Talk about fanatical moderators on the MOO3 forums. Note below is a post which I posted on the MOO3 forums as a joke, and the thread was promptly closed. I queried why it was closed and I received 3 warning points for insubordination from Sencho. (It does have a small reference to GalCiv, hope you enjoy :D)

I'm just killing time until the substantial patch comes out or Galactic Civ hits Australia.


"This is called an attempt at humour and is by popular demand. The patch is out and maybe its even half as good as it claims although one is still awaiting the data patch. If you don't appreciate humour, look away now.

For background, this is in response to a comment made that MOO3 is like a hovercraft and we should appreciate its unpolished revolutionary design.

Without further ado, let me present: Ford Hovercraft III

"Pre-stage Design"

1. You love the Ford brand of car. You have fond memories of the original car you purchased, and you very much enjoyed Ford Car Mark II which was simple, elegant and addictive to drive. Even if it was slightly cheesy, you appreciated it for its sleekness and all around handling.

2. You hear the designers are coming out with a Ford Mark III which is going to revolutionise the industry of Ford.

3. The customer is a little wary as they hear a new designer is taking over, but with features such as a built in television, sauna, spa, automated computer, and a thousand neat gadgets the car is meant to be a real Xperience to drive. In particular, a car which supposedly will take away all the headaches of tedious manual driving on the road and automatically hover along.

4. Halfway through the lengthy design stage, the designers realise their plans are not feasible and that perhaps a sauna isn't a necessary requirement of the average customer. They begin to take out all their excess design and fire the person who initially designed the car without bothering to appoint a new lead designer. Why would they need to? All the parts are there, they just need to be assembled.

6. They slot pieces here, they slot pieces there and the designers soon realise this process is taking an eternity. The distributors and their customers are getting extremely impatient.

7. Close to the final completion of the car, one of the designers justifiably proud of his creation takes the car home. His 12 year old son sneaks into the car and after pressing 50 buttons, and adjusting 25 switches to start the car radio, notes to his dad that this car may not appeal to the average person.

8. The designers rip out the spa, the television and 950 of the other gadgets, but decide to leave the television remote and spa controls in the side. They figure that the customer will be glad that they can add their own features to the car.

9. To decide if this car is any good, they decide to choose the most impartial and objective people to test the car. They gather their close personal friends and family, and draw lots until 20 lucky people are chosen. The testers drive and play with the car for a few days and note just how cool it is that the car hovers, whilst ignoring the random swerves the car sometimes takes into passing trees. (They have their first born children locked away and sign declarations in blood not to reveal these swerves)

10. However, the testers do indicate to the designers that the headlights are too bright. The designers decide that this is a very important concern and automatically dim the headlights down. Due to the hectic deadline they do not test the vehicle in night time conditions. (I can drive during the day with headlights on, SURELY I can drive at night also)

11. The company website proudly announces the 'vehicle has been completed' and links to IGN Car International which proclaims it to be 'the Car of the Year'. The review announces that the headlights are amazingly bright and that it is a must-have car for all.

Release

1. The hover-craft is released to massive pre-orders worldwide at comparable prices to a top of the line BMW or Mercedes.

2. The driving manual is from 2000 and describes the history of Fords but has little explanation as to what each of the switches, and statistic screens in the car do. The Supplementary driving manual is extra and details how the spas and saunas are supposed to work.

3. Some initial complaints come in from customers:
(a)'i don't understand how to drive the car and its too complex'
(b) 'why do I need to press 30 buttons to start the car and another 30 to use the windscreen wiper?'
(c) 'this car is no fun to drive'
(d) 'Why does the car alarm keep turning itself on every 2 hours?'
(e) 'how come when i try to move the seats back, the car crashes?
(f) 'how come everytime i load the onboard computer, it doesn't save my detailed programmed instructions?'
(g) 'the car is driving itself and not obeying my decisions (i want to turn left, and the car goes straight).

4. Ford remains silent but responses from other customers are as follows:
(a) You haven't driven the car enough to enjoy it. Read the manual and the supplementary manual, check the company website and take 30 hours to test-drive the car, then you will really love the car
(b) I LIKE pressing 30 buttons to use the windscreen wiper, and you'll like it soon after 30 more hours!
(c) That is because you haven't driven the car long enough. You can't make any comments until you have driven the car at least 30 hours.
(d) Don't you understand? That is a feature of the car. It was designed like that to drive away burgulars, how ingenious is that? The designers even thought ahead and prevent you from disabling the alarm, as they realised you wouldn't understand their brilliance.
(e) Although movable seats are in most modern cars, we didn't feel it necessary to enable them in the hovercraft. Get used to it and stop moving your seat.
(f) We used our ingenuity and decided that you would be much better off re-progamming your onboard computer everytime you start your car, it will add to your driving pleasure.
(g) You are not meant to drive the car, let the car drive itself! Didn't you listen to our pre-release hype. If you don't like the car driving itself, TOUGH, this is how WE like the car to be, and besides it has the smartest AI ever and KNOWS exactly where you want to go. This car is not meant to be like the previous Fords you liked, its meant to be revolutionary. If you don't like it, go back to your Ford Mark II.

5.There is one response from Ford. It reads "We don't enjoy all the criticism of our well-designed car, and the more you keep complaining the less likely we are to listen to you". "In fact, keep complaining and we will sulk and go home and tell our parents."

6. Meanwhile, some of the Ford designers go to Gamespy Motor Magazine and note that they really wanted another 2 years to finish designing the Ford and that nobody had any idea what the final product was meant to look like.

7. Later on, more complaints come in:
(a) How come the car only comes in one colour?
(b) How come the exterior of the car looks like a Beetle?
(c) How come when I switch the headlights on at night it is not bright enough? Also, the car keeps wanting to turn right for no reason I can discern and sometimes the brakes stop working.
(d) Why were all the fluffy dice taken out of Ford?
(e) Why does the temperature gauge go hot and cold for no reason?
(f) I try and try to switch off the auto-pilot but the car is far too complicated to manually drive?
(g) I have now driven the car for 30 hours, and I still don't like it.

8. Ford remains silent (presumably at home with their parents or on vacation) and the responses from the customers come as follows:
(a) That was what the original distributor of the car wanted and the designers didn't want to argue with them. The new distributor chained and whipped the designers, and if anyone body queried this decision, they would receive the dreaded "NO DESIGN FOR YOU!."
(b) Visual beauty isn't important for a car of this sort.
(c) We don't think this is the case, but we will look into it and fix it in a few months, they are not major problems. Besides people are fixing it themselves already, I'm sure you can do the same, why should Ford fix it?
(d) We wanted to make a realistic car, and fluffy dice are just cheesy. However I don't consider a hovering car and purple and yellow upholstery cheesy.
(e) The temperature gauge is simply brilliant. It replicates real life weather conditions, where it is hot at day and cold at night. It is simply insane in its brilliance and its a car feature and it can't possibly be an error in design. If it gets too hot or cold, its probably YOUR fault. Don't try to understand, just rise to the challenge and add or remove clothes at your leisure.
(f) Stop trying to fight the AI, the AI knows best. You are simply not capable of driving the car by yourself, let the AI handle the driving and remember, the pavement and random trees are part of your driving enjoyment. It is simply not feasible to allow you to drive your car and also have auto-pilot. We PREFER autopilot, get used to it or go away. In fact, to satisfy our customers, we decided to allow manual driving but make it painstakingly tedious with no instructions that you just won't do it. That's Ford ingenuity at work.
(g) You are not smart enough to drive our car.

9. The customer complaints start ringing in to the Ford phone lines, raising numerous questions about the car.

10. The answering service replies as follows: "Many dedicated designers went to work on this car for YOU our customer. We are now extremely tired and are on holiday and at a key car
conference, please wait until we come back to answer your queries. Note if you keep annoying us, we will never address your queries."

11. The grumbling of customers grows more audible and flames spring up over the neighbourhood. However, some people love the hovercar and tell the unsatisfied customers that they've heard the complaints many times and to get the hell out of THEIR neighbourhood. In fact, the satisfied customers start throwing firebombs at the unsatisfied customers to end all the complaints.

12. The customers wait and wait, meanwhile another smaller car company releases a similar car to the original Ford Mark I's and II's. It is a car based on the same beauty and simplicity of those models, has plenty of additional features and lets you drive the car (in fact its headlights are super intelligent and adjust accordingly). Unfortunately only one person can drive the car at any time and you can't custom fit parts into the car.

13. However, this smaller rival car company answers all customer phone ins, fixes minor scratches on the car for free, and after the day of release rewards all its customers with flowers and chocolate whilst promising and actually fixing their complaints.

14. Some Ford customers love the hovercraft, and note that they still like driving it despite its flaws (such as difficulty driving at night and failing brakes), and some have even modified the car themselves to make it more drivable.

15. Many more customers realise that at the end of the day, what they really want is a car they can drive and enjoy and not something that is revolutionary and broken. The amazing hovercraft may be wonderful when fixed, but currently does not drive at night, has sometimes failing brakes and really isn't that pretty.

16. Moral of this story? Revolutionary is good, but only if it works properly

Disclaimer: This is not spam, as I have made many amendments to the original and it is also not re-opening a closed thread, as it has nothing whatsoever to do with the original thread. Oh, and my apologies to Ford.

I didn't realise just how many gripes and bugs there are in Ford until this point

Good luck to the patch "