I know, (I was there),and again, to be fair the release of SOTS prime back then was in better condition, however like now any issues were soon sorted and resolved. The last 5 years with Kerberos has not been a case of a company blundering from one disaster to another, as would be the case with no quality control processes. There may have been a failure in their processes this time, or other factors may have been involved, but it is unfair and stretching credibility to decide on this that Kerberos have no processes in place. It is similar to saying that because of the Bush/Florida election shenanigans that the United States does not have a functioning democracy and all elections there are corrupt.
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I know, (I was there),and again, to be fair the release of SOTS prime back then was in better condition, however like now any issues were soon sorted and resolved. The last 5 years with Kerberos has not been a case of a company blundering from one disaster to another, as would be the case with no quality control processes. There may have been a failure in their processes this time, or other factors may have been involved, but it is unfair and stretching credibility to decide on this that Kerberos have no processes in place. It is similar to saying that because of the Bush/Florida election shenanigans that the United States does not have a functioning democracy and all elections there are corrupt.
Mecron talking about blown code would seem to be a smokescreen. Are you honestly trying to tell us there was a game there in the first place that was anywhere near complete?
He's got everyone talking about the process rather than their failure to design and build the game they should have.
What I want to avoid is a situation like what happened to City simulators. Simcity 4 was the last "good" city simulator. For years not much happened. Societies sucked.
Cities XL was the first major attempt to build something ... decent and it was buggy. The 2012 release wasn't too great either (although I have not on the advice of others purchased it) as it was pretty much the same thing with a bit of new content. Plus, the fundamental game simplified concepts too much. There were many things that did push the genre forward, but overall an inferior game.
4X looks like it's heading in that direction. What kinds of games are we expecting? Civ V was a disappointment. I suppose Galactic Civilizations III might be good.
What Kerberos does in the next couple of months I think will be critical. Right now there are 2 camps forming - the "fanboys" who will stick it out and the haters, some of whom have left after getting their refunds. Then there's people like me in the undecided category.
Shall we stick to the Topic as posted - about Quality Control Processes? There are already many, many, many (Police Acadmecy reference) threads on the issues you raise, lets try and condense them into existing threads rather than derail another thread.
I see where you are coming from in one way, but at the same time I totally disagree with your sentiment. I am a hard line consumer, probably more so than you (never buy excessively marketed products since I don't want to pay companies to tell me how awesome their products are, do *a lot* of research before buying things, etc).
Despite all the bugs in this disfigured ghost of a game, I have still gotten MORE enjoyment out of testing things out and playing around with stuff than I would have gotten out of pretty much any of the so called, painfully short, triple A titles that cost almost twice as much. This is speaking both quantatively and qualitatively. For me that is all that matters, since even though gaming probably is my main hobby, when all is said and done, it is just a form of entertainment. Not a necessity for me to live, not something I need to earn money. This is of course not even mentioning that I fully expect to get even more fun out of it when it is properly patched.
That is true. For $40, I suppose, if this game succeeds, we are going to be putting this game on for hundreds of hours. Most games, even the more expensive ones made by the big studios are the kind you throw away in less than 100 hours, unless you really get into multiplayer.
Generally Id say no. He's the cock of the walk there an all.
The "my little kingdom" thing.
weeeeeellll......
He did get elected twice and ppl CANT be that stupid can they?
"never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers"
or
"To figure out the average IQ of a group of people, take the highest number in the group and divide it by the number of people IN the group. Hence why people in larger and larger groups are dumber and dumber" - dunno where I heard that
The game I've played is nearly a complete game - its missing trade, indepents, diplomancy and movement scripts. Indepents were disabled before launch, trade and diplomacy with it (they are heavily intertwined). Other than a bunch of bugs, yea There is.
If I got my money nobody would have been reading my posts on this forum. I'm only here because I'm still waiting for my refund which mysteriously requires the degree of logistics that launching a space shuttle does. I would like nothing more than to be given my money back and forget I ever bought this game.
Hey if
IF
They get this game into some semblance of something I can play before they offer the refunds, I may keep it. You wont see me again, cause Ill be playing it tho.
There are just design elements that are really turning me off the game right now (well other than the bugs). But those dsign flaws wont make me ask for a refund, its only if the game is still broken that will do that. I dont buy a game then if I dont like it bring it back an ask for my money back.
For instance as I said in another thread about the way the missions are handled.
I liked in SOTS that they were done at the ship level, so if I wanted to send a fleet somewhere, I clicked on the fleet, clicked move, hit the system, they went.
Now its, right click the system, select the mission (wait) new window pops up. Select the fleet, hit confirm, hit OK (wait).
It feels unintuitive. Like they took the control of my fleets out of my hands and put them in the admirals' hands and I dont like that at all.
Logisitics of a space shuttle launch eh, that is an incredible exaggeration given the amount of time and red tape I'd imagine NASA has to deal with.
Granted, if NASA could do all that in under a month. Then I have renewed faith in NASA.
Scrod7 seems to know what he is talking about when it comes to software development.
So please don't call him a troll..
So please don't call him a troll..
As I've posted elsewhere in the forum, I already have an open ticket with Impulse:
I got this message from Impulse only hours after the incident, around 5 days ago. Since then I received multiple replies to my emails and private messages from Paradox staff, including two from the CEO himself, all asking me to be patient while they do something vague. The amount of effort in that combined correspondence with me is an order of magnitude larger than doing what that simple message from Impulse says.
They are dragging their feet. Why? I don't know.
Let's see..
TL;DR
and
That said, to the OP: If you are so clear on the subject, why would you intentionally invite people to a most obvious flame war? Since what you had to say was for the developer team only, why not make the point to THEM, not for US and them. Just make an e-mail to Kerberos, you'll find their address from their page no prob.
Shees.
TL;DR
and
That said, to the OP: If you are so clear on the subject, why would you intentionally invite people to a most obvious flame war? Since what you had to say was for the developer team only, why not make the point to THEM, not for US and them. Just make an e-mail to Kerberos, you'll find their address from their page no prob.
Shees.
I'm not a game developer, I'm a software engineer. I've worked for everyone from a major sillicon valley player to international banks to small manufacturing firms. In 18 years, I think there's been about two companies which bothered enforcing this stuff. Interestingly, it's usually the smaller companies rather than the larger ones.
Same is true of everything though. Back up policies are usually equally ad-hoc. Partially it is attitude - procedure is simply something that gets in the way of actual work - and partially it's down to program/team/middle managers coming from a business background rather than a development one, hence not understanding why this stuff is important.
To be honest though, if an international bank doesn't bother with it on business critical apps, I'm not going to moan about a game company not doing it either. Your problem is really you're looking at it from an ideal world perspective; ideally everyone would do it, in practice if the worst that happens if you don't is your game mightn't sell that well, it's probably not worth it. As the beancounters would say, if it's going to cost more to implement than you stand to lose if you don't, you're not implementing it.
Societies is actually a much much better game with the last patch that actuall turned into into a game with a limited building budget and goals.
Let's see..
TL;DR
and
That said, to the OP: If you are so clear on the subject, why would you intentionally invite people to a most obvious flame war? Since what you had to say was for the developer team only, why not make the point to THEM, not for US and them. Just make an e-mail to Kerberos, you'll find their address from their page no prob.
Shees.
Ya, I tried to point that out to the mods pretty much when it got posted lol
I think there is a possibility that you will just have to be patient.
On the other hand, I think they might just be compiling a list that needs to be sent out to distributors like Impulse (which is rather notorious, but that is what I've heard).
However, I'm not entirely sure of the process of dealing with online distributors (seeing as I do not work at a company that works with or in online distribution), I do however know that getting a refund for anything requires a certain amount of hoop jumping, no matter where you go.
What list? The distributors already have the lists of which user bought what and which users want refunds. They just need a blanket authorization from the publisher: "approve any refund for title X and stop selling it". It's not difficult. The technicalities of actually issuing the refunds are handled by the distributors, which haven't been given such an instruction yet.
It's not always hard to get a refund, only businesses acting unethically pile obstacles in front of disgruntled customers asking for one in the hope that they will give up. It's a numbers game - of a 100 angry customers who asked for a refund immediately after the launch, less than a 100 will still want one on launch + 1 week and a few patches released by Kerberos. Damage control, at the customer's expense.
I've had many cases where I asked for a refund for much less than being sold a faulty product, such as changing my mind after a few days, and I still got my refund back. It has much less to do with technical difficulties and much more to do with company culture.