I am impresed because i never immagined that a bad product would claim such a strong defence.I can understand those whose profesion has to do with programing.From the simple point of view of a customer thow (as myself) nothing makes sence when i pay something that doesn't work as it sould.Any justification even if it sounds more than real (lack of Time-Money-what ever...) can't change the simple fact,which is no other than the product i bought is not good.(I would like it to be,and for sure i don't like knowing that a Civ product leaves me unsutisfyed.)
Bad news: Next patch on hold
- Thread starter player1 fanatic
- Start date
It's too bad you feel that way kokoras. Of course I'm not pleased with the unresolved issues, but I still enjoy playing the game. I do not consider C3C a bad product at all. I am keeping the faith that Firaxis will do the right thing, but I understand the difficulties right now. Pirates is expected to be a huge release and if they miss their release date, they could miss the holiday season. That would not be a good thing for them. I am looking forward to Pirates and can play C3C as it is right now, but I want it fixed as much as everyone else.
player1 fanatic
Fanatic
I never consdered C3C or Civ3 a bad product.
It's an excellent product with good patch support, at least until now.
It's an excellent product with good patch support, at least until now.
There is also no point in arguing now that Civ3 is basically a good product, I think everyone here likes the game!
I am with kokoras, I cannot accept the reasons that are named why they should not patch Civ3 anymore. They are meaningless. If they ship a game with buggy submarines, they have to fix it. They should not even HAVE to fix that...
Perhaps you cannot compare the car industry with gaming software companies, true. The industry is basically customer unfriendly. Take a look at console games. They cannot be patched so easily, they run much better right off the box.
OK, they are often not as complex as Civ3 perhaps.
I think it is really not acceptable to support the position that it is a waste of time and money to patch a game to the end for different economical reasons.
I am with kokoras, I cannot accept the reasons that are named why they should not patch Civ3 anymore. They are meaningless. If they ship a game with buggy submarines, they have to fix it. They should not even HAVE to fix that...
Perhaps you cannot compare the car industry with gaming software companies, true. The industry is basically customer unfriendly. Take a look at console games. They cannot be patched so easily, they run much better right off the box.
OK, they are often not as complex as Civ3 perhaps.
I think it is really not acceptable to support the position that it is a waste of time and money to patch a game to the end for different economical reasons.
Longasc said:
There are 11 pages in this post and I haven't seen one post that says they should not patch the game.
I for one do not want another 1.20 version that completely screws up the game and from what I've read, that's part of the reason it's delayed.
I want a patch that fixes things not makes things worse, and if it takes them a little more time to get that accomplished, I am fine with it.
I have read a lot of defence for Firaxis from warpstorm especially if they do no longer patch the game, guyfamous.
I do not think that 1.20 is worse than 1.15 - it does not screw up the game, it removed radio tech and it is not backward compatible, very regretful, this is the point of criticism.
You are also quite wrong if you say "a little more time". No promises and not sure if there will ever be a patch does not sound like they will ever take a little more time to do any more patch at all!
I do not think that 1.20 is worse than 1.15 - it does not screw up the game, it removed radio tech and it is not backward compatible, very regretful, this is the point of criticism.
You are also quite wrong if you say "a little more time". No promises and not sure if there will ever be a patch does not sound like they will ever take a little more time to do any more patch at all!
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warpstorm said:
I think it might do more than that. Let's look at the cost of poor quality attributed to Civ3. There are parts of the game that are broken. Leaving them broken will cost Firaxis and Atari money. It will depress sales in C3C. It will tarnish the reputation of the company, which will impact sales of new releases - particularly Civ4. Traffic through the website will decrease and so will the fan base. There will be other factors that also come into play that I am too thick to be able to think of. The extent to which these things happen will depend on how bad the current product is, (the quality loss can be modelled rather well as being proportional to the square of the deviation from nominal (in this case perfect or bug-free) product. It is easy then to calculate whether the money spent on improving the quality of the product is worth spending.
In this case, resources have been taken away from patching (improving) the software, towards completing another product. In this day and age it is not good enough to merely move your resources to where they are most needed. It is very short sighted and impacts directly and always negatively on your bottom line. Of course it's an opportunity cost, and the money you are stripping away from the owners of your business is easily camouflaged because you never had it to lose. The management team gets away with it.
I may be wrong, but the decision made looks dubious to me. Either it was never a good decision to patch C3C past 1.22 or it still is a good idea (in my view). Either way the decision looks poor and does not fill me with confidence for future releases and software support.
Taking our money and running may work once or even twice. Eventually however they will be taking money from fewer and fewer people, and that only ends one way.
This turned into a diatribe. Sorry.
Longasc, you brought up a valid point by comparing computer games to console games. The problem we're facing is not about Firaxis or Civ or game programmers but the now-established "policy of patching" (not only used by Firaxis, mind you!).
Before Internet there also were buggy games around - Civ 1 had some annoying bugs in the 1.1 version, even in 1.5 final one as I recall it -, but they were still playable without any patch at all!
It's darn too easy nowadays to publish a game in a sort of "as is" state and use the customers as beta testers to find out "oops, where did we goof?". And then release one patch "okay didn't fix all", then release another, and so on.
And now we're at the turning point where other games or newer versions of the current games are more important to put the effort in. This is what really bugs me!
Console games simply do have to do better and try harder. The German version of a popular game for PSX "Harvest Moon" crashed at a crucial point in the game. Well, Ubisoft had to (and did!) offer a free bug-cleared CD to everyone who bought the first version and sent in the original CD.
I believe this put a real hole in their budget (since the Harvest Moon series was and is a top seller). Doesn't happen very often with console games, because this get's really expensive ...
Right, C3C isn't totally unplayable - but all those problems and criticisms Firaxis faces are house made. And they were avoidable. Simple as it is.
Before Internet there also were buggy games around - Civ 1 had some annoying bugs in the 1.1 version, even in 1.5 final one as I recall it -, but they were still playable without any patch at all!
It's darn too easy nowadays to publish a game in a sort of "as is" state and use the customers as beta testers to find out "oops, where did we goof?". And then release one patch "okay didn't fix all", then release another, and so on.
And now we're at the turning point where other games or newer versions of the current games are more important to put the effort in. This is what really bugs me!
Console games simply do have to do better and try harder. The German version of a popular game for PSX "Harvest Moon" crashed at a crucial point in the game. Well, Ubisoft had to (and did!) offer a free bug-cleared CD to everyone who bought the first version and sent in the original CD.
I believe this put a real hole in their budget (since the Harvest Moon series was and is a top seller). Doesn't happen very often with console games, because this get's really expensive ...
Right, C3C isn't totally unplayable - but all those problems and criticisms Firaxis faces are house made. And they were avoidable. Simple as it is.
Just have to bring up a point that there always is a budget, which has to be divided(coarsly) between development and testing & debugging. A lot of features might have not been developed if extensive beta testing would have been considered absolutely necessary.
Doc Tsiolkovski
Deity
C3C is definitely a playable game. It does not crash or hang. Nothing is missing. Nobody who'd play his/her 1st Civ game now would notice any problems. Nobody who will buy C3-Complete (if it is in 1.22) will find anything wrong, unless he visits the fan-sites.
While I want another patch like anyone else here, I think it is a little silly to diss Firaxis as if they'd sold something that isn't working.
Admittedly, I didn't buy that many games in my life, but considering that 7 out of 10 games I bought in the last 5 years did *not* work out of the box (most noticable the Panzergeneral 3 games, where Hasbro/Ubisoft did not supply an acceptable patch for the localized versions at all), and the 3 that did work were Civ3, PtW and C3C, I think this is going a bit over the top.
Thus, I don't think you need to be in the 'Industry' to defend Firaxis here.
Nevertheless, I completely fail to see why the couldn't outsource the fix - but (just a wild guess) I could imagine Atari does not allow that, considering how iffy they were about the German translation....
TedJackson
Cunning old Celt
Perhaps outsourcing the development of C3C was responsible for the re-introduction of old bugs in the first place. I mean, could you wade through all that out-of-date code and be sure that you understood all the ramifications of altering any one piece of it?
Ted
Ted
Doc Tsiolkovski
Deity
@TJ:
Outsourcing = one/some of the programers from the community
(see post # 66 & 68).
Outsourcing = one/some of the programers from the community
(see post # 66 & 68).
TedJackson
Cunning old Celt
@Doc:
Doesn't matter who does the work, the problems of reading and understanding the code remain the same.
Ted
Doesn't matter who does the work, the problems of reading and understanding the code remain the same.
Ted
warpstorm
Yumbo? Yumbo!
@TJ, Some of these bugs were introduced after the code was handed back to Firaxis, IIRC. Most of the outsourcing for C3C was art and scenario development (and the code for the new unit abilities and the editor). In any case, the code was handed in to Firaxis well before the ship date. The final version and all patches have been done in-house at Firaxis.
@Yashed To, ah the glory days, when all games worked out of the box. Except for Civ2, which wouldn't run on any system without a sound card (not uncommon in those days). They had to get a patch out and send discs to registered owners right away. In fact, nearly every Microprose game had about 3 patches to get them up to snuff, even in the pre-Internet days. They used bulletin boards and physical mailings of patch disks then.
@jst666, extensive beta testing was done. Hundreds of beta testers worked on C3C. In addition, testing companies (AQ) and Atari's testers had their shot at looking at it. Beta testing, at best, can only identify bugs. It can't fix one.
@Yashed To, ah the glory days, when all games worked out of the box. Except for Civ2, which wouldn't run on any system without a sound card (not uncommon in those days). They had to get a patch out and send discs to registered owners right away. In fact, nearly every Microprose game had about 3 patches to get them up to snuff, even in the pre-Internet days. They used bulletin boards and physical mailings of patch disks then.
@jst666, extensive beta testing was done. Hundreds of beta testers worked on C3C. In addition, testing companies (AQ) and Atari's testers had their shot at looking at it. Beta testing, at best, can only identify bugs. It can't fix one.
Kemal
Tough Bureaucrat
- Joined
- Jun 15, 2001
- Messages
- 555
Doc Tsiolkovski said:
Nobody who'd play his/her 1st Civ game now would notice any problems.
I know I'm repeating myself, but this is just not true. Firaxis say there's an effect of sacrificing your leader for an age of science, but that part is not in the game, nor has it ever been addressed by Firaxis.
I do agree with most here that the game is playable yes, and most people won't notice most of the errors in the product at first. But I do hope (and expect) Firaxis aims at a higher standard than "playable/no bugs at first glance" for their (future) games, especially in a renowned series such as Civilization. They can and should have done better than this, IMO.
warpstorm
Yumbo? Yumbo!
mad-bax said:
Here is a concept that you might not be aware of. It's called milestone payments. In the game industry, the publisher doesn't give all its money to the developer up front. Rather it ties them to certain milestones. Every 6 weeks or so (depends on the contract) you have to show them that you are progressing towards the schedule by having specific things done or you give up that increment of pay. In a worst case scenario, it can be a breach of contract and give them cause to cancel your project.
If Firaxis is shifting resources, it is most likely because they are at risk of missing a milestone. This would be very bad for their bottom line.
warpstorm
Yumbo? Yumbo!
Longasc, I want Firaxis to patch the game. Don't get me wrong. I understand their priorities though. If they can't afford to do it without risking Pirates or Civ4, I understand and am sympathetic. I would rather have Civ4 come out than Civ3 get another patch (even though there are still remaining bugs), if it comes down to an either/or situation. I hope they can get things situated so that they can do both.
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Obviously - but not my point. Moving resources to where they are most needed is not the same thing as resourcing to maximise ROI (Return on Investment).
Firing a shed load of programmers a few months ago and then stopping work on something which had been deemed necessary to be working on the previous day (if you see what I mean)
demonstrates poor understanding of their business.
I guess I won't get on the Civ4 Beta team now <sigh> Never mind
Firing a shed load of programmers a few months ago and then stopping work on something which had been deemed necessary to be working on the previous day (if you see what I mean)
demonstrates poor understanding of their business.I guess I won't get on the Civ4 Beta team now
<sigh> Never mind warpstorm
Yumbo? Yumbo!
Firaxis didn't fire anyone that I'm aware of. In fact, they've been hiring. I don't see how they could fire a shed load of programmers since at their peak they only had around 10.
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