Quite a few beta testers are people who post here and at Apolyton and from a wide range of playing skills, so I think that should take care of your worries.
It should, but it doesn't. I have noticed that many of the beta-testers tend to be very conservative (in the gaming sense) and although most of them are very familiar with CIV, they seem to have little interst in implementing new things --or changing some things. Although, this is not much of a factor, because as you said: "the customer is always right" is hogwash; i.e. developers make their own decisions in the end regardless of what players say. Most beta-testers must be aware of this, so they probably keep their input as close to the already existing game rules as possible.
Some customers are NOT worth the business, because you spend more money trying to please them and not making any profit off of them.
Very true. Although I don't think that's what "We are customers and we are supose to complain" was refering to. Rather, I think this refers to the implied customer's "duty" to maintain the highest standerds possible. For instance, if everyone buys the best product on the market, then that product will beat the cheaper, lower quality competition and become the norm at a lower price. So in terms of Civ3, that translates into: if we want Civ3 to be at its best, we should remind developers that this is what we want. A game's budget is not usually cut-and-dry, the publisher judges how well the product will do based on various economic variables (inlcuding the popularity game's predecessor) and then assigns the assigns a budget to the game's designers. The amount is based on risk --just like any investment. If the publisher sees that by putting more into a game, sales will be higher, then it will usually boost the game's budget (within reason). If they know people will buy the product with or without the new stuff, there is no incentive to add stuff in. So really, this is a question of player involvement. The reason why players are not such a big factor is because they buy it without thinking twice. In this case though, players have an excuse: they were basing their expectations around what was done in Civ2. In the case of PTW, I personally assumed (wrongly) that the Co. saw it's mistakes and decided to make up for it in the expansion. Since Atari took over, players now don't know what to expect because as you said, Infograms' PTW was glitchy (among other things). Glitches aside, the problem I personally found in PTW, was the fact that they just added a few essentials that were left out of the original Civ3 and activated already existing, but inaccessable features in the Editor. In other words, PTW was more of a big patch --that needed patching. There really was nothing new about it.
Each of these had at least as much power and most of them were much easier to use.
Although I haven't played all of them, are you sure they have all (or the equivilant), or more of the Event features that Civ2 has --that's including the flag system introduced in ToT?
Well here is a place you and I differ on a lot. I don't think Civ2 was perfect. I think that Civ3 is a more fun and interesting game by far. I also don't think that Civ3 is just riding on Civ2's popularity. If that were the case, people wouldn't be playing it still. Give people credit. They know what they like and don't. I'd be willing to bet that more people are playing Civ3 as I type this than are playing Civ2.
I was being sarcastic. Civ2 was far from perfect. In fact I was surprised that so little had changed since Civ1 (units still cost shields to maintain, I mean really) but I was willing to overlook that because of the game's modability.
Civ3 is more interesting...but at a price; i.e. slow turns, ******** AI diplomacy, much lower modability (just to name a few)...and of course, no Events.
As I hear it, many bought Civ3 because of Civ2's popularity; i.e. they were expecting a better Civ2 --not quite what they got as it turns out. I have also heard of people going back to Civ2. Going BACK! There's something not right about that. Yes people know what they like and more than an insignificant number of them aren't liking what's going on with Civ3. It's only logical that people play the newest release. I play Civ3, but that doesn't mean I've given up Civ2. If Civ3 were essentially better than Civ2 in every way isn't it logical that people like myself would just be uninstalling Civ2 by now? Nostalgia aside, what would be the point of playing the old one when you can play the new one without sacrificing anything? I'm not the type to stick with outdated stuff when there's an alternative, so give me the benefit of the doubt that I'm not just thick-headedly holding on to Civ2.
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