Hi everyone!
First, while I appreciate the desire to take to the forums and rally support for an idea, this stems from a casual conversation about what the web team has been working on lately, and wasn't intended for a larger audience. Please don't take discussions with developers and escalate them on the forums for broader exposure unless we ask you to. :-)
Second, this statement is a bit misleading and so I wanted to correct it:
As Caspian had hinted that further PrElyria footage might be restricted to Alpha 1 backers due to negative feedback...
For those who weren't part of the larger Discord discussion, my statement began as an explanation of why we didn't share footage of Prelyria for a long time. Which is pretty simple - It's not what Chronicles of Elyria is ultimately going to look like. It is, not surprising, our Pre-Alpha client and is thus more suited for a smaller audience - in particular our Alpha 1 backers who have expressed a desire in seeing the game at this stage of development.
However, as development is a lengthy process, for many people it seemed like we'd gone dark and that development wasn't moving forward, which was not at all the case. So we took to showing the Prelyria/Pre-Alpha client as part of our shiny Thursdays in an effort to reassure people that forward progress is definitely being made and that game-play mechanics are coming online very quickly now.
That said, people who are tightly integrated within our community are already aware of our development process and understand that the Pre-Alpha client is functionally equivalent to the final game, but isn't visually equivalent. On the other hand, the general audience (people who are not an active part of our community) who are only superficially aware of CoE and its features are seeing the gameplay screenshots and video footage and are getting the wrong impression of what the final game is going to be. And while some of them do express a negative reaction, that's not the root problem, nor the main focus of our Discord conversation.
The root problem, and main focus, is that the information on our website isn't easily discoverable and is a bit stale. For example, there isn't anything in our game guide or top-level pages that talks about our approach to development or which explains why the Pre-Alpha client exists, or why it looks different than the final game. So when someone does learn about our game through a Prelyria YouTube video, etc. there isn't a good way to funnel them through that first introduction of the game to a place where they have a fuller understanding.
As I said in Discord, I can see the value in a quick, informative blurb at the beginning of gameplay videos featuring our pre-Alpha, but that alone isn't enough to address my bigger plans right now, which is making sure new people who come to the site (and existing community members) have an easier time learning about the game, where we are in development, what our process is, what's unique about CoE, and why this is a game to be excited about.
Now that everyone is caught up with our discussion, I said in our conversation I'd bring it up with the team and I've already started discussing it with the team Leads. I'm not entirely sure what else I can do to make sure you know your feedback was heard. But if it helps, it was.
Cheers!
Caspian