LOL
Je n’ai plus la moindre idée de ce que j’avais pris…
J’espère que l’excel de Sans-Os est mieux tenu que le mien 
Alors là, un grand merci sitthya, je n’aurais pu espérer réponse plus complète, tout est plus clair désormais.
Je pense prendre l’ensemble, car le jeu plait beaucoup à mon partenaire de jeu, et je devrais moi aussi aimer. Ça ne m’empêchera pas de m’intéresser à Exceed le moment venu, quelque chose me dit que c’est inéluctable, merci à toi 
De rien 
J’espère que tu vas pouvoir tout trouver en boutique.
Sinon, level99 à l’habitude de faire des packs avec tous leurs précédents jeux lors d’un Kickstarter, peut être le feront-ils quand ils lanceront Exceed (par contre les fdp, compte bien 50$ !).
Le mail vient de nous annoncer que la campagne de Exceed commence lundi matin
Je prends peu de KS mais la plupart viennent de level99 (BattleCON, Pixel tactics), un gage de qualité pour mes goûts !
Il te manque le Armory, non ?
Je ne l’avais pas pris, y a un moment où il fallait faire des choix pour économiser un peu. J’ai privilégié Light&Shadow parce qu’il permet de jouer à 3 ou 4 joueurs ensembles, ce qui m’intéresse plus qu’Armory qui n’aurait apporté que plus de complexité et de choix que je n’aurais probablement pas utilisés.
Après je suis aussi supporté la campagne de Millenium Blade, et du coup si j’accroche vraiment à BattleCON, je peux encore commander ce qu’il me manque (dont Devastation).
C’est le plus dispensable en effet.
Bonne ouverture !
Toujours aucune trace du colis. Suis-je le seul dans ce cas ?
Apparemment (d’après ce thread de BGG) aucun pledge européens n’a encore été reçu, les jeux viennent tout juste d’arriver chez le distributeur local.
Ah ! Je n’avais pas vu que tu étais à l’autre bout du monde !
“As for timeline, we have a massive project from [another publisher] which has come in at the same time and is ready to go. We will be starting this on Monday and it is going to take the majority of our time between now and our trip to Essen. Hopefully, we make a start on your project before Essen, but we certainly won’t be able to finish until we get back.”
C’est un message de Spiral galaxy, qui s’occupe du dispatch des boîtes en Europe. Ils ont reçu un gros projet d’un autre éditeur en même temps que Battlecon et comme il est prêt à être expédié, ils vont commencer par celui-là. On va devoir attendre jusqu’à mi-fin octobre 
Ah c’est propre 
Pas de nouvelles sur l’avancement mais une grosse update où Brad s’excuse et donne les raisons du retard du projet (j’avais carrément oublié mais à la base c’était prévu pour décembre 2014 !). Je ne traduis pas car c’est long :
Hey everyone,
It’s been good week for me (in the personal growth sense), but a really tough one as well. A lot has happened and my head is still spinning with all the things that I’ve had to take care of and manage, as well as all the posts I’ve been replying to and the replacement parts and games I’ve been mailing out.
I decided pretty early on in life that I wanted to do was make people happy. As a kid I would design games and give them to my friends and play them with my parents, and my biggest reward was always the smile on their faces when they had fun playing. Even though I now do that for a living, and on a much larger scale, nothing has really changed for me. I don’t care that much about how much I get paid or whether the games have a big commercial success. What I really want is to see that I’ve made everyone we’ve touched with this project happier.
You guys have all supported us and lived with us through all the trials that came with this project. I want to be able to come here and see that I’ve made people happy with my work. When I see complaints or anger in the comments or in our service emails, it makes me feel like I’ve failed all of you, and failed myself and my chosen purpose as well.
It’s been a rough week because I’ve been dealing with a lot of that through issuing lost, missing, and replacement parts and games. Many of you have been encouraging, and I hope that I’ve been able to make things great for the people that I’ve reached personally, and I hope that my staff has done the same. Our promise and our goal through all of this project has been to bring you a top-notch competitive gaming experience, and it troubles me deeply when I feel that we have failed to deliver the experience that we promised to any individual backer.
On the whole, I try to keep optimistic. I hope that for all of you, the game is a blast, and you didn’t encounter any issues (or they were made right promptly and professionally). However, they say you only hear about 10% of it when people are unhappy, and only 1% of it when people are happy, so it’s difficult to gauge our success.
We’ve made some mistakes and learned some lessons over the course of creating and fulfilling this series of BattleCON Games. Many of these mistakes were made well over a year ago, and many of them we’ll be living with over the next year as well. Such is the nature of publishing–whatever you do, good or bad, it gets immortalized in ink.
I’d like to share with you a few of the lessons I learned over the course of this project, mostly just to help clear my own head and move past them, so that I can focus on what lies ahead and what we’re doing going forward.
Focus on the Core Game
This was the biggest problem, and the source of almost all other problems in this project. We started out remaking BattleCON: War, and BattleCON: War turned out awesome. If that’s where the project had ended, then the entire thing would have been great.
Personally, I’ve lived with BattleCON: War for about 4 years now, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to do something new, especially with all the resources that were laid out in front of us. Fate, Light and Shadow, Armory, and a huge array of promos became the main focus of the project, because I got sidetracked by doing something new and cool, instead of sticking to the core of the project.
With our later projects, Pixel Tactics Deluxe, Millennium Blades, and now EXCEED, we’re holding things to the center much more decidedly. Even though our projects continue to have a lot of fun stretch goals, these always come back to the core tiers, and don’t introduce a bunch of add-ons (we limited ourselves to one add-on in each project–Pixel Tactics 4 and the Millennium Blades Expansion box). I can already tell from the way things are shaping up that we’ll have a much better time on these projects than War Remastered.
If you can’t do it right, don’t do it at all (or at least, not yet)
When we realized that we didn’t have the funding to complete Light and Shadow in the way we wanted, we should have pulled the plug and issued refunds to folks.
As it stands, Light and Shadow is a functional expansion, priced appropriately for its contents, but between taking out the punch boards and taking out a lot of the foil printing we wanted to do, it just felt like ghost of the project we originally set out to create. I would rather have printed it later, but I was afraid of failing in my commitments to deliver each project we promised. I think in this case I made the wrong decision and let my fear of failing fans get in the way of making the right decision for the game and the business.
With Millennium Blades, when we realized that we wouldn’t be able to deliver the expansion in a timely fashion, we decided to just push it back and release it after the base game. While it’s not exactly the same situation, the basic idea is the same: we don’t have the resources to do everything right now (though in the case of MB it’s an art/time resource, not a budget resource). We pushed that project back so that we could do it right without rushing, and it was clearly the right decision and didn’t get anyone upset.
Don’t produce too many extras & freebies
We gave away a LOT of free stuff in this campaign. We had 11 promo fighters (that’s more than an extra Fate-sized game), a free minigame (NOIR of Indines), pins, online bonuses, art bonuses, sponsored playmats and more. Plus we gave away all the old free stuff from past campaigns to people who asked.
The number of small items and extras, as small as they were individually, made fulfillment a nightmarish chore for ourselves and for our overseas fulfillment services. I believe that a main part of the reason that we’re delayed in Europe right now is because pledges are so complex that the fulfillment company had to take longer than anticipated to catalog and sort everything.
And the fulfillment mistakes start to mount up too. Backers don’t get a promo they picked, or are missing a bonus game, or worse a paid add-on. These pile up with the already large stack of misprint and replacement items that come with any project. We usually expect around 150 replacement requests with a 3000-unit fulfillment project, but we’ve already gotten over 400 once you factor in missing items and missing promos. And we spent well in excess of $30,000 to create and fulfill all of these promo items in the first place.
This ties back into focusing on the core project. We let our focus get too much shifted onto promos and add-ons and stretch goals. With our future games, we are bundling our promos together as decks–when you get Pixel Tactics and Millennium Blades, they will come with 2 decks of promo cards, and those are shrink-wrapped together and are automatic with your pledge. With EXCEED, you get promos based on your pledge level, and that’s all there is to it. Nobody has to sort through packing slips individually and run the risk of making expensive mistakes.
Inventory Management
Some of the biggest mistakes during this project were completely avoidable. Even though we had a ton of promos, we ended up promising more promo cards than we had, and had to order more. We actually were shorted on about 5 different products over the course of fulfillment: Pixel Tactics 1, Pixel Tactics Playmats, Tournament Kits, Summer Break, Devastation-era Promos, and Microgame Collections. All of these had to be sourced from our warehouse in Indiana, or ordered direct from China, and fixing all the issues, after we replace Summer Break and the Devastation Promos on order, will add up to over $10,000 in wasted pledge money.
A lot of the issue came from our willingness to do special requests. Playmats that were low on stock were improperly allocated. Promos were given away at conventions even when they were already promised to backers–things just weren’t kept track of properly. We would say “yes, we can throw that in”, and then not take an item off the store shelves, because we had so much of it. But then, 9 months later, we didn’t have so much of that item anymore. It was a long series of unprofessional, expensive, and embarrassing mistakes that we could have avoided just by saying “no, we can’t do that for free” or “no, that’s not part of this project” just a couple times.
To prevent these errors in the future, we’re taking a two-part approach. First off, we’re implementing a professional inventory system to track all of our different products and promotional items. Secondly, we’re changing our policy on special requests and add-ons, which again ties back to our main point: focusing on the core of the project, not the frills.
With Pixel Tactics Deluxe, we’re starting right now to make sure that everything is accounted for and handled properly, three months before we anticipate products coming in. We’re going to be separating the add-on portions of pledges and handling those as custom orders, while streamlining the rest of the process through professional fulfillment services, to eliminate stock-keeping mistakes.
Getting things done in advance
When we took on a lot of promos, and when we took on Fate, most of the content for those projects was only in the concept stage. We had to do extensive testing, and that testing and extra balancing set back our delivery dates significantly. I think it was important for us to spend the extra time balancing Fate and the promo fighters, but it should really have all been done in advance. Again, losing focus cost us a lot of time, money, and headaches.
We are already deep into the balancing stages for the next games in the BattleCON series: Trials, Wanderers, and whatever lies beyond (we have about 15 concept fighters that are just called ‘Future League’ at present). These are all being balanced now in our playtest forums, so that when the next BattleCON game comes along, we can make a small promise or two without overextending ourselves and delaying the entire project like we did on this one.
More rigorous pre-press checks
We has a few printing errors in this game—inconsistencies in rulebooks, mostly, but also the card color-matching issue, that seemed tame when taken individually, but when summed together, made things look unprofessional as a complete package.
With Pixel Tactics Deluxe, we started implementing much more rigorous proof checks, including hard-proofing every aspect of the game to check colors and layout. There are still a few little things that will always get through—an extra period here, or a missing icon there, but things are far better, and are continuing to get better as we take on more help copy editing, proof-reading, and blind-testing from our playtest forums and from professional freelancers.
In addition to that, keeping our focus down to a smaller number of products and approaching these products one-by-one is helping us to do the best job we can on each individual game. With the War Remastered expansions and promos, we had to do a lot of work in parallel, which led to a lot of errors. With Pixel Tactics Deluxe and beyond, we have handled each project individually and given it full focus.
So, in brief…
We’ve learned a lot from the mistakes made in this project, but we’ve made some really cool games that I hope have made a lot of people happy.
I’m optimistic that the lessons we’ve put into motion will continue to improve Level 99 Games and our ability to fulfill our core mission, which is to make something cool, and make you all smile when you get a box from us on your doorstep. It’s been a really rough road to make this project a reality, and for our friends in Europe, and for our friends waiting on replacements, there’s still a bit yet to go. But I’ll be here with you to the end of that road, that’s always been my promise.
I just wanted to talk with all of you, personally, about my own experience with this project, and how I’ve used it as an opportunity to grow, both as a person trying to do what he loves and as a business owner trying to do right by the people who put their faith in him.
I want to let you know, most of all, that I deeply appreciate all of you who’ve taken the time to read this, who’ve supported Level 99 Games, and who have pushed us to do better and to rise above all the challenges we’ve faced. You guys are the reason we keep coming back to the office day after day, and you mean a lot to us. I look forward to a future of making great games together with you.
- D. Brad Talton Jr.
Salut
Et bien dans mon cas j’ai reçu une confirmation d’envoi par mail.
Je ne connais pas le délai mais j’ai un numéro de suivi donc c’est cool !!
Re,
Juste pour passer l’info, colis reçu week-end dernier et complet !!! 
Cool ! Tu peux nous poster quelques photos ? Il y a des chances que le gros pledge groupé ne fasse pas parti de ce qui a été expédié avant Essen, du coup on patiente comme on peut
Chips dit:Cool ! Tu peux nous poster quelques photos ? Il y a des chances que le gros pledge groupé ne fasse pas parti de ce qui a été expédié avant Essen, du coup on patiente comme on peut
Mais plus ça va, plus c'est dur! (de patienter, hein!)
J'attends avec impatience une photo du pledge groupé
-Mildaene.
guizmo74 dit:Re,
Juste pour passer l'info, colis reçu week-end dernier et complet !!!
Pareil mais pas complet
manque deux extensions
J’ai enfin reçu mon colis la semaine dernière ! Il est constitué de :
- War of Indines
- War of Indines Extended
- Fate of Indines
- Armory
- Light&Shadow
- Bonus : 10 personnages bonus + Noir of Indines + badges
Bilan : Du très beau matériel, et on peut dire qu’on en a pour son argent, il y a beaucoup de choses. Il faut le temps de trier, de tout plastifier selon les bonnes couleurs. Mais c’est un pur plaisir
Les plus belles surprises
- Armory, la boite dont j’en attendais le moins. Elle a en fait un gros atout : elle vient avec une tonne de variantes de cartes de base (cartes bleues) ! Certaines se jouent même en deck. Les cartes Weapons ont l’air bien délire.
- Les roues de scores et les cartes de bases ont été re-dessinées, elles sont superbes par rapport aux originales qu’on trouvait dans Devastation.
- Se sont-ils trompés en faisant les paquets ? J’ai reçu 12 personnages bonus au lieu de 10. J’ai donc deux BruceLee par exemple, ce qui est plutôt cool si on veut faire des matchs miroir.
- Les playmats sont très beaux, de belle qualité.
- Light&Shadow : les cartes dorées sont très belles ! Dommage qu’on ne les ait pas en double.
- Un poster géant qui aligne tous les personnages de Devastation + War + Fate, un overview bienvenu.
- Toutes les cartes de bases, dans quelque boite que ce soit, sont en quadruple exemplaires. En double aurait été satisfaisant, mais là c’est le grand luxe.
- Les strikers ne sont pas les mêmes que ceux qui sont dans l’extension Strikers.
Forcément en commandant autant de boites, dont des stand-alones, et ayant déjà Devastation qui plus est, il y a beaucoup de cartes/matériel en double
- Les roues de score de Devastation deviennent obsolètes et sont à jeter.
- Les cartes de base de Devastation deviennent obsolètes et sont à jeter.
- War et Fate étant deux standalones, ils viennent avec leur lot de nouvelles cartes de bases, celles ci sont donc en doublons…
- … mais il n’y a que deux roues de score par boite. Donc il est nécessaire d’avoir War + Fate pour en avoir quatre.
Déception
- War Extended : globalement constitué d’alternative-arts pour les personnages existants. Bonne idée si seulement ils n’étaient pas réalisés par Fabio Fontes. Je trouve que ses dessins sont super moches.
- Armory : Les cartes objets sentent le mauvais recyclage des cartes donjon de Devastation. Elles sont pratiquement identiques.
- Pour titiller, les playmats sont peut être excessivement grands. Je préfère la taille des playmats simples de Devastation.
Pour le moment, ce qui ne me fait ni chaud ni froid
- Les badges cadeaux
- Noir of Indines, le jeu de cartes
Pour une première réception de KS, je suis très très heureux !
Moi en ce qui me concerne j’ai reçu le paquet il y a 20min et bien que la boite soit totalement explosée (merci mes délicats amis de DHL), le contenu semble intact. Pas le temps de check l’intérieur des boites mais extérieurement parlant elles sont dans un état impeccable. La seule chose qui “semble” manquer ce sont les pin’s (et je m’en tape perso). Plus qu’a fouiller cette demi-tonne de chips de frigolite mais ça sera pour… plus tard. J’ai reçu aussi Blood Rage ce jour, les priorités…