Some people in the SA thread have been trying to get refunds and Valve’s been fairly stubborn about not giving one, even after some back-and-forth citing various consumer protection laws and such. I haven’t heard of anyone successfully getting one yet, even the one-time-only-but-no-more refund that they’re rumoured to give.
I think the public policy is “no refunds” for any reason. However, I got a credit for RAGE back when it first launched because the game simply did not work on AMD cards at the time. I emailed support, was told the “no refunds” thing, then in the same email I was told I would be given a one-time option on my account to have the game removed from my library and the full amount put aside as a store credit.
I know other folks have been told the same thing for various games with issues.
I guess you’re screwed if you try it for another game on the same account though.
The only single time I’ve gotten good performance is when I first tried the less traffic mod but once I started flying around all the traffic ships came back and my performance went back to normal (bad). Maybe in a few weeks I’ll try it out again as I assume the mods will be a lot better then!
Public policy and EULA’s are no protection against regional consumer protection acts. Over here, for example, if a product is not fit for purpose, or does not work as advertised, the retailer, within a certain time period, is responsible for refunding a consumer’s money, no ifs, no buts, no “you agreed to our ToS.”, no “here, have an in-store voucher.” Getting some of these online retailers to recognise and honour regional consumer protection rights, however, is the challenge.
The only way to do it, I suspect, is to escalate to relevant local authorities. This is a hard fact the Steam and the like are going to learn over the coming years if this continued trend of horribly broken releases continues.
Regional pricing, on the other hand, seems to be an easy concept for them to understand
Update November 28th:
Since the last posting we have released two more updates 1.16 and 1.17. These two mostly focussed on improving stability and fixed a couple of bugs related to the non working trade offers. See release notes for details:
News and Patch Information - Latest Version: 4.30 (254587)- Updated: 2017-12-07 - egosoft.com
Trade bugs
It turned out that the issues many of you are seeing with trade ships not working correctly is not one bug but a whole series of connected problems. After resolving the first issue with 1.17, more problems became apparent. This is the reason we are now testing the next patch 1.18 a lot longer than the other patches. We can not afford a very indepth test at this time, because too many of you are waiting for this fix, but things are looking good and chances are that this update will be available before the weekend.
I do not want to give silly excuses here. Of course you deserve a bug free game, but you may ask why these trade problems were not uncovered during testing: We had a group of testers dedicated to testing our economy over a long period of time. These guys used a special version of the game which allowed them to run the entire economy at a higher speed. It seems that most of these problems we now see did not happen with this time acceleration. Meanwhile these problems also do not happen early on in the game or if you (like most testers do) have to restart the game frequently.
Other features coming up next
• Fixed several causes of crashes in-game and when loading savegames.
• Fixed a specific problem resulting in periodic slow-downs.
• Improved general performance (first small improvement only, more to come).
• Fixed several problems with ship/drone docking/undocking behaviour.
• Fixed problem with player drone formations.
• Fixed several small localisation issues.
• Improved skill levels for new NPCs.
• Improved readability of entries in interaction menus.
• Improved GPU listing on laptops with multiple GPUs (still some driver-related issues on certain hardware).
Basically, they didn’t test the game.
Their excuse is almost insulting towards their customers’ intelligence. Just come out and say you had to release the game as-is or go bust. Saying that their QA used a “special version” of the game instead of testing the actual thing just makes them look even more incompetent. I’m not sure if they’re complete imbeciles or believe that their playerbase is.
Either whoever ran the QA is not deserving of the title, or somebody is lying through their teeth. Ah, well. I just hope the game becomes something great within the near future.
I like how they attribute their inability to properly test to people not buying their broken game. “Because too many of you are waiting for this fix” indeed.
Speaking from personal experience qa teams often do not get true power in a small to medium company. A situation where the QA manager would come to the boss and tell him that the release next week cannot be done due to show-stopping quality issues cannot occur usually. So, what happened here is solely a management mistake of the CEO who didn’t give the QA department sufficient power. Since the CEO is also the main designer I also attribute the poor design decisions to him (like the idea of the non-skippable swiveling pilot chair). Other decision are pretty good, though, like the high-ways.
So I hope that he at least has the decency to see his mistakes and remove the offending parts, or otherwise fix them.
Or they ran out of money…and didn’t have a choice. This isn’t an excuse in my eyes, but its reality.
If that was the case I’d much rather they just say that, especially if it were released as Early Access. Saying that QA was testing a different version is about as professional as “Well, it worked fine on my dev machine, so…”
Who said denial can’t be used aswell haha. I’m mostly heavily shocked I just bought a dumbed down x series. The ship holds zero interest for me, its just a crappy fighter ship with some boring upgrades.
I sad panda.
Me too, man. It’s not just dumbed down, it’s stripped to the bone. I could handle flying one ship if it were heavily customizable and could be a fast attack corvette or a freighter or a small capship. Instead, I got a boring corvette with 0 cargo space and a Laser I to Laser II upgrade system. There’s no customization at all, and I thought that was something heavily advertised pre-release. The state of the actual game confounds me on so many levels.
Yeah, that’s the biggest problem I have with it, too. Perhaps they can eventually make an interesting enough product out of Rebirth but it’s never going to approach the complexity and variety of the X-tension through X3 games. There’s just too much in the way of new game systems to add to make that happen.
We’ll see, though. You never know. Rebirth could become a satisfying game in its own right, somewhere down the line.
It would not be the. First time we’ve seen massive failures at bringing bigger space ships to the front in games. I think Elte might pull this one better off.
Space combat looks much better in this than the earlier X games; It is a shame everything else is so broken/different.
Seems they released some beta patch, ill try it out later.
Public Beta testing of X Rebirth updates and patches
In order to test updates and patches for X Rebirth more thoroughly, we have decided to open up our Beta testing to anyone who wants to get involved. If you would like to help us test our forthcoming patches (and don’t mind backing up your savegames in case things don’t go according to plan!) then please head over to our new X Rebirth - Patch Public Beta forum, where you will find details on how to join the Beta program and report any problems you find.
In the short term, until the Christmas break, we plan to operate a roughly weekly patch cycle, with patches being made available for public Beta testing towards the end of the week, and the full release following early the next week if all goes well. As we move away from urgent bug-fixing and on to improving performance, fixing gameplay issues and adding new features, the length of this cycle will of course increase, with more time being allowed between the Beta and full release.
Rome Total war 2 went with this approach as well, and I kinda like it. Especially in cases where its been shown that internal Q&A seems to have failed, this seems like a great way for the developers to get feedback on the patch, and also getting it tested on a lot of systems.
There was raised concerns early on that the ship would be inflexible and just too small for ones shoes for this game, however they said it had a modular design and could be heavily upgraded. However I thought that ment I could add game changing stuff, like compartments, more stuff like gun turrets and other cool stuff…Laser MK 2 did not fit the bill on that subject.
So fine, Freelancer had some deal like this, but then you could always find exotic stuff in that game, here you still just buy a better gun in the store when you got the credits for it…so the premise is get money, and then upgrade…that’s is nowhere even remotely as fun as finding some weapon after a cool dogfight…
I’m aghast still.