Up-to-Date Releases; Requesting Development Branches

Hello,

The development and release process has been described to us as being in vertical slices where near-complete slices are released once they are mostly complete. It has also been stated that the reason for Early Access is so that the community can comment on and help guide development of the game. I believe these two ideas are in extreme conflict. We are blindly making suggestions based on very outdated information and our input on the current slice is not being heard until it's already considered completed.

I propose that the Vertical Slices concept be for guiding development priorities only, not for releases. Please allow us to experience the latest mostly stable development branches regardless of how incomplete they may be so that we can truly collaborate on the development process.

We signed up for early access with the understanding that it isn't complete and that there will be issues and crashes, yet you only ship completed slices, which makes the development much less open than was claimed from the start. Obviously there will be some people incapable of reading the disclaimers, so if you're afraid of upsetting them, release it as an opt-in branch on Steam.

We can't truly participate in the development if we are always multiple months behind the dev build. I'd also like to request that we be given access to the list of planned features and changes for the same reasons and so we know what is still considered Work-in-Progress before making suggestions on incomplete vertical slices.

Please trust your community as we have trusted you.