LOL, I was joking about Stardock reading that thread and implementing it, but ya never know!

The timing on that is remarkable considering the subscripion thread on the forums today.

IMO it sounds like someone trying to say that the game has the dev team's attention for the next year and that they're not moving to another game after 2 patches (like happens on some games). But that's certainly not the best wording.

Two patches? Try straight after release. If you've been following STO, it feels like they reduced their crew by about 95% straight after release. Never getting a cryptic game again. /endrage

 

Not for games, no.  Apps, maybe.

But the Star Trek Online beta vs the release day version were vastly different products. The entire game didn't crash until the weekend after the tuesday release, on Sunday IIRC. This made the doom and gloom predictors on the forums look rather foolish, because anyone with reasonable expectations for the launch version of the game probably got what they expected. Now, just saying "Well at least we'll keep at it until we get it right" doesn't exactly fill me with a warm sense of gratitude. The Elemental beta naysayers I wrote off fairly readily, having seen STO go from ridiculous rubber banding and such to a functional product had every expectation of the same happening with Elemental. I erroneously assumed Stardock was a company I could place that sort of faith in, and that won't be a mistake I'll make again.

I never would have imagined that I would go from the excitement I felt with the product at the start of Beta 2 (which lasted all the way until they released 2A), to it being the least enjoyment I've ever had with a product I pre-ordered on launch day. I will admit to being somewhat baffled, I know they would have had to postpone the release until February if they did it at all, but I think that the product could have used the additional polish. I keep going back and trying to have fun with the game. Now, with the latest patch the bugs I've been experiencing with tactical combat since Beta 3 are finally addressed and I can play. Play enough to see the shallow gameplay, and feel the same sort of disgust that I saw and didn't understand here on the forums.

The truth is that every beta since beta 2 got to be less enjoyable to me, and I recalled Brad talking about Beta 1 and going out of their way to make the experience unenjoyable. I thought that must be what was happening, the things that were sorely in need of a different outlook were being showcased to get the feedback necessary to turn them into truly stellar game components. I had no idea that I was so mistaken, and to look back at all the times where people's concerns were dismissed in a different light, really makes me sort of sad. I feel like the responses of the beta participants were cherry picked, and while I know that confirmation bias plagues us all I find it rather discouraging. Some people had constructive criticism to offer, and were stickied and elaborated on and the brainstorming was really enjoyable. I felt like they were going to take the feedback and shape the product into something that I would really enjoy playing. I still feel that way, which is sad, because the game is out on store shelves.

I never once saw anywhere to sign up for an Elemental beta that didn't involve directly purchasing the game from Stardock. I subscribe to numerous RSS feeds on topics of that nature, and it leads me to wonder... How many people who played the beta hadn't already bought the product? Because I know that I'm no professional scientist, but it seems to me that your control group was too small in this little experiment. Who besides your loyal Stardock fans, and people who had such high hopes for Elemental that they were willing to purchase the game without waiting for reviews, even played this game's beta? When I eventually saw that I could purchase in time to get in to Beta 2 I was excited, I enjoy beta testing products. I have some weird masochistic tendencies that cause me to, when confronted with a bug in a beta, do my best to reproduce it and report it. Unfortunately after 2A dropped my interest fell off a cliff and I didn't really devote the kind of time I would have to helping Elemental become what it could be.

But I guess it doesn't matter if they cherry picked comments to make them feel their game was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and refused to pay attention to some of the harsher criticism. I don't think anything would have deterred the release of this game from August 24th, and in retrospect I don't honestly know how I expected a small team of coders to whip a product in to shape in the amount of time they had.

But hey, when I got that email I did rush right over to the forums to get some clarification about this "free updates" stuff. And what do you know, they're giving us some more campaign, because the word campaign isn't synonymous with glorified tutorial in many of their customers vocabularies (and a tutorial is on the way too, because the glorified tutorial was too much one and not enough of the other).

 

 

 

By the way, I'm -far- happier at the moment with my Lifetime Subscription to Star Trek Online (that I never even play any more), than I am with my purchase of Elemental. I wasn't aware that I would be purchasing Elemental based on what would be happening in the future. Star Trek Online didn't fail to live up to my expectations, the community just wasn't as appreciative of the enjoyable ship based PVP as I would have liked.