Bad news: Next patch on hold

[mad-bax]

Really - Oh Well, if I'm wrong I'm wrong. I could swear I read an article where a whole office was closed and the staff (including programmers) were laid off.

 

[warpstorm]

Atari did close an office. The Microprose subsidiary did close up shop recently (and it was down the road from Firaxis), but it had nothing to do with the work on Civ. That work was done by Firaxis.

One other point on patches, the developer pays for these out of hide. The publisher typically won't pay for patches beyond the 'first day' patch (although I don't know the terms of their contract).

 

[kokoras]

Warpstorm you said that it is better to wait for CIV4 than see a final patch released for C3C.All of us in here are waiting for CIV4,i don't believe that this is an issue,but why sould we accept easily the fact that they decided to live C3C as it is even if they know what the problems are.When CIV4 will be released it's price will be at least 50-60 euros,and i realy want to pay the money in order to have it,but i can't forget that some months ago i payed 40 euros for C3C,an expansion that from the begining had varius problems.So what sould i do,forget everything and buy something from a company that doesn't makes me feel sicure about their products?I believe that they don't care only because they are sure that the game (CIV4) will sell.
Our partecipation in these forums have to do with one thing only,make ATARI-FIRAXIS come closer to the clients view.Make them understand in other words that our ''economic'' support and advertise they can have without a second thought,but they must try to provide the best product they can,without justfications.

 

[HellboundHeathcliff]

maybe if ol' Sid took a pay cut...

 

[warpstorm]

kokoras, put your money where your mouth is. Don't buy Civ4. That's the only way change will happen.

 

[kokoras]

Thank you Warpstorm,but i don't think i have offended neither you or enyone else with what i said.
Very very nice of you.....

 

[warpstorm]

No, I'm serious. If enough people cared about quality and refused to buy then change would take place. If the weak-willed (I count myself in this category) give in and buy games from companies that have other priorities than quality, nothing will change.

I'm not offended, but remember offense is in the eye of the beholder not the eye of the offender.

 

[Kemal]

Personally, I care enough about quality to continue buying the civ-series because the game concept itself harbours enough quality already to justify the buy. Building on the concept and ideas of Civilization's earlier installments when developing civ4 is a safe way to get a good game, unless Firaxis really blows it like (IMO?) has happened with 3DO and the Heroes of Might and Magic series. If they screw it up that bad, I won't buy it no.

However, for games other than civilization that Firaxis releases, the way they handled civ3 and their patching policy won't positively influence my decision on buying them.

 

[kokoras]

Filosofy and sarkasm,well ok then we sould convince everyboby not to buy it so FIraxis will finaly create the absolute game,and then those from Atari will play it,and be realy glad too.
If you aren't offended then why responding in this way.You offended me thow and i don't understand the reason.
Some times we forget the masks and show who we realy are,that is what i know.

Edit:Not for you Kemal.

 

[warpstorm]

kokoras, I'm sorry if I offended you. It was not my intent. Like I said, the offender can't see what offends others.

I want C3C patched, I also want Civ4 to come out on time. I'm weak-willed and will buy Civ4 even if C3C is not patched. Even knowing that sending a message with my wallet might make a small difference. Given a choice between having Civ4 earlier or a patch for C3C, yes, I would choose to take Civ4 earlier. This does not imply that I don't want C3C patched, just a statement of my personal preferences. Most of the bugs in C3C are livable to me after having played it for over a year.

I try to respond to every message that I'm aware of that has my name in it. As far as the man behind the mask, yes, I'm a total a-hole and everyone who knows me agrees on this. It's not just my forum persona. Hey, it could be worse. I turned down the job of moderator for this forum.

 

[kokoras]

Ok Warpstorm,i just wanted you to know,in here we can argue but we aren't enemys.So i respect every opinion,and what i say,i say it for the good of this game,because i know that i expect it too (CIV4) .
That was my point,we all have a common idea in these forum,CIVILIZATION must be a great game.

 

[Jon Shafer]

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.

Well, that is the greatest flaw in your argument.

As I've said in posts past, the game industry is an industry. People are out to make money. If you don't make enough, then you go out of business and can't continue making games. Companies cannot throw economic concerns to the wind and do things just because "they're right" or "they should." If it were possible to do that, then I would think of all companies, Firaxis would be one of the ones to do it.

 

[Jon Shafer]

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.

I think most of this thread is a diatribe, so you're not alone.

The problem with this is that Conquests isn't selling much at all anymore (whereas any work done on Pirates or Civ 4 will be multiplied throughout every single copy sold in the future, for which the number will be significantly higher than for Conquests).

Not only that, but the fact that there are still bugs and the fact that Firaxis didn't patch Conquests one more time won't be advertised, so nobody but us here in the online communities will ever know. And only within that group can people care, and vote for different things with their wallet.

Fact is that compared with the 3+ million sales of Civ 3, the outreach of bad news about it after release is very very limited. How are those 3+ million people going to know that Firaxis hasn't patched Conquests to completion? It's not in the news, it's not on game review websites, it's not advertised (obviously). That is how most people hear about the game in the first place, and get all of their information about it. But you never hear about patch progress or things like that after the fact.

Everything revolves around the large consumer base. They are the ones that buy the game the most, and they are the ones with all the cash. They rarely download patches, so patches aren't a priority for game companies. They want their games on time and they want a good game. What they don't want so much is patches and what they don't want is to hear about news after release - or rather, they don't care. If they did, you would find much more exposure about these sorts of things on other websites outside of CFC.

If anyone can find a mention of this on a major game reviewing website I'd be willing to pay them 100 bucks.

 

[Sukenis]

Well, that is the greatest flaw in your argument.

As I've said in posts past, the game industry is an industry. People are out to make money. If you don't make enough, then you go out of business and can't continue making games. Companies cannot throw economic concerns to the wind and do things just because "they're right" or "they should." If it were possible to do that, then I would think of all companies, Firaxis would be one of the ones to do it.

While I will not go into detail and give examples (which would make my point more valid), most every industry that had acted like the gaming industry (nd software industry in general) does collapsed. The companies that were the exception to the rule with customers were the ones that livved though the collapes and made all the money after it.

In the end, the business that recognizes that customers can go elsewhere does better than those that do not. Unless you are an industry tht the government will bail out (airline, steel, ect.), you must either change to fit customer expectations or fall (unless you are Microsoft, which Firaxis/Atari are not).

And Trip, I do not think he said that there was not a gaming industry. Maybe I misread it though.

 

[Sukenis]

Everything revolves around the large consumer base. They are the ones that buy the game the most, and they are the ones with all the cash. They rarely download patches, so patches aren't a priority for game companies.

Are you saying that the majority of Civ players are still playing with the "out of the box" version? If so then Civ 4 will not sell much at all (I would think). Out of the box, there are SO many issues that would prevent consumers (well, at least me) from ever trusting the company again.

Do you mean that the average player does not know when patches are being worked on (or know when they are promised)? I am not wanting to put words in your mouth so can you please explain what you mean by this?

 

[Commander Bello]

[...]
Well, I would imagine that there was a design document for Civ 3 prior to Reynolds and Co. departing, or perhaps it was relayed verbally, or perhaps the function or even the existence of the FP was not determined by the time they had left (always a possibility).
[...]

I admit that I haven't read the whole thread already, so somebody may have commented this statement already.

Nevertheless, having just returned from some kind of "fire-fighting" project assignement, I've had a 60 hours week (with 3 hours spend on Monday and just 6 today) - just because design documents doesn't help you very much, if you don't have the chance to really talk to the original developers.

I've litarelly studied half a gigabyte of documentation this week and still don't know about the very reasons for quite some developments of this project.
And (please) believe me, I am working for a MAJOR company at the site of one of it's MAJOR customers.

What I want to make clear by this: even if there are design documents, they just give you information "at the surface". Nothing more. You won't learn about the inner reasons for certain decisions having been made.

So, I am still very surprised about the fact, that after some three years out of a sudden someone states: "And now, my dear audience, we've met what other people - who have left long ago - wanted to achieve at the very beginning!"
To me, this just sounds like a (very) lame excuse.
And this feeling is strengthened even more with the experience of the (again, out of a sudden) last and final patch, with which they decided to change the tech tree. For sure one of the least required changes - if compared with the issues we are still unhappy about.

I think, somebody wanted to make Civ3/C3C "his" game - and failed. And now, it's no fun anymore. It still isn't "his" game, it is not the original game, it is just - unfinished. "Let's bury it quietly. R.I.P. They [the silly customers] will forget about it in the course of the next 18 months."

And this attitude currently makes me hesitating from spending money again for Civ4. At least, until I - as others have mentioned for their attitude already - will have had the chance to make my own opinion about the game.

I've bought Civ3 blind-eyed. I've bought PTW blind-eyed. I've bought C3C blind-eyed. I'm not going to buy Civ4 without having had that clear look to it, that I've learned to be necessary.

Just my opinion.

 

[Commander Bello]

Why? This is where they find out what their fans really want. This is where they can check the pulse. This is where they get their testers and their new employees. (Yes, they want to know who you are on these sites when you apply for a job there. Everything you say on these forums can come back to haunt you).

Seems as if I will have to stay with my current company....

 

[Jon Shafer]

While I will not go into detail and give examples (which would make my point more valid), most every industry that had acted like the gaming industry (nd software industry in general) does collapsed. The companies that were the exception to the rule with customers were the ones that livved though the collapes and made all the money after it.

In the end, the business that recognizes that customers can go elsewhere does better than those that do not. Unless you are an industry tht the government will bail out (airline, steel, ect.), you must either change to fit customer expectations or fall (unless you are Microsoft, which Firaxis/Atari are not).

And Trip, I do not think he said that there was not a gaming industry. Maybe I misread it though.

Well, I'm assuming that you're talking about the gaming industry's tendency to not support products after release and care about their reputation.

Assuming you are, that's simply my point - the majority of consumers don't care about patches and development after release (will get onto this in my next post). What they want is more games with good graphics. They are shallow folk.

 

[Jon Shafer]

Are you saying that the majority of Civ players are still playing with the "out of the box" version? If so then Civ 4 will not sell much at all (I would think). Out of the box, there are SO many issues that would prevent consumers (well, at least me) from ever trusting the company again.

Do you mean that the average player does not know when patches are being worked on (or know when they are promised)? I am not wanting to put words in your mouth so can you please explain what you mean by this?

That is correct. And it is true for all games, not just Civ.

The vast majority of players never download a patch. I've heard rough figures that around 10% of all sales every download a single one.

The reason games like Civ 3 are released in the condition they're in is because publishers require they be done by a certain time (usually for the Christmas season, when parents and grandparents are buying gifts) and other economic reasons - you can't spend forever working on a game and until you sell your first copy you've made NO money - considering all games take over a year to work on, that's quite a bit of investment already in before anything is returned. And this is the case for every single game ever made.

At some point you have to decide whether the sales from a game at its current status (buggy or not) will make more money than continuing to work on the game, making no money at the time and having a better product in the end. Usually people will simply buy the game with no research, the most common answer is to sell it buggy.

 

[Sukenis]

That is correct. And it is true for all games, not just Civ.

The vast majority of players never download a patch. I've heard rough figures that around 10% of all sales every download a single one.

I must say I do not by any of this. This stat might have been true 8 years ago, but now days, internet (high speed even) conections are SO common that I can not see 90% of gamers not d/l a patch. Various games even have a start menu option to search for a patch if you ae connected to the internet (example Never Winter Nights) and others that offer on-line play will d/l it automatically upon connecting to the internet. I have a hard time believing that 90% of those playing computer games do not take the time to d/l a patch.

Maybe I am wrong, but this stat just seems out of date.