Stardock Central SUCKS - One Year Later

One year, while having difficulties downloading Galciv2 at release, I posted the following:

"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."

Well, I'd like to completely recant that statement. This is for several reasons:

1.) Frogboy responded to my original post a year ago, and his response was nice even though I was complaining about his company.
2.) The responses I got from the forum community were very respectful, compared to what I am accustomed to with the children of the World of Warcraft forums. On those forums, I'd just be told to "QQ more noob" but here, people actually gave helpful and mature responses.
3.) Gal Civ 2 is a terrific game and Stardock has done a terrific job of updating it post-release. In fact, outside of MMOs, GalCiv2 is the most frequently updated game I've played over the years. All the updates were easy to do with SDC.
4.) Sins of a Solar Empire is also great and its download on SDC went smoothly.

So overall, I am very impressed with Stardock as both a developer and publisher. PLEASE STAY INDEPENDENT AND KEEP CREATING THESE FANTASTIC STRATEGY GAMES!
18,414 views 14 replies
Reply #1 Top
Now that is something you don't see on the interwebs very often!
Reply #2 Top
It's always good to hear a successful conclusion to a troubled start. Thanks for the taking the time to share that.
Reply #3 Top
It's also amazing that people responded nicely to you even though you called SDC "a piece of crap" and tore into Stardock. I can never quite understand why people can't ask for help with problems without being so inflammatory...

-HM
Reply #4 Top
Its nice to know some people have the courage and integrity to come back and make a post like that.
Reply #5 Top
Seconded. The devs don't often get this kind of positive feedback going on, so you also have my thanks for supporting Stardock. I'm not a Stardock guy, but I'm sure they'll appreciate it, and anything that improves their morale is a good thing - it allows us to demand more material in the updates.

Bwahahaha!!! Milk the Stardock population to 70% morale rating!
Reply #6 Top
I can understand the digs. What happens is that you're in a really irritated frame of mind when you write the post. If you were to wait a day or two, it would probably have a much more gracious tone. In any case, they seem to be getting SDC more refined now and it does seem to work reliably.

I do have to agree that it SDC can be counter-intuitve at times. There's lots they could improve in that area. For example, there should be a "download only" button and an "install" button right next to the line item. SDC always insists on downloading when installing a game or module. It should automatically look for local copies of the installation packages before attempting to download. It should always read/write package files from/to a particular directory so that you can simply copy package files in there for SDC to automatically see. Right now, these things have to be done manually through a somewhat convoluted series of right clicks and menu functions with misleading names. I understand some of this has to do with the ability to archive an existing application, but surely that approach could be incorporated into a line item display, maybe just a subsection entitled "archived applications".



Reply #7 Top
Kudos to you for having the intestinal fortitude to make such a statement. Many people simply refuse to admit they have been wrong, great to see you are not one of them!!

Well done!
:CONGRAT:
Reply #8 Top

I had similar issues with SDC at first, I just grabbed the game via bit torrent and used the CD keys I got in the email.

Having said that I've had no problem updating with SDC and will surely purchase Sins of a Solar empire this way if I like the demo.

Reply #9 Top
IGN PC previewed Sins of a Solar Empire and had good things to say about it. I'm not that big on RTS but I may have to try that game. After all, I wasn't that big on TBS until I played GC2.

Reply #10 Top
Yeah after reading the reviews I grabbed sins and haven't regretted it, it's nowhere near as good as galactic Civ, but it's a nice little game and has a lot of potential, they just need to tweak the balance a bit and improve the pacing in multi player.
Reply #11 Top
As someone who just installed Stardock and GalCiv2 within the past 24 hours, I do have to agree with some of the criticisms of Stardock's download/install procedures.

Being a very experienced computer user, it was natural for me to take the time to carefully study and make sense of the navigation bar on the right ("Games"...hmmm, ok, let's try that) and then to right-click on my authorized GalCiv2 purchase to get context-sensitive options such as "download and archive". Unfortunately, many people out there wouldn't even understand what "download and archive" means, much less being able to find that option by right-clicking on the game title.

I enjoyed the convenience of being able to download and install the game, but it's not an avenue I'd recommend to less-experienced users who'd have to deal with Stardock. It's definitely for the technically-inclined crowd. The average person would be better off ordering a boxed copy or picking the game up at a local retailer. To be fair, perhaps a focused perusal of Stardock's help files would go a long ways to alleviate download and installation concerns, but it's a far cry from simply having to insert a disc and click on the "install" button, which is what most consumers are accustomed to -- and want.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a galaxy to bring to order.
Reply #13 Top
Thanks Cari - I had not realised that was in the pipeline, looks good :)

Regards
Zy
Reply #14 Top
From the article
Impulse is still in internal beta at Stardock but it expects to release it in mid February with additional features for it being added through the course of the year.
End of quote


Is it still on tap for the Mid Feb. release? Hopefully it will clear up a small issue with my Sins registration.