Poll: Have Cocoa-gate made you less likely to buy another game from firaxis ever?

Have Cocoa-gate made you less likely to buy another game from firaxis ever?

  • Yes

    Votes: 15 14.2%
  • No

    Votes: 91 85.8%

  • Total voters
    106
I would rather they left poor ol' CiV alone than release this sad excuse of a "patch".

I mean let's be honest here - the only reason for them to even release the October Patch was the launch of Beyond Earth, so they could add a stupid link to the Steam Store on the Science Victory screen.

Of course it would feel like a slap to the face had they patched the game just to do that. So instead we got a handful of changes that doesn't really change anything.

The only meaningful one is 50% less warmongering hate. I mean, it only makes sense war and conquest should be plentiful in Ancient times and frowned upon in Modern Era, right? History of mankind, anyone?

The science exploit was game-breaking indeed, but any sane person stopped using it long ago and just forgot about it.

Social Policy changes are a mixed bag. They were probably needed, but now we have two Policies that are sitting all on their own, not connected to any other. Sad. :(

As for multiplayer, oh well. Sucks for those 7 people that played MP CiV, I guess. Couldn't care less myself, personally. Still , pretty sad patch overall.
 
And this is why I'll wait for BNW to be a bargain bin before shelling out, GNK isn't that bad
 
That has me hesitant to go out and blindly buy a Civ 6. And that's where Firaxis needs to be careful. This industry is very 1st week sales oriented and if every civ fan waits after a patch to buy any of their games then they won't be able to afford a team that can patch it in the first place. CiV vanilla had the same problem so they need to get their ducks in a row about that. Whether it means a bigger beta phase that's invite only for power players or a longer demo period for everyone before release, they need to make sure they have a fully realized game before official release. Developers need to stop operating as if the internet is their crutch. What if there was no internet? Would people have trusted firaxis enough to go to stores and buy G&K if we only had Vanilla before the patch?

I agree with the first few sentences, but the sentiment about the "internet is their crutch" sounds like a blast from the past, circa Civ 3. The games industry has changed, and we have to accept that, even in the face of developments we don't like. DLC and the model of charging for it are here to stay. Online play is here to stay, though it is less critical for single player games.

I would welcome an extended beta period, in which experienced players get to offer their opinions on game balance. Whatever content and game mechanics they choose to include in Civ 6 need to be tested much more than the initial content and mechanics of Civ 5.
 
Kinda sucks how the industry changed from we will hire beta testers and pay them to help us find and fix bugs into we will release the game 6 months earlier and have players do the testing for us while still paying us the full price.

And I don't even blame them for doing that, I mean it's clearly a way to maximize your profit in the long run while suffering some short term damage. Namely fans being mad and quitting the game (yeah like you can quit playing Civ!), but they always come back for the next game, so...

One could even blame the "professional" reviewers for hyping every game like crazy and giving out 9/10 scores for everything about $50 dollar mark, but it's not even that. Those reviewers don't usually have the time to play each game for more than a couple of days and Civ BE and even vanilla Civ 5 (!) would be an awesome game if you played it for 10 hours on normal difficulty and didn't dwell on it too much.

All that said, there have been some great 4X games released in the last couple of years, so hopefully Firaxis will realise then can't just sit on their hands any longer or someone else might take over the turn-based strategy game flagship... if they already haven't (Paradox Interactive :mischief:).
 
You guys sound a little bit shocked by about this: the bottom line for most companies (that are owned by shareholders looking for returns) nowadays is short term monetary profits at the expense of intrinsic value, with long term considerations of any sort pretty much thrown out the window.

And that means developers are stuck with deadlines that make it impossible to QA and QC their products thoroughly, budgets are constrained so that they cannot afford to hire sufficient staff to do so (after all, salaries are treated as "expenses", not an "investment") - often times they are forced to do double-duty as both designers/coders/testers, which creates a problem as any flaws/issues they fail to pick up during development will be very unlikely to be picked up by the same group of people testing and revising the code.

And when you have hired "engineers" who may not even be competent designers/coders in the first place, you will create the perfect environment for issues such as bugs/glitches being pushed into release, poor design philosophies that were haphazardly implemented, etc, which will most likely make it into the release version of the game due to inadequate QA/QC.
 
As a primarily SP player I appreciate the fact they released a patch which on the whole made improvements to the SP game. That actually makes me feel good about the next game.

Breaking multi-player stinks, but its a minor blip when it comes down to decision time on a new Firaxis game.

Of much more concern were the initial releases of V and Beyond Earth. V was playable but really needed G&K to feel like a fully fledged Civ experience. Took awhile.

Beyond Earth feels like a mod rather than a new game that deserves a full game price.

I will buy Civ 6, but will most likely wait for the first add-on, which is what I did with Civ 5.
 
Yes, the latest patch has made more more skeptical Firaxis not less. Although I support the patch in principal, in practice I am concerned about the gradual rise of in-game advertising that this patch has introduced. I'm also concerned with a lack of on-going communication and consultation with the fan-base in order to reward loyalty. It was also impolite of Firaxis to release a patch without first warning the fan-base beforehand, since it knows that Steam doesn't support rollback of patches. I am almost certain that I will not buy Civ6 until many months after it is released, when formerly I would have bought it on release day.
 
Yes, the latest patch has made more more skeptical Firaxis not less. Although I support the patch in principal, in practice I am concerned about the gradual rise of in-game advertising that this patch has introduced.

I am installing the thing now (after a year or so hike) did they put more x-com units to it? :lol:

When I first read the news of BE I was so excited. As an old fan of Alpha centauri. I really liked the opening scene but from what I heard its not as immersive.
 
Honestly I hope they fix the multiplayer soon, the constant de-sync's make it all but unplayable
 
It's not just the stuff up on the patch that's the problem. It's the fact that, because of the steam system, it's impossible to unpatch. In earlier Civ's, I could play the version I liked best. Steam has taken that choice away from me.

Remember, 4 years ago, when the tie up with steam was pushed as a boon for MP.

What a joke. Any other industry that operated this way would be out of business pretty quickly.
 
Only single player here, but would be interested what the changes made to the social policy tree were? I'm on Steam, so must be patched up automatically, but not sure if I started the game I just ended before or after the patch - I did not notice any changes, but I only played 2 or 3 games before with BNW before this one, so don't know the BNW-policy tree by heart and might have missed it.
 
In the Tradition tree, Oligarchy was made a prerequisite for Legalism and in Piety, Mandate of Heaven is no longer a prerequisite for anything.
 
Only single player here, but would be interested what the changes made to the social policy tree were? I'm on Steam, so must be patched up automatically, but not sure if I started the game I just ended before or after the patch - I did not notice any changes, but I only played 2 or 3 games before with BNW before this one, so don't know the BNW-policy tree by heart and might have missed it.

In the Tradition tree, Oligarchy was made a prerequisite for Legalism and in Piety, Mandate of Heaven is no longer a prerequisite for anything.

Basically you're now required when going Tradition to pick the least useful policy first and hand build a monument in your capital. No other changes to the standard 4 city tall Tradition approach for any of the 2 NC, 3 NC, or 4 NC varations.

No real impact to Piety under normal play because the policy that was sped up is still too deep to get to before Rean era (even if you are more interested in reformation belief than the religious building faith discount) For the self imposed challenge of Piety first though it has moved up reaching the reformation policy by one.
 
I never thought I'd see the day that the Civ community would complain about getting a patch to the game -.- Frankly, I expected Firaxis to leave CivV to its own devices (players creating mods because developers were too lazy to create official patches) with the release of BE. I fully expected them to go balls to the wall toward Civ6 instantly. I appreciate the newest patch, and I'm hoping to never again see a 10 page thread about "Warmonger Penalties" being unfair.

Remember when CivV vanilla was released? The following year or so after it as well? I do, and I remember there being a large amount of people claiming that they lost their faith with Firaxis for not patching a broken game fast enough, or for not releasing more patches than they did. I understand the frustration in the community about MP being unplayable now, but imagine it from Firaxis perspective... D***ed if they do, d***ed if they don't...
 
So here I was, polishing up my act, preparing for MP, and the Halloween fix(?) comes down .
Well; I waited 3 years, to see if Civ V would last; I'd never even seen Civ I-IV in any stores, not getting a computer until '11.

After too many years on the road, I'm glad I found Civ V, and will go with the idea: "YOU go find those BUGS for ME", and hope that MP gets fully repaired .
 
As I've stated before, a month has now passed since the update. Now is sadly the period in which I will start thinking that the multiplayer might be gone. I really don't have the energy to get angry; it will not solve anything.

I'm just going to be disappointed until the patch is fixed. I suppose I could revert to GnK in case that would bypass the patch, but I won't hold my breath on that.

And to the topic's question, my answer is no. Judging a company because of one/few mistakes is not really smart IMHO. I will still believe in them.
 
I heard mp will never get repaired but it does work if you take away city states and start out with 0 city states plus removing barbarians.
 
I heard mp will never get repaired but it does work if you take away city states and start out with 0 city states plus removing barbarians.

Those are important features of the game...I wouldn't call it 'working.' And yeah, if you remove those things it becomes 'playable,' however in one of my games last night there were still resyncs even with events taken out of the game, leading up to a complete crash in the medieval era.

To be completely honest, multiplayer was broken even before the patch. I don't recall any other online game I've played where someone exiting the server might crash the whole game for everyone else.
 
Honestly I hope they fix the multiplayer soon, the constant de-sync's make it all but unplayable

They will.

Nov 26th:
We think we've tracked down the cause of the problem. Stay tuned, we'll get this addressed as soon as possible.
 
Cocoa-gate is a really dumb name for anything. We don't have to add "gate" to the end of everything that ever happens.
 
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