Expack: Also, I got involved and read through a thread posted by the OP on the official forums - unfortunately, the devs were quite rude to the fellow, saying things which amounted to "grow a thicker skin or get off our forums. Our game is what fans of indie games want." Both the OP and the devs calmed down, and things got more civilized, but, as you might imagine, it gave me a new-found disrespect for a dev team I formerly praised to others.
shane-o: I've been perusing the Malevolence forums over the past two or three days and was surprised to read what you wrote, so I had a look myself and I've got to say this: you're speaking about the situation incorrectly and non-factually and by doing so you can damage a Devs reputation wrongly, just like you are now
The Devs weren't rude and didn't say, "
grow a thicker skin or get off our forums" at all; a moderator did. What the moderator actually said was, "
This game isn't made for the average gamer. It was made by Alex for Alex. It's still in Beta. You could have tried it for free and researched before purchasing. Then you could grow a thicker skin."
The other part of the comment, "
Our game is what fans of indie games want" (your interpretation) was made by the user Lomi, not any of the Devs
The rest of the comments that may be construed as slightly condescending/condescending/unhelpful were made by users, the one main offender being the user Lomi
Alex, the creator, actually seemed helpful, showing johnki evidence of a tutorial/tips that were to be implemented further on in development (this was one of the concerns johnki had)
After re-reading the thread in question without my pitch-tinted glasses, I agree and I apologize. I got too deeply involved with johnki's discussion previously, and it left me with an false taste in my mouth which could've been removed after looking at the discussion again with fresh eyes. The devs, in general, are awesome, respect their community, and take user feedback seriously - which is why I backed their project in the first place!
However, I would like to point out that Lomi is, in fact, more than just a user and a moderator. He is - and was when the discussion originally took place - one of the dev team's official testers (hence the (mod/tester) part of his title). This means he aids the other devs in the bug-fixing process by finding and/or reproducing bugs; to aid him to this end, he also gets access to development builds only other devs can get. (Please note the latter is a generalization - depending on the dev team, testers can get anything ranging from special, tester-only builds to the same development build the dev team has access to.) I should also point out that Kickstarter backers and pre-orderers don't count as official testers since they are not employed by the dev team as such. That being said, Lomi is certainly
not representative of the dev team as a whole.