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

[bite]

They will.

Nov 26th:

That is good to hear

 

[Trackmaster]

I know that online multiplayer is where the big money is at with modern computer games, but how would that even work for a turn based game with 500 turns? The point of the game is supposed to be that an individual game is long, epic, and you take all of the time that you need on a turn, you're literally spanning the entirety of civilized human history and into the future a little in a single game.

You would either need to get people to agree to sit down for a marathon session, or agree to come back to the game once a week for a few months or something. And even then, there would probably have to be a clock so that you were rushed for your turns. The idea of facing live humans is awesome, but I think that makes a lot more sense with real time games than turn based games.

 

[Naokaukodem]

I would say that regarding multiplayer, it's more about the Civ5 Gate that Cocoa Gate.

- no more general lobby to find players and advertise games in a proper way, or simply discuss funny things like Hitler.
- Crippling bugs. Very crippling. A nightmare ? Fortunately some have been corrected but I've passed on MP way before.
- no list of online players so you can contact them to enter a game. Instead use your Steam friend list, no sure if that's better.
- therefore you have to have friends BEFORE you play. Whereas in Civ4, you could make some BY playing.
- deserted Steam community. That's it, players get accustomed to make friends, then they didn't need those communities anymore. (or other reason)
- still bugs. (crippling ?)
- intempestive deconnections
- started games are listed with the starting ones, which cause most of the time instant kicks for players who want to join.
- etc... the issues seems endless.

 

[TRoosevelt]

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.

That is probably all very true. But if Firaxis wants to revive the franchise, they would be wise to listen to all of us fans out here about what we want in the game, and what doesn't work, and build a game around those ideas. Then they could also ask for lots of volunteers on here who have hundreds to thousands of hours of playtime under their belts to playtest the beta version before releasing it to general public.

At least that's what I'd do. Just don't ignore the people who made you what you are today. Not the stockholders. The FANS!! The ones who will ultimately spend their money on your product. Or not...

 

[beetle]

Does Firaxis have stockholders? I think they are privately held. But they need paying customers, not fans. The status quo seems to be working quite well for them. Frankly, I am grateful they update/patch/rebalance at all. I imagine they don’t want to poison the long-term profitability, but selling the beta version at full MSRP seems to be working quite well for them. This has been the case since III.

 

[Socratatus]

Does Firaxis have stockholders? I think they are privately held. But they need paying customers, not fans. The status quo seems to be working quite well for them. Frankly, I am grateful they update/patch/rebalance at all. I imagine they don’t want to poison the long-term profitability, but selling the beta version at full MSRP seems to be working quite well for them. This has been the case since III.

Aren`t the fans paying customers? Or are you saying we all pirated the game? I paid for my game.

We, as paying customers, should have more say than any damn greedy shareholder.

 

[CraigMak]

I played MP this weekend. It didn't seem any less stable than before. BNW has always had problems. Civ 5 was at its best stability during G&K just before the fall patch. That particular patched completely botched hosting for me. The issue was never fixed, hosts almost always have problems.

 

[beetle]

Aren`t the fans paying customers? Or are you saying we all pirated the game? I paid for my game. We, as paying customers, should have more say than any damn greedy shareholder.

I think fan means enthusiastic customers. So yes, fans are paying customers. But maybe most customers are not really fans? Although, presumably, they are mostly content with their purchase. There may be greedy private owners. I really don’t think there are shareholders. Shareholders would not condone selling beta product at full MSRP because that is a risky business practice. A private owner making a good profit might be okay with it.