They fully believed that EoM was fun at launch too.  Believed that it would get something like a 85 metacritic.

Like the Emperors new clothes?  Were they all just too afraid to tell him the game was messed up?  It is hard to believe that they were all blind.  But, now they have new people in there, and I doubt that Kael, Jon, and Toby are all going to be blind.  They will make a good game, I have faith.

You know, any information at this point would be good.  We haven't really heard anything of substance since the release of how the game mechanic is handling weapons, speed, and tac combat.  It would be nice to understand what they're thinking regarding magic mechanics, city building, and a host of other things that we simply don't have any real information on at this point, other than "it will be different".  Some of us, heck, most of us have been here a long, long time, since beta started on EWOM.  I don't feel they owe us any information, of course; it's their game, but it would be nice to share some of the game mechanics they're working with.

Given the number of people here on this forum who were told "you don't know WTF you're talking about, it's fine" when they said the game wasn't ready for release during beta? Yeah.

Any post coming from inside SD at this point on if it's fun or not is completely meaningless.

Even if we got to play full games, by the time you're putting in 100+ hours/week on a project, your senses and perception of good vs. crap are horribly skewed (ie. you don't put those hours in without assuming it'll be worth it).

Anyways, to the OP, I know Derek has played a bit. All I can comment on in a positive light is that he likes the camera controls I put in   WoM had the horrible problem of diorienting users with a too-freeform camera. We've re-enabled snapback by default (which we had in GC2) so you always come back to an oriented playing field. 

I also worked with Paul on the auto-scaling of units, so they're readable from zoomed out, and proportional when zommed in close, so that should feel better as well.

I'll leave Derek to any comments/hyping of the actual gameplay

When will the beta begin for FE?

I think  I  should be the one to determine if it's awesome! I really think that my opinion is the best one.

Shit, Lan, you should be the first one picked...well...second one picked after me for a beta.

I think you guys who play the betas have gotten a pretty good idea on the fundamental change in how our betas are done.

Look how long was sat with v1.19 (over 2 months) before it finally was "good enough".  

Our games are going to slowly move more and more to the "Google" beta model where it's going to sit in beta for quite awhile, often with it seeming like it's "final" but it'll still be beta. 

The bottom line is, we require that our customers know that buying a Stardock game means quality and goodness and War of Magic failed that test miserably. It isn't enough for FE to be good. It has to be so much better that even those who were really disappointed with WOM will feel like this made up for it.