Hi all!

My name is Mellow_Online1 and I am the new owner of both Early Access Watcher groups, taking over from the previous owner and creator The Mute Cynic.

Some of you may be familiar with me for my work over on the Sentinels of the Store curator group or for my uber cool tweets that I post.

I would like to thank The Mute Cynic for firstly entrusting me to keep both Early Access Watcher groups up and running, and also secondly for his 6 years of great service that he has given to the Steam community. He is a very dedicated person, and the fact he kept this group up and running for as long as he did, in my eyes, is an accomplishment in and of itself.

I recognise the great need for a group like this to continue to exist in the current climate of Steam, and hence why I approached Mute and asked if I could continue with what he started to do.

This of course is no easy undertaking and I recognise that, and Mute even pre-emptively warned me that a lot of work is to be done in terms of addressing the group's backlogs in terms of updating the current curations, but in the interest of the curator's followers and the people who rely on this group for trusted information on Early Access titles, it is something I'm willing to commit to.

These changes however, will not happen overnight, and I will also be making a few changes to the groups, how they operate, along with the staff and the format in which they will function, but I do have some big ideas and high hopes to push this group forward.

To let you know of what I will be working on in the coming weeks on this group, my plan of action includes:

• Bringing on a staff of administrators and moderators to help facilitate the group's functionality, as well as to help cover the large backlog of games.
  
  
• Bringing on a team of reviewers to help broaden the horizons of the amount of coverage that can be offered.
  
  
• Overhauling the curator system, so that this group will be used to keep tabs on the status of early access titles (active development, development paused and abandoned) and use the second one more for proper reviews of Early Access games.
  
  
• Create listings on both curator pages to allow for easy filtration of titles.
  
  
• Go through ALL of the games curated by the 2 groups (yes, all 3,000+) and review their activity and note if they need to be moved to the other group.
  
  
• Implementing a combined function with this group and Sentinels of the Store's Discord server to allow for an easy method of submitting games for review here.
  
  
• Tidying up discussion forums and threads to make browsing easy and allow users to submit games either for review or to alert of any development activity.
  
  
• Place a contact method in for developers/publishers to quickly alert us of any changes to the development activity of the games or to send games in for review by the second curator group.
  
  
• Create a new logo (Mute requested for me to remove the old logo of the group, and out of respect for him, I have fulfilled this request, hence why we have an under construction logo on both groups).
  
  
• Take in further feedback from you all to see what else you would want to see on this page. Please leave your input for now in the comment section on this post..

Like I said, this will not be something that happens overnight, and time is needed to be able to implement and complete all of these, so I ask for a few things from the community here:

1) Patience. I plan to give regular updates both on my Twitter and I plan to make a post here at least once a month (but aim for more frequently) with notes on how close we are to completing the list I've set out above.

2) Input and feedback. If you have any ideas or feedback based on what I've set out here, please make a comment on this announcement and I am more than happy to hear it.

3) Volunteers. While I plan to implement my own staff members over from Sentinels, I will still be on the lookout, both for members to act as moderators, and also even for members to act as reviewers for this page. I believe this will be an effective way of being able to tackle the large backlog of games in early access. While this of course naturally helps the group to cover a wider field, I see it as also a good chance for any up and coming writers and reviewers to get their work in front of the sister group's following and to also help network with more reviewers and writers. If you're interested in any of these positions, please do send me an e-mail to mellowonline1@gmail.com as we will definitely need your help to both keep this group going and for it to become bigger and better than before.

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to help steer this ship, I'd like to thank Mute once again for entrusting managing this group over to me, and we will continue to hold early access developers to account and to keep the customers informed on the games they are buying.

Thank you.
Mellow