threads on the DF general discussion forum, since toady made sure to keep informing us of the progress. Hell, the only times in which such few threads came about was when toady became silent for a whole week or more, which only ever happened when he was sick or on holidays with his family.

Now lets consider things within the context of TWS. Josh was doing somewhat regular updates on the project, warning people about delays and throwing out videos and screenshots once in a while. Even if there were multiple delays regarding the posting of videos and stuff, people were still ok with it, since he was still communicating with the community. Then he suddenly kind of disappears for more then a month, and the interval between any info becomes several times longer then it used to be, to the point the community have to seek the help of people other then Josh to actualy get an idea of whats going on in the development.

Its completely justifiable that the community went all doom and gloom and started asking for refunds after all of this. Communication today is incredibly important to keep interest in game development projects, and even more so for kickstarter-born projects. Look at the Pillars of Infinity guys, they made sure to release regular updates and videos regarding the project to keep people interested. Even when they basically had nothing to report, the devs would still entertain the community with stuff like lore and answering backer questions.

[Egan_BW]

It is unfortunate that not every single game dev can be the Toad.

[Xgamer4]

Even if there were multiple delays regarding the posting of videos and stuff, people were still ok with it, since he was still communicating with the community.

That's not really accurate. The first one or two deadlines that got missed were brushed off, but past that people were doing everything but literally calling for Josh's head. It got bad. I suspect that's partly why Josh doesn't look at the forums anymore.

I generally agree with everyone else that communication would go a long way towards helping people not overreact, though.

[Zangi]

The worst thing That Which Sleeps has done is give itself deadlines... multiple times.  Missing all of em.