well said fb.

it's like a tiny group of nit pickers are trying to take control over everything.

i would like to have features like being able to retire from a game. or surrender to an ai player. or sign a non aggression pack in diplomacy. or have more good and evil techs. or have more united planets issues. it pisses me off thinking that time might get taken away from that kind of thing because a few people are spazzing about whether one of the ai personas goofs up by missing a tech on the tech path.

if they want to be really purists why aren't they insisting on taking out saved games? or ctrl-n?

If you can't see where the difference is between an option the player has and a bug which robs the player of their hard earned advantages then debate with you is pointless.

Just because you weren't paying enough attention to realise you lost a game because the AI "bugged out" and started pumping out Battleships or Dreadnoughts long before it should have been able to doesn't mean the "nitpickers" aren't right on these issues. It just means you don't understand what's going on well enough to know anything more than you lost - it's the old ignorance is bliss in action.

While clearly Brad disagrees and people like you back him up, whether the given game actually works correctly is of far more importance to me than adding another potentially flawed feature.

They should be fixing what IS there instead of tacking on more features. I love GalCiv, I love Stardock, but after trumpeting how they were different from other game devs to so many, I do find it a bit sad to find they suffer from the same flaw that has harmed many a game/product: the programmer's desire to go do something different rather than pour over code they already wrote to fix something they consider minor.

I understand the desire, I do not understand the defensiveness. If Brad and CariElf and any other dev wants to say, "Hey, they don't pay me enough to spend the next two weeks going through that old code line by line and screaming at the monitor until my voice is hoarse", that I could accept far better than all this political double speak trying to explain how leaving significant bugs in place is for our own good.
[Message Edited]

I'm involved in another very committed wargaming community with a close relationship with the game designer. Often bugs and new ideas are floated up to the developer. People clamor for this and that. The response we always hear has become a mantra for me and its one that I will always hold onto.

The equation to determine whether or not to open up the code again is based on the time/effort versus the resulting improved gameplay. Let's be real. Not every idea is worth the effort of coding/testing time versus the resulting improvement in gameplay. Too much effort for relatively little change is frankly not worth the effort. I believe the developers have meticulously and financially calculated what is and isn't worth the effort in exchange for levels of improved gameplay.

Not accepting this mature outlook is simply childish. Every creation, whether its an article I write or a piece of software has its imperfections. The support that Stardock has already shown far outstrips the vast majority of software developers out there. For that I applaud them.

Hikertrash, I agree completely. What I object to is the attitude shown by some people towards the developers. For the sake of argument let us say that there's a bug that allows some of the AI players to sometimes get a technology without the prerequisite. Okay. So what? It is apparently not noticeable enough that it wasn't noticed by anybody for months. But now there's a contigent of users getting all militant because the developers don't see this as something that needs to be looked at right now. And these same users can't seem to understand why most people including the devs don't see it as a very big deal.

My biggest gripe with the game is the leasing system. Two of the lease choices don't work right. But do I start post after post after post lambasting the devs for not fixing this right this second? No. Because I know it's not something harming the game play for most folks.

Code Monkey you seem view the world through the prism of your ego. I don't see them being defensive or spinning. They just don't think that this is a 'significant' issue that needs to be addressed right now. You do. But because they have the audacity to not agree with your opinion you start with these petty charges that they're being defensive or not caring or dismissive or whatever.

Add your bug to the bug report thread and move on.

True enough


Well, there I disagree. When you've made a point of giving numerous interviews to promote your game and a key feature is how the AI plays the same game you do, and then it turns out it doesn't by a very significant margin, but you justify it saying that since it wasn't noticed definitively until lately, it doesn't matter - that's spin doctoring.
When you have made more than a few posts in recent history that collectively lump people like me and Staffa and whatever "loudmouth" on the board you happen to think needs to get a life as "insignificant" and "Star Trek Conventioneers", that's defensive.

Now, frankly, I appreciate that Brad doesn't feel the need to limit himself to corporate speak drivel, but I wish he'd take the time to consider whether trying to shut up us loudmouths by dismissing and insulting us when we do have some valid points is a very productive way of doing it.

It's not "spin doctoring" CM. It is stating what should be an obvious fact.

If I also state in an interview that Galactic Civilizations is a rock solid game stability wise and someone shows a case where the game crashes, does that mean that I was "spin doctoring"?

Re-read what I wrote above:



This is my last post on this subject. If you're going to ascribe nasty motives to what I say, the only affect that they will have is that I'll simply ignore your posts as being that of an abusive player. You speak of constructiveness in various posts. How constructive do you think you are really being? If you alienate the only people who can address a problem you consider "Significant" but most people don't, how constructive is that? Do you really think that by name-calling me or just generally trying to antagonize me is going to someone make your issue take precedence over all the others reported by people who were able to do so in a polite, constructive way?

~SDC~

You know, maybe I should just keep my mouth shut, because I don't see where I've been ascribing nasty motives to you any more than you see why consider some of your replies as dismissive or engaging in spin doctoring. We've got a gap of communication on this particular subject that I can't fix so I'm just not going to comment on it any further either as being considered abusive is the farthest thing from my intent. You know about the issue, you know how me and others feel about it, fair enough.

Now come on, you know that's unfair. It's effectively threatening blackmail - "Do you want us to spend time looking for these bugs or do you want lots of shiny new features?" Developers have to balance these sorts of issues all the time, but we aren't talking every little bug here... just some new issues players are raising that, let's be honest, bother you because you are trying to work on the expansion. But you only announced the expansion recently; rather than cutting features, pushing out the release date should be a viable option.

But if you really want to present a choice even Solomon would cringe at, then I say cut some of the expansion set features and spend more effort on tracking down and fixing the top bugs. It would make me happier.

However, you already have my money. Fixing bugs for existing customers actually doesn't make you money, whereas releasing an expansion potentially does if it gets new people to buy the game. The only thing not fixing bugs would do is make me so disgusted that I wouldn't buy any future products from you, and tell my friends to do the same, and honestly we are very far away from that point it isn't an issue right now. But customer service is always something you want to take care of *before* it becomes an issue.



I agree. Where I disagree is pre-judging problems hardcore players complain about as not important enough specifically because of their source, not because of their actual merits. That may not be what you are actually doing, but by explaining yourself the way you have, you're starting to create that perception, which is bad.

Good response: "Hmmm, there are some problems here, but we have higher priorities right now. Please continue to submit your saves that show these problems and we'll analyze them over the next 2 months."

Bad response: "You hardcore Star Wars geeks are all in a froth over nothing. You're stupid, you're ignorant, you don't understand. I'm tired of you people wasting my time complaining about minutae."

See, even if you are GOING to blow a customer off, don't TELL THEM you're blowing them off. At least make them think like their input is evaluated.



Funny; I had actually *guessed* in another post even though it had never been announced before. Do they know where anomalies are as well?

More importantly, are the above *necessary* anymore? The AI must do *some* exploration routines when looking for enemy ships, enemy planets, making trade routes, etc. Surely you have enough experience now and plenty of CPU power to have colony ships select stars and then change destination if there are no suitable planets? It would take some tuning and testing to get it right, of course, but I think it would make more a better game.

Bruce

Bingo! You summed up the reason for my recent bitching and moaning far better than my six or seven posts trying to explain and re-explain my position did. Certain issues are hardcore only issues (the blockade issue being one of them, many of the metaverse related issues being others), others are general issues that just happen to be most likely noticed and described accurately by the hardcore.

The casual gamer doesn't understand the game well enough to try and analyze exactly why any particular game went south, he just knows that AI whomped his arse good. Not only is he not going to have noticed a problem such as the spontaneous tech issue, he's going be unlikely to describe it or document it well enough to be of much use to the devs.

Nonetheless, the casual gamer is just as affected by this issue (and probably more so) than the hardest of the hardcore players. It then becomes extremely frustrating when you're just trying to help to have the official response *seem* dismissive because of who is doing the reporting.

Frogboy-

Re your comment about waypoints in the expansion pack I had a couple ideas that I thought were cool. First, of course, we could use rally points. It would be great if they were ship specific, so you could set a "combat transport" rally point and a "sensor drone" rally point separately if you wanted.

But the idea I had which I thought would be even cooler was if you could plan your starbase upgrades. Right now you can open the screen and see what modules are installed, but you cannot see what you haven't built (the way you do when you move a constructor onto it). First off it would be handy to be able to see that. But better yet, I would love it if you could then put a button on the left that says "build" or "plan" or something. The button would be used to flag the selected module for building by the first constructor to be sent to the starbase...

Now, the key part is that this would be integrated with an automatic waypoint system. Whenever a constructor was built, it would look for a starbase with a planned module on the map. If there was one, it would go to it. Otherwise it would simply sit there waiting for commands as per usual. If there were modules planned on multiple starbases, it would go to the closest one. Ideally, when selecting which starbase to go to, it would note how many constructors were already on their way there and not send extras. Priority as between multiple planned modules on the same starbase could be set by the user, or more simply (and probably preferably) based on a system of preferences.. maybe building items with larger bonuses first or something.

I think that would eliminate a lot of the need for management in the middle to late game and make for smoother flow. I would prefer to see that rather than have the tech skip issue resolved, although of course it would be nice if that got resolved too.

-Drake

~SDC~