war craft is a big franchise

im not asking 4 much in the way of an online player bace

maby 1000 on weekends  maby >.< but lucky to get even close to 100 now on diplo.

sins 2 could b just a BIG expantion i would buy it

2x more ship, planit , fighter, and heros

bam NEW game big $$ .   if no HEPIC FAIL BUGS  new start new life to sins

make a frendler updater and ,mod dl,

hell they dont even gota come up with new ideas  the moders of 7 deadly sins or distant stars got good ones.

BIG PICTURE

nabs nabs420 , startrecker and 5sr4fags r my hanndles

im not a noob arbatrarly bitching im a long standing unsatisfied customer.

i know all the bugs and prolems with is game.  u know i guy can dream cant he.

I dream that I might play somone i havent , played b4, that i could get a soa2 mod game going.

MOST DONT PLAY onlie because IS NOT EASY and its BUGED, to an un playable state. EVERY time  they add something new!.

hell the mod folder is a hidden file ...  

how hard would it be to auto upload mods apon joining game or  NOT HIDEING IT.

speaing from a noobs point of veuw .o iv never played online says the noob ill try diplo online might be fun^.^  crash synk error crash crash   -.-"

and the noob  never plays again.

i have 3 frends that this has happened too. not with diplo they wouldnt even give it a chance or entrench.

i tryed with them 2 months after realease. still no fix >.< i could never get them stoked again , with my tails of starbaces and mines.

thats y there r not atleast  coulpe more people.

and as 4 distnt star  and  7sins imods if "sins 2" had 1 more race like pirets,

not over bord like 11, that is just WAY 2 much 4 this little company. that cant get a game with 3 races to work right

7 billion on this planit  37000 playing war craft2   is 300 online on diplo on a week end so much 2 ask

never played online have all versins including diplomacy- play longer games via a virtual lan (300+ planets before now) with my brother where we enjoy 2 hrs a night  of playing (doesn't matter if i have to work or something cause we can pick it up whenever) for a couple of months, not had a desync except for problems with internet connection generally. (can be slow though late game 2/3 fps is normal for that stage)

Frankly have no intention like most others of playing online cause i dont want fast speed charge a fleet at someone's homebase as quick as possible games, how many online games ever make it to full research?? how many people use the same tactics time and again. Not for me.

So i am one of those who have never and will never play online and judging by some of the posts in here and elsewhere i am glad i don't.

I would love more complexity not less for an example of how dumbing down recks games look at dawn of war 2 not a patch on the original and nowhere need as supported by the players.

This is my guess, too.  It's just an unfortunate consequence of the creation and implementation of Impulse in an attempt to fight piracy while avoiding intrusive DRM.  I tend to think that people who are serious about online multiplayer would figure it out and would find the Sins webpage and forums.  In spite of that, we've probably lost hundreds of players who would have been interested in online multiplayer if the barrier to playing Sins online weren't so high and so opaque.  Heck, it's very possible that many legitimate purchasers are playing Sins v1.05 over Hamachi.

I HATE all of the different login crap that Microsoft added to Windows.  Now your documents are supposed to go into "My Documents" and not a separate folder on your C: drive of your choosing.  I wish we could just go back to how things worked in Windows 98 where there was only one account per computer.  Besides, just about anyone who uses a computer seriously or heavily today has his own computer.  It has really complicated games unnecessarily.

But were Stardock and Ironclad forced into it?  What would happen if they just designed the game so that all game-related files and folders went into one single coherent Sins folder?  So what if you aren't "Games for Windows" certified?  Frogboy, Blair, are you reading this?  How do you think not adhering to the Games for Windows and My Documents folder requirements would have affected sales of the game?  Is there some other compelling reason for organizing the files and folders that way?  (I'm not accusing you guys or anything or complaining, I'm just curious as to what the reasons are for this type of design.)

@Dirty- I think what he really means is that he prefers longer, more comfortably paced games. I myself don't particularly like the idea of smashing into the enemy ASAP, unless it's on small map like the "Small Maps" selection in-game. And even then, I prefer to turtle and then go on an unstoppable death march (Necrons anyone?).

@Valaska- well, just think, now that you've updated, the whole world of awesometastic mods is open to you.

I am one of the people who who basically never play online. I felt it was a major and unnecessary hassle to make a separate ICO account just to play online, but I did anyway. I actually find myself looking at the changes in every patch going "why the bleep would they nerf that and buff those?" but I download the patches anyway even if I don't notice how the game is affected and it actually messes up a previous play style I was using.

I honestly think this game is too smart for most WoW or WC3 players. Sins is initially complicated to learn and the games can take literally all day to win. Sins is a game for those who were gamers back when Monochrome green/black screens on Apple II's were the thing and you had to think out what objects in the room you were going to "[take] mirror" or "[examine] desk" with text commands that "only nerds" would play.

I love Sins, but I play offline due to the fact I can get up to pee and not worry about my empire falling and not worrying that after two hours and calling it quits that I or my opponent will not be on again to resume our saved game at the appointed agreed upon time.

Sins is a great game and once (if?), hopefully, they release an in-store expansion with all the micro expansions I will buy that. No need to work on a "SoaSE 2" just yet unless they are just fooling around with ideas and models during the time they would be slacking off at work pretending to be productive since then they would still get a break from their task while still being productive in some way.

i could probably play online heck i do for lots of other games but for sins i want to relax for a couple of hours a night, chew the fat with me bro and not have to worry about getting it all done in one night ya know.

I dont understand the chess comparison grand masters can take 30 mins over a move i thought in online games 30 mins to move a planet would have ya killed (yes me being amusing i think )

Just my two cents but Diplomacy is by far an improvement to the game--especially if they have the desync issue resolved and do a few tweaks to reduce lags and glitches which I think they are working on.  I'll agree with Sanchez--a lot of people have never hit the Ironclad option.  I didn't play online until nearly a month after I got the game. 

More posts on the forums about strategy and actual play, hints and tips, modding advice and the like will do a lot more to invigorate new players than griping.  I actually enjoy playing though you would think many don't from the posts.

I can vouch for Nab420. He has been playing this game for a long time and is a good player. I ran into him a lot when I was active in multiplayer. He's no JJ but he is/was a dedicated sins fan.

Calling him a troll for being frustrated with the lack of a multiplayer community just isn't called for. The multiplayer community is basically dead. When I say multiplayer community, I mean the one where you could log in and play against strangers at any reasonable time of the day and have a satisfactory game, not pre-arranged games with friends.

Why is the multiplayer community dead? There's a lot of reasons it could be dead.

• Maybe it's the constant desyncs that disrupt the game, or the lag, both of which seem to have gotten much worse.
• It could also be microexpansions that divide the community every time they come out into those who do/do not have entrenchment, and now, those who have diplomacy and entrenchment and those who have just diplomacy.
•  It could be that all the new players picking up the "Sins" box (before trinity came out) went online for the first time and found no one would play regular sins with them. A lot gave up and never signed back online.
• It could be the shift over of patching to require Impulse and meaning people who refused to install that software were not able to play online
• It could be the established playerbase simply being beyond the skill level of new players, and the tutorials not being complete enough to really drive home the critical elements of the economy, or to impart basic strategy
• It could be the lack of a SP campaign meant most people didn't spend enough time playing the game to fall in love with it
• It could be the lack of balance between various races frustrating new players (and there is a lack of balance, otherwise patching the unit stats would not be necessary, but the severity of it is open to question) who didn't understand why their 40 LRMs couldn't handle 30 illuminators.

Stardock and Ironclad can easily find out why the multiplayer community died out. Grep the server logs and find out how many times someone signed in once, hit the refresh game button a bunch, and never came back. Compare who got to play a single game, lost horribly, and never signed in again. Check the chat channel logs for all of those newbies who signed in and found no one was there to play a game with because they didn't have the right version. Count the people who stopped updating at 1.06. Find what happened to the playerbase between the release of each microexpansion.

I hope that the developers will really do a post-mortem on why their game with such good sales and such high praise (game of the year anyone?) slowly lost the multiplayer component in the year after the release, and address the most impacting factors in a subsequent Sins 2.

TCores, I think a combination of several factors killed Sins.  Here they are in no particular order:

1. For whatever reason, this game appealed primarily to people who play single player or didn't appeal at all to the types of people who play online multiplayer.  Even in the first few months after the game's release, the most people I ever saw online was 280.  That very fact alone pretty much necessitated that online multiplayer Sins would die eventually.
2. When the game was released, only about 15% of all players could host games.  Those of you who came in after v1.1 and Alloy may not remember this, but it was a huge problem.  I had to spend a couple hours talking to The Monk, setting up port forwarding, and flashing the firmware on my router in order to be able to host.  I suspect that the hosting problems kept a number of players away from the game.
3. Impulse-based DRM resulting in confusion for unsophisticated purchasers.  I don't think Impulse as a means of DRM is a bad thing, but because it was implemented after Sins was released, I think it had a large negative effect on online player counts in invisible ways that are difficult to quantify.  If Impulse had been included with Sins and auto-installed with it or better yet if it had been fully integrated with Sins this wouldn't be as big of a problem.  However, presumably there are a number of legitimate Sins purchasers out there who have never visited this forum or the Sins website and who obtained the patches (up to v1.05) from elsewhere who would want to play over ICO but have no idea what they need to do.  When they click <Ironclad Online> they receive a version error but figure that they have the latest patch and conclude that the <Ironclad Online> function (whatever the hell that is) is just broke.  Also, the <Multiplayer> button looks like the button to press for online multiplayer, so perhaps they ended up playing Sins over Hamachi with the evil pirates.
4. Some players just wanted nothing to do with Impulse at all, perhaps suspecting it to be bloatware or spyware.  Really, when Impulse was rolled out several online players said that they were not going to patch the game any further because they didn't want to install Impulse.  (Doesn't make all that much sense to us, but that's what some people said.)
5. Minidumps and desycns.  This is a problem, but I don't think it's a huge reason for the low online player counts; the claims that they are the problem are overblown IMHO.

I think it's probably a combination of all of those factors and perhaps some other factors that I missed or am unaware of.  As TCores said, if 5% of the purchasers wanted to play online, it would be a large number.  If the game sold over 1 million copies then there should be about 50,000 people who would want to play online, so where the heck are they?

It seems hard for us fanboys of the game to believe, but it's also very possible that many players simply disliked it or played it for a month or two in single player before becoming bored and moving on to other games.

It would be interesting to see what the actual sales of the game were and how many CD keys were registered with Impulse.

I think it's that far fewer people play RTS's online than most would imagine. Look at Demigod. It was made almost exclusively for online multiplayer, and only 23% of the people who bought it even attempted to go online. That's not even the number that played a game online, just that tried to go online.