Cross posting this in case some of the BoW crew bought in via the pledge manager and aren’t keeping an eye on the KS updates manually since it looks like KS and Crowdox haven’t been passing info/messages on to Hysterical Games as they should

In the words of Lance Corporal Jones, Don’t Panic – Captain Mainwearing!

Hey there folks, Rob here reporting from our manufacturing & distribution workshop!

It’s been a little while since our last update and a little while since we communicated on the Kickstarter – leading to a few strongly worded messages and comments! We’re very sorry for this, sadly KS broke the link between our email and KS, so we got no notifications of any messages, comments, anything until today when I adjusted some settings and found out that a lot were being diverted!

Let me just update you!

PILOT SHIPPING
Just before Salute, we announced that we had started shipping and that we’d expect it all to be done very quickly. This has taken a little longer due to some staff holidays that I had completely forgotten about (Vince went and got married – hooray!) and the sheer weight of work we have had to do outside of the Kickstarter for our day to day contract casting work in between Salute and UK Games Expo for our clients. I can only apologise for forecasting this incorrectly, but I can confirm that all the Pilot Pledges are now packed and any that have not already been posted will be posted out tomorrow. If you are one of the unlucky few that are still waiting, you can safely expect them by the end of the week if you are in the UK, or by the end of next week if you are anywhere else in the world. If this doesn’t happen, then please do email me on [email protected] and I’ll be sure to chase it up for you!

ACE SPLIT SHIPPING
Now then, this has been a bit of a mess and it’s gotten messier and messier. So, the first thing I did when I closed the Pledge Manager was to print off every single invoice, so we can start packing them up. We then pulled out all of the Pilot Pledges and set to working on those. We then went through and tried to find any Split Shipping pledges. We couldn’t find any, so we went on the Crowdox platform and, sure enough, the Pledges did not have Split Shipping on them. We then dug around a bit more, got told about some more functionality that we weren’t aware of and discovered that you can actually only find out who has wave shipping by individually isolating each order and checking. This has been a colossal miscommunication between Hysterical Games and Crowd Ox, which, due to their preference to using Skype (bearing in mind the issues of timezones) rather than simply emailing pictured instructions, has taken a bit more time than I would have liked. In the end, they stood up and did help us out, so that for future projects we won’t have this happen again.

In the end, we have spent a while going through each order manually, finding the pledge from our paperwork and separating it into a pile. Sounds stupid, but this is a big undertaking for our small company to do. I still have to pay someone’s wages to do that, it’s not something we budgeted for and I’m a little disgruntled that we’ve had to do that after paying Crowdox for hosting us on their website.

Anyway, none of that is any of your problem, I just wanted you to know where we’re at. We are just about to start shipping the Ace Pledges. I, foolishly, ordered a stock of books based on the numbers we thought we need for our first wave as the lower number guaranteed we would have them in time to start shipping before Salute. My intention was to order the next batch just before we start shipping the final wave, but we now know that we need a lot more than that for the first wave, so I am ordering another batch of them in! This will be the next delaying factor, but I will update as soon as it turns up.

Please note that some Ace Pledgers who have asked when their stuff will be arriving have actually not selected Split shipping. We are happy to split your shipments, just email [email protected] and we will send you an invoice for the postage costs. Just be advised that your pledges will be shipped after we have shipped the rest of the first wave.

EXPANSION PACK PROGRESS
Darko is just finishing a few of the final sculpts for the Panzerfäuste Kickstarter and then will be back to working on Spitfyre. We will share his progress with you as they come in. It’s then up to us to mould them and cast them.

Let me close with huge apologies on my part for completely missing the messages you have left me. To say I was horrified to see some of the messages and comments this morning is an understatement. I am all about being open and honest with KS backers and would really hate for you to think we are purposefully avoiding you, or delaying more than we would have to.

As part of that, I want to say that we are going to take Spitfyre off of general sale from any of our trade stands or on our website until the first wave of shipments is completed. I cannot, in good conscience, sell this product whilst knowing that Kickstarter backers are waiting for their products.

Many thanks for your patience and support!
Rob and Steve (but mainly Rob)
Hysterical Games