What the hell is going on with the development of this game?
That's the million-dollar-Kickstarter question and there has been no real explanation given by CZE. Instead, people have basically been cobbling the facts together.
When the kickstarter launched, they claimed they needed more money just for a "little push" to get the game to launch in October of 2013. Supposedly, the development had been farmed out to a different company that dropped it or folded (I'm not sure) and then CZE took it back in house. In a moment of extreme hubris, abject stupidity, or dishonesty, they claimed they could finish development in house and meet their launch date for all their promised content. No one really knows what state the game was in when they took it in house, because they are not saying. They showed streams during the kickstarter build up that certainly had problems, but wrote those off as "the sausage being made."
When the alpha came out roughly two months before "launch", it was clear there was no possible way they were going to hit their launch targets. More often than not, patches would be released that broke more than they fixed. The initial closed beta client was objectively less-stable than the final alpha. CZE then proceeded to blow every milestone date and then just stopped giving out ETA's entirely. Progress on the closed beta was not good, and then in the Spring of 2014 they got sued for intellectual property violations by Wizards of the Coast. When CZE first had notice of Wizards threatening suit is unknown, but the court pleadings suggest that Wizards had tried to reach a licensing deal with CZE that would have avoided the suit, but CZE balked (this is Wizard's take on the situation, so who knows).
There have been a long series of PR plunders and poor decision making beyond the development problems. They showed the game off at various cons, and the rewards handed out at the cons were not even in the game. They hooked up with Gameforge as their server and QA partner, who has a terrible reputation. They enabled a way to get "free" in-game cash by doing those bullshit surveys and product trial things, a number of which were clearly scams (Russian Brides!) but were reachable through the in-game client where personal information was perhaps not as rigorous as it should have been. They steadfastly remained tight-lipped, but would reveal progress to their high-dollar kickstarters, who would then casually drop "hints" about stuff. The Doublespeak with the recent "open beta that isn't open beta" is just the icing on cake, because the claim that they need more users to stress test is ludicrous when just last weekend the VIP tournament failed with the current user level, which is not high.
Some of this is just educated speculation, but someone could write a book about this if they knew the truth. At this point, we are over a year past the launch date and have way less than half of what was promised with the specter of a lawsuit that could result in a temporary injunction or worse hanging over the game.
