Donation Observation

[kusto]

"Getting closer and closer to the Beta release. Founder accounts will soon stop to be offered." - Monday, December 5, 2011
"This goes in hand to another announcement, once i have mentinoed in previous communications in other means.
When the Dev server is finally concluded, we want to stop handing out Founder accounts. Its not fair to our eyes that people that put their faith for us several months ago, when a picture was all we could show, than to do it when there is a video and a server running. The difference of the leap of faith has to be rewarded."

"This gives us two options: either we raise the price on founder accounts, or we change the name of founder to 'Supporter' account. Although they would get the same benefit, the account would be flagged differently and it will be evident who where the supporters in the first phase of the project, in its infancy."

With 113 "founders" already, it seems like the group is already nothing special to consider. What a surprise they are still being offered a month later. Not so soon after all $$$

Actually its more than 113, because about 20-30 people haven't given me directions on how they want to be on the BoF.

Alpha is for almost 2 weeks now, and we haven't stopped the founder accounts because X-mas and new-year brought a lot of new supporters. But we are working on automatizing the whole account creation process by integrating paypal, and the switch from founder accout to supporter will happen easily then.

Updates on Kaya.gs Alpha - Tuesday, December 27, 2011
"To set some surprises straight, we use an Amazon Free Tier server, which is free, but also has very low reliability and other issues. Sometimes, Amazon practically shuts down our server completely. This is what happened today."

So after the US$6995 that is donated so far, you can not afford to even rent a paid server?

This is sounding like some money scam.

Actually because account creation is becoming big and people want to be able to change their passwords, we are going to open one of the non-free servers soon(surely this month). The one we need for a few months is quite cheap actually.
We have been working with the free tier since September, as we progressively had been testing what we have in our computers in the remote server. The switch is inevitable, just a matter of when.

You are not the first one to distrust Kaya, but certainly the newest one. After release, where i have spent roughly 70 hours/week talking and playing with founders inside the server, you really believe we are not 100% into it?

so donators pay them to work on a project that is going to make the owners a lot of money and the founders nothing

all while they make the group bigger and offer nothing special it still smells like a scam

the founders list will grow bigger and the regular accounts will be more rare than founders in the future

@hyperpape: a scamming used car dealer will still sell you a car even if it is overpriced and only half working

There are about 130-140 founder accounts. When we switch to supporter, which is an account with similar access but will be marked differently, founder accounts will never be offered again. So if your concern is "potential exclusivity", think of how KGS has about 100.000 accounts, and how many would 140 be in a similar count.

But true kudos if actually most people become supporters than regular free-accounts, means we are doing something right .

Regarding money, i think you might be confusing donation with investment, something of a trend of people with strong doubts. Check my response to CSamurai http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=76722#p76722 from a few months back.

X-mas came and went, New year also came and went a week ago. That is a long time for a place that was harping about closing founder signups after alpha launch. It appeared like a last push at the time for money and its been said in your blog a couple of times without doing it that they would close. Is that how the rest of the project will run? not following through and misleading people? The part about rewarding users who took the leap of faith is also a lie as people who know there is a server now can donate and join up with the same option as those who did so before it was made

i have a friend who is "founder" and he said that the developers dont even listen unless something breaks and they treat users like they are servants who cant do anything but agree with the kings thoughts. If you disagree you get ignored or they have excuses

People who donate like to see where money goes. you say the server is on a free host when its open to many users and keeps getting reset then it becomes something in need of attention that is where the donated money should play a role, its not even a large cost. ~$100/month for a dedicated server and much much less for vps.

130-140 founders and the counter in the donation section doesnt show that which is easy to update. you just want to make it look like the group is smaller than it is. while saying its hard without automation...

[Kaya.gs]

i have a friend who is "founder" and he said that the developers dont even listen unless something breaks and they treat users like they are servants who cant do anything but agree with the kings thoughts. If you disagree you get ignored or they have excuses

I have a very hard time believing someone can conclude that from any of the things we've been doing, Like an open feedback section where public ideas have been suggested and implemented, as well as the constant work and tweaking in the past two weeks that included a lot of users suggestions, ideas and why not, sometimes pleas for help .
Tell him to contact me and tell me whatever i have been allegedly ignoring of him, it would be best through the server.

You have been told in this very thread by founders how much attention we have given to users telling us anything.

[Jedo]

I have a sneaking suspicion as to where the money could have went, but out of respect I won't bring it up here.

Hey, you can't just bring this up and then not say!

[hyperpape]

I have a sneaking suspicion as to where the money could have went, but out of respect I won't bring it up here.

Hey, you can't just bring this up and then not say!

True, but since he probably shouldn't have brought it up in the first place, he still shouldn't follow through.

It's like saying "if you're gonna count the blades of grass in your front yard, you'd better keep good track of how far you've gotten." yes, but...

[Mivo]

Alpha is for almost 2 weeks now, and we haven't stopped the founder accounts because X-mas and new-year brought a lot of new supporters. But we are working on automatizing the whole account creation process by integrating paypal, and the switch from founder accout to supporter will happen easily then.

Would you mind posting a notice a week or so before you stop accepting founder accounts? Here, I mean. I'm generally interested in supporting the project, but I have some concerns and wouldn't mind watching the development a bit longer. I admit that I was also a bit taken back by the "MFer on L19" incident.

[Fizyx]

Considering that several people on this forum have posted what amounts to little more than libel, I don't feel like that reaction was over the top. These people have no backing for many of the claims that they are making that they're willing to show, and likely just have no backing at all. I have a founder account on Kaya.gs, and it's by far one of the smoothest running, most reliable Alphas I've ever seen. Whether that translates into success later remain to be seen, but to insinuate that the Gabriel et al. treat us like 'slaves' and are scamming us out of our money... Anyone that has ACTUALLY spent any time really looking at the Alpha can tell you exactly how false that is. Yet we continue to see the baseless accusations about this being a scam. I actually registered this account because of how much this is pissing me off. For whatever reason, there seem to be people on this board with a strong desire to see Kaya.gs fail, and it looks to me like they wont let the truth get in the way of their crusade. If there are legit complaints, that's one thing. But to make baseless accusations about Gabriel et al. like have been made... well, like I said, at this point it's nothing more than libel.

[adoreme]

I totally concur with Fizyx, Kaya seems to be on it's way to become a great server. I know Gabriel personally from studying with him together in Korea so for me there is no concern about trustworthyness at all.
That the developers treat founders like slaves seems laughable as usually you can discuss anything with the developers and they will listen and also give their own arguments in that discussion. Just like it was with the recent escaper discussion on kaya.

[Celebrir]

I'm a founder as well and the only times the developers say that you should post something into the feedback section instead of just telling them is when they don't have the time at this moment or there are just to much things they have to think about. And I don't see any bad in this. I believe it is just proffessional to do this instead of forgeting something which might not look as important at the moment.
All in all I never found a reason to lose the trust into the developers. In my opinion they gave us much more informations than they would have to.

[Wobble]

I think some of the comments here have been overly negative, but I do agree that it is a little strange that you are still offering founder accounts now that there is a working alpha version and we (well, most of us ) are convinced you're not going to run off with the money/screw everything up and seems a little unfair.

But the server looks awesome, you guys seems to be putting a lot of effort into it so I strongly disagree with some of the other claims.

[Kaya.gs]

I think some of the comments here have been overly negative, but I do agree that it is a little strange that you are still offering founder accounts now that there is a working alpha version and we (well, most of us ) are convinced you're not going to run off with the money/screw everything up and seems a little unfair.

But the server looks awesome, you guys seems to be putting a lot of effort into it so I strongly disagree with some of the other claims.

Today along with the release the first automated founder was successfully added to the server. If the technical solution withstands the weekend, i will make an announcement to switch founder accounts for supporter ones, as i have previously posted on the blog.

Regards.

[Magicwand]

i think giving out free accounts to strong players will help success of your server.
i like to play in new server but if i have to pay i wouldn't because there are plenty of servers that i can play on.

[illluck]

@Magicwand: I think the public release will be free. Currently the server is in alpha.

[Rochedale]

It also seems odd to me how cynical some people here are concerning Kaya. So much so that, like Fizyx, I decided to register an L19x19 account just to make a post about it. I've been reading this board for a while, and in general it's surprising how many people just want to pick fights. I know it's the Internet and all, but seriously, this is Go we're talking about.

I don't plan to get a founder account with Kaya, mostly because I can't afford it. But I look forward to the public release, and wish the developers the best of luck.

[Numsgil]

That's go players: always expecting the world to hand us hamete.

[oiseaux]

I have also registered for the purposes of replying to this thread, as I am perplexed by the negativity some people seem so keen on expressing.

Yesterday I bought a Supporter account and was up and running on the server within minutes. I played a game with someone who paitently waited whilst I accustomed myself to the UI and dealt with some browser issues. The game itself was responsive and enjoyable from a user-experience point of view. I was impressed that the core functionality is so immediate and polished at this alpha stage.

Everyone in the main chat has been helpful and polite, and each game I've played has been very enjoyable. Kaya.gs delivers as a server and I truly feel that if people get on board with it and support it, it will be the best English-language server. There is no way the amount of effort and passion that has gone into this project could ever be a scam- as someone who works in web development, I can tell you now that a Go server like this is the product of months and months of hard work.

Where the money goes is absolutely no-one's concern. If you have your doubts about it, then simply don't donate. The kaya.gs team are accepting donations for anyone who thinks the project is worthwhile. You can tell immediately that all the people who have donated for early access have nothing but high praises for this project, and yet the best nay-sayers can produce is unfounded conjecture and hear-say.

You can be the judge of the project when it becomes open and free, but until then I would reccommend you reserve that judgement until you've actually tried it yourself.