State of the Game

fiallach said:

After a good night of sleep, i woke up, and this post made me realize i can't be mad at you guys, you are really too nice and respectfull as a company

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pamarti69 said:

now all of the sudden i cant even see any of the words over the buttons. the words are shifted off the buttons.

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Cpt.Badger said:

Newsflash: companies are not about being nice. They are about being PROFESSIONAL. You know, delivering products that actually work on release. Paradox is infamous for releasing bugged, unplayable games. Hearts Of Iron 3 anyone ? Magicka ?

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Kangaxx33 said:

Yes, the DAGI-Attack (Distributed Attempt to Gain Information) by the fans was too much for the server...

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mr_myrmidon said:

LOL...I was partly to blame. Might have pounded on the site a little bit in frustration with retries.


For Paradox: I appreciate the apology but do this one thing for me: Commit.

Help/push/whack on the developer get this game completed. For my part:

1. $220 and all of this weekend till now: i upgraded my computer to run Windows 7 *just for this game* and blew my plan of waiting for Windows 8 out of the water.

2. $50 game plus the two DLCs to show *my* commitment.

FYI sorry if this was already posted, but for some real feedback from Kerberos...since Kerb site is basically unusable: http://arinndembo.com/?p=743

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pamarti69 said:

now all of the sudden i cant even see any of the words over the buttons. the words are shifted off the buttons.

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3dmadness said:

Hey guys,

Honestly thank you for your apology, this may seem a bit cheeky but can you add white to the empire colour pallet wile your at it, or just more colours in general?

Seems a bit weird to have an extremely in-depth colour pallet for ships but empire colour is so limited. :mellow:

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castewar said:

Some people are seeing this - basically the game screen is one size, and the button text thinks it's another. Min/maxing the screen should get them to agree. We are looking to stomp this, but in the meantime, hope that helps.




This is an issues we've wrestled with since SotS1. The two things you can't have with player colours in a game like SotS, where you need to look at a colourful game board (which is what the starmap is essentially) and see where everyone is at, as quick as possible (these go double in combat, where you can't always stop to zoom in on a ship to see the empire badge.) The first is that you can't have two colours that are too close together, otherwise it can lead to confusion during play - sorry I shot at you, I thought you were the other guy. The second is that the colours have to be easy to read - so, a la Reservoir Dogs, while everyone would love to be Mr. Black, a grey SolForce ship, with Black player colour, and Black as a secondary colour would be a nightmare to play against. Hard to see on StarMap, Claude Raines in Combat. It would look awesome all the while it snuck up on you and killed you.

That said, we're always trying to add more. There are double in SotS2 than in SotS1, and the secondary colours were added to let people personalize ships that they otherwise can't control the player color on.

I'll pop in here more as much as I can. Thanks everyone, we really appreciate you support.

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Mecron said:

Hey folks! Helluva weekend eh?

Welcome to the perfect storm of cock up made up of 40% Murphy's Law, 30% Chaos, 20% Overambition and 10% wishful thinking. And you have our deepest regrets for what it is worth as none of this was part of the plan.

I am tempted to go into full blown explanations but a) that starts to smack of making excuses and b) in reality I think the biggest things on people's minds right now judging from your posts is "Who's responsible?!!" and "What's going to be done?!!" And even when its time for explanations I am sure you would all rather hear about it in the context of "How this won't happen again".

That latter question is an easy one and best gotten out of the way quickly. "Who is responsible?"...I am. Half my job at Kerberos is to be the one that makes the hard call. What gets prioritized. What gets pulled. What gets released. What get accepted. And in many ways, what gets said. When push comes to shove, I am the one who makes the deal with the devil. When something is supposed to be watched, its me who has to know the answer. When the switch got thrown on the wrong build, costing many of you an extra big download and letting loose an extra buggy code base, I was in traffic instead of giving the yay or nay myself. That should not have been...hell I should have insisted nothing moved until the right code had been there and confirmed multiple times. Instead I blew it and bad things happened.

So lets set this straight here. When you are dealing with SotS2 this weekend and wondering quite rightly "Who is to blame for this?!!" The answer is me. NOT Paradox...NOT Steam and certainly NOT my team. All of those forces have been exemplary in helping deal with a bad situation. When it comes to who should be at the end of anyone's fingerpoint, it's just plain ol' me.


Ok...so now onto the real important thing...The Future of SotS2 and what you can count on.


First of all the bad news...Thanks to various factors we are now sitting on top of a pile of blown apart code and unstable features. The first thing you can expect though is stability. There will be an update tomorrow which will set right much of the chaos created friday in terms of crashing and keeping you from playing that game. What it WON'T do is magically add back in every piece of functionality. Gods know I wish that I had that magic wand but the reality is that path leads to more chaos and more broken gameplay sessions. Remember that part where I mentioned making the hard calls? This is another one of those. As much as the team wants to throw themselves at this like crazy people, I am not going to ok that. Instead we will go about this in a relatively sane and orderly fashion with regular updates that make sure everything that goes back in is as stable as possible before you see it. Oh I am sure some stuff will leak through, but at least that will be dealt with quickly and cleanly. Sorry to just put the hard facts to you straight without flowers but I think we are somewhat past the flowers make it all better stage of this relationship

What this means to you...

This plan means that you folks can expect at least 2 or 3 updates a week over the next month or so that will gradually make this game into what it should have been when the switch was pulled on friday. Soon after that you can expect personel in black suits to arrive at your house to flash a red light in your eyes. After that you will find yourself happy and enjoying the best release day ever and none of this will ever have happened.
Ok fine...I am a lil shakey on the last half of the plan but what I can tell you is that by the end of this period you WILL have more additional content than you would have under more ideal circumstances. Every update will go out with some thank you for your patience...some badges, extra maps, new nose art, more background entries. Basically whatever can be done alongside the priority path will be put in as well. The people out there who know Kerberos know that we support our games not just for weeks or months but for years. For all of you people new to us, please let me assure you that despite how your purchase may look at the moment, you can look forward to years of support. I would ask that you consider not giving up on us because it will literally take the end of the world for Kerberos and Paradox to give up on SotS2.


What I would like to ask of you...


Oh I know that is hardly what you expected to hear right now, but before your temperature rises, please hear me out becuase this portion is in reaction to ALL the posts I have read which seem to subdivide into certain clear groups.


If you are a Kerberos and/or a SotS fan then please just enjoy the game as you can over the next few weeks. I know you want to help as much as possible but to be honest you should NOT be rewarded for your support with more work. Your feedback is appreciated but in no means are you expected to act as testers or hunt bugs. Literally your patience and continued support is more than enough.

If you truely feel like you have been dumped into an unannounced beta test on this game, then please, I ask you to put the game away and not look at it till someone fires off the "all done" flag. I am not going to tell you that you should not feel this way. What I am going to say is that if you feel this way then you should not feel victimized any more than if you had made a pre-order and then been informed of a delay. I know this does not make it all right but at least it should make it clear that no one wants to use you as a beta tester nor was that ever the intent.

And finally, if you are in the camp that still feels robbed by the time you have reached this point of my post I can only offer what I can. We are fixing it and we need folks to either cheer, step aside or get out of the way cause vitriol is not going to help right now. If you demand a refund then I completely understand and you can be assured, the cost of that will make it directly to us. We will feel your "voting with your dollars", you can be sure about that and we accept that as fair play. On the other hand, if a free copy of the orginal SotS will help tide you over while we get this game shined from turnip to jewel, then please write to "contact@kerberos-productions.com" and we will set you up. If nothing else, if you are not familiar with how we support our products, you can play it and then ask the old-timers how much it changed over the years and that may reassure you.



So if you are still with me after this long post...let me summarize.

a) cock up
b) my fault
c) will be Completely fixed
d) fun stuff in many updates
e) Understanding of your position
f) Apology again and underserved request for faith and patience from people who don't know us.


That's about it folks. I hope this helps in some way or another. If enough people care, I will try and post a "Ways I can think of to prevent this from happening ever again". But otherwise its sunday and I got a whole lot of work to get done for tomorrow's update.

Once again, Regrets and our deepest thanks for whatever patience each one of you can offer.
--Martin Cirulis
CEO/Creative Director
Kerberos Productions

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