| Unfortunately, like the player position ranking, this is something Stardock no longer seem willing to mess with. |
I love GCII, and I have a great deal of respect for Stardock and its programmers. There are two aspects of the combined GCII/Stardock user experience, though, that many people (including me) find frustrating: the Metaverse and the forums.
Both of these things remind me of the Intranet project I worked on at my last job. The company Intranet affected everyone in the company, and everyone used it on a daily basis. However, the Intranet generated no revenue, so it was always the very last thing on anybody's job queue. Eventually, it became last on one person's job queue (mine) and dropped off of everyone else's.
I did what I could for this program, when I could. It had initially been written in another person's downtime, and that person had been let go before the thing was passed on to me. As a result, I spent a lot of time re-inventing the wheel as I worked on the code, sometimes having to rewrite whole pages. As a result, everything I fixed caused subtle problems elsewhere, which I couldn't always get back to fixing right away.
In the end, what I got for my trouble was a load of griping and complaining and requests for features that I could have added - if I had a staff and a budget and a project schedule.
The way that Intranet project went, a sort of long-term Kobayashi Maru scenario,
Office Space-style, is what comes to mind when I see the sorts of problems and loose ends we encounter daily on the Metaverse and in these forums.
Our problem, as users, may simply be that we are depending heavily on features that aren't part of the company revenue stream. Hopefully, one day we will start to see responses to our problem posts.