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I posted a newsletter this last week and I wanted to gather some more info about the KS before sharing it directly here (I know some of you have forwarded the info etc and thank you).
That's the general state of HF i.e. not great thanks to my continuing up and down health.
At the moment it is up, so we are pushing forward. I'm not going to make any guarantees about me, but I have noticed some people who think that if I disappear so does the KS. That is not the case. Even if I were to just straight up die, everything gets shipped up to Sal and she will continue with it.
Since coming back to work I have attempted to organise the mess that we are in. The problem with being in and out is that I do not get notice of being sick and everything is left where it was the day I fell ill. Cover steps in to send out regular website orders etc and of course they need to move things and use things.
It's been, and continues to be, a bit of a chore. However, things have progressed this past week. We have received another batch of resins and I have talked to our resin caster about a schedule for the last few problem minis (2 broken moulds, 2 missing 'pieces, a sword and a head, and the 2 3d sculpts). Everything else is ready.
We will 'not' be waiting for all these problems to be fixed before putting up the pledge manager but we 'will' be waiting for a firmer idea of when they will be resolved.
I am not taking more money without a more solid schedule in place, this could take a week, it could take a couple. As long as I am up and working I will keep people updated. Sal will now let people know if anything happens to me.
Just so this isn't a wall of text, I took some photos of the 3d sculpts, which we have progressed with and will include them below, they are just from my phone but they should show what you will get and also the size comparison with existing minis.
I understand completely that people are annoyed at the extended delays, but I can assure you, spamming 'drop the pledge manager' doesn't do anything In fact if I'd dropped it before I fell ill this last time we'd be in a much worse spot.
Captain Cain is somewhere in between the regular soldiers and the Hel-IX enhanced guys. He is not a small man He comes in multipart not the 2 piece shown above, I have included the sprues below...
The multipart is simply because of the dynamic posing. It will allow you to rotate his upper body slightly for different positioning and makes weapon/hand swaps easier if you want something different on him. The choice of heads is included.
And as a final pic, I quickly took a photo of the Sister Liberty sprues. I'll do a size comparison with her this coming week (and do them in our actual photo studio).
These will now get resin mastered and should quickly move through to metal production. We should also get the missing/broken minis sorted this coming week and our resin house can give us a better schedule for when we get masters back and can send them for metal production.
I specifically didn't fill the above with 'sorry's, just take it as permanent that I am sorry that my ill health has impacted both the KS and our business in the way that it has. Better to spend my good health time resolving as much as possible
So no real news, save that some confirmation that models are being cast.
The bit about Sally being the backup for Artemis just puzzles me since well... Artemis has said he was near death from his illnesses. So if Sally hasn't come in yet, when?
So I remain in the call it quits camp. It's not worth Artemis' health and there seems no real back up plan.
It's all a bit too sad and I wish them all the best. Somethings should be private though, like his health.
If minis can or cant be delivered just say so and leave it at that.
Life happens to all of us so I think it would be a lot easier on everyone if things didn't drag like this.
Are those 3d prints going to then be used to "master" the resin models? I hope not because that will result in even softer details. Admittedly it's sometimes difficult to tell with 3d printer resin as it doesn't always show shadows well but that's why some folks ink them to accentuate the details when showing them off. Those look about the same level of crispness/detail (maybe slightly more if I'm generous) that I used to get with my OG first gen Elegoo Mars pre-pandemic.
We Munch for Macragge! FOR THE EMPRUH! Cheesesticks and Humus!
I posted a newsletter this last week and I wanted to gather some more info about the KS before sharing it directly here (I know some of you have forwarded the info etc and thank you).
That's the general state of HF i.e. not great thanks to my continuing up and down health.
At the moment it is up, so we are pushing forward. I'm not going to make any guarantees about me, but I have noticed some people who think that if I disappear so does the KS. That is not the case. Even if I were to just straight up die, everything gets shipped up to Sal and she will continue with it.
Since coming back to work I have attempted to organise the mess that we are in. The problem with being in and out is that I do not get notice of being sick and everything is left where it was the day I fell ill. Cover steps in to send out regular website orders etc and of course they need to move things and use things.
It's been, and continues to be, a bit of a chore. However, things have progressed this past week. We have received another batch of resins and I have talked to our resin caster about a schedule for the last few problem minis (2 broken moulds, 2 missing 'pieces, a sword and a head, and the 2 3d sculpts). Everything else is ready.
We will 'not' be waiting for all these problems to be fixed before putting up the pledge manager but we 'will' be waiting for a firmer idea of when they will be resolved.
I am not taking more money without a more solid schedule in place, this could take a week, it could take a couple. As long as I am up and working I will keep people updated. Sal will now let people know if anything happens to me.
Just so this isn't a wall of text, I took some photos of the 3d sculpts, which we have progressed with and will include them below, they are just from my phone but they should show what you will get and also the size comparison with existing minis.
I understand completely that people are annoyed at the extended delays, but I can assure you, spamming 'drop the pledge manager' doesn't do anything In fact if I'd dropped it before I fell ill this last time we'd be in a much worse spot.
Captain Cain is somewhere in between the regular soldiers and the Hel-IX enhanced guys. He is not a small man He comes in multipart not the 2 piece shown above, I have included the sprues below...
The multipart is simply because of the dynamic posing. It will allow you to rotate his upper body slightly for different positioning and makes weapon/hand swaps easier if you want something different on him. The choice of heads is included.
And as a final pic, I quickly took a photo of the Sister Liberty sprues. I'll do a size comparison with her this coming week (and do them in our actual photo studio).
These will now get resin mastered and should quickly move through to metal production. We should also get the missing/broken minis sorted this coming week and our resin house can give us a better schedule for when we get masters back and can send them for metal production.
I specifically didn't fill the above with 'sorry's, just take it as permanent that I am sorry that my ill health has impacted both the KS and our business in the way that it has. Better to spend my good health time resolving as much as possible
So no real news, save that some confirmation that models are being cast.
The bit about Sally being the backup for Artemis just puzzles me since well... Artemis has said he was near death from his illnesses. So if Sally hasn't come in yet, when?
So I remain in the call it quits camp. It's not worth Artemis' health and there seems no real back up plan.
This was asked and answered in the comment section of that last update:
Ryan Dunham
1 day ago
What I don't get is why, as you put it, were to "straight up die" and Sally would continue with haven't you done this already a year ago? If she's next in line to do it then give it to her to do now! You've been basically dead for over a year. So get it done. I know I sound harsh but your sob stories just don't fly anymore mate. It's excuse after excuse
Hasslefree MiniaturesCreator
about 24 hours ago
Should I die and the entire business need to be shipped to Sal,. who does not have a warehouse and works in another country from home, it will, as would usually be the case when someone in charge of a project dies, take a considerably longer time.
Sal is not set up to resolve the KS, I wrote it to let people know that there is a backup plan in case I die, or get too sick to work at all. The KS doesn't die with me.
Also I go out of my way to 'not' post sob stories I just inform people what has happened and what is going to happen.
That backer is being totally unreasonable. I'm sure this Sally person is perfectly capable of months of silence followed by posts kicking the can down the road figuratively speaking. There is no reason to assume he or she can't continue keeping up the current pace as you don't need a warehouse or be local to show little to no visible progress towards completion.
We Munch for Macragge! FOR THE EMPRUH! Cheesesticks and Humus!
warboss wrote: That backer is being totally unreasonable. I'm sure this Sally person is perfectly capable of months of silence followed by posts kicking the can down the road figuratively speaking. There is no reason to assume he or she can't continue keeping up the current pace as you don't need a warehouse or be local to show little to no visible progress towards completion.
Ouch. Not saying you're wrong, but ouch.
Due to their oversharing newsletters and this KS I know more about Hasslefree than I ever needed to. IIRC Sally is Kev's wife and has serious health issues of her own. Not sure what country she is in these days but the UK is weird technically Wales is a another country.
Those are some great looking figures that I would be proud to own in any game system.
I want a few teams for a number of different skirmish games, that will fill the bill.
Stay Healthy Kev, and Sally. You two have plenty of love and good will coming from this side of the galaxy!
At Games Workshop, we believe that how you behave does matter. We believe this so strongly that we have written it down in the Games Workshop Book. There is a section in the book where we talk about the values we expect all staff to demonstrate in their working lives. These values are Lawyers, Guns and Money.
Due to their oversharing newsletters and this KS I know more about Hasslefree than I ever needed to
So...there's a reason why its that way. From the about us section of the HF website.
Kev and Sal (The Whites) established Hasslefree Miniatures with Kev as a sole trader back in January 2004
HF was always a very hands-on, public company because of how it started - they literally knew every customer; who would buy what, when they would order, what sort of things they were looking for and liked. Those small start up miniatures companies from that period could do that.
A lot of the figures are named after customers who became friends - like Inso, who has a blog here. There kids grew up very much as part of the business - running around at trade stands, helping out.
People don't realise just how 'mom and pop' some companies are some times.
IIRC Sally is Kev's wife and has serious health issues of her own. Not sure what country she is in these days but the UK is weird technically Wales is a another country.
She does (its in the about section) - ME.
Again, as per the website, Sals based in Derbyshire whilst the business is in Caerphilly. Thats a hefty round trip for someone with a condition like ME, and its not connected well.
I think what Daemons trying to say here is that whilst mechanically, there is an option to resolve it... but its not an option that can be taken lightly
You're talking at least a container full of 'stuff', which you then need to house in reasonably good conditions, and then you need to set up to process orders, and then you need to have someone process orders as well as running the business. The more product codes, the more orders, the harder this is. Then theres is the issue that the logistics side of the business can no longer do the logistics side of the business.. that's a headache.
Reading the two messages, and putting my comms professional hat on, there more definitive with language if not with actions - thats positive. I appreciate it may not read that way, and I'm not saying its sunshine and roses, but.. I'm quietly confident reading these two.
So the short version, as always, is up here, then I will go into detail below for those who are interested in the why's and wherefore's of such things.
We are currently closed. We're not 100% certain when we will re-open but it will be at least 1 week and likely more.
Just to be absolutely clear, even though some people will ignore this part, we are NOT closed down
Something behind the scenes has happened with the server and it is some level of catastrophic, we are working on finding out 'how' much we need to fix and while we do so we are closed for new orders.
Existing orders will be fulfilled. However you may be contacted by us to double check shipping addresses etc. as while the server is melted we currently have no way of checking if you wanted a different shipping address to your billing address.
This does not affect the Kickstarter, it's only related to our webstore.
So for right now, if you have ordered from us and not received a despatch notification, please keep an eye out for an email in case we need to ask you something.
If you need to contact us, obviously our domain name is down so please use BWARTEMIS at GMAIL dot COM.
​Also please make sure you are following our FB Page as I cannot send out newsletters every day
The Long and Scary Explanation
Ok folks, strap in, because I'm typing this and even I don't believe it.
(If anyone out there buys into the whole 'we are living in a simulation' stuff, this will not help disprove it).
Yesterday our website went down. It's happened before, it's not usually a big deal. This one is.
I got an email from our web guy that included the word 'catastrophic', not normally a good sign.
Our server is toast, and backups or recovery are currently in 'status unknown' territory.
A mysql update broke, let to a number of steps (a rollback, a reboot, a corrupted file system etc.) that got worse and the reboot corrupted the whole thing.
(Just for clarity purpose, nobody's data is at risk or anything, this is more akin to a hard drive failure)
This is beyond terrible timing obviously, I am just back from illness and have been working on a number of things to get the business back up and running. This is like a kick to the genitals as far as that is concerned.
However, it gets worse! This happened the literal day that our web guy is leaving the country for a 'cruise', not even a normal holiday, a 'boat in the middle of the ocean, try working online from there' cruise!
So we are currently sans website and more importantly, sans database.
Obviously we have emails for all payments and orders etc. But that means over the next few days I have to manually go through all order emails, make a spreadsheet, mark off everyone's order that has been shipped using the physical sheets of paper we use for that and then contact people from their payment details to ship outstanding orders.
Can we do that? Yes.
Is it a metric f&*%ton of work that takes time away from the plans to release new product and get the KS out the door etc. that I have been working hard on these past weeks since returning from illness? Also bloody yes.
I'll get a holding page up over the next day or two and link it to this newsletter on our FB page. I can't even do that easily as ...no server.
The bad luck of it both happening, and the timing of the things around it is ludicrous. I stared at the email for a little bit wondering if I was still asleep to be honest.
But, all we can do is soldier on. No point in panicking or freaking out. We'll get the orders out, do a full manual inventory and then depending on how long it takes us to get the full site back up we will likely start up our backburnered Ebay store. We will keep you all informed about each step as we go but priority number one is making sure we get outstanding orders out the door so people don't start freaking out when they can't check on the website.
Arty.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I believe the website incident - Blotz (MDF Terrain maker) and a few others have also been affected.
This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2024/07/04 08:33:22
Not everyones properly back on line yet though (looking at the original list) - I imagine some have decided to call it a day.
Too Fat Lardies has only been back up a few days, and there does still seem to be back end issues (I imagine those back up are rebuilding from scratch if anything)
Thing is, a lot might be out of his/whoevers hands. Even taking the technical side of things out of it, Hasslefree had an enormous catalogue and if you've lost everything (images, text, prices) thats a huge undertaking to get back to right.
He's streamed a lot for a long time - theres a whole stream schedule available with some of his older streams
I do hope they don't shut down as I've been thinking of ordering a few miniatures for them, but I don't really see anything here that suggests they actually have? They've not posted an update in a while, but it doesn't appear as if they were very active with that stuff before and then suddenly it's stopped. Their last post before this was in December last year even, so a lack of communication just seems to be the norm for them. It may be that they just don't have the site working properly again yet, or they may have used it as an opportunity to catch up on things or even just have a bit of a break.
I don't see how this is anything but good news in an admittedly sardonic sort of way. The "coming soon" placeholder on their website is no more or less meaningful than any update they've posted on kickstarter for their long overdue campaign. At least now they're not actively taking any money from new or returning customers unaware of their recent woes whilst having no apparent real capability of fulfilling their orders. This is a bitter win for the gaming community and hopefully will allow them some time to focus on what matters.
We Munch for Macragge! FOR THE EMPRUH! Cheesesticks and Humus!
Not sure why people keep defending this sort of behaviour. I've recently hopped back into the KS game and backed two projects, Damsels Not in Distress 2 and Dark Object, both projects had a backer kit out in less than two weeks, so what's stopping Arty from doing this? If you can stream and shoot the gak daily on discord, you can pop onto KS and give a proper update.
Illumini wrote: Is there any recourse for failed kickstarters, or is our money lost?
In general its money lost.
It's like any investment, there is a risk that you will lose all of your investment. Even if a firm goes into administration, chances are that backers are the very last in the line of people that are owed money and a firm that goes into administration is unlikely to have much cash floating around even when assets are sold off.
That's the gamble with any Kickstarter. You put your money up front to allow the firm to do what they aim to do; with the risk that you could lose everything if things go wrong.
Hmm. Web site I can understand. But why not an update on FB? Or a comment on their KS project? Not everyone uses Discord, and anyone who regularly uses Discord and has a FB page, I'd expect be able to post on FB...?
i've found that small companies (even fairly sucessful ones) rarely manage to keep multiple social media feeds going baring the occasional 'new stuff to buy now' post (and even then you often find they fail to post it on all their feeds)
I suspect it's because a lot of it is not done in any sort of formally allocated business time, but more likely when the person who does it is fiddling with their own social media, and suddenly thinks, oh yes i need to post something for the business too
In fact if I'd dropped it before I fell ill this last time we'd be in a much worse spot.
