Listening to The fan-dumb
"Taking these fans too seriously is usually a mistake. Although they tend to be louder than the rest of the fanbase combined, they are usually a decided minority in almost every fandom (though they often claim to be a majority). Fan Dumb also tends to suffer from an extreme case of Fan Myopia, regardless of what kind they are; in any variation, they are often intractably convinced that the views of "the fans" (or perhaps more accurately, them) are both more widespread and more mainstream than in fact they are. If you're a producer, then pandering to them is usually a good way to make your show crash and burn. And to add insult to injury, they usually won't be very grateful that you were thinking about them, but will instead start whining about how you made the show crash and burn."
I noticed from the day Elemental was announced, that the community had way too much sway over the decisions that were made. When you claim to be a developer that "listens" to everyone individual's opinion, you soon find out that every opinion gets added to the game. The feeling I get from Elemental is that it simply doesn't know what it wants to be. It's been pulled and yanked this way and that way so many times over, it seems to have forgotten what exactly what it started out as.
If there is one piece of advice that I could give to the guys behind Elemental, I would suggest that you stay out of the forums. Or, at the very least, keep a layer between yourselves and the opinions of the masses. Stone-walling your customer base like many big publishers do can be very bad, but there is the other extreme that can be just as bad as well. When you try to ensure that "everyone" is happy, you end up discovering that, in the end, nobody really is.
The minor factions weren't at all interesting. It's some guy standing in a non-developed city that you can run over anytime you feel like it (or ignore because they're no threat).
I'm sorry if I've offended some, but this is how the game comes off for me and has since it was released. I'm not going to go through the forum searching for posts to back all this up, but there have been a lot of times where a major complaint is raised, Frogboy quickly responded in he affirmative, and it was immediately implemented. Then at a later date, is rescinded because the forum came down against it.
One good example is the creature spawns and difficulty. I have seen this issue flip-flopped so many times, I've lost count. One day it's, "not enough spawns", the next it's, "too many spawns". Practically every patch (before and during 1.1 beta) has changed this for the forum's mood of the week. That, right there, tells you that the problems are being addressed reactively, not proactively.
People argued that there needed to be more magic in the game. Again, as a reaction, more magic spells were put in. Now the forum is like, "No, no! That's not what we meant, we wanted it to be like X!" I saw a game dev just yesterday state something to the effect of, "oh we have plans to make it more like X in the coming weeks, don't worry this has been our plan all along!". Ummm...no.
Remember the "Epic Battles" thread a few months ago? People went on and on and on about how battles needed to be bigger/badder, etc (including myself). The initial response was, "No, Elemental will keep small-scale battles"...then as the fervor grew, the response changed to, "well we have plans to make battles more epic that will tie in with population as a resource". Huh? Now, I'm not even sure what the plan is as the responses have changed so often.
Another thing I saw was a thread pop-up a few months ago that was basically praising Kael. This went on for several pages citing how awesome it would be if Stardock hired him on to rework the design. A couple days later, Frogboy announced that, "lo and behold!", Kael had been hired on as an employee. Whether or not his help on the game turns out to be a good or bad thing, the issue here lies with the reactionary method of fixing the game.
Instead of months of grueling internal QA testing to iron these issues out with professional dev goals, things are changing based on the whims of the flavor-of-the-moment fan-base. What you end up with is chaos. Patches get released with fixes for one crowd of fans, while pissing off the other crowd. This is why I say I'm still not sure what Elemental wants to be. The concept has changed so many times, I've lost track. My theory, based on the examples I've put out, is that this has happened because the loudest part of the community has been in the drivers seat, not Stardock.
I think the game has gotten better since 1.0 in almost every respect. Don't get me wrong. But the way the game has gotten to this point has been a mess. I think problems such as this could be avoided in the future, if changes were not so quickly implemented because a group of fans says so. I know the temptation here is, "well if we don't get enough sales ASAP, the game goes down. So we need to fix things very quickly". A little patience with new ideas can go a long way to long-term success.
I would have to say that in order to appreciate the situation more, you have to pay attention to what frogboy has been saying over the past several months (weeks?)
in no particular order:
1. They decided to create new game engine, in so doing they are suffering growing pains since the engine does not initially live up to their own expectations so they have had to compromise on ideas.
2. Working long hours in the week, lack of sleep led to poor judgement on the quality of the compromises.
3. People have been working on the game independently and everything was put together at the end.
4. Valid issues raise in the original fan beta (august or so) may just starting to be addressed now.
5. Frogboy likes the ai work more than anything else which can cause an ADD (my words here) like distraction to the role of producer.
6. Kael was hired so fast, and the announcement was made so quickly, odds are, they were already talking about hiring him - i doubt the fan base influenced that decision in any way shape or form. His work experience seems impressive and he is perfect for the role of keeping everybody in line and talking with each other. Quality control, if you will.
Yes, they do seem erratic in how they are taking their story and bringing it to life in the game.
Yes, the implementation of magic gives a feeling of sadness given how they talked about the game being a successor to previous games.
Yes, they are aware of games that have been made in the past and ignore lessons that could be learned from them.
Does that make Stardock a bad person ?
no. Let them make their game without trying to be influenced by other past games. We will get there eventually.
Then we will call it: Heroes of Wondrous Magic in and Age of Elemental Titans and DragonWars
I think Stardock did all of this on purpose.
1. First we will all beta test.
2. SD releases to early, on purpose--so we all see potential
3. Do debugging to stabilize the game. 1.01 to 1.09
4. Beta major fix to supply direction
5. make improvements and listen to the your customers--those bastards
6. re-release game with expansion already planned.
7. keep us apparently dumb fan boys yearning for more by giving them to us free.
Damn you Frogboy, I have figured out your plot. I want two expansions for free. Oh wait, we are already getting that. Well I have still figured out your master plan.
Wow.. This isn't full of random conjecture at all...
Frogboy hired Kael because everyone on the forums said so.
How about we start a thread telling him to hire me? I've decided I'd like to change careers.
And we got people saying that Stardock doesn't listen to the players enough. Doesn't surprise me that someone else would say that they listen to them too much. The truth is probably somewhere in between.
Poster uses Logic-less Wall of Text.
Forum Readers are confused!
Forum readers injure themselves in confusion!
Wow. Just... wow.
He does have a bit of a point...I'm hoping to god they don't take the thread about getting rid of skill trees seriously.
Just because some think it is a good idea, doesn't mean we all do. But, Stardock has to make the decision on what is needed or not.
While in general terms I agree that listening to the Fan-Dumb has been the pitfall of many great and not-so-great forms of entertainment (FFIX and FFXIII, I'm looking at you), I think it hasn't been as bad as you imply with Elemental. Sure, the devs have been playing ping-pong with the balancing decisions so far, but balance is the one area where the community has the final word on a game, for better or worse. When it comes to the actual design of the game however I believe they've showed a lot more moderation, and have been able to draw the best ideas from the community while keeping the bad ones at bay just as they did with GalCiv2 and its expansions, with the quality of the 1.1 release being the best proof of that.
No, no and no, that's just completely wrong !
See, we've raised some issues.
-Armor being too strong (or weapons too weak... although, that'd increase the one-hit kills issue), it's been fixed, it still needs a fix, in spite of a step in the good direction. Have you seed a mood swing here?
-Monster spawns were bugged. Initial spawns needed tweaking, and they have been tweaked. Thanks to community feedback, Stardock has been able to improve the quality of that aspect of the game greatly, as well as fix bugs.
-Magic being overpowered because of the exploits and the lack of a spellcasting limit. We've never asked for a spell nerf, we've asked for a spellcasting nerf. We had one (an appropriate if unsufficient because lots of exploits still exist, and some spells, like the volcano, shouldn't be castable so often, so easily). The issue here is that they didn't listen appropriately to the community. We never asked for damage spells to suck, we asked for restrictions is spellcasting alone.
-I can give you lots of other examples.
Seriously, the only example of what you're saying that I can think of is diplomatic capital, an idea that actually could have been nice if used correctly. Right now, it's just another exploit machine (that you can use to keep the AI in the stone age forever if you get a diplomatic capital resource) in a game that has way too many already.
But most other suggestions made by users are actually sensible: "fix equipment value, it's totally off-balance", "we want lighter spawns at the begining and stronger at the end", "we want tactical terrain to matter, and we want mecahnics that will make positioning count", "the AI needs major improvement in army and city building and in territory protection", "techs that spawn resources in my enemy's territory should NOT exist (and for some: techs should NOT spawn resources)", etc.
GaelicVigil, I think you are mostly accurate with your points. I will say that I think that the long-term ambition for a game has to be driven and maintained by the producers, but that user comments should be integrated "in the margins".
I would like to add two words of caution however,
1st, players always want more. When the spells in 1.1 were introduced, people instantly started saying it was great, but not enough. This should not be read as people disagreeing with the system. On the other hand, the forums mostly hated the "intelligence requirements", so there was a real danger of flip-flopping. My point is - people will always express some measure of unhappiness with everything in a game, because it isn't varied or large or complex enough. If they release a WOW expansion with 12 new dungeons, there will always be people asking "why not 15?".
2nd, the changing mood of the players is sometimes a seesaw effect. You have a lot of people expressing disgruntlement at a certain system, and when it gets changed, the other people who were happy now turn up and are in turn unhappy. A very good example of that is the global mana system - at first, it seemed everyone wanted it. And then, after implementation, it seemed only a few wanted it and quite a few opposed it. Different opinions in different groups should not be coalesced into a group called 'fans'. 'Fans' are not all the same.
but... but... I want harder spawns early game & a pony
To add to the post (2 posts) above...
3) Sometimes players have an emotional response to changes, reacting emotionally rather than rationally. I wasn't a fan of the global magic system, for example.
Until I played it. Go figure.
Armor dosen't need a re-balancing, it needs a total change in how it works. Right now, all you have to do is get one armor level above what your opponets weapon level is and your troops become invincible. Its been mentioned before, but a system like MoM's would be good, as even the weakest unit at least has a chance agasint the strongest. Yes, a sky drake will smash the crap out of a spearmen, but at least the spearmen have a chance to do a point of damage. Or dnd where you can roll a 1 or 20 and get absurd results.
Basically, add some chance in, or make the bump between armor levels shallower, because as it stands, from one armor level to the next is a huge jump straight up.
Also, for one hit kills with weapons, so what? If a random, nameless trooper takes a boar spear to the face, why shouldn't he die instantly? Or even more extreme, a low level trooper taking a lord hammer to the face wielded by a level 10 champ. I would expect that to be a one hit kill.
Honestly though, the real issue is the first couple of levels of armor. Full plate mail should make your guy almost invincible to anything but the heaviest of weapons, but full leather should not make troops immune to clubs.
Anyway, 2 more cents, added to the pile.
Well, the problem is twofolds: 1) it removes any sense from unit HPs. 2) Who strikes first win. Single round battles are boring.
The issue isn't that a champion with a lordhammer can one-hit kill, it's that a trooper with any weapon that can overcome will most-likely one-hit-kill, or at least one-round-kill. You can't strategize in those conditions.
Broadswords should be the standard measure to which weapons and armor would be compared. Aside from legendary armor, it should have a reasonable chance to damage everything. Somewhat reduced against the heavy armors, but still reasonable.
Play on ridiculous and don't wear armor. Not sure what I can do about the pony but there is a mod that gets you bear cavalry.
My suggestion would be hit locations, with a chance for critical hits- which can go through armor.
Already in the game via daring strike mechanics.
I'm pretty sure I don't need to play compacted tech trees to know how it's going to make me feel though.
Gaelic, having been here pretty much daily since release, I can tell you that catering to fan wishes isn't exactly what's been going on. They're trying to find the balance median point in a game that spits out wildly different scenarios as a selling point. That's been confusing for them, for us and for the game.
To me, it seems some of this stuff is new to Stardock. Items, inventory systems, animations, a tactical battle map, city building that is supposed to be more evolved than what has worked in Gal Civ II....I could be wrong, but isn't this their first venture into fantasy in general? They admitted that, despite all the stuff we see in Elemental that we recognize, a lot of this is brand new territory for them.
In most dev houses, they call this iteration. The reason Stardock doesn't call it that is because the game is released....iteration is something you do in development. But they're iterating none the less, and that means drastic swings in balance, game play, options...all that jazz.
I'll admit, I read Brad's post about merging the tech trees and the hairs on the back of my neck went up. That is NOT what this game needs, in my opinion. But then I realized he's feeling out options. Why he's suddenly interested in pacing when there are a wealth of polish issues the game needs done, I don't know. (The tech pacing, finally, feels right to me.) I'm sure if other devs posted their daily thoughts on where their game was going, they'd say stuff that would make fans freak out, daily.
I do think the game is coming together. The systems are working. Rather than trying to do more rewiring (let's count the ways....multi-threading, global mana pool, city resourcing, spell balance x2, building balance x2, unit combat x1, UIx1, AI x2?, character stats x2, item balance x3....), kill the bugs, flesh out the content that is lacking (diplomacy, quests, characters, AI), and do the polish work.
One thing that has constantly annoyed me with Elemental is that the polish elements have constantly been put off. So many legacy texts are still in game. So many game texts about really important stuff are ambiguous about what they do, particularly the adventuring trees for both factions. The editors in game still have some bugs and just generally screwy behaviors. All those things contribute to the sense that priorities are completely stressed out, and contributes to the perception that the game is lost.
Having said all that, I'm still here and I'm still hopeful. 1.1 was supposed to be the big hurdle, the big revamp and bug fix that clears the way for new content (read as: content we've kind of expected since release but have waited on because we're realistic.) If it seems like 1.1 wasn't the milestone they hoped it was.....yeah. But then again, why am I really worried? I bought the game.
Honestly, blaming the fans for this is out there. The community wanted a complex economic model, and didn't get it. We wanted traits and skills, didn't get that. In certain cases we got what we asked for, but quite often that wasn't true.
The problem was more a matter of unrealistic time. Brad used to say that making a game was 95% engine work, and 5% assembling the game. While it's possible to make that true in a technical sense (in that Elemental 1.0 was in fact a "game"), it's not true at all if you want to make a goo game. Good games require a lot of systems iteration to get things right, then integrating the other systems, then iterating some more.
Elemental wasn't really fully assembled until less then a month before release. Look at good games that get put out, and that's completely unrealistic. One of the reasons why 1.1 is so much better is that unlike every previous version, 1.1 is an iteration on the complete game. All the systems were in place, and SD got to see how they work together and improve them.
Had the schedule included some of that before 1.0, things would have gone very differently. And as Brad has said, that one is his fault. Several of us in the community told him the game wasn't ready, and we were told that we didn't know what we were talking about.
No blaming the fans there.
I'm not a professional game developer, so I'm not going to claim I know more than Brad on making them. But sometimes it's generalizations like this that get him in trouble. Because one of Elemental's biggest problems is content. Tech, the breadth of city options, I'm satisfied with, I think those have always been mostly solid.
The items, quests, characters, magic...that's all where things have been flatest and the most simplistic. That's not "engine work." That's "we got something, that's our content, we got to run with it." No one can criticize them for not trying on "engine work." But they've been totally consumed with it, and the emergency rebalance they didn't realize they needed to make, that we're still playing on a lot of content authored in beta when many feel its design was lacking then. Add on to the 5% of errors in assembling things that have only contributed to the problem....
Yeah. Probably not the best time for trying to sound like Edison.
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