Quote:
Yoda said:
Well, if 75% of all people had a problem
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Note: it was actually "major problem", not "problem".
"Major" is subjective. There are tons of people posting on the GC2 boards saying, "Congrats - the game is flawless - I love it - whiners are posting problems, but I haven't experienced any."
These people are wrong. They
have experienced problems, but they didn't notice or didn't care. Major problems, though - that's totally subjective. I was mostly even with the other majors in my first GC2 game, but had by far the weakest military... and suddenly found a "Lucky Ranger", then another one 5 turns later, each with stats sufficient to destroy all other empires combined (no enemy ship was strong enough to damage it). I crushed a nearby empire (the strongest in the game) taking not only no losses, but no damage. Due to a random event that happened twice in quick succession, I went from 'struggling' to 'godlike' and the game became boring, as my victory was inevitable regardless of my past or future actions. So, I quit.
As I said in my first post, this kind of 'annoyance' is widespread, but can be easily fixed. I consider it on some levels to be a major bug, since it destroyed the game for me and made it unplayable until the issue is resolved (many others have complained about "Lucky Ranger" power and frequency), and on others a trivial bug, since it can be fixed in a few minutes. I can see how some people would not classify it as a bug at all, let alone a major one. There's also a bug where you can upgrade every ship in your empire for free. The debt limit is -2000 BC, a 'feature' to prevent people from accidentally ruining their empire with an accidental purchase. However, upgrading all ships in your military for 100,000 BC, when you only have 1 BC, will leave you with -2000 BC; since that is the debt limit. Again, this is a major gameplay bug, but a minor game bug, as it can be fixed in minutes. However, Stardock's official word is that "It's a feature, not a bug." So, who knows whether it will be fixed? (I give it an 80% chance within a week.) And furthermore, it's plain how 'aggressive' or 'competitive' players would find this to be a major bug, since you can't possibly compete with Metaverse players who exploit it, unless you exploit it at least as much as they do. Yet others who don't notice a whole lot, and
assume their racial pick of +20% social production is working (actually, it did nothing before the patch today), will say "The game works fine for me; I don't know what they're complaining about."
So... 5/5 people not noticing major bugs - especially occasional bugs, exploits that are not technically low-level bugs, bugs that are specific to specific hardware configurations, and etc - is not just a statistically small sample, but actually irrelevant. I estimate from my experience that 80% of randomly selected players of randomly selected games would say, "I never experienced a bug" regardless of how buggy the game was... simply because they are not attuned to it, don't know what bugs are, forgot about them, weren't annoyed by them, enjoyed the fact that it let them do something they couldn't otherwise, or whatever. It would take a spectacularly buggy game for Joe Gamer to notice a bug.