How did I not see this thread before? So much discussion! And a few bits of drama, too!
Even though your passive-aggressive attitude is irratating and belittling the messages from other members by calling them spam comes across as rude...your contribution is still appreciated. It would be helpful if you made an effort to be more politically correct however. And no, putting a smiley after claiming that the developers tell us nothing about their progress doesn't make the claim any less aggravating. Also, the claim is false. Go here for the 'we are working on this' thread:
http://www.baremettle.com/sg/forums/index.php?threads/postponement.1103/
For the 'what you think about this and this' threads...please wait for the first alpha in February.
I think maybe the apparent passive-agressiveness and rudeness was caused by a mistranslation or a misunderstanding. It doesn't look like Kosac's first language is English, and I think maybe they just picked the wrong words for what they were trying to convey?
Anyways, about the development communication thing...
One thing I think may affect the updates and whatnot is that the devs are kinda just focusing on the backbone of the game and it's engine right now. As such, they'd rather not dedicate time to making content to show people, because they decided it'd be better to lay the groundworks of the engine in such a way that adding new content is easy to do without breaking everything else.
The trouble with the devs focusing a bit more on the inner workings of the engine rather than making new bits of equipment or UI parts or whatever is that it's really hard to actually show what's changed via videos or pictures, because it's all changes that are hidden away in the inner workings of the game.
I recall that the developer at Wolfire Games (the guys who are making Overgrowth) made a blog post about this, and how the weekly videos he was doing was affecting what he was working on, making him focus more on adding features he could show in the videos rather than work on the not very obvious, but more important details of the engine. I'd rather Bare Mettle just focus on the most important aspects of the engine and the AI and the dynamic storyline and get that working before they start doing the parts of the game they can show off.
But, I will agree that it's a bit hard to find the posts that BM make, since they're really hidden in the forum, more often than not. It might make people who've come to the website looking for more info from the devs get the impression that they're not talking much, and that's not exactly ideal.
Maybe the forum could benefit from some way of automatically collecting all the posts made by the devs and providing links to the specific comment within the context of the thread? As in, an easy-to-access, obvious menu that is updated automatically (when the devs make posts in the forum) with a link to said post within the thread? Maybe have the list just show the post, and provide the link to the post as it is in the thread at the bottom of each list entry?
That way the devs can continue to interact really well with the community in just the same way, and people won't have to scour the forums if they just want to find news from the development team.
As for not having access to dev videos or whatever tier of stuff you want, you should keep in mind you can add money to your contribution bit by bit. So, if you add like, two or three pounds that you would have otherwise used for lunch like, once a week (or just whenever you can spare it), it'll total up and eventually you'll have access to the £60 tier, and everything's awesome.
Of course, now that I think about it, I really shouldn't be speaking about this without thinking about people's individual specific situations, this is really ignorant and stupid of me... But hey, it's just an idea to consider, yeah?