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Alpha Appreciation - (No longer available)


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10 minutes ago, rudzstyle said:

hello sir, i think i need a litle help here.. how i can update the game? currently i'm in Thermal Update. i already try to change the propertis like how i do to update to Thermal, but it's not working.. is there any link for this problem? i can't find them.

 

best regards

rudz

 
 
 
 
 

There hasn't been an Alpha backer update since Thermal. Klei figured Alpha backers didn't need Alpha anymore after Thermal over a month ago and decided we could be put in the closet until Early Access launched.

Instead, they picked a few select members of this specific forum and gave only them access to the rest of the Alpha as I guess too many of us gave them money to be involved in Alpha or something and as such we couldn't be given Alpha?

Edited by Tikigit
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13 minutes ago, Tikigit said:

There hasn't been an Alpha backer update since Thermal. Klei figured Alpha backers didn't need Alpha anymore after Thermal over a month ago and decided we could be put in the closet until Early Access launched.

Instead, they picked a few select members of this specific forum and gave only them access to the rest of the Alpha as I guess too many of us gave them money to be involved in Alpha or something and as such we couldn't be given Alpha?

They picked active forum members who were likely to throughly test the experimental version and report bugs to developers.
If you wanted to be in the select group you should have got involved in the community and made yourself known.
 

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22 minutes ago, Risu said:

They picked active forum members who were likely to throughly test the experimental version and report bugs to developers.
If you wanted to be in the select group you should have got involved in the community and made yourself known.
 

Yeah, that's sort of BS when they're actually packaging "Alpha Access" as a purchasable period with a roadmap mentioning frequent bug fixes, and 4-5 week content updates. That they actually operated without problems for a month before deciding "Screw the Alpha Access purchasers. Let's just pick a few favourites from OUR forums, and just ****can the rest of the Alpha we've sold people.".

You can try to spin it and point blame for not "having got involved in the community and made yourself known", but I along with thousands of others supported Klei financially for Alpha access, got involved over on the Steam discussion boards which Klei largely ignore to the point of not posting update notes or even sharing information about build streams.... only to then get shafted in behaviour that frankly anyone but the ignorantly supportive would be critical of, purely because... what... we didn't post enough on another forum and Klei decided on second thought they'd just take the Alpha access income and cancel the Alpha involvement after a month?

Edited by Tikigit
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30 minutes ago, Tikigit said:

Instead, they picked a few select members of this specific forum and gave only them access to the rest of the Alpha as I guess too many of us gave them money to be involved in Alpha or something and as such we couldn't be given Alpha?

They mentioned it in one of their streams - there were way too many people who went for the Alpha. About hundred thousands, and when the "alpha beta" of the Thermal Upgrade was released they all downloaded it. It's way too many people for testing of development builds, they were seriously buggy, at early phases we often were lucky if the game managed to run 15 minutes straight, and there were major gameplay affecting problems up until a few days ago. Out of that hundred thousands, there would be enough people to give the game bad publicity even though it clearly states it's Alpha and buggy. And polishing the release every time so the public is happy with it would take way too much effort and cut on actual work done on it.

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29 minutes ago, Kasuha said:

They mentioned it in one of their streams - there were way too many people who went for the Alpha. About hundred thousands, and when the "alpha beta" of the Thermal Upgrade was released they all downloaded it. It's way too many people for testing of development builds, they were seriously buggy, at early phases we often were lucky if the game managed to run 15 minutes straight, and there were major gameplay affecting problems up until a few days ago. Out of that hundred thousands, there would be enough people to give the game bad publicity even though it clearly states it's Alpha and buggy. And polishing the release every time so the public is happy with it would take way too much effort and cut on actual work done on it.

And there are MUCH better ways to handle that than just deciding to go back on something they decided to sell because it was more successful than they predicted.

Take Clockwork Empires operated by Gaslamp for example (Before the disaster release state which was for a whole totally different set of reasons).

There was:

1) The public Early Access builds released monthly with critical bug fixes only. 

2) The opt-in Experimental branch with typically weekly (sometimes more often) builds of WIP things that would eventually become the stable branch monthly build when ready. Which gave people the chance to voice input on new concepts, balance changes, how things like progression pacing was impacted, UI usability and such before such changes were further fleshed out. But also was unstable and could often introduce utterly game breaking oversights.

3) A closed branch available only to certain members of the community who had shown the ability to provide constructive feedback even if it was negatively critical when needed. That got the unstable of the unstable and poked and prodded builds really not suitable for larger exposure, some of which either didn't make it to experimental even, or did so somewhat later.

 

They didn't go "Oh, we want to do #3 so, as a result, we'll stop our existing cases of #1 and #2 and to hell with everyone that's bought into what we advertised... but let's keep selling it of course!".

No. They worked out a structure to do all 3 concurrently (I hear there are these magical tools that allow you to do things like branch off repositories and migrate bug fixes and more stable changes from the most recent branch into other branches... but shhh they're super magical top secret tools). 

 

And that's a relatively small team where there were about 4 active members of the actual development team (CEO/Programmer, Main programmer, Lead artist, QA)  constantly communicating on forums both their own official boards and the Steam boards on a daily basis, doing bi-weekly in-depth dev blogs, and managing 3 different development branches and sticking to their outlined structure for a good 3-4 years.

 

What Klei did very much just comes across as deciding not to bother to come up with a practical solution. Instead opting to drum up some justification about "It will negatively impact the games image" for why keeping to what they offered everyone wasn't going to happen in any guise and did something that I'd quite honestly expect more from a studio like 22Cans than a group like Klei.

If they can't react sensibly and positively to getting more interest and support than they had expected and instead pull out of delivering something they constantly kept selling the entire time, then I don't really know how Early Access for this project can end well, or how much of anything said or presented can be taken seriously. :\

 

Edited by Tikigit
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7 hours ago, ImDaMisterL said:

I am SO gonna get Invisible Inc.

I've been wanting it for ages now!! \0-0/

It's a really thrilling game. Do yourself a favour and try it! :) According to rumours, "This year, the Steam Summer sale runs from the 22nd of June until the 5th of July." (2017). This will coincide very timely with the gift box reward (12th of July). Most certainly will we get an excellent opportunity to fill in any gaps in our game library. That's quite a few things to look forward to, especially with any potential DST update in the making in mind. :) Thanks, Klei!

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@Tikigit

i can't say i knew exactly how you feel, but i kind of understand your frustration.

while what you said in the post got some point, I don't think Klei also wanted it to be like this in the first place.

And they really did let you play the alpha version (current alpha is thermal update), what the closed tester testing are "experimental build", I know this is just playing with words, but it's like an inside build version that happen before they even releasing the "thermal preview branch".

They also have experimental version back then and no alpha tester get to test that (because it is not alpha testing).

The same thing happen here, the people who are testing right now are not just alpha tester anymore.

 

And like Kasuha already mentioned before, they said it themselves in the stream that the number of people join the alpha testing are beyond what they ever predicted.

This is my wild guess, but I think the number of players are backed fire in terms of efficiency (that Klei could handle at the time).

Klei is not a big company (yet) that have plenty of resources to do all the work to sort out every bug, crash reports including all of the false report in the forum. This is why it's getting out of hand in terms of efficiency. at least this is what i thought.

Sorting out thousand of reports which have a lot of duplicate & false issues are consuming resources and possibly holding back their development.

I assume even after the thermal preview tactic, they also didn't quite get the sweet spot.

That's why they decide to put a small handful of people to do the job.

 

I think maybe this is the main reason why, not because it will put bad publicity (this play a factor but i guess it's not the main issue)

Edited by Zervo
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Tikigit hasn't posted anything positive or constructive in these forums yet.  His first posts here were criticizing ONI as a whole, claiming that Klei were way in over their head, and that the game would flop.  He then griped about how it was unclear to him about the Klei weekly streams, and almost everything else he has had to offer so far is in this thread.  It's a shame how some people think that complaining is the greatest joy in life.

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So, could you guys add price for Eets Munchies in CN region? I really want to get DST gift box but there's no way to buy Eets Munchies. (I ready bought every other game developed by Klei... sad:(

Edited by Saintstan
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If we have every game you guys have made but some are owned on platforms other than Steam, do we have to get them on Steam or can we just send you a proof that we own it elsewhere? I guess that won't be an issue for me since I don't own the Don't Starve DLCs, but I got Mark of the Ninja and Eets Munchies in a humble bundle and finished them both, even though they're not in my Steam library, and there might be other people in the same case.

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10 hours ago, Tikigit said:

There hasn't been an Alpha backer update since Thermal. Klei figured Alpha backers didn't need Alpha anymore after Thermal over a month ago and decided we could be put in the closet until Early Access launched.

Instead, they picked a few select members of this specific forum and gave only them access to the rest of the Alpha as I guess too many of us gave them money to be involved in Alpha or something and as such we couldn't be given Alpha?

Alpha was to help us get ready for early-access, which it did. 

We had some people help us test the next version so it would be stable and relatively balanced for when it's ready to go out to everybody, and it is. 

We felt that it would be a good idea to limit the exposure of the super early version of the next update to the people who would be willing to tolerate the instability, potential lost saves and general inconvenience.

The game is still being updated at the same cadence that we originally told everybody, some people just got a version that was too early for the public. 

Sorry that this upsets you, we have seen your posts, and we appreciate the feedback and will take it into consideration for the future. 

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10 hours ago, Risu said:

They picked active forum members who were likely to throughly test the experimental version and report bugs to developers.
If you wanted to be in the select group you should have got involved in the community and made yourself known.
 

But... but I was an active member and player, I even went as far as upgrading my computer exclusively for this game... (all inconveniences included) talk about bad timing!

10 hours ago, Tikigit said:

You can try to spin it and point blame for not "having got involved in the community and made yourself known", but I along with thousands of others supported Klei financially for Alpha access, got involved over on the Steam discussion boards which Klei largely ignore to the point of not posting update notes or even sharing information about build streams.... only to then get shafted in behaviour that frankly anyone but the ignorantly supportive would be critical of, purely because... what... we didn't post enough on another forum and Klei decided on second thought they'd just take the Alpha access income and cancel the Alpha involvement after a month?

And that's why they had to come up with the idea of releasing the alpha in a parallel branch and not in the proper steam page, doing otherwise would have make people think the game was finished or at least in a stable state.

Also they've stated several times that they did expect a hundred of players at most, not thousands. That's why Klei had to select a smaller and more easy to handle group, and on top of that they wanted people that actually give feedback constructively. 

If they chose people from their forums, fine, it's their ground, that's how things used to be before Steam discussion boards ever existed, call them old fashioned if you like.

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Sad to see some people complaining. I'm super grateful that I got to be a part of this Alpha! I've already sunk an ungodly 90+ hours into this in the last month, and I expect to continue to do so in Early Access. Hands down the best $20 I've ever spent on Steam.

I do, however, wish I had been more vocal and involved here on the forums. Would've been more help to you guys if I had helped with the (few) bugs I'd seen and troubleshooting...

I appreciate all the hard work from the Klei team! Love this game and can't wait to play more!

Edited by enterflux
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11 hours ago, JoeW said:

4- We don't currently have plans to offer our published games, such as Crypt of the Necrodancer or Darkest Dungeon

Could you clarify? Is it enough to own Best Of Klei or are there other games as well?

Edited by Cyberboy2000
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48 minutes ago, Cyberboy2000 said:

Could you clarify? Is it enough to own Best Of Klei or are there other games as well?

Probably. We're going to offer some games and some DLC - we're still figuring out exactly which we want to offer. And if you already own the titles we are going to offer, you would get the giftbox. 

It's not likely that we will be offering Eets Munchies though, so I wouldn't worry about needing to own that one. =)

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So does that mean Mark of the Ninja and Invisible, Inc are included in this? I own DS and DST and haven't really had much interest in those other two games, was hoping for the DST gift box. 

Is there a way to make the items in the gift box nontransferable? No selling / trading? I don't want to sell them and make a profit, i just want something i'd actually use xD and i'm not sure i'd actually play either of those games.

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I'm confused. What was the problem with the currencies exactly? I mean I won't say no to free stuff but I didn't notice anything wrong. Also the only game I don't own is shank because I got shank 2 in a bundle and didn't like it. Does this mean I have to take shank and not skins :(

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2 minutes ago, CommissarManiac said:

I'm confused. What was the problem with the currencies exactly? I mean I won't say no to free stuff but I didn't notice anything wrong. Also the only game I don't own is shank because I got shank 2 in a bundle and didn't like it. Does this mean I have to take shank and not skins :(

I don't know if they'll be giving away Shank if they won't be giving Eets Munchies... hmm...

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