I have not posted often on the forums but this doesn't mean I have not read a lot of them. What I have seen is almost a total melt down from positive energy about the game to a vicious, bitter trolling which has cost some of us the enjoyment of seeing the developers journals.
I have the game and I experience some slow down and my fair share of memory leaks and even so I have had a blast playing the game. The amount of negative feedback and I must say nonconstructive forum trolling has been difficult to read for me and has made this not really a safe place for people to post in my opinion.
Brad(frogboy) has made his statements about the game and has been extraordinarily open with us. I feel we owe him, and the rest of the people working very hard to make this an awesome game, an apology and need to own up to our own mistakes as fans of Stardock games. I know I am only one person but I do hope it helps to hear that I will be playing this game for a long time and I still want to hear what you guys are doing. I know that my apologizing for a small vocal amount of people is not my responsibility but I want there to still be an open correspondence between the dev's and the players. The locking down of dev journals has saddened me to the extent of actually making a post.
I truly hope the rest of the forums will want the same and trust that people will start posting constructive ideas and interesting debate again. We as fans have already heard more from the devs then I have ever seen from any game company and I truly hope that this continues.
With my sincerest apologies I am truly sorry for all the Flaming, Trolling, and general Hate that has been going on around the forums. We as fans should know better and I trust that you Developers who work very hard for us will remain steadfast. I can't wait for the future of elemental as more patches come through and the game evolves into what it is meant to be.
Sincerely,
NN
I am wondering if you are talking about this forum, I am currently posting to ?
Actually I think the vast majority of people who critisized SD did it in a quite constructive way.
I much more often noticed threads in which criticless supporters of stardock where attacking people with legitimate (at least in my opinion) concerns about the game. (The company itself and especially Mr. Wardell is dealing with the critics in a very professional and open manner.)
If you take a look at the opinion poll on the journals page https://www.elementalgame.com/journals you will see that 52% like/love the game and only 3% dilike/hate it.
Does not seem to indicate much hate in my opinion.
Regarding the game. When it came out It had many problems. It still has. The only reason why I did not shelve it and turned to another game is that there simply is no other turn based fantasy strategy game with turn based tactical combat and (hopefully coming) decent random map generation at the moment that fits to my taste.
At its current state the game is ok in my opinion. It is as much fun to me as MOO3 with all user made improvements and fixes included. If the developers keep on the current pace with fixing bugs and improving gameplay it will become a truly great game and I will buy all expansions as soon as they are available. But for now the game still has some way to go now.
1.07 is officially stable as far as I am concerned. One CTD and one minor graphical glitch in 20+ hours of gameplay, thats acceptable for a game this early in the release IMHO. In fact thats the same rate of issues I've had with SC2.
If 1.07 had been the initial release version I bet the early reviews would have been a lot better. Oh well, its stable now and Stardock has already showed the game plan out to version 1.3 with corrections to the balance and UI issues in the works, so I am a happy customer.
And looking at what is percolating and emerging in the modding forum has me very VERY excited about this game's future.
You are right. If 1.07 had been the initial release version the early reviews would have been a lot better. But it wasn´t.
As far as I am concerned. 1.0 up to 1.05 felt rather like a toy to me than a game. Starting from 1.06 It started to feel like a game.
Regarding stability. I get an out of memory error after about 2 hours of playing. No big thing to me. I get a sound signal. The game is unresponsive. I ALT-TAB to the Desktop. I click the "Out of memory" window "OK" button. And then I shutdown my comp as fast as I am able to do.
If I take the time to respond to the "Would you like to send a report to Microsoft question ?" (or something like that). I get a blue screen of death and have to reset the computer.
As I said no big thing to me. It is only my game partition. My important personal data is on my Linux partition. I didn´t notice any permanent damage to my windows system yet.
Eh, I'm somewhere in between 1 and 2. I don't want my money back, expect the game will live up to its potential someday, but while a fan, I'm not a fanboy, and find the fanboys who constantly make excuses and deny reality to be annoying.
I agree with the Origional poster, one of the things I've always liked about Stardock is the good community and the degree of involvement the developers have with the community.
The game does need patching, stardock have admitted that themselves appoligised, offered to make reparations by giving those who have already bought the game a free expansion and are generally being very open and honest about the problems.
I for one still find tinkering with it fun, but there obviously are issues and I expect many patches will be published. To be honest I kind of look forward to watching the game evolve but then I signed up for the beta I can of course understand disapointment for those who expected to buy the finished and fully polished game.
But the bottom line here is death threats and general trolling is not ok and stardock should not have to tolerate constant abuse. So I can understand why they are backing off from the community in response.
so time to get over itm and start acting in a polite and mature manor again or move on and stop coming here.
It comes down to standards.
If you enjoy the game in it's current state (yes 1.07) then you simply have very low standards. Even Brad has essentially said this.
Ok, so it doesn't crash as much anymore (or at all for your rig), but the mechanisms in the game really don't work the way the way Brad wanted them to, the polish was not there (again directly from Brad) the AI is basically useless (again, from Brad), the magic is boring and undifferentiated, the tac combat is pointless, ...
All of those criticisms Brad has accepted and leveled at the game itself.
If you enjoy it, great, you have low standards.
If you think it has a ton of potential, even better, but don't confuse potential with what currently exists. And don't think that having low standards is a bad thing, because clearly, for you whom currently enjoy the game, it's not.
It seems to me that most of these rationalizations take the form of, 'wait 2 - 4 - 6 months and it will be a great game'. One would think it is like a mathematical formula, 'wait 6 months = great game', like 2+2=4, that absolutely cannot be argued with. Well, I'm gonna argue it.
1. Who knows, the game that finally gets made may not coincide with the imaginary great game that you have in your head that is gonna be here in 4 months or whatever. That is certainly a possibility, considering everyone has their own personal opinion as to what makes a good game.
2. Look at the work load. The Out of Memory, CTD problems. Magic needs to be redone. Weapon balance needs looking at. Combat system needs overhauling. Tactical combat needs a complete redo. The UI could use some love. Synergy of the different systems not clear to the player. And when that's all done, dear god, that disgrace of a campaign needs a coat of paint and a tune up. To top it off, the devs are under pressure to make good on a botched release, the fans clamoring for their patches. Not an ideal situation.
3. And most important, patching a game is a human undertaking. There are no guarantees. Things can happen, even given the best goodwill and desire to do right in the world. Situations can change. People can even make bad decisions. It's been known to happen.
A fellow musician friend of mine once said, 'the gig's not over till after you've spent the money'. I honestly hope and pray (since I've already spent the money) that if there is a great game lurking within, it manages to come out. But I'll believe it when I see it, not before.
I'm disappointed in SD a little. Luckily, I think this whole experience for them is humbling rather than catastrophic, and a little humbling is good now and then.
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