Greetings from your new Community Manager

Greg,
Welcome aboard...I do have one (slightly esoteric) question i would love to have answered.

I have two pre-teen children (9 and 10) who love to play Civilization multiplayer on our home LAN (they started with Civ4 vanilla). They are home-schooled and Civilization was a huge contributor to their desire to read (we stopped reading popups for them!) and has sparked a love of history and imaginative play in both of them. Now we have 4 copies of Civ4 complete we quite often sit down as a family and play with 4 of us in a coop multiplayer LAN game (sad I know...but we are a very nerdy family) Needless to say the kids were VERY excited to hear about Civ5, which brings me to my question.

Whilst I understand the reasoning behind the integration of Steam's online features into Civ5 I am concerned about exposing the children to the online world. I know there is a reason why online interactions are not evaluated for ESRB ratings and am concerned our family game time not be ruined by interruptions from the less savory aspects of the online Steam experience. Although in general I find the ESRB ratings on games like Civ4 unhelpful (e.g. I find some T-rated games are fine for our kids, but some E-rated games perpetuate stereotypes that are not fine) we do regulate the kids access to the internet using parental control software and are keen to maintain that for a few more years.

Given this background information so you know where I am coming from, I have two questions...
  • Will it still be possible to play LAN multiplayer Civ5 without exposing the kids to the non-kid friendly aspects of the Steam environment? I have googled extensively but have been unable to find any information about parental controls on Steam. So I am asking (although not hopeful) if there will be some non-Steam but LAN based multi-player left in Civ5.
  • Will the kids ability to run Civ5 be impacted by parental controls on their computers? I have Steam on my gaming machine (because of a gift with purchase on a graphics card) but not on my wife's or kids computers. Again, I googled extensively, and attempted to get information from Steam directly with no luck, but other than a few anecdotal stories of inability to play games could not find anything definitive.
Thanks for any help you can give.
Good Luck!
 
@ 2K Greg: Welcome to CivFanatics in this new capacity. :D

@ 2K Elizabeth: Thanks for your participation so far and don't be a stranger. :goodjob:
 
Welcome aboard Greg!
 
Welcome, Greg!

a question pondering on my mind all time now:
Do we really have to wait till E3 for new bits of info?
eh... well, well
 
mjs0 said:
Greg,
Welcome aboard...I do have one (slightly esoteric) question i would love to have answered

...
Click to expand...

I would love to answer your question in my Civilization 5 Steamworks FAQ, but it would help if you could expand a little on what "non-kid friendly" aspects of Steam are concerning you. Thanks!
 
2K Greg said:
I would love to answer your question in my Civilization 5 Steamworks FAQ, but it would help if you could expand a little on what "non-kid friendly" aspects of Steam are concerning you. Thanks!
Click to expand...

I believe the intention would be to isolate them from things like the Steam community (public forums, etc) that could potentially contain content inappropriate for children of this age.

That's pretty understandable - I asked a related question in the steam FAQ's thread. Basically, will you be able to play a LAN game between two computers in offline mode (without needing an internet connection)?

As far as I am aware, mjs0 is correct when he says that there are no "parental controls" on steam that would prevent the user from accessing things like the steam community or videos of violent games when running in online mode.
 
Chalks said:
I believe the intention would be to isolate them from things like the Steam community (public forums, etc) that could potentially contain content inappropriate for children of this age.

That's pretty understandable - I asked a related question in the steam FAQ's thread. Basically, will you be able to play a LAN game between two computers in offline mode (without needing an internet connection)?

As far as I am aware, mjs0 is correct when he says that there are no "parental controls" on steam that would prevent the user from accessing things like the steam community or videos of violent games when running in online mode.
Click to expand...
Precisely.

Greg,
Both of the kids are highly computer literate (e.g. they maintain their own websites on our local LAN and they are currently in the beta tester program for the new LEGO Universe MMO) but I am certain that there are areas of the Steam online experience that I will not want them to 'experience' for a few more years.
There may be more aspects of Steam that are unsuitable for pre-teens but the forums and violent preview videos/demo versions of M-rated games are, I suspect, the key things. Without having experienced it I would also be nervous about the possible language used in the "rooms for multiplayer matching" (for some reason the name for these escapes me...senility here I come:crazyeye:)
I'm reasonably confident I will be able to turn off pop-up adds and content and that by buying on my account and gifting to them I can avoid them having CC enabled accounts and accidentally buying stuff (I actually trust them not to do most of this deliberately). Any confirmation in this area would be good also.

Clearly the best response would be that we can continue to play multi-player on our local LAN without being online to Steam but I can appreciate that this may have been lost in the move to Steam.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.
Martin.
 
Well, that's all well and good, but I have a couple of inquiries. BTW, welcome to the forums Greg.

1) You state that you are compiling a FAQ to address a number of questions from the various threads. Is this merely going to be a general FAQ? Are you going to address any of the "DIRECT" questions put forth from within these boards?

2) Are you planning on merely monitoring said FAQ? or are you actually going to put in a significant amount of time to respond to many of the valid inquiries put forth from various members.

Lol, as I've said a "couple", I'll leave it at that for now. I'm sure many others have more questions to get answers from you.

This was supposed to follow Impaler's post, as I am a slow typer, my apologies if this is taken out of context.
 
I will attempt to address as many direct questions as I am able. The intention is to clarify the most commonly asked questions regarding the Steamworks integration.

And yes, I will be putting in significant time to respond to inquiries about the answers in the FAQ. The whole point of bringing me on to the 2K team was to have someone that could dedicate more of his time to the Civilization community specifically. :)
 
If you're open to content/mechanics questions in the FAQ:

1. How will Social policies work?
2. What kind of statistics will military units have; a single strength statistic? Firepower? Hit points?
3. It sounds like commerce is gone, and gold and beakers come from buildings and tiles directly; can you elaborate more on how this will work?
4. How will maintenance costs (distance, number of cities, units in friendly/enemy territory)?
5. Can you explain more clearly how units and cities interact (what does it mean to "merge" a unit with a city?)
6. What kinds of diplomatic agreements are possible; any important new ones (other than the research treaty) or old ones that are gone?
7. Can you describe the different unit "roles"? Like in Civ4 we had archers (city defense) swordsmen (city attack) chariot/horse archers (mobile) spearmen (anti-mobile) axemen (and melee) and catapults (siege).
8. Can you explain better how roads (and railways) will work, in terms of maintenance costs, necessity for resource access, movement speed and trade routes?
9. Are specialists still in? How are they similar/different?
10. Any changes to buildings? Do we still have lots of +X% multiplier buildings?
Click to expand...
 
I wish you the best of luck as the new Community Manager, 2K Greg.

It's good to see that you will be here as well, 2K Elizabeth. You would certainly be missed otherwise.
 
We already know 2kE has very little access with the devs and the game being that she is 2000 miles away, doesnt work for Firaxis, and is salesman not a software developer. If you are working for her how will you information be any less tainted by marketing propaganda and statements like "its what you want".
 
We are fortunate to live in a world where being physically 2000 miles away from someone does not hinder our ability to communicate. :)

I have a direct line to everyone at Firaxis, and I speak to them regularly. We are, for all intents and purposes, the same. Any information that comes from me essentially comes from them.
 
Are you free to comment on the game with your own opinions or still testing for them ?
 
Welcome Greg! Good to see a civer, and a modder, in this dedicated role. Good luck with it!
And thanks for CivStats! We got particularly great use of that with our RealPolitik games.


2K Greg said:
I have a direct line to everyone at Firaxis, and I speak to them regularly. We are, for all intents and purposes, the same. Any information that comes from me essentially comes from them.
Click to expand...
Good to hear! We know you've a line into 2k via Elizabeth; are you in direct communication with other 2k personnel? And what about Steam?
 
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