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Fairly shocked that we haven't gotten firm answers/updates yet.

It is well into the afternoon over in the UK.

They're having meetings about meetings it will probably be this afternoon or tonight.

 Alpharius wrote:
Fairly shocked that we haven't gotten firm answers/updates yet.

It is well into the afternoon over in the UK.

Seriously?

People are working, ya know.

Give em a day or two to at least actually investigate the questions you've asked. Possible the weekend to - ya know - get round to it.

This "Dakka is the center of the known universe, companies should suck up to us"-attitude is getting rather annoying.

Not to mention that this is "News & Rumours". It should be the job of .. ya know .. the mods of this site, to keep this thread to News & Rumours, and to guide customer complaints and quality discussions to an appropriate thread in the Mantic Games section of this board, or better yet the Mantic Forums.

I also didn't get my plastic heavy armor Enforcers added for free, I definitely had to pledge extra to get those.

Actually, I'm going to retract my vitriol over Mantic/James just a little bit and apologize for jumping down his throat. I spent last night watching all of the available Kings of War week BoW videos while assembling some models and he obviously does have a job (and I did enjoy watching those videos). But more internets interactions in general would be nice.

I get the feeling from the comments on the ks that mantic want to make sure this update is completely correct and gives the most definate answers they can. Id prefer them to take the time over it than rush out a brief statement and have dozens of comments to wade through afterwards.

If you remember the inital problems regarding the complicated shipping waves in dz, the inital update wasn't clear enough so it caused a huge amount of confussion until a more in depth update was released.

I think we can afford them some time to get this right.

 Alpharius wrote:
Fairly shocked that we haven't gotten firm answers/updates yet.

It is well into the afternoon over in the UK.

I told them that the update should happen as soon as possible, preferably yesterday. They just said it would be "soon". Dakka wasn't where these questions originated from and the details were drawn up long before this thread went into meltdown. There should have an update about it sent out before it became an issue on here but for whatever reason that update didn't get sent out.

 judgedoug wrote:
Actually, I'm going to retract my vitriol over Mantic/James just a little bit and apologize for jumping down his throat. I spent last night watching all of the available Kings of War week BoW videos while assembling some models and he obviously does have a job (and I did enjoy watching those videos). But more internets interactions in general would be nice.

This is sensible. I cringed when I read your original comments.

 edlowe wrote:
I get the feeling from the comments on the ks that mantic want to make sure this update is completely correct and gives the most definate answers they can. Id prefer them to take the time over it than rush out a brief statement and have dozens of comments to wade through afterwards.

If you remember the inital problems regarding the complicated shipping waves in dz, the inital update wasn't clear enough so it caused a huge amount of confussion until a more in depth update was released.

I think we can afford them some time to get this right.

Absolutely this. Better that they get the update right and not cause more questions by missing something. I believe, given an update I've just been given, that there were some final pieces to lock into place before they could 100% confirm their solution.

Again, people are going to be very happy with it. Please just be patient.

 Zweischneid wrote:
...to keep this thread to News & Rumours, and to guide customer complaints and quality discussions to an appropriate thread in the Mantic Games section of this board, or better yet the Mantic Forums.

Customer reviews and quality discussion make up a large percentage of most News & Rumors threads, where it is applicable. See the Puppets War threads for an example.

That is, until it either becomes a non-issue (the quality is universally good, and there's no concern there) or people stop caring (which actually happened with Puppets War for a while, although now their quality seems to have improved and people are posting about them again).

So, the fact that people care enough to discuss it is a good thing... and yes, the quality of components being delivered is certainly appropriate for News & Rumors.

Looking forward to the response from Mantic, thanks again for checking in here!

What is the best way to contact Mantic about issues with Dreadball shipments? I used their 'contact us form' on their website a few days ago and have not gotten a reply yet.

 CptJake wrote:
What is the best way to contact Mantic about issues with Dreadball shipments? I used their 'contact us form' on their website a few days ago and have not gotten a reply yet.

This is the email for dz survey questions, may be of some use?

stewart.gibbs@manticgames.com

 edlowe wrote:

 CptJake wrote:
What is the best way to contact Mantic about issues with Dreadball shipments? I used their 'contact us form' on their website a few days ago and have not gotten a reply yet.

This is the email for dz survey questions, may be of some use?

stewart.gibbs@manticgames.com

So it appears as if the million dollar company still doesn't have a functioning website. I think it is perfectly reasonable for customers to contact the company through a website and expect a response without having to hunt for secret staff-direct emails for a response. How do 'non-kickstarter' customers ever get anything resolved if the website doesn't work?

 Zweischneid wrote:

 Alpharius wrote:
Fairly shocked that we haven't gotten firm answers/updates yet.

It is well into the afternoon over in the UK.

Seriously?

People are working, ya know.

Give em a day or two to at least actually investigate the questions you've asked. Possible the weekend to - ya know - get round to it.

This "Dakka is the center of the known universe, companies should suck up to us"-attitude is getting rather annoying.

Not to mention that this is "News & Rumours". It should be the job of .. ya know .. the mods of this site, to keep this thread to News & Rumours, and to guide customer complaints and quality discussions to an appropriate thread in the Mantic Games section of this board, or better yet the Mantic Forums.

Yeah, seriously.

Are you serious?

Especially as this is, essentially, Mantic's "Job".

Additionally, a Kickstarter update would be OK, yeah?

Sheesh.

Any news on when Deadzone is actually going to ship yet?

 cincydooley wrote:
Any news on when Deadzone is actually going to ship yet?

I think that, and details of what will actually be in it, are what we are agog to hear in this update today

It's arriving at Mantic HQ sometime between the 25th and 29th November. It'll then need to be packed and shipped which could take a couple of weeks. I'd expect the first parcels to start arriving the same week and overseas the week after.

 Daedleh wrote:
It's arriving at Mantic HQ sometime between the 25th and 29th November. It'll then need to be packed and shipped which could take a couple of weeks. I'd expect the first parcels to start arriving the same week and overseas the week after.

Sweet, so its still on time. Good to hear.

Gonna have to figure out how to hide all the various packages that are going to be arriving at relatively the same time...

 Alpharius wrote:

 Zweischneid wrote:

 Alpharius wrote:
Fairly shocked that we haven't gotten firm answers/updates yet.

It is well into the afternoon over in the UK.

Seriously?

People are working, ya know.

Give em a day or two to at least actually investigate the questions you've asked. Possible the weekend to - ya know - get round to it.

This "Dakka is the center of the known universe, companies should suck up to us"-attitude is getting rather annoying.

Not to mention that this is "News & Rumours". It should be the job of .. ya know .. the mods of this site, to keep this thread to News & Rumours, and to guide customer complaints and quality discussions to an appropriate thread in the Mantic Games section of this board, or better yet the Mantic Forums.

Yeah, seriously.

Are you serious?

Especially as this is, essentially, Mantic's "Job".

Additionally, a Kickstarter update would be OK, yeah?

Sheesh.

Babysitting your forum is not the entirety of mantics job. If I wanted a answer to something they did or did not do or intended or did not intend the first place I would look wouldn't be the news and rumors of a primarily GW games forum.


*****************************************

With regards to people contacting Mantic I have had replies from the website forum on one occasion but on the other I ended up sending another message to them via kickstarter to get a reply.

Again - I'm NOT asking them to 'babysit' this forum - I'm asking for

1) an update that answers a lot of questions that exist now and 2) to send out the update...they said they'd send.

It isn't mysterious, and despite Pins' assertion otherwise, "Dakka" doesn't expect anything.

Additionally, Page 1 in the News and Rumors forum doesn't really look to be primarily GW anything.

Okay, I dropped my $141 pledge as well. Some cool stuff in this KS to be sure but everything that is not a Martian (minus that awesome truck) is not at all my thing. For me, the final straw is that I still haven't gotten interested in painting any of this stuff. Ah well, maybe I'll catch Mantic on the next spin.

You have 15 GW specific sub forums. Look at the thread numbers of those forums compared to the others. This forum is very GW heavy.

 dragqueeninspace wrote:
You have 15 GW specific sub forums. Look at the thread numbers of those forums compared to the others. This forum is very GW heavy.

Sorry to chime in, but their Major competitor is GW. As a business decision ouldn it be wise to keep track of what your competitors customers are thinking? Maybe even listen to their thoughts and try and implement ways of capturing those customers for oneself?

Manticore wants to be a big boy, then they need to do big boy work! Small companies CANNOT survive bad press. They need to b on top of their game every moment, and if they slip up hen they need o address it quickly, and completely so h problem doesn't continue to rear its head over and over.

 Theophony wrote:

 dragqueeninspace wrote:
You have 15 GW specific sub forums. Look at the thread numbers of those forums compared to the others. This forum is very GW heavy.

Sorry to chime in, but their Major competitor is GW.

As they are increasingly moving towards board-games / hybrid-games, no, I don't think GW is such a big thing for them anymore. Other Kickstarter-companies (e.g. CMON) probably are closer to them in direct competition.

And while Dakka-mods seem to think that "miniature-quality-discussions" are "news", it still strikes me as counter-intuitive for most people. This is News & Rumours. People come here to see "new miniature released by X-.. here's the link". and "new rumour about Y .. here's the link". People looking for a discussion on Mantic miniatures quality would never find it here.

That's largely the point of having non-News-&-Rumours discussion boards in the first place.

Admittedly, non-News-&-Rumour boards on Dakka are all pretty much dead (outside the 40K / WFB main-threads), not least because all the Dakka-regulars discuss everything and the kitchen sink in "News & Rumours", because everything worthy of discussion of some kind seems to be "News & Rumours" by Dakka's ultra-vague definition (arguably because this makes it more convenient for Dakka-regulars and Mods to have all "hot" discussions in one place, where they hang out anyhow, even if it makes finding these discussions in these 50-pages-mega-treads an absolute nightmare for more infrequent visitors).

Hey guys! It's been a very busy day today - and among other things (trying to organise the open day, filming a couple of videos for the Mars Attacks and Deadzone kickstarters, helping out with some writing for the Beasts of War Kings of War week (of war) and catching up after my week in Essen) I've been chasing up proper answers. Chris is putting together a massive Deadzone update which will go out very soon, and that will have lots of properly-worded answers which hopefully will cut the confusion.

As for things I can answer that I've seen in this thread:

- Daedleh isn't picking up info from a "friend of a friend" - he comes to Mantic HQ fairly regularly, and we tell him stuff! We have a fairly good policy on visitors - if you're in the area, give us a call and we'll give you a tour, and let you see what we're working on.
- I've had a look at the metal Zees, and I can't see the scale difference people are talking about. If you compare two of them that are in more or less the same pose, they're within less than a millimetre of each other. HOWEVER, I'm not saying anyone's wrong - if you have got your hands on some metal Zees that you're not happy with (or anything else that you're not happy with), we will happily either exchange them or give you a refund if you send them back.
- Regarding the time it takes to answer our web contact forms, Sarah (whose job this is now) is doing everything she can to keep up, but it also trying to help us catch up with some other things. Also, there are a few she can't answer without consulting us (she's new, after all!) so they get held up while she waits for one of us to become available. In any case, it shouldn't take any more than a week to answer a query. If you email us, we *will* respond!
- Yes, it's our job to answer customer feedback and questions. However, it's also our job to do a lot more things, many of which are a bit more urgent at times (for example, getting rulebooks finished, organising events, putting together Kickstarter updates... stuff that is very time-bound.) I like to think that most info is available and we are fairly contactable online, but we can't promise to be in every place at once. We use our Facebook page quite a lot, and due to the nature of Facebook - lovely red buttons telling you when people are asking you stuff - it's really easy for us to keep up with it. Third-party forums (even massively popular ones) are a bit tougher to maintain a dialogue with, but we will try, especially now I've seen how much you guys want us to have a presence here!

Hope those are some answers that are helpful. I'm going to go and put the finishing touches to this video so the Deadzone update can go out - I'll be back in a bit to answer any follow-ups!

Great post James, glad to have you on board!

Great to be here! Hopefully I'll find my sea-legs before I'm violently ill....

...I may be stretching this metaphor a bit.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
(...or am I?)

Nice to have you on board James.

Also, thank you for your assistance with the missing component I had from the Corporation Marines box about a month ago.

No worries! Always glad to be a help.

 lagoon83 wrote:
Great to be here! Hopefully I'll find my sea-legs before I'm violently ill....

...I may be stretching this metaphor a bit.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
(...or am I?)

Hello James,

I'm not sure if I should ask this here or on Facebook, but I was wondering if you could shed some light on what happened with the Men at Arms and how Mantic is working to insure that the Deadzone plastic troops won't share the same fate. What was the process that Mantic went through when deciding to release the Men at Arms?

I am mainly asking because all of my DZ money is going to go to hard plastics...so long as Mantic can reasonably assure me that I won't be clipping chunks out of all their arms and gluing bits to their other arms.

ISo, how confident should we be in the DZ plastic troops?

Thanks for any answers you can give.

Bob

Thanks for the response, James!

Regarding this:

 lagoon83 wrote:
I've had a look at the metal Zees, and I can't see the scale difference people are talking about. If you compare two of them that are in more or less the same pose, they're within less than a millimetre of each other. HOWEVER, I'm not saying anyone's wrong - if you have got your hands on some metal Zees that you're not happy with (or anything else that you're not happy with), we will happily either exchange them or give you a refund if you send them back.

It'll likely be cost prohibitive for me to send back any models I'm unhappy with for a material exchange (which is why it would've been good to communicate this change before shipping), so I'll likely just keep whatever I receive from Dreadball regardless of quality. But I do appreciate you looking into it and providing an answer, cheers.

This does mean, though, that I'll be going back to my strategy which worked extremely well with KoW- waiting until the sculpts are done and pictures are shown (usually by customers first, for whatever reason) and then buying the ones that turned out well.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Hello James,

I'm not sure if I should ask this here or on Facebook, but I was wondering if you could shed some light on what happened with the Men at Arms and how Mantic is working to insure that the Deadzone plastic troops won't share the same fate. What was the process that Mantic went through when deciding to release the Men at Arms?

I am mainly asking because all of my DZ money is going to go to hard plastics...so long as Mantic can reasonably assure me that I won't be clipping chunks out of all their arms and gluing bits to their other arms.

ISo, how confident should we be in the DZ plastic troops?

Thanks for any answers you can give.

Bob

Hi Bob!

The Men-at-Arms went through a strange process that I don't entirely understand myself, and everyone else who might know has gone off to a meeting. As I understand it, there were a few changes in how they were sculpted at different points during the process, which led to several delays; as we already had a trade release planned, and various retailers had already ordered them, we decided to go ahead with them even though they weren't 100% where we thought they should be. To be honest, we thought they were at about 90%, but in hindsight they probably weren't as high as that.

We've made some serious changes to how we do things - for starters, our CAD sculpting for soft-lines stuff (i.e. flesh rather than armour) is looking a hundred times better. Just check out the most recent Mars Attacks update for evidence of that. Also, with our Deadzone terrain (which will be in the upcoming update), our production sprues are looking better than ever. I'm honestly very, very excited. However, we're being cautious - again, the update (which will be up within the next fifteen minutes, as far as I know) explains all!


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 RiTides wrote:
Thanks for the response, James!

Regarding this:

 lagoon83 wrote:
I've had a look at the metal Zees, and I can't see the scale difference people are talking about. If you compare two of them that are in more or less the same pose, they're within less than a millimetre of each other. HOWEVER, I'm not saying anyone's wrong - if you have got your hands on some metal Zees that you're not happy with (or anything else that you're not happy with), we will happily either exchange them or give you a refund if you send them back.

It'll likely be cost prohibitive for me to send back any models I'm unhappy with for a material exchange (which is why it would've been good to communicate this change before shipping), so I'll likely just keep whatever I receive from Dreadball regardless of quality. But I do appreciate you looking into it and providing an answer, cheers.

This does mean, though, that I'll be going back to my strategy which worked extremely well with KoW- waiting until the sculpts are done and pictures are shown (usually by customers first, for whatever reason) and then buying the ones that turned out well.

Fair enough - if you do want to send them back, though, we can sort you out something equivalent to the cost of postage.

 lagoon83 wrote:

- Regarding the time it takes to answer our web contact forms, Sarah (whose job this is now) is doing everything she can to keep up, but it also trying to help us catch up with some other things. Also, there are a few she can't answer without consulting us (she's new, after all!) so they get held up while she waits for one of us to become available. In any case, it shouldn't take any more than a week to answer a query. If you email us, we *will* respond!

The problem you have is not that it can take a week to get a response, but no one has ever set an expectation as far as I can see. In turn, your overzealous fans have set a false one with their statements which say "I have never had more than 24 hour turn around, email Soandso directly!" The last thing you want is people circumventing your contact system to pester staff directly especially about stuff which may not be their job, but the idea that people expect 24 hour email response and fear their emails are broken or ignored and stories of people out there with frequent same-day responses makes people upset and switch to emailing via other means. (or forum/KS comments bitching)

Simple stuff like email confirmed receipt, a 'real person' emailing back 'I can't answer your question, it may take a week to get an answer' and forcing everyone through a central communication's system (like a bug tracking or support ticketing system like lots of companies do) to keep things from falling in-between the cracks by having 'fans' encouraging to email people directly. You guys should be setting the 'hear back' timeline via your contact page or via email receipt. People going to forums with 'my email has no response' is a sign of frustration which is going to cause relation issues.