Elemental all-purpose thread

Sarkus · 2010-09-05T11:27:06.000Z

strategy:

This was an interesting take.

That blog post of Brad’s from late July is a pretty major smoking gun, for sure.

It does support what I’ve suspected from early on, that there were other factors involved. For example, I’m sure there would have been consequences from the book publisher if the game had been delayed several months. But none of that makes it clear one way or the other whether Stardock’s financial future is really tied to this game. Yes, they have had to lay off some people who’s projects were apparently based on the assumption that Elemental sales were going to pay for an expansion of Stardock’s game development staff. However, as far as can be determined right now, Stardock as a small developer with one internal development team will continue.

DrCrypt · 2010-09-05T11:51:00.000Z

"Sarkus":

[A]s far as can be determined right now, Stardock as a small developer with one internal development team will continue.

Sarkus, well, I certainly hope so… but didn’t someone in this thread (or a news item linked in this thread) say this was the first of many layoffs that would eventually encompass about twenty people, all told? That’s a good one-third of Stardock’s workforce, according to Wikipedia. And Brad Wardell said this debacle was going to have “major repercussions” for the company as a whole. I doubt he’d say this if he just meant they’d have to eat some crow for awhile. In fact, Brad’s also implied Stardock is currently in its its gravest period of uncertainty since 1997, when they shifted from OS/2 development to Windows. In all honesty, right now, everything really seems to point to Brad basically saying, “This is a fuck up our ass did not have the credit to cash.”

Sarkus · 2010-09-05T11:55:35.000Z

DrCrypt:

Sarkus, well, I certainly hope so… but didn’t someone in this thread (or a news item linked in this thread) say this was the first of many layoffs that would eventually encompass about twenty people, all told? That’s a good one-third of Stardock’s workforce, according to Wikipedia. And Brad Wardell said this debacle was going to have “major repercussions” for the company as a whole. I doubt he’d say this if he just meant they’d have to eat some crow for awhile.

Brad has said more people will be laid off, but again, the explanation was up front. They had plans for a second development team and had already hired most, if not all of those people. With the launch they’ve downgraded their revenue expectations and decided they can’t support the second team. So that’s where the cuts come from.

We’ll see if it goes beyond that.

Alstein · 2010-09-05T12:04:15.000Z

Considering that GalCiv 2 was probably made while Stardock was 30-40 people, I’m confident that Stardock can work with a smaller team. Does anyone know exactly how big SD was in 2005-6?

I don’t think it’s as dire as people think- SD’s hardcore fans seem to be in full Stardock defense mode, so they have a core base, it’s expanding it that’s the problem. That said, I don’t think Stardock’s name is big enough to be tarnished by the Wal-Mart crowd which according to Brad is a large source of their income- especially if they do GalCiv3 next (which would make sense as that’s their most reputable game)

I think people will be made whole in the end, at least most people. Oftentimes, I find a bad game turning good to be more fun then a game that’s good to start with. This is why I’ll probably preorder SD’s next game (call me a sucker if you want)

Also wondering if they’re going to do a Political Machine in 2012 now. That’s usually a small side project for them.

Damien_Neil · 2010-09-05T12:12:06.000Z

Sarkus:

That blog post of Brad’s from late July is a pretty major smoking gun, for sure.

A smoking gun of what, though? What’s the accusation here? That Brad, for some nefarious purpose, deliberately released an incomplete game in order to…what? This whole mess is obviously a disaster for Stardock. They’d have been better off pushing back the release date, no matter what the consequences of that might have been.

Have you ever worked on a death march project, where you tried to do too much in too little time with too few people? I have. For the six months before the project was put out of its misery, I certainly knew somewhere within myself that we weren’t going to succeed. To admit failure would have been to let down everyone else on the team, however, so I just kept working and believing that we might somehow pull off the impossible.

It’s entirely possible to know that your project is failing, and to not admit that to yourself or anyone else. That’s a failing, but not a moral one, and not something that is deserving of scorn.

frank_austin · 2010-09-05T12:22:10.000Z

Damien Neil:

A smoking gun of what, though? What’s the accusation here? That Brad, for some nefarious purpose, deliberately released an incomplete game in order to…what?

If you read that blog from a SD employee, you’ll know that this isn’t even an accusation. It’s the truth. They released an incomplete game in order to make a shipping window.

The “accusation” is that Brad deliberately misled customers about the state of the game in order to drive sales.

Angie_Gallant · 2010-09-05T12:44:26.000Z

vyshka:

Another quote from that blog post suggests that they had an idea of it’s state:

As another former tester, I’ll support that guy. On every project I’ve worked on, when players said “How could QA have missed this?” QA didn’t miss it. It was deemed as shippable during final bug triage between QA, development, and production. It’s just very easy in the final, tired days before gold to say “Come on, it’s only crashing that one system every once in a while, that is shippable,” and later realize that there’s tons of people who have the same configuration and they are now all on your message boards.

Sarkus · 2010-09-05T12:52:03.000Z

Damien Neil:

A smoking gun of what, though? What’s the accusation here? That Brad, for some nefarious purpose, deliberately released an incomplete game in order to…what? This whole mess is obviously a disaster for Stardock. They’d have been better off pushing back the release date, no matter what the consequences of that might have been.

Have you ever worked on a death march project, where you tried to do too much in too little time with too few people? I have. For the six months before the project was put out of its misery, I certainly knew somewhere within myself that we weren’t going to succeed. To admit failure would have been to let down everyone else on the team, however, so I just kept working and believing that we might somehow pull off the impossible.

It’s entirely possible to know that your project is failing, and to not admit that to yourself or anyone else. That’s a failing, but not a moral one, and not something that is deserving of scorn.

Right now Brad is saying that he didn’t truly understand the state of the game and that was because he was too close to it. And yet that “smoking gun” post, three weeks before the game was released, is Brad talking about a bunch of the same problems that people who bought the game are angry about. So how do you reconcile “I didn’t know” with “here’s what’s wrong”? As I noted above, the only way you can reconcile that is to believe, as Brad apparently did when he wrote that blog post prior to release, that all those things were going to be fixed in the final, not beta tested patch.

Or you can look at the other evidence and believe that Brad was fully aware that what they were shipping wasn’t going to go over very well but believe it was the best of two bad options you had.

fenrir · 2010-09-05T13:01:17.000Z

It’s not mutually exclusive. Under severe time pressure, software projects do have a tendency to look much more finished than they are to developers. I can believe BW was aware of the faults but then deluded himself into believing it’s all good now after superficial fixes - he didn’t have a choice, really, once the decision was made to ship in August. Stopping a train is not as easy as it sounds and everybody involved is just human.

Tide · 2010-09-05T16:10:55.000Z

nothing in this saga makes any sense.

the kinds of bugs that I’m seeing and reading about are not edge cases. They could not have been missed internally. Modern IDE’s would catch threadpool and memory allocation errors. Plugins easily identify missing drivers.

if they are their own publisher then what circumstances forced SD to release incomplete in Sept?

if they make most of their money not from games, then why are there bad circumstances for the company? And again, why rush the release if you don’t depend on games for top revenue?

if they champion a gamers-bill-of-rights, then why do they consistently do the polar opposite? Why not have frictionless refunds, or release a polished product when you criticize other companies for not doing so?

In all honestly and fairness, I don’t know why BW gets any attention from people. His company consistently releases unfinished software (GalCiv2, Demigod as publisher, EWoM); he evangelizes one behavior for developers (gamer’s rights thing) but then doesn’t follow through for himself; and he self-flagellates and testifies about his shortcomings in public, but then reacts badly when others bring them up. He is NOT ALL THERE. Something is broken in Michigan and it’s not just the threadpool.

Bill_and_Belinda_Gat · 2010-09-05T16:38:48.000Z

anyone knows how the company is doing other than the game products? if the whole windows blinds thing was going to the dogs then more light is shed on the reasons for this early launch. given the evidence that has been posted lately in this thread it seems fairly reasonable to believe that Brad has overstated the importance of his love for the game as a reason for the unfinished release state of elemental.

Abiding_Dude · 2010-09-05T16:51:24.000Z

Bill and Belinda Gates:

anyone knows how the company is doing other than the game products? if the whole windows blinds thing was going to the dogs then more light is shed on the reasons for this early launch. given the evidence that has been posted lately in this thread it seems fairly reasonable to believe that Brad has overstated the importance of his love for the game as a reason for the unfinished release state of elemental.

I have no answers for you, but just wanted to thank you for your eleemosynary efforts.

Bill_and_Belinda_Gat · 2010-09-05T16:51:51.000Z

on the other hand. Destiny’s Embers gives the impression of being made by a person with an at least temporary impairment of judgment.

Linoleum · 2010-09-05T16:59:23.000Z

Tide:

the kinds of bugs that I’m seeing and reading about are not edge cases. They could not have been missed internally. Modern IDE’s would catch threadpool and memory allocation errors. Plugins easily identify missing drivers.

Bwhahahaha, no. I think their graphics engineer bit off more than they could handle, and I don’t think they had adequate compatibility lab testing, but it is not as easy as that.

dbd1963 · 2010-09-05T17:00:54.000Z

Wow, that’s a new one for me:

el·ee·mos·y·nar·y/ˌeləˈmäsəˌnerē/
Adjective: Of, relating to, or dependent on charity; charitable.

DaleKent · 2010-09-05T17:00:57.000Z

Angie Gallant:

As another former tester, I’ll support that guy. On every project I’ve worked on, when players said “How could QA have missed this?” QA didn’t miss it. It was deemed as shippable during final bug triage between QA, development, and production. It’s just very easy in the final, tired days before gold to say “Come on, it’s only crashing that one system every once in a while, that is shippable,” and later realize that there’s tons of people who have the same configuration and they are now all on your message boards.

With Elemental, there is no possible way to cover up “we didn’t know about the crashes” or that it only crashed on one system.

I was one of those unfortunates on an ATI/64-bit system which up to 1.06 couldn’t get through 20 turns without a blue screen or hardware lockup or reboot. 1.06 allowed me to get to 50 turns, but still the same. I haven’t tried 1.07 nor will I (I’m chasing a refund).

But if he comes out and says “we didn’t know of the problems” it’s a clear lie. It’s not like an ATI/64-bit system is rare.

Bill_and_Belinda_Gat · 2010-09-05T17:03:39.000Z

dbd1963:

Wow, that’s a new one for me:

el·ee·mos·y·nar·y/ˌeləˈmäsəˌnerē/
Adjective: Of, relating to, or dependent on charity; charitable.

i let it slide because even after reading the definition i was unsure if it was an insult or not.

dbd1963 · 2010-09-05T17:05:33.000Z

Bill and Belinda Gates:

i let it slide because even after reading the definition i was unsure if it was an insult or not.

In this thread? Probably safe to suspect the usage was ironic…

Bill_and_Belinda_Gat · 2010-09-05T17:06:53.000Z

FUUUUUU

Stepsongrapes · 2010-09-05T17:08:14.000Z

DaleKent:

It’s not like an ATI/64-bit system is rare.

I’ve seen the game run fine (at least in 1.05) on a ATI/64-bit system. The game has issues, but I don’t think it is universally incompatible with that set-up.

Maybe a certain driver set or certain northbridge chipset.