Cassandra : How to move CiV forward

For those that arnt aware, Cassandra was a prophetess cursed by the God Apollo never to be believed by the people she warned. Months before release I pointed out all the signs that the development of Civ 5 was having issues and no one listened. The clearest of those sighs were that we were being advertised at not communicated with. A huge pitfall for any company is losing touch with its customer base and I would say Firaxis fell in that one for sure.

Anyhoo. Civ 5 isn’t a disaster. It didn’t turn out to be moo3. “Just one more turn” is still intact. Some of the new features are a subtle and take a bit to sink in and be appreciated. 1UPH is evolution in flight and pure awesomeness. But as the 100s of threads lamenting the game tell, there are still some not so small issues, many of never should have made it out of beta. (Btw for those of you with a legally purchased copy there are several simple to install mods out there that neuter Steam so you don’t have to ever deal with it, register your copy, or go “online&#8220

Just imagine what we might have changed if we had organized and used our “hand” as a community. Well..we cant change the past but we can make those meaningful changes now and move forward with the goal of making Civ 5 be the game it certainly has the potential to be.

The first thing we need to do is to establish a non-toxic, non for profit (as in our community rep doesnt have DLC to sell or wont get kickbacks) customer-developer culture and relationship. Putting up 100s of whiny threads saying the game sucks is diluting out message. We need to come together as a community with a unified but brief agenda of what we feel needs to be fixed. And we need to make sure that message reaches the people actually working on the game. We need to send a clear message that a 3rd party advertiser not involved with the devolvement living 3000 miles away from Firaxis being assigned as our liaison is unacceptable and disrespectful to the customers. Many other developers have set the communication standard much higher and its about time Firaxis joins us out here on the interwebs. Not just in marketing releases and pod casts.

Unless we want more of the same, there needs to be some accountability here in this community. There is a list posted around here somewhere of the individuals who contributed to Civ 5 development. We as a community need to look inward and ask - did these people do their jobs and honor their responsibilities to the game? Where these people there for the game or there for kickbacks or insure profit from DLC sales. Its not a friendly question to ask. But the results show these people “failed” Civ. Twice. They had a responsibility to make the game the best it could be, and its not the best it can be atm. And they had a responsibility to come out and inform the community that the game would be a little rough at release, to put it mildly. And they didn’t. We don’t need a lynching but we do need to be sure we have strong people who can stand up to the company who have the right motivations to represent this community.

Anyhoo I’ll leave it at that for the sake of brevity - We've seen the quality what the status quo will bring us; are we going to make changes or just accept more of the same?

You're getting into the realm of social change. I'd say is too much to ask from any institution at this point in history.

Well, good luck. This game need to change its fundament so if Firaxis is up to the challange and I in some way can help out, it whold be a pleasure to do so.

evrett37 said:

For those that arnt aware, Cassandra was a prophetess cursed by the God Apollo never to be believed by the people she warned. Months before release I pointed out all the signs that the development of Civ 5 was having issues and no one listened.

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For what it's worth, if you remove the "see, I told you so" intro from your post, it might have a better reception.

I'm sure you raise some interesting points, but honestly, any thread that opens with someone glorifying their own opinion is a thread I generally don't bother reading. Your self-appointed role as Civ 5 "prophet" is not relevant to anyone else, so if you're truly interested in real discussion, you might consider removing it.

(Mods, I hope this doesn't come across as inflammatory - I mean this in all sincerity, I'm not insulting the OP, just offering advice re: presentation.)

A very convincing speech. However you should not forget to mention what exactly we should do to "make changes". Atm the best thing seems to be whining and hoping the devs finally recognise and acknowledge that something is wrong with our game.

What is your (The Prophet`s) vision of our further action?

Be pro-active instead of reactive. We first need to solidify our unity here then do something appropriately dramatic in order to make our voice heard. A big sign on the front page of the largest civ website expressing our dissatisfaction should make news on many of the media sites and get Firaxis attention.

I'm glad I am seeing people's opinion regarding Civ V before I waste my money buying it.

I will stick to Civ IV if I want a simple strategy game(which is what CIV IV was, and if Civ V is even more so, no thanks) and Europa Universalis 3.

Honestly, I listened to a lot of the advertisement prior to Civ5. The main issue with the released game, the stupid AI, was not visible in this media. So even If you had a united community, foretelling the actually problems, would not have been possible.

Question: who in the community help test the game? Do we have a list of beta testers?

evrett37 said:

Anyhoo. Civ 5 isn’t a disaster.

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But I wouldn't say it was a major success either. Funny I don't read any thing that CiV broke game day sales for strategy games or anything like that.

It didn’t turn out to be moo3.

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But it is still on the same shelf of MOO III. A game that was hyped up, to change the world, that once released it wasn't ready and had bugs in it. Only difference is this game will not be abandoned like MOO III.

“Just one more turn” is still intact.

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Only reason it is still intact is because there is nothing to do, so all you do is "end of turn" button hoping you can actually move something or give an order.

Some of the new features are a subtle and take a bit to sink in and be appreciated.

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Funny thing, isn't that whay people said when Call to Power 2 and Masters of Orion III was made?

1UPH is evolution in flight and pure awesomeness.

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Eveolution? Sorry this was done 10 years ago with Masters of Orion II. Nothing new, all they did was copy another game, didn't invent something new. Yes it's fun and refreshing but nothing new.

But as the 100s of threads lamenting the game tell, there are still some not so small issues, many of never should have made it out of beta.

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Again same shelf as CtP2 and MOO III

(Btw for those of you with a legally purchased copy there are several simple to install mods out there that neuter Steam so you don’t have to ever deal with it, register your copy, or go “online“)

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You say this in the same sentence. Legally purchased copy? Then put a "mod" so you don't have to ever deal with it? The "mod" sounds more like a "crack" a no-no on CFC.

The first thing we need to do is to establish a non-toxic, non for profit (as in our community rep doesnt have DLC to sell or wont get kickbacks) customer-developer culture and relationship. Putting up 100s of whiny threads saying the game sucks is diluting out message. We need to come together as a community with a unified but brief agenda of what we feel needs to be fixed. And we need to make sure that message reaches the people actually working on the game. We need to send a clear message that a 3rd party advertiser not involved with the devolvement living 3000 miles away from Firaxis being assigned as our liaison is unacceptable and disrespectful to the customers. Many other developers have set the communication standard much higher and its about time Firaxis joins us out here on the interwebs. Not just in marketing releases and pod casts.

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Funny same thing was tried to be done with CtP2 and MOO III. We were told to shut up in Civ IV or Civ III forums saying they were crappy games. Funny how it's a different story with CiV now.

Unless we want more of the same, there needs to be some accountability here in this community.

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From who? Us the fans need to be accountable? Not shure what you mean. At least 2 companies I know of Manned up and apologized for releasing a buggy or bad game.

I do not beleive Sid will admit to this at all. There will be no accountability on Firaxis part at all.

Anyhoo I’ll leave it at that for the sake of brevity - We've seen the quality what the status quo will bring us; are we going to make changes or just accept more of the same?

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For one thing, it's any how, Anyhoo is not cute anymore. You are correct about the status quo.

As you can see in other threads, there is a few people who told me to shut up and accept it. I say we shouldn't accept it, others say, yes it is and tell me where to go.

So you might as well be talking to the wall about the status quo sadly.

Apparently I'm not allowed to simply post "yawn", but do we really need another thread complaining about the same things?

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JudgeDeath said:

Apparently I'm not allowed to simply post "yawn", but do we really need another thread complaining about the same things?

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Yes of course we do. This will show how many people are displeased with the game. Also if this game is so good, where are all the CiV RoKZ threads? Firaxis should be shamed how there is so many negative threads than positve threads.

I guess the don't care since they know, what ever they put out, people will buy, espically the First DLC since peoeple want to know what it is like.

evrett37 said:

Unless we want more of the same, there needs to be some accountability here in this community.

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Why? They're just guys, not elected officials.

There is a list posted around here somewhere of the individuals who contributed to Civ 5 development. We as a community need to look inward and ask - did these people do their jobs and honor their responsibilities to the game?

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How do we choose the jury who will judge these miscreants?

Where these people there for the game or there for kickbacks or insure profit from DLC sales.

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What financial relationship between firaxis and the beta testers can you show to exist?

Its not a friendly question to ask.

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You're correct on that.

But the results show these people “failed” Civ. Twice.

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By whose criteria? When was the first time?

They had a responsibility to make the game the best it could be, and its not the best it can be atm.

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Why is that the beta testers and not the devs problem?

And they had a responsibility to come out and inform the community that the game would be a little rough at release, to put it mildly.

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Why? They'd signed an NDA. It would have been illegal to do so. Your comments?

We don’t need a lynching but we do need to be sure we have strong people who can stand up to the company who have the right motivations to represent this community.

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What people would you choose? On what basis? How do you make sure Firaxis agrees to these people? Do you think a oppositional relationship will allow them to be good beta testers?

I can kind of feel for the developers ever so slightly. They were destined, in the eyes of many, to always fall short of the expectations of the core fans. The thing that is on my mind at present is the difference between civ IV vanilla and beyond the sword. To my mind, the game didn't really become "complete" as it were until BTS (even though aspects of it seemed overpowered).

I personally haven't got a copy of it. It won't run on my p.c. basically. I may get a copy later on, but at my leisure and hopefully when many of the problems have been resolved through patches and mods. The communities will help to improve the game, simply because of the passion of the people involved: there is a serious amount of love for this franchise. This will happen irrespective of Firaxis and one wonders whether or not this is part of their marketing/development strategy: it comes across as lazy.

Some things put me off: I hate having to register anything on-line, whatever it is. I never trust anyone with my information unless I have to. Steam seems to be a marketing tool for the gaming industry and it makes me suspicious. The fact that their are already patches for this suggests that I'm not alone in this.

There are many good ideas in this game, judging by the walkthroughs I've been reading and watching religiously. But too much of it just comes across as poorly implemented and the gameplay seems to be just broken in too many ways.

One example:

The game can be won through conquest quite early, even on higher levels and particularly on slower speeds, by simply building a huge army and largely ignoring infrastructure and peaceful expansion. The more cities you gain, the higher your tech rate

The mechanic in Civ IV for city maintenance worked better: get too big and your tech rate plummits because it's linked to your gold economy leaving you disadvantaged technologically. But you could get round it by good empire management and imaginative play. It was actually pretty well balanced. If you tried to ignore your empires infrastructure development it would cost you.

Knocking out one civ was possible and usually left you with land you could expand into. But if you tried to too quickly, it would penalise you. Conquering far off lands penalised you through a distance to capital penalty. Conquering the world really early through warfare was harder to do really early.

The unhappiness in Civ V can be ignored because it's penalties are capped and tech rates are heavily dependant on size of population rather than the strength of your economy, precisely because they are separate. So you can be an impoverished nation yet despite this still advance technologically more quickly than your rivals? How does this make sense? The unhappiness penalty to growth will not affect warmongers, because their growth stems from conquests and cities become puppeted anyway.

This encourages the ignore happiness tactic that has recently been posted on forums. It encourages expansion through warfare because this will always be the quickest means of out-teching rivals. This then leads the player to "not bother" filling the lands available to them. A mechanic designed to limit thoughtless expansion ends up only penalising peaceful expansion, because the penalties for doing so through war don't compare with the benefits. Worse still, raising cities has become the preferred option for too many players, in a way I never saw happen in Civ IV.

As such, gameplay seems to be more 2-dimensional than civ IV.

I can admit that this may just be how it comes across from the walthroughs/playthroughs I've seen. But it just seems too common.

It's a shame (but it's not the only thing that seems broken). Civ V looks to be a game that has many really great ideas. Let me list them:

Social policies appear to be fantastic.
City states.
hexes + 1 upt.
Limitations imposed on strategic resources.

But you have to wonder how seriously it had been play-tested before release and how broad the pool of play-testers were. If it had been, some of these problems may well have been spotted and solutions found prior to release. Complaints that the game seems "half-cooked" actually appear to be quite justified. The communities will sort this out I expect and in a couple of years this will be a truly great game. And I fully expect CIV VI to be a real step forward.

evrett37 said:

The first thing we need to do is to establish a non-toxic, non for profit (as in our community rep doesnt have DLC to sell or wont get kickbacks) customer-developer culture and relationship. Putting up 100s of whiny threads saying the game sucks is diluting out message. We need to come together as a community with a unified but brief agenda of what we feel needs to be fixed. And we need to make sure that message reaches the people actually working on the game.

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As Venereus noted, this is impossible within the current institutional framework since 2K/Firaxis have no reason to be especially interested in our views. Get rid of the copyright/patent laws that shield developers of intellectual "property" from market pressure and you'll see an entirely new institutional framework that is much more responsive to customer concerns. But within the existing framework: sorry, it can't be done.

DalekDavros said:

As Venereus noted, this is impossible within the current institutional framework since 2K/Firaxis have no reason to be especially interested in our views.

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They do if it means dollar signs, or lack thereof. If you actually can get enough people to commit to doing something like say, refusing to pick up any expansions or DLC unless certain changes are made, Firaxis will listen. Any company would.

logintime said:

They do if it means dollar signs, or lack thereof. If you actually can get enough people to commit to doing something like say, refusing to pick up any expansions or DLC unless certain changes are made, Firaxis will listen. Any company would.

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My point stands. It can't be done.