==>

Making empty promises is not giving up your time and talent for free. This is not charity – Kazerad has already used his readers for his own ends. If Kazerad stops the show here, he has actually taken more of other people’s time than he ever gave them in return, which is why the one who starts a project like this should also end it.

So, as far as he’s never going to actually finish this thing, it’s better to cut the losses short.

Think of the thousands of people who didn’t get the button. Where’s their reward?

Imagine you’re in a library where all the books have their pages torn off after page number 100. Every novel you pick up, you’ll just get in through the character introductions and the beginnings of the plot, and then nothing. Would you enjoy reading such books? Would you even bother?

Now, imagine that you entered the library not knowing that all the books are ruined – but wait. This is a special library where they only let you turn one page every two weeks, and you have to go there for four years to discover that the end of the story simply doesn’t exist.

How about that then?

” the two existing books would be worth reading as they are greatly enjoyable within themselves”

Yes. Two complete books. This piece of “serial art” hasn’t even gone through one complete chapter. We are exactly at the point of character introductions and the beginning of a plot and no further.

And that’s how far this will ever go. Stop fooling yourself.

@Rufus the Incoherent: Actually I wasn’t being sarcastic. I was actually surprised that someone like him would get the courage to openly criticize how Kaz ran things and even for total control of the story, I at least give him that. Though, I already knew that it would cause total inevitable chaos. Kinda like the Greymarch.

Now excuse me, I need to find my calming pants.

I’m late to this conversation cause I just found the comic, but I do have one thing to say to Anon and anyone else who thinks that Kaz is just wasting our time:

Anon’s claim that Kaz is costing us more time than he puts in is literally impossible.
here’s a little demonstration
ask a friend to draw a simple comic. stick figures making a fart joke is fine. give them one minute to complete their masterpiece. then time yourself reading it. if it takes you more than five seconds to process the entire comic, there’s something wrong. unless you spend hours at a time hitting refresh on the main page of this site, the situation is the same with this comic. it simply takes longer to create than to consume.
with this in mind, i would like to say that two months between updates is a bit much, but what do you want for free? put this in your favorites bar and read something else for a while, checking back here every couple weeks or months. works for me.
also, your comments about the value of unfinished works seem… odd. stories are about enjoying the journey, not reaching the end. if the conclusion of a tale was all that mattered, all stories would be boring cause they just end with the good guys winning or some psychobabble about how there are no good guys to win. enjoy the moment, dude.

It’s literally impossible to be unbiased, but try.

Anon is right, and as harsh as his words were, he was…not necessarily constructive, but his comment did make sense.

Kaz has been delaying for a very long time, and he has been committing a bit of perjury.
However, this might not be his fault. He may have lost interest, but he lost interest in what I dub a “petty hobby”. Obviously it isn’t petty to many people, but it is a hobby which gives a thrill in the beginning as a new thing. Basically, as far as my experience tells, it is a hobby which follows this pattern:
1. Begin hobby. Love it for the thrill/refreshment of a new activity, e.g. begins drawing/writing
2. Continue for a while. Duration/productivity varies by person and their opinions
3. Good opinion expires, activity gets boring. Productivity decreases, e.g. Kaz stops
4. Quit.
5. After getting bored of other hobbies, come back but not have as much thrill
6. Pretty much repeat 2-6

Now, I understand the feeling of getting bored; run a comic/story for two years and that happens. However, it would still be nice to inform the readers of a pause or retirement. There are many webcomics which have obviously long since died, but you will find old readers sometimes peeking back to see if it updated yet, since the people who make or run them never said they were stopping.

Additionally, Anon does not mean that “statistics show that us readers are taking more time to read than it takes Kaz to make”. There…probably is something wrong with that, you might want to update your OS and switch out of IE6. I may be wrong, but I interpret that he means Kaz is telling us that he will update, but with no definite time. People have waited three months now, and will still be waiting indefinitely. It would be helpful to state some kind of time, such as “I will be taking a break from this so I don’t die of trying too hard to draw and write this story, but expect updates two months later” or something like that. I think he means that pretty much every day people are sitting down checking and hoping that he updated while they were sleeping, eating, working, or even refreshing (which some people do), only to be disappointed by a December 1, 2013 page. It should probably be expected by now (take the number of days, weeks, seconds, or whatever that has passed since the last update and put it under 1, for instance, 1/80 or however many days, that’s probably how human logic on this stuff works) that there will be little chance for an update, but people with still check hoping for a change.

Of course, I don’t mean to discourage or rush Kaz, but the truth is the truth and there is fault on part of Kaz. There are people hoping to see more of the story because they like it, and basically Kaz is failing to deliver. This likely depresses the readers’ spirits. Then, he says he will update, and the readers look forward to the update as Katia looks forward to Kvatch, but end up in the same (metaphorical, emotional, probably-not-stripped-and-robbed-by-an-update-schedule) scenario as her when Kaz doesn’t do so. I will not tell Kaz he should come back to this — Kaz could quit making this story entirely and I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it — but if Kaz does not plan on doing so, even if just for a while, Kaz should probably inform the readers. This way, even if the readers are extremely disappointed, at least they know they weren’t outright abandoned by someone they looked up to and trusted.

After all, we are all imperfect, even if in a perfect way; everything has flaws. If Kaz suddenly hated doing all this, let him hate it; Kaz has rights to preference and shouldn’t be forced to do something just because he started it and stopped liking it. Kaz may be looking for a new hobby to stick to for now or forever, or he could be working on the next one. It doesn’t matter. A classical violin soloist at a concert could finish the piece and leave. The soloist could choose to play a few extra pieces. The soloist could pause for a break in the middle, and could even choose to just stop at the worst chord of a piece and just walk off the stage, never coming back. If the the soloist had played many times before, and the audience looked up to the soloist, trusted the soloist, respected the soloist, it could not — and probably would not if it could — stop the soloist from doing so. Maybe the soloist will play cello solos for a while and come back, maybe not.

Kaz can make his own choice. Try not to peer pressure him into doing something he doesn’t want to do. Peer pressure is usually only good when used to persuade someone to do something the person wants to do, but doesn’t have the resolve to; at those times, it could be very helpful. If we are to respect, trust, and look up to Kaz, then we will do so by all means. (If not, then, well, do what commands those biological Intels are chugging out.) If Kaz makes the decision to stop, then obviously people will be disappointed, but Kaz made a decision which people who respect him should respect. Kaz wouldn’t be at fault for not liking this; Kaz imagined it and was kind enough to share put effort into it to share it. Kaz never needed to share it with anyone; it was a world which could have been honed down without external guidance. Although it may not have been the same, it definitely could have existed without the W3.

———-If you just want to skip to the conclusion———-

Kaz put effort into sharing this with the W3. It was a little world which was introduced and will eventually make its parting. Kaz has the authority to decide when it will leave, and when it is made, the decision Kaz made must be acknowledged as the decision Kaz made, and nobody is directly entitled to change that decision without permission from Kaz.
Please make any decision soon, and make the last decision when you feel it fit.

Hey, like I said, I don’t blame you. There are reasons, and I’ll wait if you say you’ll get back. Anyway, I was only proposing it as a possibility, since lots of comics have stopped and most people preferred being told instead of being left out to hang.

Don’t worry about feeling bad about delaying it long; you (hopefully) don’t have Katia-time, so if you’re feeling bored, just put it off for a few days and do something else, it sometimes helps. It is your comic, and if you have some technical issues then you have some technical issues.

Don’t get too stressed about it, it won’t help you recover from any sicknesses or anything.

And eat some oranges? I used to eat way too many Vitamin-C tablets (they were yummy), and I haven’t eaten a single one in half a year but I think that according to the %DV I still have a month or so left before it expires.

Assuming the effect lasts:

833%DV(Vitamin-C)/tablet * 6 tablets/day * 20 days
= 100000%DV(Vitamin-C)

yea
1000 days total – ~180 days

“I’m not bored or giving up the comic, guys D=”

Yes you are.

It’s been three months, about 90 days or 2100 hours, and you did not spend a single one of them, even while being “snowed in” to scribble one comic panel even if just to pass the time, yet you find the time to occasionally post notices that you’ll be updating the comic “next week” – only to make another notice two week later to say “Oops I did it again”, and then do it again.

You’ve literally spent the time just making excuses, that you could have spent actually making a small update to the comic to keep things rolling. I don’t know why you even bother. It’s perfectly clear that you are not actually going to, and you should just stop wasting everyone’s time.

The guy may be a bit harsh but he surely has a point. It has been more than two years since we are in Kvatch and yet there’s still plenty of things unresolved.

We are also forgetting that Kaz’s art style has improved significantly over these three years. We are seeing less of the copy-paste circle-headed cat and more of the detailed Katia at different angles and varied backgrounds.

This stuff takes time as well.

That’s not nearly fast enough. Besides, he hasn’t been able to keep up to a rate of 1½ weeks either. The current average rate over the past 6 months has been 2.17, or almost exactly once every 2 weeks.

There’s just an illusion of progress when Kazerad decides to update 4 times in one single month and perhaps thinks he’s caught up with the schedule, but overall he’s slowing down consistently with ever-stretching delays and other “whoops I forgot” excuses. If he had kept up to his plan of 1½ weeks, we would have been where we are now around mid September.

If Kazerad had continued to update four times a month through 2013 that would have been in July, or half a year ago.

Oh Joce, we understand that you’ve only just gotten here, and you’re feeling dazed like you’re watching the end credits of a movie, thinking you just got to have a tiny bit more no matter what, but that’s not a reason to brown your nose.

Bob: “I was actually surprised that someone like him would get the courage to openly criticize…”

Who exactly am I?

Hey i am new here!!!!
For me get to this point take me 3 days of full reading, the comic is osom 😀 but… i know how hard can be make a comic with gifs, games and interactivity with the readers.

Only imagine how much time takes make a game… even a crap one. (I make games in C++ and GM) these thing take time.

I read others comics, some make updates per week, others per month… everyone begin with basic drawings… then become in nice art work.

So i wanna say that for to criticize someone… you need to put their shoes, i dont believe some one here can take the right pace to handle a web comic as prequel is (with games, gifs… interactive pannels and interaction with the public).

Finally mention that I know of projects that end in cancellation as SMBZ, mostly because of time or difficulties to continue the project. If this guy “Kaz” thought abouth canceling the comic… is his decision, it would also mentioned that already.

(sorry for my bad English)

“Anon, you need to realize that when you choose to read something, you are giving NOTHING to the person who created it.”

What is readership? Kaz wanted people to read it and feels it’s a thing worth reading, he wouldn’t be posting updates on the internet if he didn’t. It makes sense that Kaz would want to increase (not decrease, by having people leave) his readership, so Anon is right. He won’t be the only one who leaves if things continue at the pace they are, they’re simply going too slow for people, and it was that radical change in pacing that will fail to keep people’s attentions, and probably already has.

“Wow, Kaz, you are *awesome* (and no, that is not sarcasm!). Rarely is anyone able to take the sort of criticism leveled against you here in such a mature manner and be so incredibly polite in response. I really, really love seeing that.”

I agree Kaz is taking Anon’s constructive criticism on the chin but; WOW. SUCH BROWN. MANY NOSE. MUCH TEACHERS PET DOGE. SO SWEET. WOW.

Hue.

Another thing, a lot of people responding to Anon seem to be new, I don’t think you quite grasp the frustration of enjoying a thing almost daily one year, sticking with it, devoting time to the story in ways outside of reading, being ready to toss money at the creator if need be, and eventually seeing an exponential decrease in content, to the point you’d rather just have the story end than continue at a glacial pace. This is what Anon is feeling. I’ll admit I feel it sometimes too.

I know schedules are apparently awful or whatever, but I’d rather just know when I should check in if things are gonna be like this, Kaz. Love the comic, hate the pacing.

Also Aggy is a dumb name.

(I may have joined the discussion a little late, but anyway) This drop in update rate isn’t unusual, it even happens to webcomics with a script already written and 3 to 5 people working on them, kaz may have help with the site from ch’mar and the art from cider but it’s still an interactive comic without a solid script to work on.

Also compare the amount of stuff in the first year updates to the current updates, you saw maybe 1 or 2 animated panels per update, and those were mostly blinking or mouths moving, that sort of thing, when someone changes his stile and comes up with more complex stuff it will naturally take them a while till they get used to it and pick up the pace.

In conclusion I think the update rate will grow to about 1update/2weeks or so eventually, the same thing happened to SDamned and a few more comics i’m not gonna name when the artists changed their art stiles abruptly or were buisy with other projects.

well i want to see the next one too, but regretfully pestering him won’t make him go faster. now a whip on the other hand…. heh heh… i mean, um, hi there?

ahem, anyway, my request is maybe can something be done about the ‘take control of the situation’ comic? since the contest ended the whole comic is all vanished again now. it’d be nice to be able to read it again, for giggles.

This is easily the best webcomic I’ve ever read. The story so far has been absolutely perfect. But anon is completely right in that Kaz has stopped updating seemingly out of nowhere. An honest answer from him about whatever has been keeping him from updates, be it a lack of time, a lack of devotion, studies, or whatever crazy thing would be great. And if it’s him just not caring about the comic, he needs to just either end it or try to find someone else to work on it or something, because him just putting out 1 update a month would be completely ridiculous.

Okay, but it makes sense that the updates have been taking longer. Go look at the first page again.
It is enjoyable, but look at the lack of details. Someone with basic drawing/editing/and animation skills could make it in a a day or two if they had free time. It looks like 25 frames aaaaand, then a paragraph and that’s it for the first page. Even the third or fourth one where she confronts they lady in the elf’s bar has a total of around 19 frames for those 5 animated gifs and wow just look at the detail on that. A table AND a blank wall.

Now updates are like 10-20 images, some of which are animated. This update has 18 images with 15 of them being animated rain with the once or twice lightening effect (and the one with a levitating book). Plus there are a variety of poses now, details on the wall, background, and stuff that takes time and skill.

Yeah, updates aren’t as frequent, but they’re clearly better now. And better means more work and time put in to make each update. In two years people improve with their skills, but that doesn’t mean that this still doesn’t take a lot of time. Heck! There was a fricking flash game in one of the updates! And sometimes a little movie.