That's really nice of Stardock to add content/features for free and I appreciate it, but charging for bug fixes would be an insult to me as a customer.
Let us be clear: If you felt 1.6 was buggy and that we owed you an additional update then I don't want you to be our customer. Ever.
You and others have made the case that we shouldn't do any more free updates for Dark Avatar until after Twilight of the Arnor comes out. 1.8A is it.
And if you think it's buggy do not buy Twilight of the Arnor or any other Stardock product. Because we considered the quality of 1.5 (the original Dark Avatar release) to be very good. That's our standard of quality. If it doesn't meet your needs then we are both better off parting ways now.
Nothing aggravates me more than when people with no leverage speak as if they have leverage. Let me be clear: If nobody had bought Dark Avatar or buys Twilight of the Arnor it would make no noticeable difference to Stardock's bottom line.
Game sales are what allow us to make more games and allow us to make games in the way that we think people like them being made - open, transparent, with lots of user feedback with no on disk copy protection. But the existence of these sales don't determine the overall company's future.
If someone doesn't like the way we make games or thinks our games are buggy then the best thing they can do is not buy them. If the RELEASED version of our games are considered unacceptable to a user, then people shouldn't buy future products. They should not instead sit around treating our free updates as some sort of entitlement. When people treat our updates as entitlements, they destroy the incentive to do them and diminish the sense of specialness in their existence.
We make games because we enjoy them. They are certainly a good business venture as well but the underlying motivation to do them - particularly the expansion packs - is to keep making the game better because it's fun and we believe in the community. We honestly think that most of the community appreciates and enjoys the work we do.
So the minute that the most vocal elements of the community begin to treat our updates as entitlements and try to use the "you owe it to us as customers" then I'm going to bring the hammer down and make sure we are crystal clear as to why we do these updates.
And to be clear: The original post here is fine. I think it's fine to have constructive criticism of the game. What went over the line were the people who argued we had "destroyed the game" or talk that 1.8 is somehow ruined or that we are "regressing the game back to GalCiv I".
I can assure you very very few people even noticed a difference in habitable planets. And those that did we had already begun to find ways to satisfy them within 24 hours of release. Not having as many habitable planets as someone would like is not a bug.
And with some reasonable discussion we could have been talked into continuing to put up updates this week to make sure that the habitable planets at the highest setting were satisfactory for long time players while still having the memory savings we had achieved with the modified algorithm -- even though doing this would have meant working 16 hour days this week instead of 14 hour days since Twilight of the Arnor beta 1 is due out this week.
But getting flamed and insulted has successfully taken away the desire to work longer hours to do that. It'll have to wait until we have more time (after Twilight of the Arnor).
