[Richard]

Actually you can just send in the whole CD if you wish.

And no it isn't splitting hairs, I don't think you understand what I am saying here. I mean as a publisher we can just button everything up and not discuss anything, I could stop posting the internal (and possibly damaging) history reports prior to release of patches, or stop telling you guys what we are trying to get accomploished, like most big publisher do. However we try to avoid that and do things straight with you guys. If you have dealt with a large publisher you will know what I mean immediatelty and how closely they horde info on their games for some reasons just like this.

And that's the issue there, if we had just kept our development plans for drones and TCP/IP to ourselves no one would be craving them now, but that also woudl be contrary to how we work.

However I must admit if this is how folks are going to rewards such honesty maybe we should just keep new developments to ourselves until thy are done.

The game is not being abandonded. Simply put we have issued 7 patches for over a year now that not only fix bugs but also ADD features, name me a major publisher/developer who does this kind of support. Some do, but they are few and far between.

We continue to test the game up to this point, I have NEVR been involved with a publisher who does QA on a game after a year.

The game in it's current state is a very stable and strong 4X space game, probably the best in the genre.

The update takes that solid game and adds most of the things that have been requested by the fans over the Last year or so and implement them at a price that is fair for an add-on (and in many cases most add-ons are simply just scenario packs with maybe some new art added).

But I also want to be frank about this also. With the economy going the way it is SE4 Gold needs to be a success in order for Malfador to stay in business, period. Sales for SE4 have been nice but after 9/11/01 all of our sales began to dip as folks spent less money. For a small shop like Malfador that means that without additional income there won't be an SE4 Gold or and SE5, and in that case the features that SE4 adds would be gone forever.

You may feel slighted, and I understand that, but unfourtanetly we both have to pay the bills and to support an older game that has drastically reduced sales we need to be able to pay the bills and keep the servers running.

Personally I have seen what most major publishers consider a "Gold" Version and to be honest I think we meet and beat the industry standards for such a game.

Hope this put some fresh perspective on this...