Starr Long posted an update to the Shroud of the Avatar forums this afternoon, announcing the results of both a backer poll and some internal discussion at Portalarium concerning the recent brouhaha over backer titles:

Greetings Avatars,

With the recent influx of New Founders, we feel it is important to differentiate all the original backers who, during our brief Kickstarter campaign, championed our team and our project. It was their efforts and generosity that allowed the Shroud of the Avatar project to happen! To that end, we will be recognizing our original backers (those who backed us before May 20, 2013) with the title Royal Founder. We will also be creating a set of Royal Founder items that include the Founder symbol with a white color scheme (instead of the blue color scheme). These rewards are in addition to all the other Founder rewards and are associated with the same tiers (i.e. Shield for Adventurers/First Responders/Second Responders, Cloak for Immortal Adventurer, etc.).

The list of Royal Founder items includes:

• Cloak
• Shield
• 4 Starter Armors
• 2 Melee Weapons
• Tunic
• 2 Ranged Weapons
• Plaque
• Taming Horn
• Crystal Sword

To illustrate the new colour scheme that has been selected for Royal Founders (with assistance from Dev+ backers, mind), Starr included a picture:

The Royal Founder colours are on the left.

As I said yesterday, this does nothing to resolve the tension between Founder-class backers and Benefactors, which was (I maintain) a causal factor in the results of this unpleasantness. Indeed, if anything, further stratifying the backer base may well serve to exacerbate things.

But maybe I’ll be wrong. And the colour scheme is nice, at any rate.