While this is fair, it is also the first time it has happened to Tess. A second time would be very worrying. A first time I can forgive.
Somewhat true and both not true in my opinion. Feel free to disagree but Tess doesn't usually set hard deadlines until she's very close and then they are usually met.
Kinda care about this but also kind of don't. I do pay on an upper Tier but am finding myself less and less interested in these little sets. What I wouldn't mind seeing for higher tier members is some clothing and posing options for the main female characters. Options like Olivia has half her hair black while being in a super-hot outfit, something like that. Might take less time, be more doable. Wouldn't be for in-game of course, but more like little extras Patreons get.
This could end up being a major problem. I hope that by cleaning paths up it won't.
I'm not sure if hiring people to work on a project like this is as easy as you think. TBF, you did say that was not fully in her control yet she shouldn't have to pay, say, 1.5 market value just to get someone to work on her game to please either me or you. I'd love a dedicated team but it is just not realistic.
1. When you're making about $70,000 a year, I don't think it is unreasonable to make some plans to avoid the loss of all your work. I back things up that are important and I make far less than she does on this project. That being said, yes, mistakes happen and she has taken steps to fix it. And I agree, she communicated well about this after it happened, was transparent, and took steps to ensure it won't happen again.
2. Tess did set a deadline when she committed to a shorter development cycle for this update. She gave a rough estimate of 4 months and a general render target of ~1,500. Sure, she didn't say "the game will be out September 15th", but she did effectively lead people to believe there would be a release at some point in the fall. I think it is absolutely fair game to criticize her now being at about 8 months of development time (by realistic final release in February) of an update she gave a reasonable target of 4 months for. Now, she has lost a week's work and more than that in knock on effects, but even if you allow her a month of extra work for that it is nowhere close. I think she can also fairly be credited for delivering far more renders than promised (more than double based on her last update), which is great. But this is totally botched communication for saying you will deliver in 4 months and then being unable to stop yourself from continuing to add content for another 4 months. Look, I'm glad we get more content, Tess' content is consistently great and more of it is a plus. But the reality is if she had stuck close to her original plan, we could have had a short update in the fall and another short update in a month or so. We'd have the same content delivered, it would have just been delivered on the schedule that was given. Ultimately I don't care what development cycle Tess adopts if it results in us getting the same content, she should do what is best for her. But once she comes up with a plan and communicates it, it would benefit her to stick closer to that. I find the people constantly harassing her about release to be really annoying people with no self-control detracting from her work on the update and operating contrary to their own interests in a quicker release, but their thought process is at least discernible given they were expecting this in September.
3. I also don't care too much about the sets and think it is a bit of a poorly thought out reward given it basically requires her to render over 100 renders between the three on a semi-consistent basis, which hugely eats into her time to work on what everyone supporting her actually wants. But in my mind this is the biggest concern. You have people paying her $10 USD a month (considerably more in some other currencies) for her to deliver something she is simply not delivering. I stopped supporting her in the late fall for this reason, in addition to a change of financial circumstances. She has promised to provide this in exchange for support at this level, and over half a year with no content delivered when people have paid her about $60 for this benefit in that time is not good. You can get a lot with $60, I get you are mostly supporting her work on the game as a patron, but when she says she'll deliver some token benefit as well, she really should once in a while. This is the only area in which I think Tess has fallen short of the ethical standards she sets herself; she has a contractual obligation here she is not meeting.
I don't think she should nor do I want her delivering this more than once every 3 months or so, but she's way beyond that. I would also be willing to support her again if she scaled down the obligations on herself and delivered a couple of renders of characters in sexy poses (appropriate for the dom or sub subscriptions) every month or so. I think that would be fair and create a more manageable workload. But the issue is she hasn't delivered anything, not even a single render, for over half a year. I understand she has set this aside to catch up on being behind with the update, but in my opinion she should have paused billing on those tiers at the very least once she got to half a year of delivering none of the promised rewards for them. There isn't even any update about these or indication they are on her mind later than September when Anais was apparently working on them, last I can recall. If Anais is working on them and can't deliver 2 sets of 40 renders in a 4 month period, I'm not sure how she's going to be able to manage her own game.
4. I'm confident in Tess' work ethic and professionalism that any major bugs that arise will be quickly fixed. She has a track record of delivering on that. But minor issues lingering because they were poorly tracked or they were delegated and the person supposed to fix it didn't is not good nonetheless. I think this is a good area for improvement before going for a Steam release as Tess hopes to.
5. I don't think it is easy, but I also believe I could likely find someone to help in some area of the game and reduce my workload if I was working with Tess' budget and I'd been trying to find someone for years now as she has. But, I will freely concede this is the most speculative of my criticisms, and Tess may have exercised excellent judgment in holding off hiring if the right person wasn't there.
Again, not trying to bash Tess. I think she has created the best AVN out there which is really awesome work from a first time dev with no background in any related field prior to starting. Her work ethic is awesome. In most instances her communication and transparency is as well. I'm just identifying what in my mind are some legitimate areas of improvement as examples of constructive criticism vs. just being a toxic person and taking shots at a dev for no reason as some others here have been doing.
