Didn’t Brad say that himself earlier in this thread? Not to buy his games?
JM1
4182
That was kinda the joke, yes
I just received the exact same non-response response and will be requesting my refund post hastily.
Granted I have derived some small pleasure from the game, but it has been painfully overshadowed by the half-baked release, embarrassingly arrogant “apology” that Brad posted and finally by this nonsense on the forums.
I could possibly let the unjustified and completely inexplicable banning slide if I weren’t in possession of a very pricey, very indie paid beta. That MIGHT be “fixed” in 6 months.
It definitely puts a sour taste in my mouth. I’ve been a Stardock customer for over 9 years (and on the forums for that long) and have recommended Windows Blinds and the like to friends and customers in the past. Worse, I’ve been blabbing about Elemental to whomsoever would listen since it was first announced.
Thanks for the royal treatment Stardock. I won’t forget this.
So Stardock is like mouthy mini EA… This only get more fun as time goes on.
I’m glad you had some fun with the game. :)
I am one of those unfortunates on an ATI/64-bit laptop, and thus have never been able to get a game past turn 50 without something horrendous happening.
Hardware lockups, CTD’s, freezing, black screens and of course the best one, reboots. I’m sure it’s just how I’m holding though, not the phone game itself. ;)
Arboris
4186
When someone has been a customer for that long you would hope they would at minimum receive a warning before they were banned.
If I had not already asked for and received a refund I would be asking for one now. This is totally unacceptable behavior coming from a company that should have it’s tail firmly between their legs after this not ready for primetime release debacle.
So let me ask a question that isn’t angry. IIRC, they wanted to release this now because their next “window” would be sometime early next year, like February,right?
If so, do you think that delaying it could have caused more damage to their reputation and the game’s publicity than this earlier, seemingly too-early release, or would the damage have been the same?
Personally, I’m of the mind, given the level of reactions, that they should have waited, but I could be wrong.
There is no doubt that they should have waited.
Botched launches are very hard to recover from. Prolonged botched launches even more so.
Well, you would think that with a badly unfinished game coming out in a week, the CEO wouldn’t get on a message board and talk about how done it was and how great it was. Sometimes visionary businesses do things that don’t make sense to people who don’t have what it takes.
How much was Valve’s reputation damaged by the huge wait between Half-Life 1 and 2?
As the saying goes, “A late game is only late until it ships…”
Mazuo
4193
Exactly, a delay admitting it needed a lot of work and promising a whole new list of features would have done nothing but garner more pre-orders.
Hasn’t shown up on my credit card, but SD finally replied stating my refund’s been authorized so I’m cautiously optimistic.
Sarkus
4195
Bill Harris commented on this mess on his blog and made a good point: by choosing to release now, Brad and Stardock are as guilty of the “big company” approach he often accuses others of. A company only concerned about the quality of their product doesn’t let retail shelf availability dictate their decisions.
Lovely.
Through a weird series of events, my “weekends” fall on Wednesday and Thursday. I looked forward to enjoying the much-ballyhooed Patch 1.07 during said weekend, but the launch date of “today” recently changed to “not today” on the main IRC channel, so I am assuming that means “tomorrow,” and the only patch launch window I’ve ever seen SD run is 11PM EST or later. . . so, so much for serious playtime this week.
Gah, I bitch about this game a lot on here but very much want to like it. This company’s behavior and the game’s enormous number of game-nuking bugs on my system are making this absurdly difficult to do. I wish I had the mature patience to just box it up for a month or six like so many of you are choosing to do, but I am still very much a kid at heart when it comes to games like this. . . which makes being a PC gamer absurdly stressful ;)
Ah well. . . Elemental the Game will launch soon. Till then, guess I am going to watch Elemental the Beta crawl by on my screen at 5FPS. . . the same screen that runs Ultra Crysis at 25 -.-
Mazuo
4197
I know retail boxes are still pretty important, but is anyone else a little surprised that with how hard they’re pushing Impulse they didn’t offer it solely through it? Avoids being forced into any shipping timetable as well.
Would it have drastically cut the sales?
KevinC
4198
I’m not surprised at all, Brad has said they make over 60% of their sales at Retail.
UPDATE: It appears that I might well have been banned from the forums for posting about the “corrupt patch” issues as my innocuous post was deleted and the ban seems to have come about that time.
This CAN be an indicator of using a pirated copy or any modification of the Elemental executable… say using a user created patch to work around OOM errors as seen in the Elemental support forums. Ignore the handful of fanboys screaming “oMG PIRATEZ ARE TEH BADZ!!!111” and look at the legitimate customers just trying to get this dog’s dinner to run.
Nice that I got banned for starting the exact SAME thread yesterday and am most assuredly not pirating this game.
Brad wants to ride with the big boys, but still wants to be treated with kid gloves because he’s an “indie” and posts on message boards*. In a few years, so many developers will be doing that kind of stuff that people will recognize it for what it is: just a cheap form of marketing.
*About how the game is 10 weeks ahead of schedule and will be loved by everyone.
