Gamma = release candidate.

They are now trying to offer partial refunds without any reason for why it is partial. They really are trying everything^^

I can call this simply unethical.

Same here they offered me £50 out of the £105 I pledge... this is getting ridiculous.

Well, luckily I didn't kickstart this (because I don't kickstart anything on general principle), but I would have loved to play a new Elite game. Explore the universe, trade, fight off pirates... But I had planned on doing that on my own, offline.

Weird, I wonder how they come up with these numbers...

As a KS backer, they offer me 45£ on my 80£. What's the meaning behind those 35£ you asked ? Frontier say that's for the beta I didn't play for a single second the last year. Maybe I will play it later. Frontier is so nice.

Dear *******,

We are writing to you following your request for a refund.

Firstly we want to clarify and re-iterate that the announcement of no offline play does NOT affect the existing single player / Solo mode. Single player / Solo mode is and will be still in the game, and requires a relatively low bandwidth online connection. Around 10 kbps average. In single player / Solo mode you will not come into contact with another human player.

We are sorry we were ultimately unable to commit to deliver an acceptable fully offline mode for Elite: Dangerous; we tried for a long time to find a good solution. Should we find a way to do this in the future we will let you know.

After careful consideration of your request we hereby offer you £45 to refund the purchase of the game when you backed it, your upgrade to the physical disc and your payment for access to all future expansions.

Any other benefits you may have will remain intact and associated with your account in the event that you decide to purchase the game at a future date.

Your acceptance of this offer will indicate that this is a full and final settlement of your refund request.

We thank you for your support of Elite: Dangerous, and hope that circumstances may allow you to play the game in future.

Kind Regards,

Support.


Absolute scum ! -_-

I'm still debating with myself on accepting their offer or not. I just don't want to stick with a sinking ship.

The bloody bastards could, at least, offer playable version of their old Elite games.

But then I guess some people would wonder why Elite 2 and 3 manage to be played offline, whereas Elite 4 doesn't.

Yeah that's exactly, word for word, the same message than the one I received. (Except with 50 Pounds instead of 45)

So these partial refunds are supposed to be where you give up *everything*, yet only get back part of the money? They really consider you playing/testing (if you did at all) the incomplete alpha/beta to be worth 35 pounds?

First time I actually see paying for a beta be so apt.

Or 55 pounds. It's literally "Oh we'll give you half. Were you really generous in your support? Okay, fuck you."

Yeah, I didn't touch the beta at all, nor downloaded anything from them. They really are getting desesperate to scam their backers :)

I'm waiting on the "pibbles hivemind", but I don't think I will take on their offer. As much as I want to get out of that sh*t, I just can't stomach their arrogance and their lies.

What did you answer, Gersen ?

Well you DID pay for the privilege to play the beta. That's good business for a company, especially when it's usually something they need to pay people to do.

It actually is pretty interesting, all things considered. Even I paid for the privilege to play Wasteland 2 beta. And for what its worth, the backer beta part, Arizona, had much less bugs than the part of the game that was beta tested by an official company.

Well, I told then that I paid 105 and not 50 and that, as I never played the game and never will now that the offline/DRM-free more is gone, I expect a full refund.

I was still polite but I have to admit that my patience is wearing thin, I strongly suspect they use the "let's refund less than half of the pledge" tactics to try to force peoples into canceling their refund request, hoping that some peoples will prefer keeping the always online version instead of losing half their pledge money and have nothing.

This is very pathetic of them. By haggling so much they really do transfer the image of greedy bastards very well. Still I advice you to take the offer and immediately afterwards ask them for the rest of the money too because they had no right to keep it for themselves and threaten them to sue them if they do not pay you in full.

I didn't see my backing as paying for the beta. I never played it and never wanted to. I saw the backing solely as a good price for the final product and as a support of the development. And since I got the final product in the promised form I'm very pleased. Actually I still have to start playing it. But they also still are improving it.

With Frontier here one gets the feeling they just want to screw backers.