Tsathoggua

Join Date 02/2006

Stardock Central Really sucks

While I am sure the game is fine, your SDC program is painfully slow and annoyingly unintuitive. I will truly never buy one of your products using this method again. Now I have to wait while you ship me a copy of your damn game. If I had known this program was such a piece of crap, I would've just ran out and bought the damn game from the store. Ironically, by going the download route I will have access to the game LATER than if I had just bought the damn thing physically.

Your game had better be worth it. I am certainly never going to download anything on SDC again and I am damn near close to never doing business with your company.

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Good arguments....

Anyways I think SDC works like a charm. I think you're being pretty unreasonalbe and very impatient here.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2412

Stardock Central is just a download manager. The speed of the download has nothing to do with it. It could as well be a web page with Internet Explorer being the villain instead.

As for being intuitive, I'm not sure what's unintuitive (obviously I'm used to it). But you just click on the thing you want and it downloads it.

I understand your frustration that the game is not downloading as fast or easily asy you'd like. But that's not a function of Stardock Central. It's just the messenger.

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If you are trying to download the game at the same time with thousands others, of course there would be some slowdowns, SDC works perfect and a little of patience goes a long way, insted of cursing and acting so inmature you should ask for devs help and they will answer to your rquest right away. No need to offend anyone.

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Do you se even Frogboy answer to you before I did.

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It must be flattering to Stardock to know that folks that aren't sure about their game or their programs still pre-order and rush to get the game as soon as possible. I mean, they must have made something incredible to make you want to jump all over it like that.

On the other hand, if you weren't sure about the game or the company, and now threaten to not do business with them over this one issue, why would you go that route at all? Wouldn't it have been more prudent to wait for reviews, test out SDC, listen to user feedback, then buy the game if you still felt positive about it? I recommend it for those that feel they can't handle any hiccups.

Me, I pre-ordered off Amazon and still have days to wait for arrival. We'll see how it goes that way.

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I don't understand why someone who is going to buy direct take the download route wouldn't just get it a few days in advanced and take advantage of the preload?

I got my copy today and I only had to download something like 2 megabytes. It was over in less than 15 seconds.

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I'm just glad that I pre loaded most of the files before today.

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At least it picks up where it left off. Over halfway done, sooner or later this will be downloaded and installed. This is really about as smooth as can be expected. Several online games are mangled for hours everytime they patch. Try and be patient!

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My guess is he ordered the game via the download route today expecting to download it and get started playing faster than driving to the nearest store and then installing when he got home.

Ask for me my game is pre-loaded and waiting for me to get off work so I can download the exe and start my conquests!

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I think the Download Manager and SDC is pretty nifty, I admit I couldn't download the last bit of the game and had to do a fresh download from scratch. But it is working fine and decent clip too despite the overtaxed servers.

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Just had a quick bash of GC2 after digitally buying/downloading via SDC. The entire process was smooth, and pre-loading is the winner for digital downloads, since it only took a few minutes to get the last bit of the game on release.

I did the same thing with half-life 2.

I'd much rather all my cash go to stardock than via some publisher.

gg stardock, gg. now if only I could work out how to play the game properly

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Well, I have been using SDC almost daily for the past 2 years and have never really had any problems. The odd glitch here and there, but nothing that has ever stopped me from getting the programs I have purchased.

Patience my friend, and you will realize that SDC is an amazing way to have access to what you need.

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I've been using SDC since GalCiv 1, and rarely had issues with it. The biggest problem today is that the servers are getting HAMMERED with downloads. Stardock's done all they can to spread the load. You can only have so many people downloading at once before you start having server issues, regardless of what method you use to serve it up.

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hm, I found it worked really well. I had over 200kb download all day, the interface was intuitive.

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I'd much rather all my cash go to stardock than via some publisher.

Fortunately, since Stardock is developer and publisher, you don't have to worry about it.

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I could not find any store that had it, which is why I downloaded it and have it running now on my PC. I had some pitfalls (disappearing files), but overall a good experience (HEY, I CAN PLAY NOW, NOT IN 2 WEEKS WHEN AMAZON NOW SAYS THEY WILL SHIP!).

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I have to say that I've had no problems with Stardock Central this time around. When GalCiv 1 came out, I thought it was a horrible PITA, and I felt pretty much the same as Tsathoggua. This is three years later, though, and it's been infinitely better for me.

- Ash

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I'm a new Stardock customer. I was always interested in GC1 but didn't bite until GC2. Stardock Central was sinfully easy to use - I'm not sure how you can consider it unintuitive. Hell, I even found how to switch download servers without any difficulty or help. Stardock Central is fine.

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Well you're entitled to your opinion, but then you know what they say, opinions are like noses, everyone's got one

Personally I think Stardock central is great. Like Frogboy says, basically it's a download manager, however it also can achieve your game so you can burn it to CD and back it up as well as connect you to the games forums.

Still if you don't like SDC, I am willing to bet that you will love GalCiv 2, it's great and well worth the wait!

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I'm sorry but some ppl just need to get over themselves. Patience is a virtue. You better have at least one in your life.

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I’ve been trying to get GalCiv2 all evening and agree it could be better. I started a download, it seemed to be doing alright so I and went away to watch a movie then came back to an error message telling me the download has been stopped as the server was taken down for maintenance. If I’d been using GetRight it’d have just kept trying until the download was back up and I’d be playing right now. My experience with Steam was pretty similar – these bespoke content delivery things tend to suck Maybe next time they’d consider offering us a secure HTTP download as an alternative.

Still it's not the end of the world and I'm eager to get stuck into some nice 4x action.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2412

Stardock Central is just a front end to a secure HTTP download.

You would have had the same problems with GetRight. The difference is that we don't want a system in which the thing would endlessly hammer the server with retries if an ISP flakes out or whatever.

That's the thing I don't think most people realize -- Stardock Central is simply a fancy looking GUI web page basically. The difference being, rather than getting some cryptic 404 or error 500 or whatever else happens when servers get hammered, Stardock Central will give you a log of what happened.

We should be fine now though bandwidth-wise. Cogent came back up on that server. I might also point out that if people had read the stickies and switched to a different server they would also have been fine.

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Downloading stuff on release day is always slower. There should be a greater use of the bit torrent tech. I always use that option for downloading demos when available.

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What annoys me is that the "error 19 connection closed by the server" (why the server closes the connection by the way?) seems to destroy the file already dowloaded and the damn thing restarts from the beginning from 0%. Getright almost never loses a download. I have lost 3GB of discarded partial files already. In a 256KBPS connection that is a lot of time lost.

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