I understand what you say Swill, but the fear that most of us have is that Sprit could once again ship some stuff to 1-2 people so that we stop worrying and putting pressure on him and the disappear for 5-6 months again. It's been more than a year many of us ordered and got nothing yet. And up to now, there's still a high risk of getting nothing at all. While it is possible that Sprit was ill, we have no proof. And many group buys have ended up being scam so we all have legitimate fears.
I don't know why you feel that there is a "high risk of not getting anything at all". I understand that things have not been moving as quickly as everyone would like (sprit included), but things HAVE been getting shipped. Yes, only in small bursts and not as frequently as everyone would like, but its not like the product isn't being made and he is just scamming. He is actually producing stuff and people are getting them. If this was just a scam he would not actually have gotten keyboards made and shipped them.
This is the first GB Sprit has ever run. Even when he had more free time and everything was moving along pretty well last year, he was already overwhelmed. I skyped with him a couple times then and it was clear to me that it was difficult for him to know how to keep the threads updated and the community informed in a way that everyone would be happy. English is not his first language and trying to give you all quality updates is not as easy as we are making it out to be.
Last year he changed jobs and it seems that the new job has required him to travel more. I don't know about you guys, but when I have to travel for work, when I get home, my wife and family get priority over hobbies. Yes, I don't have other people's money on the line, but my point is that the amount of time he had to work on this was greatly reduced. Yes, we all saw a sharp decrease of activity from him and he updated less in this period. He has recently been sick to add to it all, so I think we need to be a little more forgiving for his lack of communication.
I have suggested that he basically ignore all of his PMs, try to keep the thread updated with what is going on and only focus on getting orders together. In my opinion, the PMs are just slowing things down. The time he has to put into those is free time he wasn't able to use towards getting stuff done. We will see if this suggestion helps...
All we ask is that he put up a list of shipping and actually start shipping it at a reasonable rate. If he ships 5 orders a week for 2 months, people will be happy even if it takes 2 month to get their stuff sent because at least they will know he is sending the stuff and that it's just taking some time because he needs to send a LOT of stuff. That's normal. But if he send stuff to 2 persons and then that's it for 6 months, we will believe that he will never send all the stuff we ordered and that's bad.
If we can simplify his life and just have him post little status updates in the thread as progress is made, I think that should be good enough. I think we, as the community and his customers, should be trying to help reduce the busy work he has to do and see if we can focus on a simpler on-the-fly update system for him so he can do small bits of work and give an update and not have to worry about maintaining a public representation of everything he does.
I myself have invested around 100$ in this and I am pissed to some extent that I received nothing yet. But many people ordered for MUCH more than me and are in the same situation I am and if I was down 1k$ I would be utterly pissed. Yet if he ends up delivering the stuff and keep putting some minimal updates all will get ok in time.
Yes, GBs are tricky. We invest lots of time and money into these things and everyone enters with the best intentions and then life happens. In the end it is one person trying to share his passion for keyboards and he probably bit off a little more than he was ready for in his first GB. I am confident that he will deliver, hopefully in 2015.
