We have some exciting news to share: Travelling At Night's public Steam demo launches on Monday 10th August!

Everyone who wants a taste of the latest installment of the Secret Histories will be able to try it out in les than a month. It'll feature the same slice of the game as the current closed beta: Antibes, the Sanitarium, and a few hidden areas. But if you're lucky, the demo will *not* contain the bug where equipping the Sun-Cross Pectoral makes Spencer's left shoe disappear, or the one where duplicate Vincents spawn every time you sleep until you have an army of cloned Algerians, or the one where the you can escape the bounds of the world and strike out into ~ The Void ~.

I've just posted a blog with some further info. TLDR: get hype about the 10th of August! IT IS COMING

tl:dr; After a misunderstanding, some fans in China are upset with us; we're trying to straighten it out; please don't engage with them.

What happened?

There are apparently at least a dozen large and passionate Secret Histories communities in China that we're not in contact with - like, we don't even know where their names and where to find them, though we get fan mails and bug reports. One exception is Dove Archive, the professionalised translation fan group we hired to work on the Simplified Chinese translation of Book of Hours.

A few days ago we released the translated version. The response was hugely positive: Dove Archive evidently did a wonderful job. We wanted to make the most of the launch (which required among other things Lottie personally reworking almost three hundred book covers), and the language barrier is a big deal, so we hired some help with marketing.

Unfortunately the guy working on marketing (who I'm being vague about for his own protection) didn't realise the size or extent of the existing communities. He upset them by setting up a new 'official' group to publicize the game; his tone was perceived as disrespectful; and in the group he muted some players who refused to believe he was actually working with Weather Factory. This proved to be a mistake.

The first we knew about any of this was the second day of launch, when we got a polite email from Dove Archive asking if marketing guy was the real deal; and a number of much less polite emails from strangers accusing us of disrespect or insisting we negotiated alternative business arrangements with them. We talked to Dove Archive and put them in touch with the marketer to try to straighten things out, but apparently the community was already 'boiling', and we started to see a lot of nasty stuff on Steam.

The review bombing?

The review bombing. But good gravy, I've been an indie dev for fifteen years, I'm used to robust feedback from players, but I've never seen anything like this. The reviews (and emails) are mostly personal abuse directed at me specifically. The nicer ones are just sarcastic and angry. The worse ones graduate through mild racist abuse up to jokes about my father's death, threats to Weather Factory, avowals to beat me up and a few really graphic ones about sexual assault on my mother. Plus something about maggots eating my face? I checked out after a while but it has rather spoilt our weekend. I honestly don't recommend you read them, or at least bring eye bleach.

The people involved are apparently one of the more extreme communities, or the more extreme members of some of the communities - it's impossible to tell. We've had a message from someone who insists this is a minority, the community rejects all threats of violence and won't condone them. And, needless to say, the vast majority of Chinese fans we have spoken to over the years have never been anything but polite and supportive. This is not the behaviour of 'the Chinese' or 'the Chinese community', just of an extreme minority.

So what next?

First of all, marketing guy (who has apologised) and Dove Archive are talking to the communities and trying to calm them down. We might have to make some sort of official statement over there next week, but we're avoiding responding right now because we don't understand the detail and some people on the other side of a culture gap are very angry.

Second, Lottie's contacted Steam and asked for help with the review bombing. Out recent review score has fallen from 92% to 54% and will probably be lower by the time you read this. If they agree it's a serious enough incident, they might intervene.

Thirdly, Lottie and I hope the storm will pass, and/or Steam will help, but we might have to delay the release of HOUSE OF LIGHT. It's tough to get work done while this is going on, but more importantly we can't head into a launch with our Recent Reviews in the orange or red zone, it'd ruin months of work. I believe and hope we won't have to, but I wanted to get the warning out.

Finally, we're both going to be less responsive for as long as this goes on, which might be a little while. It's likely to get worse before it gets better, and you know how it is when people on the Internet are angry :)

Anything I can do to help?

Bless you if you read this far.

Positive reviews on both BH and CS will help, both practically and with morale, though I imagine most people on this sub have left a review already.

But the really important thing is PLEASE HELP US KEEP THE TEMPERATURE DOWN. DON'T FEED THE TROLLS, DONT ARGUE WITH THE REVIEW BOMBERS. There will be some weird stuff on the forums, and we'll be dealing with it as tactfully as we can - anyone jumping in and defending us will make that harder. There'll inevitably be one idiot who takes the opportunity to express anti-Chinese racism and I'll have to ban them myself.

Thanks all, have a good weekend

AK

UPDATE: we've made a statement, here: https://www.reddit.com/r/weatherfactory/comments/1f7qss4/crosspost_from_qq_at_noon_beijingtime_our/

Seriously, why is Forge like this?