3961

Stardock should just offer full refunds no questions asked. I don’t get why people are having issues with that - if Brad wants to have that part of the Gamer’s Bill of Rights, then he needs to instruct his CS reps to just be cool about it. Anything else comes across as slimy, IMHO.

3962

I wish I would be.

On top of that you have a game that generously is not unanimously fun or competent.
The fun is missing because the game is buggy, extremely unbalanced, lacks documentation and - unless you know how GalCiv works - has an unintuitive design.

Sometime next month, the first two of those problems should be fixed by Stardock. By then the existing players will probably have documented the game sufficiently to get new players started, which will largely fix the accessibility issue.

I don’t see any reason to think Elemental won’t be just as Good, and very similar to GalCiv. Of course that’s a problem in itself, since a sizeable chunk of us didn’t buy it to get a GalCiv with wizards.

It doesn’t look good to me for its lasting appeal.
Depends on what you mean. I fully expect the game to get a critically acclaimed expansion or two, because as mentioned, the problems are very fixable.

But I also expect it to permanently piss of a lot of current owners, by being GalCiv with wizards and by failing to provide the mod tools necessary to turn it into something more in line with what all of us old MoM & AoW fans want.

3963

He actually did over there on the Elemntal forums. An admittedly snotty poster was creating lots of posts about how bad the game was and Frogboy appeared saying to just reference him in an email to support and get a refund and shut up.

Which is why I’m even more surprised on top of everything else that they’re running me around or just taking their sweet time.

3964

Multiplayer games tend to have a short shelf life, other than a few exceptions. Players get the game and even if they enjoy it, unless it’s a big hit, they tend to move on to the next cool game. When you log on and fewer and fewer players are playing, chances are you will log on more infrequently too.

demigod is one of those exception, fairly sure mazuo was talking about demigod.

3965

I phrased that poorly. I’ve been brain-dead form some weeks now. I can’t think of a way to explain myself.

3966

Yeah, they probably aren’t busy or under a crunch or anything. Certainly no really bad times around the office. Nope, they just have it out for you.

3967

Yeah, they probably aren’t busy or under a crunch or anything. Certainly no really bad times around the office. Nope, they just have it out for you.

if they are crunching that’s their fault, their release date and their buggy product.

3968

You do know that CS people don’t program and design the game, right? Their only job is to answer the phone and help people like Mazuo in a timely manner. Besides, the choice to give someone store credit and the choice to give them a refund has nothing to do with being busy. I know for a fact that Stardock has refused to give refunds to people.

3969

You obviously have not been annoying enough to warrant a refund. :)

3970

Yes, I’m not sure how their sales staff is busy fixing the game, but whatever. I don’t like having to send them yet another email asking for some response as to why I can’t get my money back when others have and it’s their official policy, but I’m not sure what else I can do.

I don’t see how I have a persecution complex for thinking 4 days of nothing after a brief offer for store credit is a rather poor effort in resolving this.

Haha, vyshka, very nice. :)

3971

I hope so. There’s a fun game in there somewhere, once all the problems are ironed out.

3972

They’re nuking criticism threads on their boards now. :shame:

There was a thread called “Point Blank: Why did you release it so early?” about 15 mins ago, now it’s gone.

Lucky I got a screenie of it from my browser’s “back” cache. ;)

Oh, the poster has posted a “why’s my thread deleted” thread. How long till it’s nuked? :D

3973

Do you think Stardock might be getting a slightly higher than usual number of refund requests and bug complaints? That they might be a bit busy too? That the call and email queue might be a bit longer than usual?

3974

In fairness, I’m seeing plenty of critical threads that are still up. If people start ranting and screaming, then yeah, the mods are going to shut those threads down. But really, how many threads do you need to start if it’s yet another “I’m pissed about the state of this game” thread and there’s several active ones on the page? In other words, it’s about typical for a company sponsored game board.

3975

It’s about tone. I’ve read over a dozen critical threads that have remained on their forums, as long as the content remains at least somewhat constructive. I don’t feel like their moderation has been any more draconian than what I see on other forums.

3976

The random maps are coming at some point. Here’s BoogieBac from Stardock on the issue:

"August 29 10:29 AM

Truly random maps are defiantly in the pipeline. We figure there are around 80-100 man-hours left to get them up to speed (they were working pretty well at one point, but got messed up along the way, plus we need that stamp intergration, ways to ensure players dont start in blocked sections, etc.)

No fears, we’re not ignore it…just trying to get some other items hammered out first."

3977

Is superweird to me that random maps are the last thing to get dev’s love. Sounds like the type of stuff all programmers would love to write. You have a visual feedback of your work, and you are doing something cool: worldbuilding. You are playing the Game Master role in a Role Play game, drawing a world. Also, who need artist wen is the programmers that is creating a system that create the worlds, all the worlds? infinite of then. Not only a god of 1 universe, but the god of a infinite variety of universes.

The only problem I see is definition. Everyone say’s “good maps” in a way, that looks like everyone agree on what is really a good map. But… do people really agree? is “good map” really well defined? poorly defined problems are hard to program.

The Civi serie have mastered the mapmaking thing… literally 19 years working on the problem, and refining the solution. Elementals has released withouth it, and plan to give 100 hours of love to it, post-release.

Also, mapmaking is another thing where you can add flavour, or you can go bland. …

3978

Teiman, I would like to talk to you about the purple lights of LUIS, Armand, and Angel. Can you take the three mystical Philipino dwarves into your heart? You seem like you’d fit right in with the Dwarven Faith.

3979

you are gifted with glossolalia

3980

There is an official post stating that they will release a FREE addon in form of the former Book 2 planned addon/expansion in Fall this year that together with various post 1.1 patches might actually resemble something close to an actual game.