OT: Starcraft II and Elemental

[Gandalf Parker]

Another facet to this 20-sided dice would be this post from usenet.

A person asked about the game saying it was due soon but he hadnt seen much chatter on it. One of the response posts was this....

I've been doing the beta testing and I am a little concerned.

The game is still very unstable (frequent CTD, extreme slowdowns,
running out of memory on a system with 16GB, ...) and incomplete as of
the last (beta4) release and they have been making huge changes in each
"beta" release. It is waaaaay late to be making such big changes with
release immanent instead of just ironing out serious bugs and balancing
things. I suspect the initial release is going to be in very rough shape.

That said it is a lot of fun and if they stick with it and keep cleaning
things up it will eventually turn out to be a great game.

On the one hand this does support the statement that the release date might be something to avoid.

On the other hand it does not give me the impression that new ideas are being ignored. If anything, quite the opposite. So if one or two ideas seem to have gotten no attention except flamage from fans Id suspect they did not meet the criteria.

[sector24]

http://forums.elementalgame.com/389642

http://forums.elementalgame.com/389083

http://forums.elementalgame.com/388766

http://forums.elementalgame.com/388747

I didn't have time to do too much digging, but this is the general gist of things. There are a whole lot of threads talking about how the tactical combat is awful, how the spells lack distinctiveness, how the research is overly simplistic, etc. They don't all get locked but the "promise" that release will be awesome while all evidence is to the contrary is a bit disingenuous.

I believe the fanatical side of the fan base is sometimes a hindrance as well. I have a difficult time getting objective information out of their forums because there's a ridiculous amount of blind praise and bashing of any contrary viewpoints. That is of course not Stardock's fault per se, but from my (cynical) viewpoint they condition the forumites to tow the party line for "karma" or the slim chance that "Frogboy posts in my thread" kind of stuff.

I'm wasting altogether too much time talking about Elemental. But I guess I'm overly harsh simply because it's almost worse to come so close to success and still fail than it is to just come up with crap in the first place. I guess I set my standards a little too high.

[WraithLord]

Good examples.

Frankly, I don't understand SD's attitude.

As a dev I highly value potential customers inputs. It doesn't matter if it's "constructive" or plain *****ing (in case of *****ing I just filter the facts from the noise). Comments are good, criticism is good since at end of the day the product is developed for the costumers not for the devs.

SD seems to be pretty resistant to external influence, the threads give the impression that they know what they're doing, all the comments are already in their ToDo list and the beta version is nothing compared to that hidden version they plan to release.