Początkowo opublikowane przez I'm Spartacus:

" In short.. thats the whole story...? (Dutchgamer)

aah Dutch.... I love you like a brother... but if that was the short version I hope you never post the long one.

Somebody did not get the irony of that line;) Dutch Humor.. one has to get it;)

Początkowo opublikowane przez Marfig:

Początkowo opublikowane przez Mr.Kill:

Well no one ever said that Zero as a developer is bad and therefore we should ignore what EA and Ubisoft do...

But the constant aggressivenes just makes it all look suspicious. Every time there is a new development or a restart of the conversation about SD2, which sometimes is just a few days after the last post, we have to be reminded how bad Zero is.

That to me, is called character assassination. Sure, he's an asshole. So are we all... many times in life. And what do you think it makes of you when you make the unprovoked point of reminding everyone, all-the-bloody-time, how much of an asshole he is?

You just come across the same or worse, because at least he doesn't hide who he is. Sorry, for being so upfront. But people with a clear agenda bother me. Probably as much as he is obviously bothering you. So you must understand how it is and relate. Me being an asshole to you.

Assholes do not deserve to earn money. I evade some real life shops for the same reason.
I do not always buy the best product or the cheapest deal, if I really get pissed of by the person earning from it, want him to go bankrupt and not buy his crap.
The reverse is true too, shops that have generally goodguys working with them, can get more slack from me.

As for my experience :

1 I was buying a FULL product or so it said on the page I was shown when I bought it.
Pricing, advertising it all apearled like a whole list of features were already IN the game.

-Than I discovered that these were mere "promises" and that the game was not chanced since it was beta halve a year before.. I should have bailed right there, but there was no refund option in steam yet, so I hoped for the best.. some rumours about zero's bad rep and lack of updates were sometimes posted but I generally was patient.

-After some play (a good 100 hours) I discovered the first serious flaws (a whole difference with minor flaws) Here they come :

-It was not possible to customise the ONLY 8 races in the game nor was it possible to add more, while I bought the game labled containing 20 races, fully customisable and the ability to create more.
Meaning you were faced with the same 7 opponents every freaking time.
You could ONLY customise the race you yourself played, the others would ALWAYS reset to default.

-The default ship designs every race had were plain weak, but it would save the designs you made with the ships of that race. So if you first played a game than the next game would be much harder since you now faced your own ship designs. The ONLY way for me to correct this was to waste 200 hours of designing litterly hundreds of ships, about 12 models for each ship of each race, not my idea of fun.
Ofcourse the game was sold as containing "custom designed ships for every race"

-The transportships did not work AT ALL. transportroutes, or planet settings none of it worked. Meaning the only way to do transport was to order ships 1 turn at a time and manually do all transporting. Meaning the whole concept of having mineral and foodworlds and swap supplys between them went down the drain, or it just made games take AGES doing very dull stuff that should be automated or at the very least be able to handle a siimple go from A to B order over muliple turns (and for transportships it did not)

But ok, if you wasted 200 hours designing ships first, and waste 4 hours of managing transportships every turn.. and accept the same dull 7 opponents every time, could you than at least play the game? nope...
-it worked for a while and than grind to an unplayable crashing mess. apearingly it was not able to handle even a small universe with 60 stars or something like that.. as soon as empires grew beyong a certain size, and to many objects (ships, planets, etc everything needing orders) were in the game.. it would crash all the time.
-while the game was sold ontaining large universed upto 1000 stars, and with the promise it would later go 3d and upto 100000 stars, while those small maps would not even work.
-
Mind you I have a very high end pc (in the 5000+ euro range) there is no reason it should not be able to handle this many objects.. nor was it anywhere near being close to being out of memory or something like that. This bug is purely in the executable of the game itself that could not handle so many strings.
-
This I NEVER had with any game I owe.. bugs are mostly unheared of, and if they are there they are more glitches that can be exploited, nothing of this magnitute. And never to a degree it makes the game unplayable.
So logically I posted a couple quite negative posts about this on the stardrive forums.
(demanding basicly that this pile of bugs needs to be fixed pronto!)

It was around this same time I heared that this zero-sum games was a one man show and an indie dev. I though you gotta be kidding me.. oh no!
Why does steam not do quality control,
>15 euro is ONLY AAA titles.
between 5-15 euro's are "arcade" titltes as sold on bigfish games and the likes
and below 5 euro are "apps" or small games.
(I get it now thats not how the steam-world works but you got to understand where I coming from, I buy most my games retail, sometimes bought a bigfish game, and no apps)
In retail shops here pricing is VERY consistant.
Every cd in dutch shops will ALWAYS be 21.99 (and never drop in price)
Every game will ALWAYS be 51.99 for regulair and 59.99 for luxe at release and than drop in price at fixed steps (though time between steps may vary) 39.99-29.99-24.99-19.99-14.99-11.99-9.99-6.99-4.99
No other prices will ever be used on the price you can judge the age of the game... if it's cheaper it is older.
For bigfish games it is the same but lower priced :
games cost maximal 11.99 and minimal 2.99 on bigfish, the more expensive games are bigger in size and usually are solid B titles that have decend size teams working on them (20-30 people) the smaller ones can be projects of 1-3 people.
But all are bugfree, completed and quality controlled.
Generally what differs the B-league (bigfish and such) from the A-legue (retail shops) was merely that A games had a high replay value, and a lot more complexity to them, where B-legue games generally were very linear and hance lacking in replay value.
Both were bugfree, looked good, and played enjoyable.
--
Apps, now that was a whole different story, apps while priced between 0,49 and 4,99 at that time, were rumoured to be mostly crap and essentially trashing your money away... buy a ringtone 1.99 and such crap... no thank you very much.. (only bought 1 ringtone for a girl I loved at that time ever..)

So I am very displeased with steam not take better care of quality control.
And steam should also better place control on pricing.. as there ARE different legues and those have different prices.
Discount must be REAL discount, if a game is 19.99 but on sale for 75% all the time, even without the bugs, it should really just be priced 4.99, it is misleading to use discounts this way.
But ok you see now from where I coming why a price of 19.99 for a project like stardrive is misleading.
If it was completed (with all features as advertised) than it might be on par with games like westwards. and be worth selling for 11.99 on bigfish.
And as long as it is not complete it should simply not be available on steam (as should any beta or buggy game on steam)
-> free beta's being a different story)
And it should clearly be labeled as a B-game.

But ok thats steam policy... and maybe I am behind the times here.. still I found it worth mentioning...

But ok were were we right.. yes on the forums complaining.. demanding fix this buggy mess.
I was hearing rumours of zero's behaviour on his own forums now.. but I though can't be that bad I mean my own posts are on the forums for 2 months now... can't be all that bad.
->
untill d-day (aka the next wintersale) my opinion of him shifted DRAMATICLY.

One morning I woke up, grabbed my coffee, logged in and found myself permabanned from the steamdrive forums, and not only me, but like HUNDREDS of users... like twothirds of all the posts in the forums were removed. where the first 3 pages of revieuws and responces on the stardrive forums were negative... and with at least 30 responces each, now only the handfull of positive ones remained.
This time of mass-censortship and destruction of content is unheard of and have I NEVER EVER experiened before.
-Needless to say I was able to get steam support to undo the ban within an hour as they got SHOWERED by complains (the only such time I was able to get a permban lifted, AND got them to respond within a weekm steam support generally does rats ass.. does show how bad things were)
-
My posts however were still all gone, so logically I made a new one amoungst the many WTF posts of the people who just lost all their content and were banned but now free again.
now I saw this "zero" character himself on the forums (before he never showed himself even once) I could not believe my eyes... called us assholes and other bad words I will not even repeat here. myself he called mutlple of those things as acusing me working for his completition. (meaning I was actually hurning his sales??)
Never in the history of gaming I ever have seen any person selling games, heck never in ANYONE selling me ANYTHING have I ever been called names.
Dragging your customers through the dirt like a little toddler throwing a tantrum is unheared of.
If anyone should have been permabanned it would be zero, that very day, in fact his way of expressing himself there is so far below the social class I live it, it would better befit trailer trash than someone who is suppose to be a former lawyer and living in the good circles.
As a lawyer he should have known at the VERY least how to be a proper crook and sugarcoat things...

This responce was why I say NEVER EVER buy anything of zero.
I not care if stardrive 2 or any of his future project somehow are any good.
Anyone who has every behaved like that in a professional function should never ever be allowed to work in that function, plain and clear.

Now as for the aftermath :
-Some time after this he ran off and said he would not even complete the game any longer.
As a responce I went Looking a bit in the coding (as far as possible) myself... I judged that only 3000/10000 hours of programming needed to complete all the features that were advertised to me were in it at best. So I was sold a whole familiy size pizza, but only got delivered 2 halve-baked slices.
I got why he shifted engine, a good call, but what I did NOT found a good call was that he would call it stardrive 2 and wanted to charge me AGAIN for the same buggy mess after how he treated me and others? RIGHT IF EVER!
-
Logically for me there is no stardrive 1 or 2, but stardrive 0.1 and 0.2.. there both versions of the same buggy mess, and owners of stardrive 1, who were deprived of the remaining progamming, should at very least have gotted stardrive 2 for free.
(I opted to zero that to fix his rep he should give everyone a full refund who wanted it (at the price they bought it at) or a free copy of stardrive 2 for a 30 day period)
->
ofcourse he would only responce to that with more calling me asshole and such.
->
I also suggested that the job could not be done by 1 man working normal 40 hour working weeks in any reasonable amount of time, a team of 6-10 would be best they an do it in 6 montths.
->
Again he just ignored it.

And those posts were only on the forums for 2 months, than the next sale hit... he delited again all my (and other negative posts) -> this time without banning at least he learned that that would not work.. a proces he has been doing ever since.
When there is a sale.. every negative post on the stardrive forums will disapear.

(though by being forced to chance that practice, he has switched to combining them all to 1 massive negative post... still it makes the frontpage of stardrive looks a lot more postive than in reality it is)

And yes on top of this all there is some nitpicking :

-we were promised (not said to contain) more events and minimissions (like the reveren) turning them in full event lines and new factions in the game, and at least 2 more different ocuring events just as large.
Instead he later removed what little was already in the game of that quest-chain much to my dislike

-he promed things one day, said things one day, and than later said he never said or promised them (luckely some kept screenshops so they could confront him with that)

-I never was promised multiplayer, others were and to them it not being added matters.

In short.. thats the whole story...

We all know if there were "negative" revieuws... zero would just delite and ban them.. (or report them and have them banned).... and only leave the positive ones..

Besides... that dev does not owe a single penny of me ever, with his scam and bad behaviour.. even if his product WAS somehow great (and it is not) I still would never buy it.

Początkowo opublikowane przez Mr.Kill:

There so many mis-used tags on steam. Like the nudity tag which is slapped on to any game even though it probably doesn't even have nudity. Seriously, neptunia games are put on that tag list even though they don't have nudity.

well american morality for you eh;)

two man kicking the life out of eachother is ok for all ages... (and the shotguns in their stores are at the bottom shelve as any age can use.. but don't you dare use that boose before 21...

so I gues if it shows as much a a mother giving her kid breastfeed, or it shows 1 male nipple.. it's "nudity" for those strange american twisted vieuws.

Początkowo opublikowane przez FireStorm20:

Początkowo opublikowane przez Dutchgamer1982:

I NEVER played an RTS you could pauze (or issue orders when pauzed) and I find the very concept wrong.

RTS -> REAL TIME strategy.
got it, real time, so not "freeze time"

Iy depends on what you want to obtain with real time mechanic. Some games wants just the fluid pacing of the game , without all the rts paradigm. You could think of it as turn based with turn taking 1 second and turns ending automaticly... Polaris is that way. I find it works really good , with enough notifications.

and just what multiplayer gamer would allow his oponent to freeze time and "do your moves" nobody.
so how would freezing time prepare you for good multiplayer battles.

I think of it that way, if a human opponent would not tolerate it, than it's cheating.

I NEVER played an RTS you could pauze (or issue orders when pauzed) and I find the very concept wrong.

RTS -> REAL TIME strategy.
got it, real time, so not "freeze time"

How fast you can issue orders while the game is progressing is the skill that is an essential part OF the games.

if you cannot handle that or want more micromanegment, you play TBS (turn based strategy)
and by default there is no time limit on a turn. (though some add clocks on tournament, just like in chess you have a max of 2 hours for all your turns in the game combined)

That said.. I do like more "forgiving" RTS.. where a game takes 30-45 minutes or even a full hour.
A good example I find Tiberean sun.

-you have more superweapons, but none is really powerfull, you might knock out a powerplant or two, but nothing importan.. not even with all of them tossed at the same thing after eachother. and even if you do, you maybe get to kill 1 or 2 buildings, as their radius is not that great.

-Likewise tossed on troops, it will do more damage, but also not THAT much..

-and than you have walls, very strong defence towers, stealth and other things to keep the buggers out.

-this means Tibean sun, even with a huge skill difference boils down to a long conventional war of units vs units and chopping down your oponent bit by bit.. I quite like that.

In most other (multiplayer) RTS the pace is a LOT faster.. and your base can be wiped out in seconds.. and superweapons wipe out your whole base or your whole army or both (meaning 1 hit with them and your game is over)

Battle for dune does it different, it makes the game more forgiving by just giving you basicly unlimited money... (well not so much but for players like me I have so much money in that game I can pump out a continues flow of units from like 10 unit producing buildings at the same time for the whole game...)

Początkowo opublikowane przez jlc2:

Początkowo opublikowane przez Dutchgamer1982:

there is a difference between loving, and forced to suffer it.
There is also a difference between might profits and what custromers actually desire.
aka the difference between "profit maximalisation" and "see a need fill a need"

I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at. If there's a big enough demand from customers for grand strategy then I'm sure development will continue for it.

Once Paradox Interactive is public the shareholders and the Board of Directors (what I meant by market, not the consumer market) will set the direction for the Paradox Interactive. If they say no to funding grand strategy titles than Paradox Dev Studios (if they remain wholly/majority owned by Paradox Interactive) will not be developing grand strategy. Paradox Interactive won't be "forced to suffer it" if Paradox Dev wants to develop it. Chances are that won't happen quickly if at all, but that's what I was getting at. I wouldn't be surprised to see Paradox Dev continue developing in much the way they are now and just see more money come to them to branch out and grow into mobile or casual development as well to cash in on past games. Or Paradox Interactive could just buy someone similar to Activision Blizzard's recent takeover of King (Candy Crush developers) to branch out into mobile development.

what I mean is this :

-if paradox goes multiplatform, and for that very reasson
-to cater to the "dirty commoners" cuts back on the gameplay, dumbing it down, to make it's learning curve far lower, gameplay quicker, playing it much simpler, better suited fot the "quick 30 min fix" console gamers look for.
-to cater to the lower processing power of consoles (and smartphones) cuts back on game elements.
-to adress the issue of controll by controller or a touchreeen, removes a lot more features that cannot properly be controled without a keyboard+mouse

They might hoard in tenfold the cash they do now.
but it would NOT be a "honest move" but just selling out.

A case of would you rather earn 3000 a month doing a honest productive job (aka deliver high quality games for PC only) or earn 20000 a month being a dirty banker... (aka betray the very users that made you great and sell out)

if they just keep doing this (lesser paying) grand strategy thing as a "love afair" and have a second team making "the more earning console crap" and keep them strictly seperated... than I would have less a problem with it..
but in the past this rarely has been the case.. we all know how "investors" only want to see profits.. and do not care for quality products.

I do believe their IS money to be made with honest high quality strategy games like we had in the 90s. but it would be like invest 100 million to get 110 million back.

If you invest instead 50 million in making a causula crappy game aimed at console players (and merely ported to pc but not catered for) you earn easely 300 million

and if you invest only 1 million in 10 different free to play, pay to win browsergames, they earn you 200k a month with ease.

and apps.. the profit margins get even more insane..

Selling craps earns WAY more WAY WAY more than selling honest high quality strategy games. One can still earn a decent living from designing high quality strategy games, but still, it is a work of love mostly, if one goes for profit maximalisation one just focusses everything on those way more profitble markets and forget about the old farts who want quality alltogether.

I like big studio's... because of the big budgets make great games.. but independent ones are preferred.

Początkowo opublikowane przez jlc2:

I agree AK_Icebear, going public will create such short term focus that they will be looking for short term quarterly/cash flow bumps and faster investment to payout titles. It will be interesting to see how independent Paradox Dev Studios remains as I doubt the market is in love with Grand Strategy titles. Although the market probably loves EUIV's and CK2's DLC strategy...

there is a difference between loving, and forced to suffer it.
There is also a difference between might profits and what custromers actually desire.
aka the difference between "profit maximalisation" and "see a need fill a need"

concepts I always liked :

-from call to power (TBS) I liked how you could "tax" your production globally (but also exclude certain city's from that tax) and than were able to use that "tax" to pay for tile improvements or terraforming. MUCH less hussle than civ's "workers"

-from rising lands (RTS) I liked how the best units in the game could only be build from scrap, and that scrap was available only in very limited amounts spread out all over the map in small piles of 1-4 and you had to fysically order a unit to grab them. Killing a unit build from scrap, produced only halve the scrap that went in it.

-From rising lands (RTS) and Knights and merchants (RTS) I liked how units need to be fed regulairly and you need to have an economy capable of supporting them and the means to getting that food to them

-From rising lands (RTS) I liked the concept of tech progress through the missions.
*free picking on what tech you invented, combinted with a limit of 2 techs research per mission, plus the ability to carry your current tech to the next mission, made for an interestiong mission progress.

-From alpha centauri (TBS) I always liked how you designed your own units and techs only gave parts to build them with.

-from call to power (TBS) I liked how they added a "spacelayer" a second map on top of the map, complete with units capable of using the jump between the two layers to strategic advantage.

-from Rise of Nations (RTS) I like the steampunk design of the Vincys, i would like more steampunk strategy.

-from warcraft III (RTS) I like how they allowed units to equip "gear" and use potions.

-from warcraft III (RTS) I REALLY like the funny audio and effects when you clicked units multiple times from the famous exploding sheep, to "click me baby one more time" to "and they say blizzard games do not contain BUUGS"

-from rising lands (RTS) I like that it is the ONLY game with audio in my own tongue (ducth) with very funny lines, like the flame thrower saying "where is the BBQ" and "need a light" but than "vuurtje nodig?" en "waar is de BBQ"

-from Spellforce (RTS) I like how you mix RPG and RTS, and collect the actual "cards" to build your base with.

-from morrowind (RPG) I like how open the world is, with only hints where you need to go, but you actually needing to discover your way there no way to fast-travel to your destination and nobody protected from you killing them.

-from Neverwinter Nights (RPG) I like the implementions of the affiliation chart (good-neutral-evil and lawfull-neutral-chaotic) on both what gear you could use, what missions were available to you, and how people would interect with you.

From alpha centauri (RTS) and civilization V (RTS) I like how their are not fixed "goverment types" but you can finetine them to your liking.

From Beyond Earth (RTS) and Alpha centauri (RTS) I like the not so static techtree

From Red Alert (RTS) C&C (RTS), Generals (RTS) and Dune (RTS) I like the in between missions movies with actors and everything

from Civilization II (RTS) I liked how the advisors were having comincal minimovies of themselves when you asked a report of them.

From Civilization IV(RTS) I liked how strategic resources came with a limited supply and each of a certain type of unit or building would consume 1 of them, making it usefull for the first time to own multiple of the same resource.

From call to power (RTS) I liked how they added 1000 years of history well into the future including future technology and goverments I want to see more of that "life but not as we know it"

that were for now, the highlights.

oh and not so much a feature as a prefere :
-I do NOT like unit limits, I want to be able to build as many as I can aford and want.
-I aso do NOT like city/settlement limit, I do not want to be nerved for having too large an empire, bigger IS better or at least equally good as smaller.
-I mostly do not like "turn limits" or an end-date I want to continue the game as long as I want.

Początkowo opublikowane przez hr.oskar:

Like I say a tech system like that could be interesting but the way you describe it the gameplay would be very focused on the process of technological discovery. In other words, it would end up being a game about science more than a game about empire-building. Because I can't quite see how you could fit such a complex and demanding research system in while still keeping lots of depth and complexity in all the other aspects of empire-building (economy, military, diplomacy, etc). There isn't enough design space for it.

There is... you as your empires ruler would still have to order technology you already HAVE to be implemented, train, outfit and update/retrain troops.
Order tile improvements, order buildings to be build.. deciede how large the taxes will be, and how much will go to research and how much to other things.

How you will deal with other players... and so on so all the normal "civilization things"

basicly you would have to deciede how much of your empires "gold" aka production you wish to put into the gamble for a "uncertain" promise to improve something.

One day you may be winning, the next loosing because your opponent made a lucky invention, or he just may have doomed the last chance he had of saving himself...
you can see the apeal of it..


as for the depth.. all the things you can discover boil down to buildings, units, (unit)ability's, tileimprovements, and so on.
You only don't really know what you be getting before you research it.. and you do not know what the future may bring..

so still plenty of empire building left.

what you cannot do is indeed focus on the fastest research path to knights, so you can get that one wonder first... the anticipation of that tree is removed and your tactics are more in the here and now. (with science being merely the "diceroll" to stir things up)