Talk about hyperbole, that comment of yours is a classic one. This forum has been pretty solidly constructive in general; far better than any I have seen under such release conditions. Are you actually silly enough to say that if one does not like EWOM then one is 4x hater?? That there is serious flamethrower material. Seriously go spew that kind of nonsense somewhere else. Just because someone has an opinion about something and it happens to conflict with your own idolizing, does not make them a hater or not a fan of the genre. 

RAT

But you have an option to get your money back, they aren't saying you can't...stardock is great in that they give refunds....so if you can't afford the 50 dollars then get a refund.

Part of the problem here was that the beta testers kindof lied in terms of how things were going. There were way too many 'yes men'. There was almost no beta to speak of, and yet most beta testors still seemed to expect greatness. Here's Denryu's poll from the end of beta. Most people seemed to assume the game would be ready.  

https://forums.elementalgame.com/390463/page/1/#2709273

The thing is, I have no idea on what they could have based that opinion. For 6 months the beta was unplayable and had zero content in any case. Right at the end with beta 4 there was something you could actually play, but before we could even discuss it, plans were already in force for an August release.

I guess people kinda fell in love with Elemental's potential, and were careless of the fact that we hadn't really seen any evidence of it living up. I'm sure there were those who just had faith because of Stardock's previous games.

The lesson here is to be extremely wary of the flatterers. Their reputations are not at stake after all.

No, you can dislike anything you want.  I'm simply saying that I like the game very much.  Even in it's imperfect state.  I probably would like it less if I was having all the trouble some folks seem to, but apparently I lucked out.

While you're saying this, realise that the people who post on these forums are an interesting slice of Elemental's potential customer base - a disproportionate amount of posters will have preordered, a disproportionate amount of posters will have bought this game and lastly a disproportionate amount of posters have followed this game for some time. In other words, as far as slanting the overall impression towards the positive, this poster base is probably as far as you're going to get.

If you perceive this board as hostile to the game, imagine what the broader gaming populace has to say.

So you think Elemental falls into the category of 'high art'?

Hey Charon, how's that foot tasting?

Every time you try to try to defend your love of Elemental, it ends up coming off in the most offensively elitist way possible.

• We're stupid.
• We don't like 4x.
• We don't understand the game.
• We want to be spoon fed some big studio dreck instead of an arthouse game.
• We might as well go play SC2.

Do you really think so little of the legitimate complaints about this half-assed game?

I *LOVE* indie games, I *LOVE* TBS games and I *LOVE* fantasy games.  The combination of all 3 should send me into nerd paroxysms, but Elemental has been a huge letdown.  Potential yes, but miserable delivery.

So before you want to start smacking all of us around with your broad brush of elitism, think for a moment...  just because I don't share your unbridled love for Elemental, I'm not a lesser person.  My voice still deserves to be heard here.  And my desire for Stardock to FIX the game isn't somehow invalid.

No, you haven't lucked out. You just haven't noticed or don't care about all the mechanics in the game which are not working at all or properly and the fact that there is very little balance between the paths and few meaningful choices to make in the game.

My issue isn't with the crash bugs and it sounds like many people agree with me. The problem is the lack of a proper balanced strategy game which interesting choices and various equally valid paths. I actually think the engine is pretty good, the game is the problem.

Yeah im a big fan of TBS games, I love the fantasy genre and particularly like the 4x style of gameplay. I have been quite disappointed with Elemental so far, and I bought it based on my previous excellent opinion of Stardock from their fine work on Galciv 1 and 2. I am sure many patches will be released over the next several months to polish the game up, but im mainly concerned that some of the flaws in the game seem so fundamental, that they might be beyond the scope of work normally put into game patches.

Btw, props for mentioning Spiderweb Software. I first got into their games with Avernum 3, and Spiderweb have provided me hundreds of hours of RPG fun.

Wrong attitude.  Stardock needs to know they fudged and for their own good.  When people like you keep shouting "hooray, hooray, hooray!" it's hurting Stardock more than helping. 

This kind of attitude isn't uncommon and it's a bane to the creative process.  I think it's ultimately rooted in humankind's remarkable and resilient ability to believe whatever-the-hell-they-want in the face of overwhelming evidence. 

In the creative process, when you've worked on something day in and day out, you need really thick skin to face the facts that your work is severely flawed.  I know the feeling my self, and I can think of a moment where I felt just like Frog probably did.  I've written a few novels and spent untold hours doing so.  In one instance, I had spent over 100 hours on a 5 page prologue and began handing it to get some opinions.  Now, the problem with giving your creative work to people who like you is that they feel obliged to give you a positive perception on it regardless of how they really feel about it (such is the case with a lot of people on these forums.)  Unfortunately, this doesn't help your work.  So I got a lot of non-specific "oh, how interesting!" or "Mmm, yeah, that was really good."  Though they were just trying to give me confidence, it was extremely counter productive because, as it would turn out, my work really was severely flawed. 

So then I thought it was ready to give to some beta readers on a professional writer's forum.  Guess what happened?  It got panned.  Why?  Because it read like a lecture and not a novel.  What did I do?  I assumed that the beta readers were just: jealous/spiteful/amateurs/biased/over-critical/uneducated/gingers.  All 15 of them.  Deep down inside though, I knew they were right, but just couldn't admit it.  When I finally did, it stung really, really badly.  But...  when I finally fessed up to myself, I realized that the prologue really was misfitting and in some ways, even just bad.  So I wrote a much, much more appopriate one that the critics liked.  The old prologue didn't even go to waste.  I chopped up the prior one, ditched some parts and sprinkled the rest of the relevent aspects around the rest of the novel at appropriate places.  And when I finally did get it right after my self-confession, I felt damned good.      

Hi Astral,

I've been working int he videogame industry for about 5 years now. And I have to say that everytime I read a post of this flavour I now have to fight back the chuckling. Be it for people claiming they should have waited to release the game for more tweaking or those who say they should do a "zero bug release".

Fixing bugs isn't as easy as everyone seems to think it is, the more variables a game/problem has the harder it gets to fixing it without affecting anything related. At some point you have to weight the costs of attempting to fix something, if it has the potential of breaking down something else. Having worked with small to large publishers, the rule of thumb is that THERE WILL BE BUGS in ANY released game. That being said, obviously the severity of these issues will vary, but there is no such thing as a "bug free" game. Well, to be fair, complexity does factor in.

It's very easy to sit back and look at Elemental and 'fantasize' about how you would have done things or what changes you would have made, but it's a little out of touch with reality since we aren't privy to commercial arrangements, obligations, deadlines, and what not. Also, I don't want to say that SD is a small dev/publisher, but in any case, they don't have infinite amounts of money to throw around, I'm sure of that. So at some point a line needs to be drawn in the sand, and they have to stick with it. They most likely have little leisure as to when to specifically release the game, numerous factors, invisible to consumers, are the driving force behind a game's release. Some of which are out of SD's control in some instances.

The face of the gaming industry is rapidly changing, what happened to the movie industry is translating to games as well. Publishers / investors are all about the money, and don't want to finance 'risky' projects, they want more first person shooters or sequels of successful games in order to qualm any investor worries. So Strategy games and ESPECIALLY TBS games (Almost a "dying genre"), will not be receiving the largest amounts of support and money. So I'm more grateful than anything that a game of this magnitude was even released.

Now, yes... there are some pretty glaring issues that we've all noticed. That being said, it's something that was to be expected. Not to make excuses but whoever found this game's release contained too many bugs... Go have a look at Hearts of Iron 3 release. That was beyond catastrophic, and it's patching recently got it to a ok state. (1+ year after release). This ties in a bit to what I just said in the previous paragraph. True TBS fans hunger grows, as it's to be expected, so we want this epic TBS game with loads of features and witty mechanics, but we have to be realistic with the ramifications of such an undertaking.

 From what I mostly read in posts, broken features, balancing / AI tweaks are pretty much the main things that need to be looked at. And from reading the Dev Journals, I am very confident that most of the major exploits, lack of AI, etc.. will be fixed very shortly. In an ideal world, the game would have been released in a better state, but in my book, it's almost a miracle it was even released. So I try to rejoice myself in that aspect.

Gimme the MP severs!

Regards,

V.

Are you simply mistaken or making up things to try to make some point?  The threads that were being locked were the ones that evolved into full fledged flame fests.  Like this one, which desperately needs a lock as well.

Seriously, there have only been a handful of threads locked.  Plenty of critical posts remain open.  Look around, you'll find them easily enough.