Been thinking over what you said Medierra. I totally see your point re team time constraints. Re the early developement yes, the initial followers of the game were mostly TQ fans and tolerant of progress. The community’s grown since the Kickstarter, but they’ve also come to know how Crate works (at least for this game) in communicating with the fan base.
So it could work both ways. Yes, you got flack as development went on for GD, but there’ll probably be some flack anyway when the new game is revealed. Few people here on the forum seem to know about the new project, never mind the greater potential audience out there and when it hits some will be saying “Wtf why are Crate making this instead of another ARPG?” because that’s what your reputation’s been built on so far. Maybe if they’d been in on the development earlier it could have generated interest and got people hyped. We’ll never know.
Whenever I tell people who’ve just bought the game or are thinking of buying it that Crate communicate regularly with the fan base via the GM’s and live dev streams the reaction is always positive. They like the fact that Crate does tell people what’s going on. To nick a comment from Zantai (mistress of quotations that I am ;)), it’s working well for you. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizzard aren’t kinda wishing they’d done the same.
And if you’re still in a question answering mood Medierra still using this hack?
"Without a doubt the hackiest thing I remember from Titan Quest is how we managed the event scripting. The quest / event tech had a major weakness in that there was no way to delay an action once it was triggered. So if you wanted something to happen 5 seconds after a player ran through some bounding volume, there was no way to set a delay. It would always be instant.
We were nearing the end of production, so it was hard to request additional features, as engineers were slammed just trying to meet their milestone deliverables. One of the QA testers had started helping out with scripting work, and figured out that there was in fact a way to delay an action from triggering based on the length of an animation.
He ended up using these squirrels we had as ambient creatures as the animation timer, and they became the default timing mechanism. He created an invisible version of the squirrel, which he would place in the levels where he needed them, then would time everything based on the duration of their idle animation. Because of his creative problem solving, he was promoted to designer on the next project."
Can’t say I’ve noticed any squirrels lurking in GD, but then again being invisible you never know. Or maybe you’ve stepped it up a bit and it’s now an invisible Zantai in his zentai suit that is the trigger. 
Still sounds a pretty ingenious way to solve the problem at the time - says me who knows nothing about programming/game making.
