I received a refund in 2018 though they have since tried changing their EULA and TOS to make it harder, they have no legal standing to refuse a refund to Australian customers.
I was refunded for around $750 USD IIRC and at one point was in email contact with Will Leverett prior to my refund being approved.
In video games development, and more broadly in software development, Alpha state refers to a feature incomplete and largely untested state and is unrelated to internal/external sales, review, testing or release.
Alpha software is not thoroughly tested by the developer before it is released to customers.
While outside of recent trends, particularly in crowd funded games development, alpha releases to customers for paid software are less common they do occur and don’t have any bearing on the alpha state of the software.
In general, external availability of alpha software is uncommon for proprietary software, while open source software often has publicly available alpha versions.
Further
A feature-complete (FC) version of a piece of software has all of its planned or primary features implemented but is not yet final due to bugs, performance or stability issues. This occurs at the end of alpha testing in development.
And for Beta
Beta, named after the second letter of the Greek alphabet, is the software development phase following alpha. A beta phase generally begins when the software is feature-complete but likely to contain several known or unknown bugs
I am both a qualified software developer, and have worked in the video games industry. I hope you have learnt something.
You’ve likely listened to the same or similar lectures I have on level design and I seriously apply those lessons to every single game and UI I have influence over!
While some might not consider it a game mechanic I certainly do, as gaming the proceduraly created levels is a core part of certain games, see mapping tactics in Diablo 2 for example as you use knowledge of procedural generation to reduce the time to find and kill bosses!
I haven’t found a mod that handles what I expect from building an empire, and it would require a decent bit of work, which I’m not currently interested in doing myself.