Compensation?

Aztec566

Chieftain
Joined
Oct 29, 2005
Messages
3
Seriously guys, this is rediculous.
As a developer myself I understand there will be bugs, but this is just wrong.
I would never release a game and expect my user base to unwillingly become beta testers.

In fact, my experience so far with this game has been a worse experience than I have ever had with beta software.
I have even gone so far as to try all of the fixes posted (update drivers/install and uninstall/unpack art file) all of which simply do not work.
I am running on an ati radeon 9200 and everything else works, doom3, halflife2, the progs in the dx9 sdk, countless numbers of my own programs and games I have made running on the new dx9 .dll's.
There is simply no excuse for this.

I spent my hard earned money on this game expecting a finished product, and got a beta. I want compensation for my time and money I spent thus far as a beta tester! This is not a job I signed up for and if it is to be forced upon me, I'd like to know what my salary will be.

Seriously though, I think that the publisher and devs should be the ones to patch this thing up and not shove long bs fixes on the unsuspecting consumers who can't fix up buggy code and don't have the time to try fix after fix only to find they just wasted 4 hours on something that simply wont fix this shoddy product.
 
amen!

I think it is crazy to expect everyone to have to update their drivers, and search around to find obscure fixes just to get the game to run proplerly or even at all. My pc isn't old, and should have been able to run this after isntallation without having to do all these strange little hacks.

I expected this game to be the quality civ3 was, but I am disapointed.
 
I have to agree. Firaxis really screwed up on this one.

All this waiting for nothing.
 
handyandy said:
i dont want to get into an argument but why not just return it?

Perhaps the store he purchased it from has a no return policy.
 
i dont want to get into an argument but why not just return it?
Well, I don't believe I have that option being that it is a software product, and who pays the shipping costs? Should I give more money to ship it back?
Why is the burden with the customers here?
 
we cannot return it, it is a software product, once open, that it. This is ridiculous.
 
dasnov said:
amen!

I think it is crazy to expect everyone to have to update their drivers, and search around to find obscure fixes just to get the game to run proplerly or even at all. My pc isn't old, and should have been able to run this after isntallation without having to do all these strange little hacks.

I expected this game to be the quality civ3 was, but I am disapointed.

yah, count me among the 'extremely disappointed' crowd. i've been crowing about it since wed night. and i guess at this point, i'm resigned to just waiting to see if they offer a solution. if not, i will be commited to the vow: "never buy a sid/firaxis/2k game again"...unless of course 10 years from now i have an even NEWER computer and i see civ IV floating around some bargain bin for $1.99.

my beef is really not that i expect perfection (though why isn't that a goal of any publisher?) but a REASONABLE expectation of out-of-the-box playability. if they recommend updating drivers, fine. that's reasonable imo. but these obscure home grown fixes are beyond reasonable. i can now run the game, but far from properly...and extreme lags and choppiness make the game unplayable. so really, it's a moot point.

i know there's a large crowd who will likely give this game high marks even after all this mess. and some are simply willing to shrug it off and be patient, hoping there is a fix soon (i assume there will be, but how soon? anyone want the over/under at early december?). but my feeling is that given the expectation for the game, having it cause so much aggravation jsut to run a crappy product leaves me far less than satisfied. at this point, i don't think the game can ever be "awesome enough" (!!) to make me glad i spent $50 on it.
 
I bought Age of Empires 3 the day it came out and the installer crashed at 97%. It's quite frustrating... Eventually a patch will come out for Civ 4 though. Also being in the software development business myself, I understand how frustrating it can be for both end users and developers when something like this happens.

I tried running Civ 4 on two machines. I spent over 3 hours trying to trouble-shoot the game on a GeForce 5200 eventually gave up. It kept crashing to the desktop when loaded a new game.

Tried running Civ 4 on another system with an ATI 9800SE, after 3 hours of playing around with drivers I finally got it to run.

Black and White 2 also had a huge bug where users couldn't finish the game. A patch was released within a few days however all save files had to be erased as they weren't compatible with the patch...

Patience and eventually it'll work. That's the gamble with buying software the day it comes out.

Hopefully a fix will show up sooner rather than later :/
 
Dida said:
we cannot return it, it is a software product, once open, that it. This is ridiculous.

in the uk the companies you bought it from are obligued to give you a refund including postage if you return anything with i think 14 days
 
Dida said:
we cannot return it, it is a software product, once open, that it. This is ridiculous.

Of course, I don't work for them, but I would *think* that if you called Firaxis and told them that you wished to return the game, and your reasons why, that they would provide you with the shipping information and issue you a refund as soon as they received the product back. But again, I don't work for them so I can't say this with any authority.
 
lien99 said:
I tried running Civ 4 on two machines. I spent over 3 hours trying to trouble-shoot the game on a GeForce 5200 eventually gave up. It kept crashing to the desktop when loaded a new game.

this is the exact problem i have (except i have a GeoForce 4). I have updated drivers, downgraded drivers and read this section of the forums for quite some time, but I haven't gotten this fixed. Strangley though I have no problems running the tutorial, or joining an online game.
 
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