Ok.... whoa.
What the heck happened here?
I popped off for a day or two and come back to what is to me a big and bloody pointless arguement.
Gonna sum up my own thoughts on this pretty quick.... or what counts as "quick" in terms of my typical long-winded rambling.
First of all, we're all here because of three things. 1, for the most part we're all fans of Arcen as a whole. There may be some that have only played this one game so far, and maybe dont really consider themselves fans yet, but I think for the majority of us this is generally the case. 2. We're here because we like this game. Not because of anything negative. Even if it's imperfect.... as pretty much every game ever is... we still like it. We want to see it succeed. And 3, which builds offa that, we want to help the process along. We're not the devs, but we can still do something to help grow and polish this game. This is the reason why this, and many other topics exist.
All of those are positive things, simply put. There's nothing negative about what anyone wants here.
That being said, one thing I've learned in God only knows how many total hours of testing & similar tasks I've done (and I've done way more than just with Arcen's stuff) is that in order to provide feedback that is actually of use, you have to provide feedback that is truly HONEST. No exceptions to this rule. You must not just say things to try to sound positive, if saying it that way also makes it somewhat of an untruth. Even if what you need to give as feedback sounds pretty harsh, if it's your honest thoughts on the matter, you need to give it that way, AND spell it out in detail. It can be hard and unpleasant to do this, but you need to do it anyway.
I usually try to always be polite to everyone, but I dont hesitate for a second to let my natural negativity show whenever something is bothering me. Hell, many times through development of each of Arcen's games, inevitably there'll come a point when I get overly aggravated, and even though I hate doing it, I *will* declare vocally on here (and usually in too many words) that I've stopped playing said game until such-and-such aggravating thing gets fixed. It's a harsh thing to say, but it's an honest form of feedback that goes along with the way I do things. And typically, such-and-such thing always does get fixed in the end, which seems to usually be the case in testing, not just with Arcen. And then everything is good. Nobody gets hurt by a harsh statement like that... it simply shows the magnitude of the effect that something or other is having on the player in question.
If something is bothering you, say so... if it's bothering you ALOT, say that too. And then explain just what it is in detail. It's a GOOD form of feedback... never a bad form. We're not being antagonizing by doing this. Any feedback that isnt completely honest, in an attempt to seem more friendly or happier or to defend the developer or whatever is bloody useless. And that's the worst sort of thing you can give them, period. Development is partly a learning process, and both positive AND negative types are necessary for that to work.
So there's nothing offensive, or genuinely mean or whatever, happening here... simple as that.
.....besides, I think the devs here are rather used to many of us and our varied personalities by now to know that we mean no offense. I know they sure seem to put up with me well enough, at least. Probably the case for everyone here.
- Some examples: Stardock's Elemental. The beta testing community told them from the beginning the game wasn't ready. They released anyway. Elemental tanked and the community became bitter. Kerebros's Sword of the Stars 2. The beta testing community told them from the begining the game wasn't ready. They released anyway. SotS2 tanked and the community became bitter. Amplitude's Endless Space and Disharmony. The community told them the mechanics were wrong, the game fizzled out. The community became bitter.
- I'm not sure I have any good examples actually. Paradox or Ironforge perhaps?
Stardock's Elemental... Dark times. That game had so much promise. But I remember the problem a bit differently. A lot of complaints had to go through fanboy armor. Fanboys defend the developers like every design choice is a word of God. And while developers certainly have the final decision about their games, they are not worthy of forming a religion around. Stardock weighed the fanboy opinion over the critical opinion and got burned. It's a dynamic I see far too often (it's starting to form more strongly over at Paradox as of late).
You don't think your drawing deserves to go into the Louvre because your mom puts it on the refrigerator. Having too many fanboys is like having hundreds or thousands of moms putting your work on the refrigerator. Treat fanboy feedback like mom feedback.
Incidentally, Mother's Day is soon so do something nice for your mom.
Oh yeah, Elemental was.... bad. Everything was just bad. Definitely an example of everything going wrong.
At least, for Stardock, the NEXT game in that series, Elemental: Fallen Enchantress, was everything that Elemental was supposed to be. The expansion to it made it even better. It's very worth checking out if you havent yet. Great 4x game. Painful learning curve though.[/list]
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