5021

We got to that point many many pages ago.

However, stuff keeps coming out all the time - from the mea culpas to the firings to the appearance of Brad on the podcast. This thread will die when Elemental and everything surrounding it is no longer of interest. Until then, people can whine about dinosaurs and ask for the thread to go away as much as they like, but it won’t do anything. Even posting complaints just serves to bump the thread further.

It’s just a thread. If you don’t like it, don’t read it. There’s another thread dedicated to the gameplay if that’s what you’re looking for.

5022

You really think this thread did all that?

PS - fair enough, JM

5023

Did you follow the beta on the Elemental forums? Numerous game design decisions were reversed and gameplay changes (some of them, to me at least, startlingly major ones) were made on the basis of player feedback.

One bad decision - however huge it was - doesn’t somehow cancel all that out. From my point of view Stardock were extremely responsive to their beta testers.

5024

The fact that Stardock had to do three updates speaks volumes… In fairness to Stardock, they can release an update a week till I get the forthcoming Civ 5 addiction out of my system. It is all the same be it three or thirty. However it touches back to why I passed on Elemental until this hypothetical date sometime in early November.

5025

Some time around September 21st, I reckon.

Until then, :popcorn:

5026

Yeah.

5027

Boring old meme is boring and old.

5028

Okay. How’s this for a new meme?

I was in the beta. There were WAY more mistakes than just one.

5029

I did, and I was a part of it in a small fashion - but some (many?) aspects of the beta were just downright baffling.

The major disconnect I’m speaking of is the state of the game at Beta 4 vs Brad/Stardock going ‘nope, totally cool, trust me, internal build is all good, we’re ready to ship’. That is never going to be true a month out from release unless your beta is so far behind your internal builds as to be functionally useless.

But on a more specific level, there were some very, very good conversations in the beta about various gameplay systems, and I have a hard time looking at the end results in the final and feeling that they were heeded. Random example: Caravans. They got rid of workers (yay!), which eliminates that annoying mid-late game micro that Civ has always suffered from, but then they throw in these incredibly annoying (and poorly documented) units that require micromanagement and are difficult and irritating to manage both from a UI and a gameplay standpoint.

I also found his commentary about the magic system somewhat painful, as he specifically addressed one comment from Mark Asher - did he and the team somehow miss the other reams of posts about magic systems, concepts, suggestions, feedback? (I’m sure he picked that one out of a hat, but still, that he would take one piece of feedback and say, yeah, we fixed that up, when 1) they didn’t and 2) what about the other few hundred suggestions?)

And now the whole system is getting tossed and replaced with the global mana system that MoM used, right after release?

I don’t ascribe any malicious intent to his behavior, nor do I have any rancor towards the team, so I’m not saying this out of spite, but hearing him talk about the beta and seeing the results makes me wonder what sort of weird filters this public information is going through before it hits the developers.

To put it another way, it’s just plain dumb that it took a monumentally painful review/public hammering for them to suddenly become incredibly responsive to the community and have a good hard look at the game, when that information (and those warnings) were already present during the beta.

I didn’t like the way that he sort of… brushed off the beta comments by going ‘the users always want tons of big huge features and changes’, when there were plenty of very good suggestions and ideas that were either much smaller or worked within the confines of existing mechanics.

I totally understand that a) you can’t design a good game by commitee and b) you cannot implement every public request, but applying some critical thinking to suggestions and recognizing when your beta testers are trying to tell you something really important is, well, really important.

But whatever, I’m just rehashing stuff already talked over in this thread repeatedly. I guess the podcast just brought it all back in a manner that got under my skin. I’ll still happily play Elemental 1.9553 or whatever the version is that makes it awesome, if they get it to that point.

It’d probably be healthier if I just ignored the game for awhile, I’m still feeling burned on my investment.

5030

Being part of the beta myself, I can tell you that following your player feedback is not always the best method of game design. Specially when a beta is in progress not all systems are functional / complete, so player feedback is based on an incomplete game. Only the designer sees the entire picture. Only the designer should make the design calls, not beta player feedback. There were a number of cases where a system was changed on the basis of the 1% to the detriment of the 99%.

And then you have the infamous post halfway through the beta tests where it was stated by a Stardock employee that Brad tends to read negative criticism and ignore it and from that point on that poster’s comments from then on. Let’s say it did nothing to boost the morale of the beta testers who even halfway through were pointing out severe flaws in gameplay. A beta tester ignored (specially an unpaid one) tends to stop posting. I know I stopped because of this.

5031

The three moves ahead podcast is pretty good. I think it is fair to Brad while also asking good questions about the development process of Elemental (particularly Rob’s insight into their Q&A process). I still think it’s going to take them awhile to piece together what happened, as it’s odd Brad was too close to it yet really joined the project only last spring.

One thing that kind of struck me was Brad’s design sensibilities. It seems like they are rushing into this shared mana pool decision, as the specific problems he cites (summons) seems like it can be addressed a lot of other ways by changing the spell itself rather than such far reaching change. Maybe it’s good for other reasons (one he cites as making shards more valuable), but you can also fix summons by giving them a set expiration (after X turns), increasing their costs, making some spells off limits to some heroes, etc.

Anyway, like I said, I felt it was a pretty good listen.

5032

OK, fair enough. Although counting the number of mistakes is going to be a) pointlessly subjective for the most part and b) tangential to the point I was making to and replying to.

Having said that I do think that strategically, there really was only the one huge mistake that really matters. I see Elemental as having the core of a good game with some really rough edges. If they hadn’t decided to ship in August then there would have been time for several more beta iterations and for most of the current problems to be shown up and fixed.

Although having just listened to that podcast I do wonder whether the beta feedback would have been enough to penetrate the Stardock groupthink that Brad was describing. It’s hard to know.

5033

Which is why Brad has consistently said that delaying the game wouldn’t have solved much. The bugs/crash issues weren’t going to found until the game went into the wild because Stardock simply didn’t do enough hardware compatibility testing. And the core problems with the game were going to be there because Brad and his developers were completely blind to them.

Releasing the game at the end of August was not the “one” mistake they made.

5034

Kind of an odd beta process frankly–if you’re in beta you should be making sure major systems work and tweaking numbers, not just adding ones that should have already been in there. It needs to be damn near feature complete. Among other things this allows you to get away from the perceived-design-by-committee approach.

— Alan

5035

Yes. The game has more problems than just bugs. There’s some serious design issues here.

5036

OK, I misread your previous shorter post as expressing a generalised disbelief that Stardock paid attention to beta feedback at all. As I said, it seems to me that the beta caused major changes to the game.

I wonder if the final private beta did a lot of the damage by giving Stardock an easy way to duck negative feedback from the players. After all, we were no longer playing the current version of the game so our criticisms weren’t properly informed.

I understand your sense of bewilderment listening to Brad talking about Stardock’s decision making process. It just seems bizarre that they were so disconnected from reality. But then, this sort of thing happens all the time to software projects. Developers routinely lose sight of the needs of their customers and deliver software that doesn’t do what’s needed and nobody wants to use. In a sense it’s odd that we find it so strange, when it isn’t really unusual.

I’m also going to stop playing for a bit. I’ve quite enjoyed the game despite the frustrations, but what I want more than any game design or UI changes is a nastier AI. But I guess that will only be a priority once they’re out of firefighting mode.

5037

Except my “pile-on” consisted of pointing out that Brad was guilty of some of the character assassinating his fanboys were accusing Angie of engaging in, and of some reverse stalking on his own by calling Angie a “crazy lady” on FB. All of the attacks against Angie–from Brad, his employees, his wife, family friend, Stardock fanboys–basically centered around assumed motivation for her initial review, but oddly enough they never really tried to dismantle her criticism of the book itself. I didn’t bring this stuff up either, it was brought up by fanboys and family friend(s) in their reviews or comments.

And do I really need to go into the family friend or fanboy reviews on Amazon? But because I had the book on my wish list prior to hearing how god awful it was from a few trusted sources, I’m a Qt3 stalker who joined the pile-on for defending against Brad & co’s silly assertion that all the 1-star reviews were being orchestrated by Matt/Mike?

I’m also probably one of those “lowlives” Brad described yesterday on his forums. I think someone needs to look in the rmirror.

5038

I didn’t call you a stalker - I was just pointing out that QT3 was being represented by more than just Matt (and angie, but she stuck to discussing the book). It’s not like you didn’t post stuff about Brad’s politics - and yes, I know that was in response to the original accusation aimed at angie, but that’s not my point.

The point was Brad/Stardock were hugely wide of the mark with the original comments about angie, but his later comment about QT3 were sadly made somewhat believable by Matt’s behaviour on Amazon, and given that you were providing support of sorts I’m not entirely surprised he tied QT3 into it.

5039

Well, in no way do I “represent” Qt3. Neither do Matt or Angie. I thought it rather crappy of Brad to mention Qt3 in that light considering his supposed relationship with Tom, but crappy behavior seems par for the course.

5040

Both sides of the arguments about the book look bad (other then Angie.) Everyone else needs to just stop talking, though Brad, Stardock employees, and Brad’s family should be particularly cautious about getting into those kinds of debates.