Here is the thing... Civilization V was a big divergence over its predecessors. Their were a lot of changes and that means big risks, both gameplay-wise and balancing. There were many factors that often come to light once the core market gets a hold of the game. With Civilization: BE
BE is not part of the mainline series. The bulk of its issues were in design, and I chose to ignore it for the purposes of this.
And yes, that means I'm calling out Civ 4 release, despite that it still holds the best design choices in the series on most things. MP was a non-functional travesty in vanilla and the tradeoffs were not as deep as BTS. It wasn't as broken as Civ 5, but it wasn't good.
Apples and Oranges, man! One is a massive machine where any mistakes or problems can cost lives... the other is a video game. There is a BIG difference.
I'm talking about incentives. What I've quoted is a non-sequitur red herring that does not address or refute anything I said.
It goes both ways, you know... calling out people who preorder and saying that they are the problem is essentially calling them "idiots".
No, people make poor choices all the time without being "idiots" in the general sense. If a person had to never make poor/irrational choices to avoid being an idiot, we'd have a planet full of idiots and nobody who isn't one. It kind of loses its utility as a term in that scenario though.
So when I tell you that the consequences of your choices are bad for the industry, no I'm not calling you an idiot. I'm telling you that you're giving incentive for a firm to underperform its promises, by rewarding it for a track record for underperforming on its promises.
I'm not calling anybody's reasoning "juvenile", such as what I quoted. I'm just calling some of it wrong, because those wrong stated beliefs are inconsistent with what has happened when similar choices have been made (IE the evidence). You can be a perfectly competent, wrong adult. I'd estimate that represents the majority who disagree with my stance.
This may be true with SOME companies in the industry, but can hardly be applied to every company out there. I'll touch more on this later...
No, it's true in every case. Some companies resist disincentive for providing quality, but if the market lowers its standards for quality the incentive for quality go down regardless of what the firm chooses to do about it.
I never said that hardware was the SOLE reason for issues after release. But it is a BIG issue. Yes, there are almost always a few bugs that show up that have nothing to do with the hardware configuration or anything. Also some issues that are the result of poor to bad design decisions or short-sightedness. Still, a large portion of issues are usually hardware related due to the different configurations that can be found with an open system such as the PC. They can be frustrating, they can be annoying, but most GOOD companies react and fix those issues pretty quickly.
What you say about hardware isn't wrong, but it doesn't refute what I said. Such issues are a small percentage of the problem in these games, time-wise, because they do get identified and fixed pretty fast and it is unrealistic to expect them all to be foreseen without exception.
However those issues are not part of my case against pre-ordering.
Unlike certain other companies (who shall remain nameless... though their initials start with E and A ) who disregard fans complaints, wants, and wishes because they have their own idea of what is best and no puny player can possibly know better than them.
There are more similarities between Firaxis and EA than you care to admit. I could cookie cutter copy most of your arguments above and apply them to Madden '17 and they'd apply almost identically. The DLC model, product release quality (actually, EA is a LOT better than Firaxis at MP functionality, which is painful), and defense of practices are more similar than ever.
Yes... And that was largely do to hardware compatibility. The issues were resolved.
OOS in MP was not, however. Broken UI (that remained broken all the way until BTS 3.19) was not. MP in civ 5 was largely not hardware, and was never fixed (put 5+ people in a game, it melts).
At least 4 had some UI conventions from the past decade. 5 actually regressed in UI, and that's pitiful considering 4 has moving buttons, a tendency to ignore commands for stack selection, and automatic re-pathing mid-turn to screw you. But in 5 you have cases where you select something and the game forcibly unselects it and selects something else over and over, inconsistent input buffering exists to this day. On release 5 would literally lie to you about whether your city was growing and whether your unit would attack as well.
In pre-ordering, the $$$ are sending a message that such is acceptable. Yes, I consider sending that message to contribute to the doormat status of this market.
) I don't begrudge paying out more up front. Wouldn't do it for another game though, only Civ.
