Ok, it's time for people to stop thinking their way to see through life is the right or the only one.
Most people, since Civ 5 was launched, criticized the game.
Other people defended the game with arguments like "it's selling well" and "look at steam, there are 50k people playing it right now".
The truth is, all of these are falacious arguments that have no use in this discussion.
If you have a forum full of fans that can't agree whether the game is a success or not, then IT IS NOT. Period. Doesn't matter if it's selling well (haven't thought of about the possibility of people being fooled into buying the game with all those good reviews that mentions no bugs?) or if people are playing it (if I buy a game, I'll freaking play it even if it doesn't excede my expectations. Hell, my money is gone anyway, I'll try to find something in there to salvage).
So, now that the directly responsable for Civ 5 to be the way it is have just left the building without warnings, people still try to find "answers" and questions about "why" he left.
I don't care if you like the game or not: the game isn't unanimous in a way that has never seem before. Yes, Civs 3 and 4 also had their share of problems at launch, yes many people were disappointed with them but the reasons of the disappointment were different. Civ 5 disappointed people in its very core of gameplay, things that can't be fixed with patches.
No matter how many patches they launch, the people that were disappointed with Civ 5 won't come back and say "now it's a good game!". Diplomacy is so broken that looks to be beyond repairing; the whole game became a mindless wargame that doesn't incentive interactions between civilizations because 80% of those interections will result in war and the later patch showed that there's still a lot of tunning time before we can really enjoy a Civ 5 playthrough with the same feeling if that will be possible. I'll repeat: feeling. I don't wanna play Civ 4, but I want to have similar feelings about my game in progress: I wanna have long term allies that won't betray me all of a sudden; I wanna have long term enemies that I know for sure I can't count with; I wanna have a plan for my civilization that won't be screwed by a wrong display of the tooltip or civilopedia. Right now the only feelings I have are: 1) expand as quickly as possible cos the AI will mindless do the same. 2) crush all neighbors before they crush you. 3) conquer the world.
Or if I don't wanna make any wars: 1) don't expand or you will anger someone. 2) give your neighbors anything they want, even if it will lead to a war with another civ, doesn't matter as long as your neighbors are standing between you and them. 3) build some military anyway cos your neighbors will betray you when you are close to whatever victory you're after. 4) when your neighbors betray you, easily obliterate the invading forces with your tiny army, giving you confidence to just conquer the rest of the world with it. 5) conquer the world before you achieve any victory you're after.
That's simply ridiculous. The buildings can all be renamed to "Gold 1", "Gold 2"... etc. "Unit xp 1", "Unit xp 2"... etc. "Culture 1", "Culture 2"... etc. It's annoying to have so few buildings and that they are anything but unique.
This game is pathetic. That's why Jon Shafer left Fireaxis.
"That's your opinion, many people say otherwise". Yes, but many people agree with me. It doesn't matter if the minority agree with me, it doesn't matter if we are only 5% of the people in a forum or customer base, the fact is no company likes when their game displeases anyone so much that even being a huge fan of the series having bought the 3 last versions of it in a country where the game simply wasn't launched at all and that arrives with such high taxes that I end up paying double of its real price (that's one thing that I like about steam, I can finally pay the real price of a game), such a person have reasons to just think that the game is pathetic.
Again, doesn't matter if you love this game, the fact is that many doesn't. And your proof, for you that have asked so many times in this forum "show me the numbers of the people who doesn't like the game", have just arrived: not even Fireaxis liked the game, possibly not even its lead designer. It doesn't matter how many copies the game sold, it matters that part of the fan base is annoyed.
The first really good news since Civ 5 was launched and the first act that brought to my heart the respect I used to have for the company.
So, good riddance to Jon Shafer and long live to Fireaxis and Civ series.