Yay. Staying out of topic.

*resisting the urge to post something different, sticking to the essential things*

YAY!

whew... Long read...
Anway- Just want to thank stardock for the next update! Keep'm coming! (Also if its not to late, could you install a program on there, that well play my games and post them to the Metaverse? Becuase that would really help on my score)

Interesting thread. Bugs should be fixed as often and as fast as possilbe. For some reason I run into most of them and everything I do I quit playing for a while hoping that a fix will come out soon. My last bug was the Treasury Bug where all of a sudden you end up 2B+ in debt that takes 60,000 turns to work through or a 1000 play years. I wonder what the score would be like after a 1000 years, assuming that you did not get wiped out by the AI whild you had no money to do anything with.

Cari, please send out bug fixes as often as you can get Brad to let you. Your hard work is what makes the game playable.

The point that really stuck out for me was this by E.S...

"But I have never seen a game that needed so many updates and patches, ever."

Heh.

I can't tell you how buggy some software is, because it's just too painful to discuss. Most of the time, an astonishing amount of software goes straight from buggy to unsupported.

It does seem like we are in a different kind of game world now though.

A few years ago you could reliably say that if you bought a console game you'd have lots of bug free games. PC games had more problems, and it seemed that there was such a rush to 'ship it out the door, fix it later!' that the designers had started to not even TRY to make a bug free product.

Now, of course, the Xbox people are seeing the bug-and-patch cycle, and it's a bit of culture shock... They aren't happy about it, but the PC gamers are just taking it in stride. We're used to the abuse of cruddy, minimally functioning software that we pay full price for and then have to patch, and repatch several times to get a scrap of fun out of the game. Xbox (and soon the other game systems) are just at the beginning of this journey.

It's a pretty sad state of affairs though.

So it's kind of shocking to hear E.S. rail against Stardock, when the rest of the PC game industry has SO MANY more worse examples of this trend toward 'never get it right the first time, just patch it later.' In fact, Stardock is one of the few (very, very, very few) companies that released a nearly bug free product, and actually had a stated GOAL of releasing a bug free product. Most game companies set their goals much lower.

As for E.S.'s point about not everyone has easy internet access...

Well, it won't be long.

In gaming circles, there just isn't going to be any other trend... if you want to game you ARE going to get reliable fast internet. It's the wave of the future, and it's crashing over us now. Life without fast internet is just about inconceivable to me now. They say that an entire generation of people has grown up without ever NOT having access to an ATM machine to get cash 24hrs a day. The internet is becoming like that.

So yeah, E.S... I know what it's like to not have fast internet. I felt like I wasn't one of the 'cool kids'. Like I was being left behind because my family didn't afford the service, and I couldn't afford it... and you know what? I WAS being left behind.

You've probably got a few years before you're out on your own, but for your sanity (and your ability to mesh with people of your age group), one of your requirements for living will probably be fast internet. Living without it is like not having indoor plumbing. Just too painful. Just too primitive. Just leaving you too far behind.

But I have never seen a game that needed so many updates and patches, ever

I sure have.
I started playing EQ about 16 months after it first came out -- 4 months after its first expansion pack.
I can remember them doing several updates ( bug fix patches ) -- that would generate problems of their own and cause them to have to take the servers down for patches quite a bit. Sometimes 2 or 3 times a day for 2 to 8 hours at a time. It would go on like this for 2 or 3 weeks till they finally got it stable.
Us players were paying $12 a month or so to play. Lots of players just waited out the downtimes and jumped back on as soon as they could.
EQ was the most successful MMORPG till WoW cam out.

I really miss those days and wish I had started EQ when it first came out and was even worse than what I experienced.

Cherish these days, you'll eventually miss em.

A console game has one set of hardware to deal with across the board. With a PC you have such a wide variety of OS's, video cards, drivers etc etc that the game has to run on.

I just got back on DSL 3 months ago when I moved. I had to d/l the 85MB Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 patch on dial up, so I know the pain.   I used to just leave my PC downloading overnight and just let my D/l manager handle it.  

Hey all, again, my busting in here yesterday was wrong in my eyes. I get pissed and just start ranting. Not fair of me to take it out on Stardock. Brad, Cari, Kryo, and all of the rest of you are the greatest. Please don't ever think that my rants are personal attacks against you or your work. It may sound as such, but it isn't. Sometimes being articulate out of the gate isn't my strong point. I am not a computer wiz and never claimed to be so. And being at work having a bad day (not that that is any excuse, ever)didn't help my attitude any. It was nice to see that the final few replies on here actually were more civil, which was also refreshing since I usually find myself to be the "odd man out". And now to quote...

You've probably got a few years before you're out on your own,

Uhhhh, that was rich. I am 36 (even if I do sometimes act like a six year old)and have been on my own since I was 19. As far as being a heavy PC gamer, I like to think that I am but I know there are probably quite a few of you who would put me to shame. I got my first computer in 2001, so I haven't had many years of experience. I am/was a console gamer (shout out PS2 and Intellivision)but the PC is where all of the "cool" games reside. So I broke down, spent the 1000.00 and bought my first PC, just for the games. Everything I've learned, which apparently isn't much, was on my own through trial and error. I never experienced a game that required me to modify settings on my comp (other than graphics of course)so this all took me off guard.
I just thought that I would reply to this thread once more to clarify. I know I can come off as being an enormous ass, but I can admit it. Thankfully, my doctor said that with a few more years of rehabilitation and some heavy medication I should be up and running in no time, without a case of "ass head syndrome".  

do NOT believe that a game is provided bug free. Do I think they should be, well, yes if it was a perfect world but it isn't and I know this. I said I think they SHOULD,

Changing the costs and benefits of buildings is a game balance issue, not a bug issue. The only way to learn what could/should be changed in the game is to get feedback from the players, which is exactly what Stardock is doing. I have played MANY games over the years which shipped in what the developers thought was the final version, only to discover the flaws as I went. Look at al the mods for various games - those are all user efforts to change game balance. That's different from a bug fix.

I disagree strongly with Evil Stormbringer and grieve with him for his lack of connectivity. But I find his rants to be most entertaining...

If you go directly from Gal Civ 2 DL to Gal Civ 2 DA without adding any of the updates and patches, won't they be fixed with the DA update?

If you don't have Internet access, you won't be able to update the game, until DA arrives, but for those of us that does have access, we might want, if possible to get rid of some of the bugs and changes before that.

IMO, chaning the game to make it more balanced is not a patch or a bug-fix, but welcome nonetheless, especially the stronger morale, since I always seem to go downwards when I come close to winning...

TIP

As a side note into this conversation, when Evil Stormbringer stated:

I never experienced a game that required me to modify settings on my comp (other than graphics of course)so this all took me off guard.

  Computer gaming in the DOS and early Windows days had you modifying config.sys files and autoexec.bat files to make sure you had enough "startup" memory to play your game (messing around with extended and expanded memory).  Even IRQ conflicts are a thing of the past mostly. Configuring and updating games have become easier, especially with programs that check for updates for you.  I am another one of those 15+ year gamers who has played everything from text adventure games to the latest PC games like Prey.  Its become accepted that updates are needed, new features can yield new errors that can't always be caught in testing (or lack of). 

I also agree that the gaming industry should expect most people to have internet connections.  That time is already here where everyone should be connected in urban and rural areas (except maybe in areas far removed from electrical power plants, but that's what the U.N.'s proposed $100 hand-crank powered laptops are for..).  The only people who aren't connected are those that aren't willing or able to learn.