Asmodee pay us back our money

[Droz]

Seriously, it's one thing for a sketchy guy living in his mom's basement to create a fake kickstarter to scam people out of their money but SHAME on you guys. At this point I'm not even angry at the team of monkeys that is responsible for this spaghetti code fiesta. It is VERY clear that very little resource has been given to whoever they outsourced this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Let's see how messed up our situation is at:

1. Acquire the rights to a popular highly rated game.

2. Give the project to a small or mid sized company who probably had a slew of projects already on their hands before getting this job.

3. Release the game in its alpha form with its various many game breaking bugs that casuals wouldn't notice or really care but the demo that bought the product and who gave a flying ♥♥♥♥ would just tilt knowing how stupid this was.

4. Demand people pay up front for their ♥♥♥♥♥♥ buggy game because they don't have the money to finance their own quality assistance team to check the bugs. In effect we paid to be their unpaid interns.

5. Instead of fixing the multitude of issues in the game itself, focus more on released an even buggier Draft mode WHILE pushing for a mobile release for BOTH android and ios where they feel they can scam more people out of their money.

6. Release a beta version of the draft that once again they had no money to pay for a QA team and since the monkeys lined up last time to test their product why not do it again?

7. At its best it prob had less than a 100 active players online, then the beta draft happened of which only half the people cared to sign up for it or even know how to sign up for it.

8. The pathetic small player base gets divvied up by half for those with draft and those without, making both sides unplayable in the Q time needed.

9. No communication whatsoever after all this time, even a "we're still working on this ♥♥♥♥ sorry" would have gone a long way. For all we know the firm they hired might have gone bankrupt or whoever is the lead coder actually had an ounce of self respect and jumped off the bridge after seeing how terrible he was at his job.

Now they're hoping like hell we just forget all of this and it sits in our Steam library collecting dust while they promote whatever other ♥♥♥♥♥♥ games they throw at us.

Seriously F U Asmodee. You're never going to see another penny from me in my lifetime. Thanks and have a great ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ day.

[Cohlrox]

seriously, I agree. I just want my money back too.

[FrankJones]

Well said, Droz. Especially number 4. We have all, in effect, been unpaid interns, discovering numerous bugs that literally would have ben caught on ONE play-test by one or at most two programmers who actually know the rules.


FryxGames need to be held accountable too.

[Star Paladin]

Pay us now, we will fix it later, is the worst thing to happen to computer games in my lifetime (and I'm old. Like retired old).

"In my day", they'd release a game, and if it was buggy and unfinished, you could return it to the store for a refund. Magically, this way of doing things meant games were released pretty finished and functional most the time.

Now, kids are crazy enough to give money to a company in advance, and hope it will give them a working product in the future.

There are reasons there are so many laws on the books that companies can only take a 10% down payment on goods or services, and only get the other 90% when the work is completed satisfactory. Reason being, most the time in the past, if you gave someone all the money up front to do a job or make you something, it was 50-50 chance they actually would follow through.

There is just no reason for a company that already has your money to follow through on anything (except "moral" reasons). But not only are kids not learning this, some even DEFEND these practices. So sad. Just like the Eloi.

[jforeal]

I agree. I'm considering a CC charge back at this point.

No updates to a seriously broken game after a month?

[Tiz]

I agree too. Asmodee's behaviour has been shameful.

The last beta update was 23.01.2019 and introduced a game breaking bug that they haven't bothered to hotfix after more than a month.

They don't communicate apart from to release broken updates sporadically or occasional vague promises that they are working to improve. It's really not good enough.

They have been completely disrespectful of their customers and they have guaranteed that I for one will never buy another Asmodee game on release day.

[DeathBySnuSnu]

If you want them to listen:

1) Write poor reviews
2) Give negative feedback on their facebook page
3) Tag them with negative stories on twitter.

It's clear they could give a ♥♥♥♥ about this game. You have to hit them where they actually care.

[darkdaze]

It really is amazing that they turned one of the best board games into such a piece of garbage PC game. What an utter disappointment.

[Angel_Ranger]

I did try to reclaim my money from steam. They informed me NO.
However steam is stil selling this broken product!

[TwinSails_Crunch3d]

Hello Droz.

We're sorry to hear that you feel this way, but want to assure you that we have not halted our communication or efforts with regards to Terraforming Mars. We are continuing to work hard towards the necessary improvements and new features to ensure that the game meets the standards of our community. Just last month we deployed a new version of the game to our beta test server to test our improvements and changes and we have also just now deployed new changes to the beta server. If we encounter no complications with this new build we will be pushing it to the live servers as soon as possible. You can see the patch notes for this here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/800270/announcements/detail/1789523305009350476

I wanted to take some time today to go over some of the points that you've raised:

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1: And it is a game that we all love and want to do justice to. Just like you and other players of Terraforming Mars, we want this to be a great game!

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2: LuckyHammers is a dedicated studio that was chosen to develop Terraforming Mars and has worked hard to accomplish a lot so far. There are unfortunately issues that still need addressing, and they are hard at work resolving these.

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3: The game was not released in its Alpha state. We want to have a game that the Core audience of the board game can enjoy. We are sorry if we did not deliver on this at first, but we are working hard to ensure that it will be a game you are proud of. The bugs that have been caught so far are an incredibly important matter for us and we are constantly working towards fixing them.

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4: You have not unwittingly been "unpaid interns" in the game's development and we hope that your perspective on this changes as we continue to develop the game. It was unfortunate that bugs did bypass our QA teams, and this is something we do apologise for.

Unfortunately the complexity of Terraforming Mars and the sheer number of interactions between cards and tile actions can be a massive undertaking in regards to QA testing. As is the case with almost any game, no amount of QA can amount to the number of dedicated players that can uncover bugs that we are unfortunately unable to detect due to the sheer size of the game.

This of course does not excuse these bugs making it to the released build. We are working closely with our QA teams to avoid issues like this again in the future.

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5: The Android and iOS versions of Terraforming Mars are not a priority for us at this time. Our main goal is to ensure a PC version of Terraforming Mars that not only meets the expectations of our community, but surpasses them. This includes the Draft mode feature which we have committed to launching as soon as possible.

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6: Please refer to #4. We always perform QA passes on any build we release. We are working closely with our QA teams to avoid any similar issues in the future.

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7: If anyone is curious about how to use the Draft Mode beta, or wants to switch back to the original version of the game, they can learn about it here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/800270/announcements/detail/1690437137185609743?insideModal=0

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8: This is a division that would happen if the beta was pushed to the live servers as well. Those playing on the Draft Mode beta are there to play and test the Draft Mode. Which means they would probably be doing the same on the live servers as well.

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9: We are releasing regular updates to TFM, as well as blogs in the announcements section here on Steam. We are almost ready to push a new update very soon and will let you know as soon as this has been deployed!

You can find our communication here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/800270/allnews/

We are actually releasing a new build today that you can download and try out now. Feel free to try it out, or check the patch notes here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/800270/announcements/detail/1789523305009350476

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We are definitely not wanting our players to forget about the game. As has already been mentioned, we are working hard to get the game to a state where it meets the expectations of our community and to surpass them.

We can understand the frustrations you have had so far while playing. Be sure to keep an eye on our updates though and we hope to see you back and enjoying the game, soon!

[allenwfc]

just to confirm, they did just release a patch up, not enough players yet to test it with

[FrankJones]

Originally posted by allenwfc:

just to confirm, they did just release a patch up, not enough players yet to test it with

Well, obviously I'll test it. I assume I need to manually download the patch?

[TwinSails_Crunch3d]

Hey FrankJones. Yes, you need to manually change your build settings in Steam to participate in the beta. You can find out how to do this below, or there is a more detailed description of how to do this here:

1) In the Library tab of your Steam client, browse the left-side list and right-click on Terraforming Mars and select Properties.
2) In the new window that appears, select the "Betas" tab.
3) In the drop-down menu, select betatest - Draft Update beta test and close the window.
4) Steam will now download the update.
5) Once the download completes, you can now open the game and it will be the beta version.

If you wish to switch back to the live version of the game, simply follow the below steps:
1- Opt out of the beta on Steam.
a. Go into Terraforming Mars’ properties
b. Select the “Beta” tab
c. Select the “NONE – Opt out of all beta programs” option
2- Delete the content of this folder:
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\LocalLow\LuckyHammers\Terraforming Mars
Make sure that you check all files have been deleted, some of them are set as “hidden” and will need to be revealed to be deleted.

[Nibenei]

This is hilarious to me. I bought the game when it first came out, and it was so obviously not fit for release. Steam gave me ***** about getting a refund because I "played" it more than 2 hours but I kept bothering them, explaining that I spent 2 hours trying to get the darn thing to work and eventually they gave me a refund.

I also emailed the board game designer -- [e-mail] - that Asmodee was destroying his brand and he needed to get involved. He was defensive at first, and then thanked me for his comments but says he was involved...which to me is a bigger problem lol.

And now I come back six months later, assuming that at the very least the bug fixes would have been solved. NOPE. LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL.

I love the explanation that the game is complicated. It's really not. Maybe the strategy to code a good AI is complicated (but really, any more so than any other game out there?) but the game is absolutely NOT complicated. I mean, they couldn't even copy the board right or get the cards to do what they are supposed to do. It's an extremely linear game.

But you can complain here all you want, nothing will happen. The only things that will have an effect are:

1/ Complaining to steam over and over until they refund you
2/ write [e-mail] -- maybe EVENTUALLY the board game designer will exert the necessary pressure on Asmodee to get its head out of its ass.

This is so hilarious to me that it's still broken.