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 kestral wrote:
At the bargain rates in Reaper kickstarters I don't think you get to complain really. "Hey, we'll sell you figures at 1/5 the normal cost. But, uh, we're going to make them in China (Does USA have bones capability? - I'd pay a little extra), and it will take a while to get them." Sounds fine to me. They're super up front about what container is where.

To be fair, Reaper should surely have their gak together with estimations by now, so it's not unreasonable for people to be annoyed with their lateness over projected delivery dates. For me personally, I'm way the feth down the path of KS-cynicism, so anything I back these days I assume will be at least 6 months to a year late, and I tend to fire-and-forget, and make sure I'm okay with the extra year to get the stuff in hand.

In the last year I back two small KS with limited runs of metal figures. So local production, sculpts already done, and both from established manufacturers.

Both shipped on time and I was quite happy.

Now I need to paint them...

Point being I think Reaper among others is a victim of KS bloat, adding too much to one project. I mean even Palladium managed to get out one wave of Robotech.

So I would say 'adding stretch goals on the fly' as a warning sign for any KS project.

Between small sooner and big later I'll take the extra stretch goals every time.

I backed Bones 1,2 &3 as well as RTT, that comparison doesnt even make any sense.

For RTT, Wave 1 for the US was 10 months after projection and wave 2 is 3 years and counting with no end in sight. I'd say theres a high likelihood Reaper has all (significantly more than RTT total) delivered <10 months late.

Although, is it looking like it might be a serious inconvenient time for me, given my move to an undetermined location....

Jerram wrote:
Between small sooner and big later I'll take the extra stretch goals every time.

I backed Bones 1,2 &3 as well as RTT, that comparison doesnt even make any sense.

For RTT, Wave 1 for the US was 10 months after projection and wave 2 is 3 years and counting with no end in sight. I'd say there's a high likelihood Reaper has all (significantly more than RTT total) delivered <10 months late.

Although, is it looking like it might be a serious inconvenient time for me, given my move to an undetermined location....

Add to this the fact that Reaper allows folks to add to their pledges afterward - for example, my good lady and I doubled our pledges - and when the Pledge Manager re-opened briefly, I added yet again. (And, if they had re-opened it again when they started finding out how late shipping was going to be... I almost certainly would have added still more.)

The Auld Grump - my good lady missed that second window... by one day. If her paycheck had arrived just one day sooner....

stroller wrote:
Wonders if ANY kickstarters deliver the promised goods on time to promised standard - or whether I just hear about the ones that don't...

I backed one that almost delivered within the month they promised.

 oldzoggy wrote:
Kickstarters are inherently risky, it is good to remember that they are an alternative way to fund projects that you really want to get funded, and not a webshop nor an investment platform since you do not get shares in the company. Delays and setbacks in the development process are to be expected and company owns you nothing if things go south.

Okay, but come on, is no creator capable of allowing some slack in their estimates for when something goes wrong? It's even more galling when you see the same people running late KS after late KS, and they seem incapable of pattern recognition. I think KS needs a subroutine that adds 6-24 months to any creator's estimate. Because the consistency of lateness is almost comical by now.

But really, I don't mind so long as the creators talk to the backers and tell them what's going on. Sadly, that eludes many creators as well.

Dwarven Forge delivered 3 campaigns on time (if not early), massively funded as they were (all around 1.5-2 million before pledge manager additions), and their 4th is going to be a few months held up due to (you guessed it) CNY.

Which is to say that projects can fund highly and deliver on time, but even the best laid plans can get held up by extenuating circumstances.

RRT being a clusterfeth is among the low bars one can set for a Kickstarter campaign. They're my go to for "completely gaked the bed, and then did it again".

Anyway, I backed Bones 2, and liked what I got (like $25 in terrain bits and stuff), so I tossed another small (sub-full tier) chunk at them for Bones 3. Delays are unfortunate, but a quarter or two isn't horrific in my eyes, so I'll probably join in for Bones 4 as well, but again, just for a select group of figures that appeal to me, not the expected "$100 for a gajillion things" tier.

 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
In the last year I back two small KS with limited runs of metal figures. So local production, sculpts already done, and both from established manufacturers.
Both shipped on time and I was quite happy.
Now I need to paint them...
Point being I think Reaper among others is a victim of KS bloat, adding too much to one project. I mean even Palladium managed to get out one wave of Robotech.
So I would say 'adding stretch goals on the fly' as a warning sign for any KS project.

I backed a similar one - RPE's dwarves. But that's because they were keeping it small, and not bloating it with stretch goals, etc. There are a few small manufacturers like them or Stonehaven who I'm happy to back, though a lot of that is because of past history, and frankly not going overboard with their pricing. I'd have loved to back that guy who does the classic not-40k not-oldhammer stuff, or more of Tre's KS, but the price-model ratio just isn't there for me. Especially when I know the stuff is just going to sit in a box for ages and I'm mostly backing because it's nice to do and the models would be somewhat nice to have - but not must-haves.

Johnny Lauck also delivers in time, but, since he works in metals, does the casting during the KS. (He uses KS to pay back the metal he purchased.) He usually fulfills within a few weeks of the KS.

No SG's this tine, so he can better plan his project as well.

ObPlug: He just started a KS for robots and sf ratmen, : https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/967512676/robots-drones-cybers-28mm-miniatures-sci-fi-alien

Projects on this scale expect to cause some disappointments on timing. Reaper have a good record on deliveries.

My only gripes are

1 Postage was massive and I wished I could buy all that I wanted. Free Us shipping, but full price outsisde the US, so in a way non US backers wer subsidising others, they could at least have deducted the difference from our orders.

2. The pain is not over though, got customs to come, there was no EU hub.

"ROW don't matter" is the common excuse thrown up by some around here.

Eh, "free shipping" just means they probably tucked it into the base amount paid for the tier.

They still have to pay for it, there's no way they're dumb enough not to account for it in advance.

Unless we want to posit a conspiracy theory that they used fluffed up international shipping charges to pay for nearly 10,000 US backers shipping charges, it was accounted for somewhere. 3/4 of their backers were in the US, according to Kickstarter.

Forar, that is how you might think of it, but it's not the case.

More specifically the free shipping to the US is absorbed by ALL the backers, but those outside the US pay shipping on top of that.

International backers pay for ALL our shipping costs even though US customers get all their costs absorbed into the base price. If the difference between US shipping and international shipping was absorbed then everything would be even.

More, I believe, that postage up to and including the US postage is accounted for in the pledge levels - it is the amount above that level that is paid by the non-US pledgers.

VAT and customs on the other hand, seems almost to be handled on a case by case basis, with the method changing without much rhyme or reason.

The Auld Grump

I'm with Auld Grump here.

What is more likely?

- There's a dollar amount included in the base tier to cover US shipping, and International shipping is added on top of that.

- They just hope that 25% of their backers contribute enough in shipping to cover the other 75%? Oh, and they can't know how this will round out until the campaign ends.

The $7.73 I paid in shipping sure as hell isn't going to cover both a small box to me and someone's giant box of minis, let alone 3 of them.

Sorry, but both far as I understand Kickstarter, and my meager grasp on business, this would be insane and likely ineffective.

I *suspect* Reaper doesn't want to deal with international shipping.

I forgot which Bones KS, but Reaper posted in their forums or an update how much work it took for the paperwork to ship to international customers. One of their carriers (a major one?), in fact, effed up some of their international shipments by giving them the wrong information. Roughly, each *country* has the same amount of paperwork, so there's less work to do for countries that have the most backers (ie. USA). As much as KS creators discuss *shipping*, there's the cost of *handling*, so that paperwork costs more in employee fees for international shipments than domestic. (Reaper also mentioned that, although they said "actual costs", they subsidized internationals as well.) Reaper's owned by accountants, so I'm sure they did the numbers before coming to this decision. They also made almost as much money and shipped product *much* faster after the containers arrived, after implementing their international shipping charge. That says to me that, even though international backers want Bones, they're still not as profitable as domestic customers.

While boardgames with miniatures and metal and resin miniatures are pretty competitive on KS, I'm not finding any mass production of non-boardgame miniatures that compete against Reaper. WizKids has a retail line of pre-primed plastic miniatures that keeps getting delayed. I haven't been following how CMON treats their internationals, but, I guess, CMON would be the closest competitor.

How does Dwarven Forge treat their internationals?

All the money stuff is much more legitimate than the wait time which is just part of a Kickstarter. People are complaining that their stupidly cheap miniatures from a really, really good company are slow in arriving?

Hell, I had a second child at the beginning of November and for going on 5 months I haven't been able to even paint a single one of the various miniatures that are waiting on my workbench downstairs for me, or participate any other hobby, either. Both Kickstarters I have participated in didn't even take that long.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
All the money stuff is much more legitimate than the wait time which is just part of a Kickstarter. People are complaining that their stupidly cheap miniatures from a really, really good company are slow in arriving?

Hell, I had a second child at the beginning of November and for going on 5 months I haven't been able to even paint a single one of the various miniatures that are waiting on my workbench downstairs for me, or participate any other hobby, either. Both Kickstarters I have participated in didn't even take that long.

Congratulations!

Our firstborn came in September - just days after my own birthday.

She has just started crawling, and is eating up all of our available time. (You don't realize how fast a crawl is until you put her down, look away for one second, and off she has gone....)

I am not complaining about the wait time - Reaper has been keeping us up to date, which makes a big difference.

The Auld Grump - Brigid Danger O'Grump born September 16 2016. I made a joke about giving our first baby the middle name Danger, and Megan opened her mouth to snark back - then got this look and instead told me 'I would have loved the middle name Danger when I was a kid.' A month later, she was pregnant. The Danger stuck.

You know what? I'm glad Reaper Bones 3 is late now. If it weren't late, I never would have learned there was a little girl with the middle name Danger. I love this hobby.

Congatulations to both of you!

I remember when Kyoto Secunda and her Clone Sister Kyoto Secunda Prime learned to crawl over our makeshift barricades.

After that it was all downhill.

 TheAuldGrump wrote:

 AegisGrimm wrote:
All the money stuff is much more legitimate than the wait time which is just part of a Kickstarter. People are complaining that their stupidly cheap miniatures from a really, really good company are slow in arriving?

Hell, I had a second child at the beginning of November and for going on 5 months I haven't been able to even paint a single one of the various miniatures that are waiting on my workbench downstairs for me, or participate any other hobby, either. Both Kickstarters I have participated in didn't even take that long.

Congratulations!

Our firstborn came in September - just days after my own birthday.

She has just started crawling, and is eating up all of our available time. (You don't realize how fast a crawl is until you put her down, look away for one second, and off she has gone....)

I am not complaining about the wait time - Reaper has been keeping us up to date, which makes a big difference.

The Auld Grump - Brigid Danger O'Grump born September 16 2016. I made a joke about giving our first baby the middle name Danger, and Megan opened her mouth to snark back - then got this look and instead told me 'I would have loved the middle name Danger when I was a kid.' A month later, she was pregnant. The Danger stuck.

Congrats man, and that is an awesome name.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
You know what? I'm glad Reaper Bones 3 is late now. If it weren't late, I never would have learned there was a little girl with the middle name Danger. I love this hobby.

An old gaming buddy gave his son the middle name "Danger", and his daughter the middle name "Adventure". Good stuff.

Good to have at least some vague update on this. I'd kind of forgotten about Bones 3. After splitting the first two with friends, this year I realized I've got more than enough cheap minis and just had a buddy add the stone-henge-ey terrain piece to his order for me.

As for KS's and delivery time, like others here, I tend to assume that KS's will deliver 6-9 months quite late. Keeps my excpectations low and makes for a nice surprise if they are on-time. Even RAFM who has their own manufacturing delivered quite late. There are some exceptions though.

-Johnny Lauck (aka megaminis)
-Ramshackle games
-Oathsworn minis

These folks have been very on-time.

I can see both sides. As a consumer, I'm always sympathetic to people that are waiting on their product. I'm also aware that Reaper has a good track record, and good management, and if there is a delay, it probably wasn't due to negligence, sloppiness, or incompetence.

ced1106 wrote:
How does Dwarven Forge treat their internationals?

I've backed all four Dwarven Forge campaigns thus far, and all 3 boxes that have delivered (4th is due in the next month or two) shipped to me without issue. It's not cheap (I want to say $50-75 or so in shipping?), but they are sending a couple of sizable bricks worth of material through the mail, so I respect and actually appreciate them using a service that is fairly fast, secure, tracked, and delivers with a signature. I sure wouldn't want a couple hundred bucks worth of tiles sitting around at my door because the mail guy that day didn't feel like lugging it back to the truck.

The first three campaigns delivered on time or early (that is to say, they shipped out a pile of test packages weeks before the delivery target, and had most or all of the boxes at least in the mail by the end of the target month). Chinese New Years bottlenecking slowed things down with #4, estimate was January, looking like it'll be sometime Q2. Even then, a 4-6 month delay for one our of four campaigns is still under the margin of error when it comes to Kickstarter campaigns. A company pulling in around 2 million dollars and committing to make like 100+ different pieces and hundreds of thousands of them is the kind of thing I just assume will be massively delayed in general. That they generally haven't been is what keeps them as my gold standard for delivery.

Their communications can be a bit infrequent, but when they do drop an update it is usually informative and packed with pics, so that also generally isn't a concern.

To loop back around, that is one thing I really like about the Reaper campaigns; having an update schedule, sticking to it, and advising us in advance if they'll need to shift it due to a holiday or convention or something. Reaper may not be at quite the same level for timely delivery (though again, I don't feel their delays with campaign 2 or 3 are egregious enough to warrant ire, but that's my personal opinion), but their communications are among the best of the 80+ campaigns I've backed to date.

 Forar wrote:

To loop back around, that is one thing I really like about the Reaper campaigns; having an update schedule, sticking to it, and advising us in advance if they'll need to shift it due to a holiday or convention or something. Reaper may not be at quite the same level for timely delivery (though again, I don't feel their delays with campaign 2 or 3 are egregious enough to warrant ire, but that's my personal opinion), but their communications are among the best of the 80+ campaigns I've backed to date.

I'll absolutely agree with you on that. Reaper knows the importance of regular, scheduled updates and keeping us up to date. Even if that info is "we're not sure where the next shipment is right now?" That level of transparency is to be applauded.

Mind you, their first Kickstarter was a great example of how not to do updates - a lot of what we see for updates in the second and third Kickstarters was from Reaper finding out the hard way about what doesn't work.

But they did learn, so I am a lot more forgiving when I get frequent word of what is happening. (My toy soldiers are on a slow boat from China! Hurray!)

The Auld Grump - about to start a chase scene in Pathfinder... I expect it to be silly.

 Azazelx wrote:
For me personally, I'm way the feth down the path of KS-cynicism, so anything I back these days I assume will be at least 6 months to a year late, and I tend to fire-and-forget, and make sure I'm okay with the extra year to get the stuff in hand.

Yeah- I once had a KS deliver on time (it was the most disappointing KS I've taken part in).

What i'm wondering about is the level of communication that you should have. I mean, I'm in on a bunch of late KS at the moment- and I'd like to compare two of them:

Widower's Wood doesn't update very frequently. They haven't given us much information- they never really announced that the KS would be late- and they really didn't start updating us on things until after it was late. Overall- not many comments are being made about them.

Super Dungeon Legends updates weekly. They got very delayed due to an open beta they did with their rules (they found out from fans that they needed to fix a lot of fundamental rules). They've continued their open beta into other items, and have told us that they're getting things together for the final set.

They're also splitting shipping between things that got finished sooner, and things that are still in the works.


So- a lot of backer involvement, and very frequent updates. The current update doesn't have much in it, and some folks seem livid about the whole thing (swearing off SPM products and such).

I don't get it. I'd figure that the frequent updates and communication would make people LESS upset, not more.

(although, the lack of comments on the WW side might indicate that there's an apathy toward the product, and that's probably worse).

 odinsgrandson wrote:

 Azazelx wrote:
For me personally, I'm way the feth down the path of KS-cynicism, so anything I back these days I assume will be at least 6 months to a year late, and I tend to fire-and-forget, and make sure I'm okay with the extra year to get the stuff in hand.

Yeah- I once had a KS deliver on time (it was the most disappointing KS I've taken part in).

What i'm wondering about is the level of communication that you should have.

I agree with you folks. I wouldn't say I'm cunical but I have readjusted my expectations for most KS's to allow for a 6 month delay or so. I pledge, then mostly try and forget about them and am then pleasantly surprised when a box of minaitures lands on my doorstep. It's roughly the same way (though a longer timeline) as I approach buying things from HLJ where I always save on shipping by using the 1-2 month shipping method. As with most things in life once I've planned for the future, I am far happier (and I suspect most folks would be too) setting it asside and concentrating on the here-and-now rather than worrying about what-and-when the future might bring.

However, there are some companies where I expect and recieve prompt delivery. IIRC, Ramshackle, Johnyborg (formerly Megaminis), and Oathsworn miniatures all deliver on time or earlier and have done so over multiple campaigns. I feel that if I had to, I could schedule a game to use those companies KS figures simply by looking at their declared delivery date and adding a couple of weeks for painting them up. Of course for most other companies it's just a matter of researching to see if they're reputable and them fire-and-forget and know that they'll probably be late.

As for communication, it certainly helps, though I only tend to pay attention to updates if it's something that's going way overtime and I get reminded of it by a post on Dakka.

So, the theme of the OP is that dreamakuma has been waiting nine months or so for his miniatures.

I understand that can be annoying, but I've just taken delivery of models (from another company) that I paid for in June 2013.

Eilif, do those companies you mention - Ramshackle, Oathsworn, Johhnyborg - make many times more what they pledged for, offer huge amounts of additional goals, etc? Or are they more humble affairs? The quickest crowdfunding campaigns I've backed were for Freebooter's Fate and Kensei. They were on Indiegogo rather than Kickstarter, and came in with a modest increase on their target. And yet, they were both on time (to within a month at most). Probably because they didn't have to throw out their production plan and start again.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:

Eilif, do those companies you mention - Ramshackle, Oathsworn, Johhnyborg - make many times more what they pledged for, offer huge amounts of additional goals, etc? Or are they more humble affairs? The quickest crowdfunding campaigns I've backed were for Freebooter's Fate and Kensei. They were on Indiegogo rather than Kickstarter, and came in with a modest increase on their target. And yet, they were both on time (to within a month at most). Probably because they didn't have to throw out their production plan and start again.

They were more modest affairs than Reaper, but I think they all surpassed their funding level 4-10 times over. However, they didn't have a ton of exorbitant stretch goals and I don't think they had many stretch rewards that weren't already or mostly sculpted. They were also put on by companies that either do their own casting or have someone relatively local do their casting.

Here's the ones I was referring too:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/967512676/salvage-crew-28mm-humans
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/179741323/post-apocalyptic-dwarf-bikers
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oathsworn/burrows-and-badgers

I'm actually waiting on a second Oathsworn Burrows and Badgers project right now.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/oathsworn/burrows-and-badgers-new-blood-anthro-animal-miniat
The target is sometime in April and I've already gotten reports that folks are getting their figs, so I'm expecting it will be on-time as well.