What phase of beta are you in

I saw your FAQ, you had three phases, progenitor, automation, and bio-organic. I bought the game a year ago and while I found it to be great fun, it was tempered by knowing it would all be deleted. I decided to wait until the game was finished.

What is the current state of the game. Are you progenitor, automation, or bio-organic. Also, can the FAQ be updated to reflect this?

 

The game is still the first phase, progenitor. A lot of the groundwork has been set up, but the game has yet to have most of the main features be ironed out. If you opt into the nightlies you could help play test the newest parts of the game and look for bugs to report.

 

They lied with those "stages" and just put out a news post that would calm people that time.
There has been no "stages" or beta updating for a year. So we are still the same as when that was posted.
Also, no ETA, and nothing has been said of true importance besides "we will do a patch soon". Which could be next month to next year taking into account their definition of soon based on previous interactions.

Remember they can't really tell when they will be done, they don't have that kind of planning down. They missed their targets by such an outstanding margin, that even if they did say a time, how could we trust they will deliver it?

 

They didn't lie.

The old iteration of development called for stages. Technically -- Chucklefish is still using those stages. Yes, we are still in stage 1; but stages 2 and 3 won't take nearly as long as stage 1; stage 1 requires and has had a lot of "built from the ground up" sorts of things that are non-factors in stage 2 & 3's time tables.. There is also an internal deadline that Chucklefish has -- they have a good estimation of when the next patch will be ready. But as the FAQ states, they're not going to release any ETA because they don't want to disappoint anyone if that date is missed.

I get that you are frustrated with the devs or the development time. Or both. But you can be better about expressing those disappointments. You're passing off your negative assumptions about the development team as facts -- and your peers have taken notice. Please don't be a disruption for the sake of being disruptive.

 

Hee, "disappoint" is a euphemism for "attempting to prevent some people from prematurely going completely insane".

 

I don't mind them taking their sweet time. I don't even mind them missing deadlines, I just wanted a sense of how playable and close to complete the game was before getting too invested in a save game

 

So that means you have an ETA, because if you don't he's right on point. I mean say I want to build a house and I tell someone I'm going to do it three sages. I'll call those three sages Alpha, Beta, and Omega. Alpha stage is building the house, Beta stage is looking it over to make sure it looks like a house, and Omega stage I tell them their house is done. I've setup stages that mean basically nothing and given no time tables. Granted the guy does sound pretty salty about it, but the guy has a right to be upset about this.

 

I don't. Chucklefish has an internal one that they are working toward. If I come across the quote again, I'll link it (my fault, should have saved it for reference). Don't forget that moderation is *NOT* Chucklefish. We're volunteers from the community. We don't get a paycheck or any assigned hours to moderate the forums. As such, we're still considered players & users, so we're not privy to details of development that haven't already been made public.

The stages are not a time table or calendar in which to gauge development speed or to predict a release date. Not entirely. Mostly, they are an organizational tool for a process. It's by simple deduction and assumption that people pull development schedule from it. It can't get any clearer than our FAQ already states:

When people mistake the stages for a "timeline" of sorts, they make the common mistake of thinking Automaton will take just as long as Progenitor is taking.

I never said he can't be. I said he needed to be better about expressing his being upset. The way he's going about it now is getting him reported by his peers. And I don't want to warn/ban anyone needlessly.

I'm hoping this clarifies things.