Artix
The AdventureQuest Worlds: Infinity Kickstarter plan is still on schedule. The next step is to launch the pledge manager, which is how backers will send us the survey information (like email, name for the credits, etc) which we will use to delivering their rewards (codes, steam keys, etc). We anticipated roughly 2 weeks for the Pledge Manager to go live. It was smart that we did. At the half way point we ran into a weird bug on Kickstarter blocking us from releasing the pledge manager. Specially, 6 backers with payment errors that are not timing out. Click read more below for the gnitty gritty details. We have been in touch with Kickstarter's support and they are working on it. As you can imagine, I have been refreshing the page like crazy the past few days.
The Pledge Manager is a new feature at Kickstarter. In the past we used another service called BackerKit to manage pledges and rewards. So this process is new to us. Any new feature is likely to have some bumps. Consider this a sneak preview of the chaos roller coaster that will be our Alpha :D
For the Kickstarter Pledge Manager, we filled out all of the required information, adding the survey questions, and submitted it. It was approved.
But when I went to hit the launch button, I was surprised to see this....
The message says we need to wait for the payment errors to clear. No problem. It also said that the Pledge Manager would be available no later than April 14th. Which sounded great... until April 14th past with crickets.
Normally, Kickstarter drops/cancels a pledge after it is unable to collect payment in 7 days. But for some reason, these payments are stuck in zombie mode.
The first thing you will notice is they are all payments from actual Kickstarter (Not late backers.) So we waited an extra day. When they still had not cleared I wrote our contact at Kickstarter to ask for help. This is what they replied.
I really like this support person, they have been fantastic.
Now, you are caught up and know everything I know.
Now we wait.
Ultra transparency!
Once the pledge manager goes live, you will have a week or two to fill out the survey in the pledge manager. Then we will bring up the Alpha servers and send the first batch of codes to the backers who completed their surveys. That puts the launch of Alpha at the very end of this month, or the very beginning of May. If you have not been a part of a Kickstarter before, then know that most Kickstarter projects take many months, if not a year before they release their pledge manager (survey) and start delivering. We are moving lighting fast in comparison. Not fast enough for many of our excited backers maybe :D. As you read this we are continuing to build content for the Alpha release including the first of your Kickstarter reward items. Cannot wait to hang out with you in game. It will be just like the launch of the original AQWorlds. The Alpha will be pretty bare bones... and we will build (convert) the content under your feet as you play it.
