Normally, we only post Shroud of the Avatar-related news once every couple of weeks, but this recent forum post by Starr Long is worth highlighting all on its own. Portalarium are evidently in the midst of a big push to get outstanding physical rewards — maps, game boxes, but not, notably, books (more on that shortly) — shipped to those backers who have not yet received them.

Thank you everyone for your patience and please once again accept our deepest apologies for the horrible delays in getting the last of the pledge rewards delivered. Tens of thousands of you successfully got your boxes in the first couple of rounds but between the manufacturer incorrectly delivering packages, bugs in the address confirmation code, another former team member having to suddenly depart with back issues, and other problems there are still a few of you who are still owed your boxes. Fortunately this week the entire team got together and sent out all of the remaining boxes (that we had accurate information for)! You should receive your box in the next couple of weeks.

If you have not received your box by August 16 please message support@portalarium.com and we will figure out what the few remaining issues are. Please note that we do not have the bandwidth to reply to all of the customer support messages and that is why we have not sent out notices to those of you who messaged us already. Your notification will be the arrival of your boxes. Also note if you got a notification from “Lemonade Couture” about in incoming package that’s from us (it’s Chris’s wife’s clothing company and we are using her shipping account).

#bandwidth

Let’s just pause for a moment and take note of the fact that they aren’t using their own shipping account here, but rather that of Chris Spears’ wife’s infant and children’s clothing online boutique. To be fair, because it’s an online-only (as far as I can tell) clothing boutique, Lemonade Couture probably — thanks to Umbrae for pointing this out on the UDIC Discord server — gets much better bulk shipping rates than Portalarium does. That said, I can’t help but have the feeling that this arrangement speaks to the very threadbare financial circumstances Portalarium may well be in at present.

At any rate, it was noted above that there’d be more about physical copies of books, specifically Blade of the Avatar. And from a certain point of view, there is:

Unfortunately we do not yet have an update on the physical book reward. We are still trying to work out something with the publisher. As noted in previous posts as soon as we have an update we will provide one.

I’m beginning to suspect that the resolution of the book issue will take one of two forms:

1. Nobody gets a physical copy of Blade of the Avatar, except those who bought — separately — the expanded version published by TOR some years ago.
2. Portalarium buys a bunch of copies of the TOR-published version of the book, and ships these to backers.

At any rate, Long for his part is asking that further discussion about physical rewards be a) limited to just one thread on the forum, and b) be constructive in nature:

Also please note there are multiple threads on the forums about the box topic which makes it difficult to track where the actual issues are (and technically multi-posting is against community policy). So I’m going to close those other threads and point folks to this thread so we can consolidate feedback. Also note that repeated posting of memes and other unhelpful items will begin to be moderated. We understand everyone’s frustration but fanning the flames helps no one.

Once again we are sorry for the delay but we should have this straightened out soon.

You’ll probably all have noticed, by now, that there’s a third counter in the header now, counting down to 5:00 PM (Mountain Time) on August 16th. If my box hasn’t been delivered by then, I’m pretty sure it won’t ever be (but my hope is that it’s somewhere in the pile of boxes above, at least one stack of which is labeled with a K.