Camelot Unchained Refund Received

What will likely be the last post on the topic of Camelot Unchained here for some time.

I got a refund on my Kickstarter pledge.  I got it very quickly and with no deductions for processing charges at the CSE end of things, just the money transfer fee from PayPal, a mere $3.49.  Op success.  I should be very happy.

And yet I am still a little prickly about the whole thing.  I still think that a transaction ID for a credit charge remains a pretty unlikely thing for people to have around nearly seven years later.  Mark Jacobs says that the company needs to use that to protect themselves from scammers, but it sure can make it hard on people who didn’t keep one specific email from that far back.

I am also a bit prickly about the fact that I got a refund so very quickly.  I have an egalitarian streak, and getting jumped to the head of the line and getting an expedited refund straight from the CEO for being the loud mouth doesn’t make necessarily make me feel good about myself.  I’m not giving the money back… dollar votes are still a thing in my mind, and that was a motivation here… but I don’t have to like the fact that others are going to be stuck.  I don’t want to be special, I just want to be part of a system that works.  But that is so rarely the case.

Before you declare this a victory proving that blogs are still relevant, I have to stop you.  They aren’t.  Blogging remains a backwater in the world of social media.  If Bree at Massively OP had not mentioned me to Mark Jacobs I might still be waiting for the Pony Express to deliver my request to the archives department of my credit card company in Wichita in the hope that they would be able to find a transaction ID somewhere in the Indiana Jones warehouse where I imagine they store their old paper records and other such these treasures.

I did not ask Bree to do this for me.  She had asked me to forward the email blast that CSE sent out to everybody asking for refunds last week, and I followed that up with the next message from CSE just to keep her in the loop.  Next thing I knew Mark Jacobs had taken up residence in my comment section.  It was a bit of a shock.

As for why I wanted a refund, there are a couple of reasons.  The first, as I mentioned above, is dollar votes, the idea that you spend your money on things you support and believe in and withhold it from things that you do not.  After years of delays and updates and things that have not come to pass, I began to feel my support was not warranted.  There is a whole story of a startup I worked for in the 90s that plays into this, but I will just say that enthusiasm fatigue is a thing.  Given enough changes, updates, delays, and excuses and your capacity to give a shit will eventually fade.

This is why I try not to get invested in games too early in their development cycle.  It rarely ends well as all surprise and sense of accomplishment tends to be broken by early familiarity.

I also pledged more for this campaign than I did for many other, largely due to Mark Jacobs visiting my blog back during the Kickstarter campaign.  This week was not his first visit.  Blogs were still mildly relevant in 2013 I guess.  And while $110 isn’t going to make a huge difference in my life, I pledged that much only because of him.

And then there is the fact that almost seven years down the road I am not sure I care about the game any more.  Part of that is the enthusiasm fatigue I mentioned above.  I unsubscribed from the updates email list because it was tiring to read after a few years.  (For whatever reason I have not unsubscribe from the Star Citizen weekly updates. I suppose their brevity makes them less wearing.)

But part of it is my, my life, my friends, and what I enjoy have all changed over time.  Seven years changes people.  What CSE is selling doesn’t really thrill me now, so a chance to redirect a bit of money into something that I might enjoy is something worth doing.

Now to figure out what that is.

Anyway, I won’t harp on this or be one of those people who has to post something negative every time Camelot Unchained gets mentioned.  That isn’t my style.  I got my money back and I can move on to something else and leave this in the past.