Sirian
Designer, Mohawk Games
sirkris said:
A. I use the Wait option most of the time. Most of my games are with friends, though, where waiting for a dropped player to return is the norm (and the game would halt if they couldn't return). Just because you, personally, have no use for a given feature does not mean nobody else does. Not everyone is going to share your playstyle preferences.
That you hold no recognition of this in your criticism undercuts all the rest of your points. You may be making some valid points, but your point of view represents your perspective, not everybody's perspective.
B, C, D are all related. You're having trouble with grief players, and the game isn't set up to allow you to cope. I would have to agree that it would be better if you could protect yourself from jerks. The MP world for Civ4 is akin to the wild wild west, with foul language in unmoderated chat, and with lack of protections against the lowest common denominator taking over. However, the player who cites Blizzard as a company who can do no wrong must not have actually played Blizzard's first internet title, Diablo, with its Battle.net service being a collecting pot for the worst possible samples of online human behavior. That game was rife with cheats and hacks end to end, while Civ4 is not. An objective comparison between Civ's first shot at built-in online MP vs Blizzard's first shot with Diablo has to favor Firaxis on the whole. Both are untamed environments, but Civ4's is less chaotic. That is not to claim that it's good enough, when several problems are self-evident, but overblowing your criticisms is the surest way to turn off the people to whom you are trying to speak. Turned off and tuned out. Why should they bother to listen to criticisms that overly emotional, factually challenged, and unobjective?
Clearly, the game is vulnerable to deliberate sabotage by players. Is this really the responsibility of Firaxis, though? Given players of good will, whose aim is to actually PLAY THE GAME rather than to make mischief and torment others, these issues are not problems. Your example of the Diplomacy screen, where your opponent brought in a friend and tricked you into a stuck position... Why would you even want to continue that game? If people want to be jerks, take yourself elsewhere. You want your cake and to eat it too, that you can play in open games and never run in to griefers. Technology does not exist to prevent that. Giving power to game hosts to kick out players, even if limited to the launch lobby, would only give griefers one more way to torment you, by setting up false games with the sole purpose of kicking you out of their lobby just to mess with you.
Griefers are the gaming equivalent of terrorists. I'm afraid there are no easy solutions when it comes to stopping terrorists. Malicious people will find ways to ruin games no matter how much protection is put in place. To some extent, players have to roll with the punches. If you are going to play in open games, with strangers, you need to accept that some of them will refuse to "play nice". Just get out and move on. Any resistance you try to offer them is only going to play right in to their hands, since their whole purpose is to try and get your goat.
E. This one is a real problem independent of griefers, but it tends to hit your style of wide open random games the hardest. Games between friends or within families don't see people coming and going, don't see replacement players coming in, etc. What are obvious problems in one setting may not even come up at all in another. Sometimes testing procedures have gaps, where a problem like this can hide. If you think it through, you should be able to imagine how this one could have been overlooked.
F. Strange things happen when lots of players are connected peer to peer. Civ4's synching system is what prevents cheats and hacks from taking over the community, though. Hacks go out of synch. Period. Nothing anybody can do will override what is going on at your system. You may have legitimate complaints about the flaws involved, but I notice the absence from your list any complaint about cheaters and hackers. That's a huge accomplishment, and Firaxis did well with it on essentially their first try.
I've played dozens of games of Civ4 MP and not hit any of the problems you mention here, not one. However, I surely play with fewer players on average than you, and mostly (though not exclusively) with all humans on the same team vs one or more teams of AI civs. That different style simply does not run afoul of the things that are plaguing your open-to-the-public MP games.
G. This is the most absurd point of all. Your list offers no mention or acknowledgement of things done right, only complaints about things not done well enough to suit you. Once you assume bad faith on the developer end to be the cause of your woes, you might as well pack it in and go home. If you are right, then nothing you complain about will matter, because the devs won't care. If you are wrong, then you are doing a significant injustice to the devs, which can only undercut their morale or give reinforcement to the notion that fans will complain no matter what the devs do or try to do, so why bother listening to them or trying to respond to their requests?
- Sirian
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