Incentives to patch the game?

[Edi]

Jourdelune said:
Anyway, my feelings about that dependency of a game manual:

It is mean to put away any people copying the game and playing it without paying for it.

It's like a cd protection system, but without using it.

"Meant to put away" or "Mean to put away"? A fairly big difference between the meanings there. I presume you meant the first option. I don't understand the CD protection comment, since the Dom3 CDs themselves don't have copy protection that I know of.

Jourdelune said:
And some people on this forum, prefer to don't take chance about piracy and refer to the manual the noob on their forum, hurting the general grow of the community.

We've had our share of pirates here and most often they get caught because they ask obvious questions that would have been answered by reading the manual. Manual referrals generally are not mean-spirited here, though sometimes you do get people snapping at you. Especially for obvious things.

Jourdelune said:
When players are put on a negative mold because the dev try to reduce the piracy, it's simply don't make it. Surely, you got less pirate, but you got less players that would have been interested by the game. The negative mold here is go read your manual.

As you said, Dom3 is a niche game. It's not going to get significantly more (in the sense you're talking about) players even with pirates, and pirates also happen to use bandwidth and other resources that somebody (in this case Shrapnel) must pay for if they come to the forums. There's another word for pirate, and that's "parasite". It's a fact of life that people will resent those who just try to sponge off and since most of the pirates who have been caught here have been caught precisely because of the manual or obvious lack of one, "go read the manual" is not in fact a negative answer. Just skimming it can give you a lot of info.

This does not mean that I have something against you. In fact, now that I look back on the thread, I can understand why you felt that way, but the comment about snarling "RTFM" was meant more generally rather than at you specifically. I admit that is not quite clear from the context. Apologies for that.

Jourdelune said:
In Vanguard it was go back to WOW. Those too are niche market game with negative mold to protect something that don't need to be protect. Protection restrict expansions...

Vanguard is irrelevant here. Krisoffer also gave a fairly good direction as to where the game is going. Dom3 expansions are going to happen along with patches (such as 3.10, which added enough content to be an expansion on its own). The protection scheme on Dom3 does not have any problems restricting adding content to the game. It does make life hard for those pirate Dom3.

Jourdelune said:
Galactic Civilization 4 got the same CD-Key restriction by patches but with 0 cd protection software. (same probs, I cannot update it from home, and worse, I need to update it with the computer the game is installed on) So, when I had bought the game and I had no way to patch my game at home, without internet... what I had think about that game? I had been cheated. I had paid for a buggy games that I cannot update because I don't got internet.

What's the relevance here to Dominions 3? This rant in a Dom3 context puzzles me, since updating Dom3 does not require an active internet connection during the process. The patches are simple executable files.

As for the evil plot, I have no experience of GalCiv, but from the sound of it, the patching issue is done differently from Dom3, so is not relevant here. It is a fact of life that the gaming market is mainly aimed at first world countries where internet connections are common and game design decisions can reflect that. It is usually also said on the box if a connection is required rather than just recommended. With Dom3, it is not even required for anything, since patches can be downloaded elsewhere and transported.

[Jourdelune]

Edi:

I don't know the difference between meant and mean... :S I should look into it.

To answer all of your questions about my other post:

"Ouf... all those lines simply because I had the feeling to be crush by a "protecting community mold" about a manual not implemented in the game. "

For a newcomer (even if I lurk since June at job downtime), it could be a bit harsh to be welcome with a look into your manuals statement. And my question cannot be answer with that, because the 3.00 version don't come with commanders icon on strat map and my manual is a 3.00 version. I don't think that the manuals got a lot of updated even with all the change since 3.00 to 3.10.

And at that starting "feeling", I had expand a lot about those on the "protective mold" bring with the dependency of the manual to play the game.

While a big manual is always nice to have (a lot of game simply sell their strategic guide separately), it should not be a must to play a game. (even to counter piracy because, a dependency to play a game with a manual affect all your potential users)

It was completely a IMHO post about some incoherence of a community. While I express them, feel free to show me other way to view it, like you had done.

All in all, I don't have bad feeling toward it, since I had express myself and I have not been flame by those different point of view.

Dominions is by far the best Fantasy War Game on the market. But IMHO, it got a lot of flaw that could be addressed to be a better and perfect game that could sell millions of copy.
(control panel for spells that we don't want to be cast by our mages is a really nice features... a lot have been suggest on that forum to bring Dominion to a greater game)

Even if it is not for the money, the desire to expand a successful implementation of a fantasy war game to bring more people into it.

Jourdelune