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 Black Nexus wrote:
new update says the first boxes have shipped(!)...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1744629938/dreadball-the-futuristic-sports-game/posts/359595

Amazing. Barely six week from raising funding to shipping the product.

Who knew you could design and produce a miniature game this fast!!!

Time for CMON et al to stop slacking

 Zweischneid wrote:

 Black Nexus wrote:
new update says the first boxes have shipped(!)...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1744629938/dreadball-the-futuristic-sports-game/posts/359595

Amazing. Barely six week from raising funding to shipping the product.

Who knew you could design and produce a miniature game this fast!!!

Time for CMON et al to stop slacking

And if you read between the lines, they suffered a lot of delays and such - all the Dreadballs were originally supposed to come prepacked and shrinkwrapped from China (hence the reason why they couldn't sign the rulebooks included in the box) but they got everything as separate components and had to manually repack everything. But not a single public complaint, and regular updates on the statuses of everything. This is how you run a Kickstarter. And starting tomorrow, they're doing the "12 days of Mantic", showing off a new sculpt each day alternating between Dreadball and the Kings of War Kickstarter.

 judgedoug wrote:

And if you read between the lines, they suffered a lot of delays and such - all the Dreadballs were originally supposed to come prepacked and shrinkwrapped from China (hence the reason why they couldn't sign the rulebooks included in the box) but they got everything as separate components and had to manually repack everything. But not a single public complaint, and regular updates on the statuses of everything.

Imagine that, keeping your backers informed. What a concept. Someone should run a kickstarter on a way to bottle that philosophy and get other companies to drink it down.

Yay!! At least one KS delivered.

Can't wait to get this and put it on the tabletop!


BTW, is this the first KS to actually be close to its promised/guessed/intended delivery time?

 Salacious Greed wrote:
Yay!! At least one KS delivered.

Can't wait to get this and put it on the tabletop!


BTW, is this the first KS to actually be close to its promised/guessed/intended delivery time?

Kings of War delivered early.
Well, on the first part. The new sculpts are scheduled for Q2 2013.

 Salacious Greed wrote:
Yay!! At least one KS delivered.

Can't wait to get this and put it on the tabletop!


BTW, is this the first KS to actually be close to its promised/guessed/intended delivery time?

The first I've been involved in,

but then again the basic componants box, rulebook, basic teams had already been ordered and were in production when the KS went live (although from Quirkworthy Mantic were promised stuff sooner, and pre-packed)

Awesome stuff, purely selfishly hopefully that means retailers should start receiving theirs before too long too!

Any chance before xmas I wonder?

^ Probably. A few UK retailers already have them on shelves, much to the anger and #firstworldproblems rage of certain KS backers.

I'm so glad Dakka hasn't joined in on that.

Oh and btw, this early delivery for KS backers is being done in the face of Mantic being let down by multiple different suppliers.

Their main supplier promised that all of the Dreadball boxes would be delivered assembled and shrinkwrapped.

What Mantic actually got delivered from China was a pile of un-assembled components and they've had to work insane overtime and turn their offices into packing space to get each box hand-packed, doing the work that their supplier couldn't be bothered to do, despite being paid for it in advance.

Mantic *always* plans for disasters to happen and are not afraid of simply knuckling down and working extremely long hours as a reaction to things going wrong instead of just posting "we had a problem, there will be 3-4 month delay, not our fault, deal with it" as some other Kickstarters have done, I think that's what keeps them ahead of other companies in terms of meeting their commitments. Earlier this year they had a boatload of minis sink off the coast of China, but it didn't affect their release schedule, pre-orders still shipped on time.

Here's some more info on the topic: http://quirkworthy.com/2012/11/30/its-not-really-my-place-but/

So many other companies running Kickstarters would have simply said "bugger it, it'll have to ship Jan/Feb" in response to that rather than going out of their way to hit the shipping deadline (Kickstarter calls it an estimate, but we all know full well that it effectively means "deadline" if you want to be taken seriously in future). Instead we have Striker boxes being shipped out to everyone starting next Monday, some of you on here will be getting your packages in a few days time.

Huh. Thanks for the info SS, that makes me respect Mantic even more! Makes the excuses of every other company running a kickstarter right now seem a little... Lame.

From what I've seen, Dakka appears on the whole to have the attitude that things WILL happen to mess things up, and companies appear to be judged more on what they do when those screw-ups happen. If a company like Mantic does their level best to make things right and communicates about the work they're doing, very few people here will crucify them (not that it doesn't happen). I don't know if that's because Dakka is an older online community with more, ahem, veteran gamers who have perspective or just a happy coincidence.

I was disappointed when DFG slipped, and yes, DreadBall is shipping later than I'd have liked. At the end of the day, it's just not that a big a deal that my toy soldiers/space football players will be here two weeks from now instead of next week.

All in all, I believe Mantic deserve a pat on the back for keeping to what they promised in the Kickstarter by delivering DB in December, regardless of their issues.

Then a cheer for including some MVP's a month or so earlier than expected and getting those January pledges moved forward.

Oh did I mention the regular updates they put out?

Sadly Steve Jackson's Ogre and Sedition Wars are not so cusomer friendly....

 scarletsquig wrote:

So many other companies running Kickstarters would have simply said "bugger it, it'll have to ship Jan/Feb" in response to that rather than going out of their way to hit the shipping deadline (Kickstarter calls it an estimate, but we all know full well that it effectively means "deadline" if you want to be taken seriously in future). Instead we have Striker boxes being shipped out to everyone starting next Monday, some of you on here will be getting your packages in a few days time.

After the brief back and forth I had a few days ago in the Sedition Wars thread when Mike flagged that the May stuff is going to be late as well, and with the arrival of some boxed sets from Mongoose, I started working out how well my Kickstarters have worked out so far. The answer is not too bloody well, actually. I started turning it into a couple of blog posts instead of writing it here, and what I already knew (That Mantic have been the ones to actually deliver AND update regularly) really stands out even more. What surprised me was how badly pretty much all of my other projects (excepting Mongoose) have slipped, and how much more forgiving I am towards those with decent communication (Reaper, Dreamforge, RBG) over those with poor communication (CMON/SW/etc).

So yeah, kudos to Mantic. And you know what? When Mantic start the Warpath KS, I'll be there with bells on. Others? Not so much.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Krinsath wrote:
From what I've seen, Dakka appears on the whole to have the attitude that things WILL happen to mess things up, and companies appear to be judged more on what they do when those screw-ups happen.

It just gets a little tiring when they ALL have screw-ups and delays.

^ That's an interesting couple of blog posts there. I didn't realise that almost none of these wargaming Kickstarters are hitting their shipping dates on time, and that out of those that do have problems, the majority don't even bother with regular updates. Makes me kinda glad I haven't gone too nuts with buying into all of them. Going to keep ignoring them next year and just save up for the Warpath KS (either April or June next year).

I'm really glad Mantic are the only one on your list that you're happy with, their customer service and good attitude is one of the things I've always tried to highlight, but it hasn't been until the kickstarter craze took off that people have seen just how dedicated they actually are at coping with high demand and tons of pressure. The reaction to things going wrong is definitely really important, as you say, it only takes 5 minutes to post a KS update to let people know what's been going on in the warehouse that week or what the latest word from the printers is.

As a counter to my earlier comment, this is probably an example of one of the good things about having a businessman (Ronnie) running the company rather than an artist. Stuff gets done, and it gets done on schedule.

Oh, and they've moved out of their old offices that got completely flooded a couple of Decembers ago (there weren't any order delays as a result of that back then either :p) , so the flooding across the UK at the moment won't slow things down either.

I hear Impact! are pretty good with Kickstarter too, they've built up a good customer base with about 5 different kickstarters that haven't ran into any problems.

Well, there seems to be a strong correlation between overfunding and delays for Kickstarter more generally (http://www.gottabemobile.com/2012/07/17/only-25-of-kickstarter-projects-ship-on-time/) (and no, a correlation doesn't mean that EVERY overfunded project is delayed).

A "run-away-success" can be all sorts of problematic in itself. It's not always a smooth process to "scale" up to something that far exceeded your initial expectations.

Today's Green:

I like it - "Splinter" was the only reason I bought the coaches pack the others I could take or leave so at least my $15 wasn't wasted.

 Cyporiean wrote:
Today's Green:

Turtles, the Shredder has taken April O'Neil. You must stop him and his army of Foot soldier robots!

 Cyporiean wrote:
Today's Green:

Wow, I gotta say, I had no interest in the coaches before, and while I still don't have much use for them as a whole, that is one of the best rat-men I have ever seen! If that aesthetic was carried over to the Vermin team as a whole I would be buying extras of them.

Damn fine!

 Buzzsaw wrote:

 Cyporiean wrote:
Today's Green:

Wow, I gotta say, I had no interest in the coaches before, and while I still don't have much use for them as a whole, that is one of the best rat-men I have ever seen! If that aesthetic was carried over to the Vermin team as a whole I would be buying extras of them.

Damn fine!

I think really this game just needs a turtle team

 ironicsilence wrote:


I think really this game just needs a turtle team

Season 3, the Teratons.

On the topic of KickStarter slippage, I do think some of it is the scale of success. Dreamforge, for example, is certainly a victim of this. November was very close to the end of the KickStarter to be creating all the new tooling (a week-long Chinese holiday didn't help either). In the end. the factory couldn't cope with the sheer demand and complexity like they had thought is what it sounded like. I thought November was very ambitious for anything they didn't have halfway in production yet, and honestly a month's slippage on the first shipment with no expected further delays isn't horribly unreasonable. It's not the one week delay of Mantic, but it's not as bad as others I've heard.

Had Mantic not had most of the things lined up already, I can easily see them falling into the same situation. However as a product they had had plans to launch for a while previous, factory screw-ups are less crippling to the delivery timeline.

As scipio said, you can be a lot more forgiving when the people running it deal with you straight rather than saying nothing.

That coach is amazing! I think I just rolled an exploding six in my underwear.

The only explanation I can think of is that there is a finite amount of awesome available to the Veermyn range, which must be conserved. Therefore, Mantic have saved it all up, denying all previous Veermyn models any awesomeness so that they could release it all in one creative blast via Coach Splinter.

I don't think I pledged for the coaches in the end but that is still one fine looking model!

any idea when the strikers ship out?

Triszin wrote:
any idea when the strikers ship out?

Look to Scarlet Squig's post near the top of this page, he mentions Strikers are supposed to start shipping tomorrow. Meaning we should have them before Christmas!

Triszin wrote:
any idea when the strikers ship out?

They have already started. Some retailers have basic games and the starter teams, but the backers should be getting their full first wave in the shipment.

Saw the game in a store yesterday, but still haven't gotten my shipment.

Pretty lame.

I guess for future Mantic KS, it'll be safer to wait for the release in stores than back the campaign. You'll get your stuff faster

You may get it faster, but minus all the kickstarter extras.

CptJake wrote:
You may get it faster, but minus all the kickstarter extras.

What extras?

All those multi-hex minis and 2nd/3rd season stuff won't ship for a while (Q2 2013 is what the Kickstarter says). And, seeing how this goes down, I wouldn't be surprised if retailers get these earlier as well.


All it comes down would be T-Shirts and the one or two Kickstarter exclusive sculpts like that Penny Arcade guy.

The first shipment to backers doesn't include anything that isn't already in the stores, except that signed art print for Striker. Yihaa.

Zweischneid, stop sounding like "But I want it now!!! " *spits dummy*

I think the 'extras' he was referring to are probably the mass of extra stuff that you are getting at an extremely bargain price. Unfortunately I didn't back the KS, but I wish I had - would much rather get the stuff cheaper (and more of it) if it meant waiting a week or two.

Actually the first wave of MVPs will be included in the first KS Striker shipments, some of which will not be hitting retail for another 1-2 months.

Some of the other MVPS from season 2 will be delivered 3-6 months in advance of retail.