Given you've tagged me, guess I'll try to respond to some of your post;
I get not wanting to deal with negativity but people are still paying him. I think if you were supporting him on Patreon, it's now been 7 months since the last update, you've kind of earned a little negativity. Not everybody joins discord, for example so every now and then literally just come in, don't bother reading any of the comments if they're offensive and just post "Still here, working on the game. No ETA yet." Maybe post a screenshot or two and then disappear again. Just something to let people know the the thing they are giving you money for is actually still happening.
Correction, people "were" paying him.
After making that last Patreon post, he paused (or suspended) all Patreon payments.
With discord, it's not a platform that I use the most (out of all social media platforms), but generally if the dev is quite active on discord server, fans of the games can get quite a bit of new information which may not typically be available even on Patreon.
So if a person doesn't want to join discord, well it's on them and they can't go complaining "Why isn't this info available in Y" etc etc. Cause that's just the advantage of the platform.
This isn't to say that Hopes is currently active on discord; so to those tempted don't go complaining to me saying "You deceived me!" etc lol. All I am saying are merely benefits of joining discord compared to those that don't.
Or like you said try to get someone you can communicate with regularly who can update the pateron page at the very least. Something like what
JJJ84 does for us, even then unless Hope comes out and says "Hey this person is going to be my official community person, they will give you the updates." We shouldn't have to rely on someone like JJJ to give us updates, they should come from Hope himself. Even if it's only 1 update every few months, when it gets to 7 months, like now, that's a whole different story.
That won't really make any difference.
Every info that I revealed until now, I only have revealed after getting permission from Hopes anyway.
Any info which Hopes gives me the OK to share, I share here.
The rest (which he may have revealed to me), it's pretty much given he wishes to keep it to himself so I keep quiet about.
So only difference would be just the "title/position" of Community person, which I never really cared about.
And yes, for those who are in Hopes' discord already know I am one of the Proofreaders for DeLuca (along with Wibble, who is the main proofreader), but that's because Hopes wanted to give me that position for proofreading substantial part voluntarily, not because I wanted the Proofreader role lol
In the end, I'll still be limited in what I can reveal based on what Hopes says (which obviously is his right), so there would be no changes.
I also get Hope's perspective of "Well if people want to think it's abandoned that's their right" is not the right attitude to have in my opinion because the reason people think it's abandoned is because he hasn't said anything about it in 7 months, even on his pateron. Which is also why there's a lot of negativity cos he doesn't say anything.
If he poked his head up every 2 or 3 months and gave an update, people would probably be okay with that on his Pateron and odds are someone from the Pateron would post an update here. Hell he's got a discord, post the updates there because again someone, most likely JJJ would post the update here too.
And even if he doesn't want to post here the Pateron page deserves the updates. And if something's happened in real life then just post that. "Hey shit's happening in life at the moment, haven't been working on the game much, will be back at it when things settle down." Literally anything and not nothing.
"the reason people think it's abandoned is because he hasn't said anything about it in 7 months, even on his pateron."
That's not the reason.
The reason why people think it's abandoned is the Prefix/Tag system on this site (referring to the
Uploading Rules section 3 Prefixes).
Most people on this site don't even understand why the tag is applied, & when they see it they just assume it's abandoned (the fact that it's so hard to find certainly don't help things lol).
Hence, I find it is a very flawed system which doesn't take into account dev's irl personal situations; it only misrepresents actual positions of devs by just sticking the label after 3 months while fanning the flame for the trolls to infest the said game's thread to well..... talk crap, in which thread's state often becomes a dumpster fire.
It happened to this thread after getting the "abandoned" tag got slapped on, & it's the same with a lot of other games which got abandoned tag as well.
As for the whole how often the dev gives status updates; well, yeah there is no doubt he could have done a lot better in terms of his communications - and I did mention to him it may have been better off just giving a one or two sentence irl status as you said (this was early this year actually).
His response was, "Yeah, I was good at communication, until I wasn't. Can only strive to be better in the future."
As for why he doesn't make status update posts now (on Patreon, Discord, f95zone), well he's already aware of how this thread is on this site lol.
But regardless, he feels pointless to just say stuff cause he feels they will just merely be words at this point & he wish to back them up with something tangible when he says something.
Hence, you may not agree with it, but that's the way he's going about it.
Expect him to be active on all platforms when he's ready to release the next update.
But until then, he's content to let people think what they wish to think about the game's status.
