It does exist and some people have gotten it.  I haven't received it.

ashmire13 wrote in The Cataclysm is Here...:I honestly think the Barsh family are now dining out on their reputation and actually robbing people of money without the ability to deliver the goods anymore

If that's the case, that's really short sighted of Ben Barsh. He's got a media presence and a prospective career, and the amount of damage the internet can do to his career, particularly when his name is searchable and posts get stored by more than a hundred search engines. You would expect Bill to want to protect his son's reputation in these matters, and not attach his son to Pacesetter Games until he'd established a reputation for honesty and integrity.

Also, if there is form for screwing customers, then the recent Kickstarters could be argued to be specific acts of fraud with Kickstarter, and backers could lobby KS to have them shut down. They could possibly demonstrate a history of failure and take legal action against Kickstarter alleging that they should have known and should have protected customers from such companies. There is no end of online news outlets and social media channels who can run with a story like this should interested parties feel like they want to kick up a stink. It's not like you can hide names and addresses in this world anymore, so taking money from masses of people and not fulfilling is not a good idea. You only need one nutter to really ruin you life! Why would anyone take a chance like that?

I assume Bill and Ben ignore Acaeum now?

Hopefully they are aware of the issues of trust then and are willing to reassure people on a public forum.
I wasn't around for Cataclysm. Was there dialogue during that one?

The real question is why Kickstarter allow failures to do further Kickstarters. Like eBay, Kickstarter makes money regardless of who loses out and how often. Their income stream comes from the project not the backer. There will always be backers.

The best backers who feel they've been defrauded can do is make a lot of noise with a lot of posts in as many public forums as possible, and with as many mentioning of individuals' names as possible. That way individuals may come to feel that they have to take personal responsibility to protect their own reputations, as they learn that what they do and who they are associated with come to impact on their career options and who wants to be associated with them.

Somewhere along the line individuals will realise their own personal reputations can impact them. It doesn't matter to most of the older generations, but it should for Ben if people start talking about money being lost backing Pacesetter projects.

Unfortunately that’s what is happening, so Bill appears to be deliberately hiding his last f**k up

As I've also found out, you don't really have recourse through credit cards for KS failures, as the time limit will have expired.

This is one of the factors as to why I gave up on new items. I won't deal with KS anymore, and that means I'll miss some things. So be it.

mbassoc2003 wrote in The Cataclysm is Here...:Maybe we should keep a list of bad Kickstarter and Indigogo recipients and track them, out their future projects and publicise their frauds to future backers. Just like we track and out eBay fraudsters and their new IDs.

That’s the easy bit because KSers can not hide their names and addresses from the public, and they can be outed and posted online. Especially if a Google search will then pick up terms like Kickstarter, company name, and words like problems and failure, and throw up a thread with a name and address of a perpetrators in it.

So a bad Kickstarter or Indigogo thread might be a good idea.

Once you track and trace an individual through repeated frauds you could them put a company like Kickstarter on notice that you have evidence of a systemic pattern of fraud associated with one group of individuals and you could then start posting articles to online news agencies that Kickstarter are aware and knowingly facilitating fraud for profit. But you need evidence of a repeating pattern over many years and you need to demonstrate that you had made KS aware. That bit really takes commitment to take action against KS, and I doubt anyone really cares that much over a few hundred bucks.

There is a ACAEUM Kickstarter thread, but it's mostly to alert people about what Kickstarters have just started:

Kickstarter projects

Knights & Knaves Alehouse currently has what I believe you are requesting, and it seems to work well:

Kickstarter Scorecard - Knights & Knaves Alehouse

It should be noted that grodog shares his experiences on this K&KA thread with some of the most impressive update summaries.  

Either way, Ben has a lot more to lose, and is the logical target to bring about some form of restitution.
You go after Ben's reputation and make him despised in the gaming for what he and his family do. You confront him at on mass at conventions, complain about his presence with potential employers in the industry destroying those employers' trusty worthy images with his links to his family, and do everything you can to publicise him and what he and his doing.
The natural response to that from Pacesetter is either, 'F*ck you! We will keep taking until we get shut down and we don't give a F! about our child's reputation' with Ben just following along like a simp.
Or, they will say, 'Okay this is getting out of hand. We're really sorry and we will immediately return the funds to those who want them, and those who can take the loss, we'll give yous our complete range in digital form because they cost us nothing but go some way to saying, thank-you.' At that point Ben tries his best to restore his reputation with a real employer if he can find one that won't push him out the door in response to publicity and public pressure, and Pacesetter kill the company and quietly open a completely new brand hoping they have either quelled the fires of old.

But, nothing will happen if only a half dozen people actually give a sh!t. And if only half a dozen people actually give a sh!t, then from a business point of view they have taken the right course of action. They have found a source of money that requires minimal work and are milking it while its available to them.

Social media as a means of rectifying problems only works when people care enough to talk and take action. I suspect that 99% of backers to things don't really give a F if they ever receive something or not. They go in at the minimum amount just so they can feel good about themselves for helping out. Just like GoFundMe and a lot of the beggar sites out there. They just want that personal self congratulatory pat on the ego, because maybe Ms Jones gets her medial bill paid, Company X survives another year, or Little Billy Wronged gets to sue the city. 99% couldn't give flying F! if the money doesn't ever get spend on what they patted themselves on the back about, just so long as they get their momentary feeling of, 'aren't I a good person.'

If you're in the 1% your problem is whether it's worth it to get together with the other 1%ers who actually care, are willing to organise, publicise and campaign for restitution.

Personally, when I go in to these things, I tend to go in at higher levels, and I really try to be selective with the projects I back. When I invested in RJK and then PP latterly, it was because of who he was and what he had already given to the hobby. If he had failed to produce I would not have cared. He had already given me so much enjoyable reading that I would have considered it an honorarium. When I put money into James Raggi I didn't know him from Adam, but from talking with him I could see he understood the difference between what the majority were putting out  and what a quality product really was, and I believed he was really going to publish a quality product, so I agreed to buy in bulk and resell them on eBay. I stopped after Vornheim, but I understand he had a really good innings, and I have no idea why the company withered. The rise of gig culture means authors and artists of quality no longer need to attached themselves to any one publisher.

I suspect Ben's problem is he's not an author but a middle man. A project manager. And it's so easy to fail at that when you're surrounded by f*ckw!ts.

With Cataclysm... Were the maps really just scans of graph paper and magic markers!? It costs like $200-300 to hire a cartographer. WTF!

I promised myself I would not post here. Every time I see a bump, the anger and frustration though... Like how many times can one blame needing an address, or waiting til they get home from work, or fluffing stamps dot com?  Put the book in the mail, or print off some more, or refund the money.  Dodging your customers who’ve prepaid for your work is as shady as it gets. But I am repressing my bitterness and won’t post. I feel bad for others like me for all this baloney.