BRAD: "I should also say that regardless of sales or reviews, our commitment to Elemental will not be affected."

If this is 100% true then I will be awed, surprised, grateful and positive about the future of our race.

Don't get me wrong: this would be normal.

But I just have to look at simple things like politics where politicians don't just do what's best, but they tend to do what gives them the most votes to see how horribly it has been going wrong, ever since I started following the news and being old enough to make sense of it. Let alone companies depending on other people's money to survive.

If you'll have proven to have kept your word in let's say 2 years you deserve to be heralded like a hero and praised for your strong stand by what is normal (or should be normal) and just. You deserve a statue and a place among the great people that affect change for the better in this world. Just hearing you say what I just quoted makes me look more positively at the future and makes me hope my ideal hopes for better times might come sooner rather then later!

Thank you for saying it, I'll keep watching to see if it becomes truth.

BRAD: "As some of you know, most of our company's revenue doesn't come from developing games. Even if the game didn't sell another copy, we would still continue our update schedule."

Of course, that helps a LOT, but it doesn't diminish your intention nor the candor that speaks from your post. I am very impressed by you and your crew!

BRAD: "7. To those reviewing the game: I would urge you to review the game prior to v1.1. I say this because v1.05 (the release day version) is the version of the game that was originally released and if that version of the game is considered flawed then my view is that Stardock should suffer the consequences for that."

Another example of you taking responsibility, stepping into your own power. Facing the future bravely in the eye with your feet solidly on the ground you placed them on, instead of hiding, manipulating, twisting,...

I wish I could give you 100 karma, your words deserve it. I thank you,

Espavo 

I never said this.

Sorry about that.  I must have made an errant cut somewhere when I was trying to clean up the text.

Well probably times (and expectations) were different back then.

People expected a lot from Elemental... and by a lot I don't mean high production values, like movies, extensive voice acting etc. The point was to get a relatively low budget game, made by lovers of the genre, with less shiny content and more focus on the things that matter. People took it for granted that those would be absolutely nailed. Instead we got a nice, promising framework were everything regarding balance, proper AI, consistent "spreadsheet behaviour", etc. has still to be worked in.

It's only ironic that the aspect I love the most, at the moment, is the graphics! Certainly not what I expected before release.

Some backlash was unavoidable: the effect is exaggerated by people being "caught off-guard".

BUT...we're still here. No real harm done so far, we have patience and I definitely appreciate honest, frank post like yours  Good words and reviews will come in time.

Dito. 

Here's my post in its entirety.   Here's a selected bit for those uninterested in the whole post:

"So, I don't think of SD as rookies in the big leagues [As the person I'm replying to suggested], but rather as pros who are merely smaller and more streamlined, but as puissant.  I think their game is sufficiently "...step[ped] up...", and had they a bit more time we'd have seen that at release.

The test for my argument is the state of Elemental in a few months -- and I'm betting we'll see a game that holds its own vs. the 'big boys'."

The big lesson from Nixon's Watergate is that it's not the 'crime' that sinks you, it's the cover-up.  Best to take one's lumps immediately so one can quickly move on to what's being done to fix things.  Each time someone waffles they just prolong the topic and delay moving things to the positive -- how the game will be improved, looking forward not backwards, etc. ie the 'vision thing'.  It's in a business's best interest to do this.  Boogie obviously understands this, and does a great job being SD's public face here.

Well, quality period.  The last few posts by Brad before launch all indicated that they were ahead of schedule which implies that things were as they wanted.  I took that to mean that the game would run well without slowdown on a high end pc (they was talking about this running well even on netbooks in some earlier dev journals), that there wouldn't be random crashes, etc.  Things like the dev journals raised my expectations of what we'd be getting on day one.  Anyway, I'm still very confident that it will get there, but I wish I'd have adopted the game a little later after the bigger issues have been resolved.  I'm really glad that they are hard at work making the game better and am looking forward to playing again when the next patch comes out.  Fingers crossed for another patch this week, but who knows. 

Not sure if this my original Stardock account, probably isn't (I think this one dates from when I used to do Content addons for GalCiv??). Golly gosh, at one point I think I was under the 100k mark on member no. though. (I post this without knowing / caring about my member number - it used to be important, in the very distant past, or at least a source of amusement when the old fogies came out to play)

$50 tag & various tie-ins with book publishers, retailers and so on and so forth means this isn't the Stardock that used to exist. Stardock is about as Indy as Valve is, these days, just less commercially successful. Stardock (and no, I don't make the absolute fallacy / cult of personality that seems to exist here nowadays equating Brad with the entire company, I think we've moved beyond that somewhat, the financial position is allowing a castle now?) dropped the ball on this one. Not only dropped the ball, but committed three errors that shouldn't happen in a modern business:

1) Given a choice of retail space, weren't prepared to wait until an obvious market leader went gold, and attempted a rush release to "beat the release". If anyone in Stardock seriously thought they were competing with Civ V in terms of advertising spend, coder time, retail exposure or simple pure naked $ to throw at the project [2k games spent a fortune on the copyright license alone, fyi] then you're seriously deluded.

At this point, fire the person who made that call. (see point #3)

2) PR. Stardock has amassed some seriously good PR "kudos" in the last eight years. The very fact that reviewers are saying "Wait off for 6 months" instead of burying you, your product and any future product you might release is a sign of this.This forum, and the code (both 1.0 and 1.6) and the general media exposure and this very post I'm replying to proves it. No doubt. No whining that you like it. No forum "fanbois". Critical mass has spoken. You have been judged, weighed, measured and found wanting.

Stardock just burnt eight years of good PR. I hope that sabbatical is spent clawing some of it back.

3) For an "indy" developer, you ignored your strongest asset: die-hard fans. Beta-testing reports / points / posts all suggest that people were telling you the issues that existed, and you ignored them. You can do this if you're releasing a product that is guaranteed to ship a million units in its first month [Starcraft II]. Stardock cannot.

A point, and a stupidly obvious one, is your player-base opening up your own XML and pointing out the tragic errors you missed. This, I find the worst case in point: if you're releasing a product where people can look into your XML / Python, and they're fixing the errors for you then you need to just own up to releasing bad code. For reference - this point relates to "magical shards not effecting mage spells in tactical combat, but working in auto-resolved combat". Bad code there. Just scrolling through the XML, there are more, and some really amazingly crass ones. But you're not paying me to beta test your game for you, so I suggest you get cracking on it.

Point #8 of the OP's post should have said: "We're aware that some of the code we released is simply broken and as such, we cannot view the released code as our final product. We broke our own Bill of Rights, and for that, we're sorry".

Hmm. Yes, that bears repeating. Your code is broken. I can see it, your player base can see it (and is indeed fixing it for you), and if reviewers were up to old standards, they'd mention it as well. But we're no longer in Indy land, so they don't.

I think hubris was mentioned? Yes.. the person who posted knows what it means, as do I, and as do the people in the industry watching this debacle and feeling pity for Stardock. Not glee, no gloating... pity. But, given points #1-3, it is entirely self-inflicted. Given the problems the entire industry is facing, I think Stardock could have done itself a lot of favours here by simply not trying to play 'big business'; this is stated with full knowledge of which names went under this year, and which names just went flat out bust. (The Origin problem rears its head again, and again, and again... and Elemental isn't even a MoM beater, let alone industry leader. I'll say it again - whoever dared mention Civ V in the same breath as Elemental needs a serious reality check. Serious. Budget wise, the difference is in the $ millions. Reality is a bitch, but it is unavoidable).

Given the political nature of the cult of personality here, I think a quotation is in order: Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason. Ayn Rand (horrible & deluded individual that she was). The more intelligent readers will grasp the irony I'm getting at here.

p.s. Member # 694k.. definitely not my original account, oh well, that's what you get for recovering a password from a foggily remembered email account years out of date. And I hope the viewable edits will show I thought long and hard about this post - 'kudos' for the I.M.Banks reference and nod was worth it.

Like your XML?

*ba-bom-tish*

No, seriously, I wouldn't be posting wisecracks at the moment if I was working for Stardock. In a thread where the CEO posts his everlasting and humble apology to the world. Guessing you aren't in the PR department.

*Wonders about # returns refunded in the last week*

It turns out that there's some real people working at Stardock, they allow them to post on the forums, and they have a sense of humor?

Seriously dude, WTF? He posted a funny reply to your comment. What's the problem? Do you REALLY expect someone to come in here and give you a serious answer to a question like that?

Stuff like this is the reason why so many companies let nobody other then PR interact with the public.

I thought it was funny, along with many of the above.  It was in good taste. It's sad that some people have no sense of humor and must try to take us down to their level.

*wanders off muttering something about misery and company*

I didn't ask any questions, I posted an opinion on the OP's commentary. It was fairly mild, given that this is a public forum and all. His comment also wasn't directed at anything I said, which sums up the "head in the sand" mentality going on; I believe another Stardock employee summed it up when they said, publically, that the CEO "ignores posts that say it isn't done" (I can dig out the full quotation easily enough).

https://forums.elementalgame.com/394060/ is a "bug fix mod" for the 1.06 release code. It is a player generated fix to huge gaping holes in the XML. #2 Of the gamer's bill of rights, read it. And no, commentary such as "All PC games have bugs in" does not let you pass Go or collect $200. There's a difference between "bugs" and "broken XML that doesn't actually work and is fundamentally imbalanced even if it is working". The memory leaks / scroll out = massive FPS slowdown on building a city / Alt-Tab crashing are "bugs"; I've not mentioned them as they meet the traditional criteria for a proper "bug" and as such will get fixed (shouldn't have been released in that state, but there we go). Badly written / imbalanced / poorly created XML is the content dev's job, and it looks poor at the moment.

Well, historically, the way it works is a game is released and if people don't like it, they're supposed to buy some expansion pack for it that "fixes" things that people thought should be in the original version.

This is pure horse manure, and a fairly weasely way to attempt to dodge the bullets flying around: historically, the industry didn't work like this. Even today, in the climate of the EA "Let's package DLC 'content' that really, really, really should have been in the first release but we think our customers are stupid and we plan to milk them dry, let's try it with Spore, it worked on the Sims", expansion packs don't work like this. I'll pull a random example out of my hat: Anarchy Online. Disastrous launch; perhaps the most infamous bad launch of all time. Full of proper old school bugs and game imbalances: Expansion pack "Shadowlands". Historically, the expansion had nothing to do with what should have been in the original version, it added an entire new world to the experience. Nor can, historical example here, expansion packs which "milked" the player base back in the 90's (I'm thinking here, of say, the Origin / EA 'expansions' to Ultima VII / VIII) be seen as fixing things that should have been in the original versions - these additions merely added OP gear / 'utility' items to the game & a bit of back story / lore. From memory, these were items such as rings that removed reagent costs, teleportation function, key rings etc: i.e. small short-cut modifications that didn't alter the play experience by much, other than to reduce inventory management.

Someone around here needs to start calling this as self-delusion, and fast. Employees making jokes on the forums are obviously not doing it. My advice would be to kick the content dev team up the ass, and fast, but there we go.

p.s.

Any (and I really do mean any) experience of MMOs or just games in general tell you why "everyone" uses additive % multipliers, not stacking multipliers. The game using them is just insane, and stupid. "Everyone" uses additive % because the likelihood of accidentally creating massive imbalances either through your own creations or players finding inventive ways to stack multiplier % bonuses you didn't think of means your game will get broken, and fast. This should have been addressed in the first few months of development, and understood, and then followed.

-100 kudos to the person who didn't know this, and so was able to put content in game that reduced all build costs to 1. You really deserve a medal - just to make this plain: the error isn't in putting the content in and not noticing the effect (a fairly heinous one, but understandable during crunch and no testing) it is being able to add said content without automatically realising that it would be a massive game breaker before you put it in. This says whoever wrote that XML fundamentally just doesn't understand the basic core concepts the game is built on.

If you really "must" go with stacking % multipliers, you make sure that either 1) the bonuses themselves are small enough not to stack past a certain point or 2) you make each additional tier of % modifiers within the same function tree replace the last, not work in tandem with it. e.g. I build a "Pants Factory of semi-awesomeness", it gives +40% "<insert generic fantasy name for McGuffin production here>"; I then build a "Pants Factory of awesomeness" which gives me a +60%"<insert generic fantasy name for McGuffin production here>" that replaces the old 40% bonus, otherwise I've obviously just broken the game.

This is basic 101 stuff. Having content with multiple tiers of +25 - +50% bonuses that all work in tandem suggests the dev. team just didn't get it, and were using the traditional additive mindset whilst working under entirely different mechanics. I'm aware there's been a review of Elemental focusing on this, but it bears repeating ad nauseam - and the reviewer was too kind in his appraisal, due to his personal links to Stardock, imo. This is pure bad management and bad game design, there's no excuse for it.

Period.