Raving reviews but poor feedback on Civfanatics?

[prideaux]

Oh that's right, Civ IV was Game of the Year ... they have 10 weeks to patch up Civilemon V or it will be the Joke of the Year.

People have been talking a lot here about one poll ... let's look as some others.

List of polls:

http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=94311

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=382765

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=381961

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=390297

The "up down meh" poll is actually ambiguous about what meh is to mean. Some may interpret it to be the "I don't know" for a dichotomous variable of "Up or Down". Or it might be the middle value among "good, mediocre, bad" (or even "Good, Bad, Ugly" ) Seems at best that 60% can muster entusiasm for the game ... not even that many in the infamous "dumbed down" poll. And in my poll, only 3% like the game as is.

Having 51% or more voting that they like the game does not make all of the issues go away. I think that polls showing 40% or more disappointed or lukewarm about the game is bad news for the game. And you would think that a game getting that kind of an initial reaspone would have had some more caution in the reviews.

dV

why do people keep grabing poll like these (or like the even more laughable the other chap who used the amazon one) to try and prove there point... because they dont... all they represent a tiny faction of the amount of people who play. there was 40 000 odd playing last night, i dont see numbers anything like them in these polls.


the only truth here is that the forums are full diehard civfanatics who are screaming foul, saying things like worst game ever, it doesnt deserve to be released, each claim even more laughable

i have worship these games for as long as i have been playing computer games, they are my favourites, i see things i dislike about ciV but heaps more i love... because it is different than cIV

As for the lame ideas that all the reviewers have been bought, maybe all you screamers can get together and make a large supply of tinfoil hats to wear when your army invades firaxis sorry conspiracy headquarters??! meanwhile the rest of us ARENT getting sleep or posting because we too busy playing ciV, because even with all its weakness' (not that i can find) trusting firaxis will keep patching and releasing XP packs to extend/improve the vanilla game JUST LIKE THEY DID WITH BOTH CIViii and CIiv and SMAC

 

[falconne]

Seems the detractors here are *very* vocal, though that's unsurprising given the focus of the website. But the large majority here really like the game. For example, the latest thumbs up/down poll has 398 up, 121 meh and 135 down of those who have (ostensibly) played the game. So that's 3 times the number in favor versus the number against - hardly lukewarm support.

However, if Civ V doesn't get patched adequately to remove the more glaring errors...then you'll see lukewarm support.

Yet again someone brings up the one poll that agrees with the defenders' about a "silent majority", except this poll isn't "current". It got the bulk of its votes in the first week of release, after which it didn't get much exposure. Every poll that was voted on consistently since the first week has shown the opposite: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=381961

 

[PieceOfMind]

But I don't think there's anything wrong with high expectations, is there?

That's not for me to say one way or the other. All I wish to do is make as objective a comment as I possibly can.

I've given the advice to not have high expectations, but I don't think either way is inherently good or bad.

A repost of something I've written before:

My advice to anyone who has greatly enjoyed the civ series so far is still to try and not create expectations for the new game of civ5. Treat it as a new and different game if you want to be less likely to be disappointed.

I argued why in a previous post (see next quote) in another thread, but I won't repeat it here as the concept I spoke of is usually poorly understood and then misused (like here). Read only if interested (this poster applied the concept in the intended way, and had a good explanation of it).

2nd September:

I am curious how many of you are familar with the abstract phenomenon of "regression to the mean".

I was wondering why it was that many civ3 players were disappointed with civ4 and preferred civ3, and now with civ5 on the way, inevitably many civ4 players are going to be disappointed with civ5 and prefer civ4. I think the above phenomenon plays a big part in that.

People like myself who were impressed with the game civ4 are simply going to be more likely to be less satisified with civ5 because our satisfaction with civ4 was above normal. Conversely, and maybe it's obvious, but the people who were not impressed with civ4 are more likely to be more satisfied with civ5.

More generally, it goes some way to explain why sequels of great games are often perceived to have failed to satisfy the players of the original to the same level. Of course, it goes with sequels to other things like books and movies etc. Consider that if a game doesn't sell well and is considered to be a flop by its players and producers, it is less likely to receive a sequel and so the regression towards the mean resulting in a better sequel never gets experienced. It's perhaps ironic that the better a game is, the less likely it is that a sequel will live up to expectations.

My advice to anyone who enjoyed civ4 a lot would be that they should do the best they can to treat civ5 as an entirely different game. If you bring expectations over from civ4 or make too many comparisions between civ5 and civ4 when you play civ5, you are more than likely going to be disappointed with civ5. Maybe a slightly depressing thought but statistics pretty much guarantees it... Also consider that probably most of the people preordering civ5 or who buy civ5 quickly after release are doing so because they enjoyed civ4. That could result in a bias in "first reactions" to the game - the most fanatical of fans are the group who are most likely to perceive civ5 as being lesser quality than previous games.

I've been a pretty hardcore PC gamer going waaayyy back to my old Apple II and huge floppies. I've played games I love and games I've hated -- and I've stuck with series that have worked and even given shops a 'pass' on truly awful releases (I'm looking at you, Paradox, for the original Vicky).

Still - Civilization was always at the top of the mountain... I'd sometimes spend months with Hearts of Iron or Out of the Park baseball - but always, always - it was Civilization... whatever the current release happened to be. No other series has blessed/cursed me with so many hours of entertainment.

Heck - as much as I hate (and yeah, I've truly tried to give it a chance - but it's become hate) Civilization V, I wouldn't even dreaming of asking for a refund on the $100 special edition I bought... For one thing, it's buyer beware when it comes to gameplay for me --- but even beyond that, well... I figure on a dollars per entertainment hour basis -- I'm still in the fractions of a cent range.

Still-

Either you're the top of the heap or you're not.

Either you've got the crown, the championship belt - and you strangle it like grim death, utterly refusing to be dethroned, or you're not.

Either you're the standard everyone else gets measured against - or you're just part of the rabble, trying to get noticed.

I think V is inferior - by a fair margin - to IV vanilla... but that's besides the point.

If you're the best, that means you keep getting better -- so I think a fully patched BTS ought to be inferior to vanilla V. I'm not talking about bugs - bugs are to be expected in the modern age, where we've got so many different hardware configurations, different OS's, etc.

If you're not the king anymore, you either abdicate or the masses are going to do it for you.

Right now - to me - this is fair to good title compared to the 4X pool. I think - if it had a decent AI - it's probably somewhere in the GalcivII range, which certainly isn't half bad... even somewhere in the good range.

But - this isn't just another 4X title. It's the latest release of Civilization - the granddaddy and gold-standard of the entire genre. The game that every other pretender gets compared against.

I too have had many memories along the civ series, also starting with civ1 - I know what that passion is. However, I also like to think I can at times remove myself from my fanatical perspective and look upon these things with some degree of skepticism.

Civ4 was in my view an exceptional game, and I don't use that word lightly. If one examines the civfanatics reception of civrev you'll see very mixed reviews, and particularly from the civ4 (or civ1-3 too) players you are more likely to find extreme disappointment. I too was extremely disappointed with civrev because I had expectations for it which were beyond what it even tried to achieve for its target audience, so the disappointment with civ5 that people are expressing is not difficult for me to understand. (by the way, at least I can sell civrev . Stupid Steam )

Think about something you consider to be pretty much perfect, but something which is not completely trivial in its design. Take a car for example. Imagine your perfect car. Now imagine that you own that car (or rent it, whatever). Now imagine that you are required to upgrade to the next year's model of that car. Almost inevitably, some of the things you loved about the former design are going to be changed to something you are less happy with. That is 'regression to mean' in full effect. Similarly, if you had hated a particular design, it's extremely likely that whatever they changed for the next year's model would be improvements in your mind.

Now that doesn't mean you are wrong to think the newer design is worse or that you should not criticise it. It's just stating that when you really love something the way it already is, it's extremely unlikely for any change to it to be considered a good change.

I think some people have this belief that in a franchise of games (e.g. civ series) every new game has to be better than the last. There is nothing wrong with having that expectation, but it will always lead to disappointment somewhere along the line unless the series ends on a high. Whether to set yourself up for that disappointment due to expectations or not is a personal decision.

In my view, games, just look books and movies and every other form of entertainment, do not get more enjoyable just because of the evolution of time. They may get "better" in some sense, because it's hard for a lot of people to enjoy a game 20 years old as much as a game from today (though it certainly can happen, I don't deny!), but overall the enjoyment derived from playing them is similar.

The point I'm getting at is that I think it's good to model our enjoyment of things like games as something which has an "upper limit" as opposed to something which can just keep increasing forever. Once you have experienced/enjoyed what you believe to be the near perfection of a series or genre, it is very difficult for any game, even a very good game, to match that level of enjoyment.

A personal example: I loved the game Perfect Dark on the N64 and I have to this day failed to find a FPS game that has matched it. However, that game by today's standards is not as fun to play anymore, and there are certainly lots of other FPS games that I have played and have considered to be good games.

In laymen's terms, Civ4 did so many things right from my point of view, that almost anything that got changed or removed (or added) was likely to be for the worse.

 

[da_Vinci]

POM, I think you have a valid insight here.

It also points out differences between expansions (which are almost always just additions) and new versions (which have more core changes, removals, along with new stuff). You almost never hear of an expansion making things worse, but there is more risk of that in a new version.

I suppose the choice for design was Civ IV Makeover, or Civ Reinvented, and they went for the latter. Nothing wrong with that in theory. The question is whether in the process, they have removed the "Civ-ness" from the game (think of "chair-ness" ... lots of different looking things can all be seen to be chairs), and thus produced "Civ Removed" instead of "Civ Improved".

One poster's impression that Civ has gone from a game of maximizing reward to a game of minimizing penalties (I forget the thread) may have hit it on the head ... the game feels less like a joy and more like a chore for some after a while. When the best strategy is to do less, to be smaller, to be a kingdom instead of an empire, to fight with platoons instead of armies, to destroy everything in sight because you can't afford to keep it ... it doesn't feel like Civ. Now maybe we are all missing the key strategeis that solve all of these problems, but if not, maybe the game that always had unlimited potential for your empire, is now designed with strict limits. If so, that is not regression to the mean, it is just plain regression.

dV

 

[ohioastronomy]

What's most revealing to me is that defenders of Civ 5 are basically reduced on this forum to arguing that they have legions of silent supporters - rather than making any argument for the quality of the game itself. Civ 4 had high profile defenders showing people cool tricks that you could in the game. Civ 5 is getting dissected, not praised.

Sometimes critics are wrong. But sometimes things that they're criticizing really are bad.

 

[PieceOfMind]

da_Vinci, I can understand your criticisms with the game's design/implementation, but I take issue with the misuse of the 'regression to mean' expression. I know you're trying to make a point, but it erodes the meaning of the statistical argument.

i.e. You say, "that's not regression to mean, it's just plain regression." You have shown a reasonable argument to suggest the game has been subject to a regression. However you've not contradicted nor said anything about the regression to mean concept (in relation to opinions of people, not design directions) so it doesn't make sense to say "that's not regression to mean". Or at least if you are making some statement where you use it correctly, it is a different argument to what I was making.

Regression to mean isn't a statement synonymous with "make it simpler, so it's more average". It's more synomymous with "the more exceptional an observation of some random variable is, the more likely it is that further observations of the same variable would be less exceptional".

I really should just find another name for that theory... surely there'd be one.

 

[ohioastronomy]

That doesn't mean you are wrong to think the newer design is worse or that you should not criticise it. It's just stating that when you really love something the way it already is, it's extremely unlikely for any change to it to be considered a good change.

That is a very real dynamic - excellent point. But I see two core problems with how they did things:

The 5 year time lag set them up for some serious expectations, and that is the heart of the problem they're having. After all of that time the new game, with whatever design, should have been polished on release. I think that they badly need a large public beta (as in, thousands of players) to get that level of initial quality. There are a lot of things which are just plain clunky or rough - including missing conveniences and frills, not even game-play options, from earlier versions. Like the nifty world timeline movies at the end.

I'm actually very sympathetic to the idea of resetting complexity after a series of expansions that added layers of things on the structure. But when you have an existing series you need to understand what people actually like about it. This is a wargame design, and many Civ players don't like the war aspect and never have. You need a viable peaceful path to play the game that many folks like. Part of the draw has always been a sort of pseudo-history simulation. Replacing distinct personalities with civ1, civ2, civ3...; buildings with happy1, happy2, happy3; techs with happytech1, happytech2, happytech3...this drains the game of that layer. Some folks like sprawling empires, others quick and little ones. A successful release would have had something for everyone, in the sense that the groups above could all enjoy it in their own way. But it didn't.

I think the designers should be judged very harshly on this last point. They should have asked people "what makes civ fun for you?" and worked hard to keep that spirit, regardless of the mechanics that they used to get there. Instead they designed the game that they liked and made only token gestures towards the many other games that Civ is.

 

[BobeBrown]

lol. I cant remember reading a bad review on a new game release. They are all in sync together and write biased reviews.

Im so disappointed by CIV5 ive taken to bashing on forums to release anger haha.

 

[Jediron]

I would love CIV 5, but only when the game-balance is done right. I never witnessed that much unbalancing issues in older CIV's. And that's what killing me most.

 

[PieceOfMind]

That is a very real dynamic - excellent point. But I see two core problems with how they did things:

The 5 year time lag set them up for some serious expectations, and that is the heart of the problem they're having. After all of that time the new game, with whatever design, should have been polished on release. I think that they badly need a large public beta (as in, thousands of players) to get that level of initial quality. There are a lot of things which are just plain clunky or rough - including missing conveniences and frills, not even game-play options, from earlier versions. Like the nifty world timeline movies at the end.

I'm actually very sympathetic to the idea of resetting complexity after a series of expansions that added layers of things on the structure. But when you have an existing series you need to understand what people actually like about it. This is a wargame design, and many Civ players don't like the war aspect and never have. You need a viable peaceful path to play the game that many folks like. Part of the draw has always been a sort of pseudo-history simulation. Replacing distinct personalities with civ1, civ2, civ3...; buildings with happy1, happy2, happy3; techs with happytech1, happytech2, happytech3...this drains the game of that layer. Some folks like sprawling empires, others quick and little ones. A successful release would have had something for everyone, in the sense that the groups above could all enjoy it in their own way. But it didn't.

I think the designers should be judged very harshly on this last point. They should have asked people "what makes civ fun for you?" and worked hard to keep that spirit, regardless of the mechanics that they used to get there. Instead they designed the game that they liked and made only token gestures towards the many other games that Civ is.

It may surprise you, but actually I suspect Firaxis did ask the player base what they wanted and took feedback in that way. For example, (and I'm not trying to say this was a good idea - probably a bad move actually) but Firaxis have been collecting feedback from fans on their facebook page.
I think I remember them acknowledging that culture was a part of the game where people wanted to see more depth. People probably also suggested making tech prerequisites less complicated too. That is, now all techs only have AND type prereqs - never OR ones anymore. And every tech prereq is indicated by an arrow now, and the tech tree is much easier to "read". Again I will just say that's not necessarily a good design to have taken, but it probably was in response to player feedback about the game.

 

[vincentz]

In laymen's terms, Civ4 did so many things right from my point of view, that almost anything that got changed or removed (or added) was likely to be for the worse.

Civ 4 did a lot of stuff right. So why not expand on that. Make it bigger and better.
To say that there wasnt anymore to add I'll just post a quick list of my favorites that was added to Civ 4 by modders :

Revolutions
Religions +++
Corporations +++
Inquisitions
Start as Minor civ
Tons of graphics for new units/buildings/etc
Multible production /turn/city
Culturally linked starts
Techdiffusion
Expanded tech tree
3 radius cities
Tunnels (are there bridges in civ5?)
Flexible difficulty
Archer bombard
Ranged bombard (and all the other Dale Combat mods)
Better AI
Better UI (BUG)
Advanced diplomacies
Advanced scoreboard

the list could go on, and I propably missed some of the big ones, plus I don't even mention my own contributions

I think a lot of people was hoping for something close to this with multicore support, nice graphics and a better AI (coz lets face it, it wasn't very good in civ 4 either.)

 

[SuperJay]

One poster's impression that Civ has gone from a game of maximizing reward to a game of minimizing penalties (I forget the thread) may have hit it on the head ... the game feels less like a joy and more like a chore for some after a while. When the best strategy is to do less, to be smaller, to be a kingdom instead of an empire, to fight with platoons instead of armies, to destroy everything in sight because you can't afford to keep it ... it doesn't feel like Civ. Now maybe we are all missing the key strategeis that solve all of these problems, but if not, maybe the game that always had unlimited potential for your empire, is now designed with strict limits.

Well said. Beyond the concrete problems I have with the game (bad combat AI, random diplomacy, shallow systems), this "limit the player" design is a big part of the dissatisfaction. Especially when the mechanisms used to limit us are so heavy-handed and simple. I think patches can help things like AI and diplomacy, but these simplified mechanics may have to wait for an expansion. Cross your fingers

 

[Disgustipated]

That is a very real dynamic - excellent point. But I see two core problems with how they did things:

The 5 year time lag set them up for some serious expectations, and that is the heart of the problem they're having. After all of that time the new game, with whatever design, should have been polished on release. I think that they badly need a large public beta (as in, thousands of players) to get that level of initial quality. There are a lot of things which are just plain clunky or rough - including missing conveniences and frills, not even game-play options, from earlier versions. Like the nifty world timeline movies at the end.

I'm actually very sympathetic to the idea of resetting complexity after a series of expansions that added layers of things on the structure. But when you have an existing series you need to understand what people actually like about it. This is a wargame design, and many Civ players don't like the war aspect and never have. You need a viable peaceful path to play the game that many folks like. Part of the draw has always been a sort of pseudo-history simulation. Replacing distinct personalities with civ1, civ2, civ3...; buildings with happy1, happy2, happy3; techs with happytech1, happytech2, happytech3...this drains the game of that layer. Some folks like sprawling empires, others quick and little ones. A successful release would have had something for everyone, in the sense that the groups above could all enjoy it in their own way. But it didn't.

I think the designers should be judged very harshly on this last point. They should have asked people "what makes civ fun for you?" and worked hard to keep that spirit, regardless of the mechanics that they used to get there. Instead they designed the game that they liked and made only token gestures towards the many other games that Civ is.

Your post sums it up nicely. I don't have much problem either with them saving stuff to add in expansions. But as you said the design decisions of the core game are just wrong and just plain boring.

And I'm one who likes a sprawling empire. Why build a game that focuses on war and then penalize them so much for going to war to build a sprawling empire?

I am a huge fan of big empires. I'm not the best at min/maxing so I make up for my lack of micromanagement by being bigger than the ai. I either do this with peaceful expansion, or if I lack the room, war. So I enjoy both peaceful building and war in Civ games. Civ5 doesn't appear to do any of these right.

 

[lschnarch]

List of polls:

1) http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=94311

2) http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=382765

3) http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=381961

4) http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=390297

(added numbers for reference)

All numbers as of the moment of typing and rounded.

Poll 1) Do you think Civilization V has been dumbed down, in comparison to Civ4 Vanilla?
50% yes
43% no
07% too early to tell or fence sitter
Total voters: 136

Poll 2) Civ 5: Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down?
58% thumbs up
19% meh
23% thumbs down
Total voters: 742

Poll 3) Who else agrees that Civ 5 has been dumbed down?
50% yes
41% no
09% undecided
total voters: 1632

Poll 4) Does Civ 5 need to be "smartened up"?
03% no, love it like it is
66% yes, fix basic functions
88% yes, give it a brain
40% yes, bring back the good stuff
total voters: 232

Now, what can we learn from these results?

a) 58% thumbs up is a clear message.
The majority of voters in that poll thinks that CivV is a good game

b) 50% thinking that the game was dumped down is another clear message
50% in comparison to 41%/43% think that CivV has been dumped down in relation to Civ4

c) The third clear message: CivV is lacking
66% demanding fixes (which is astonishingly low, as I think for a game short after release), but 88% demand better AI. 40% are missing "stuff". Just 03% like it as it is

The interpretation of the results:
58% giving a thumbs up looks good at first glance. This cannot be denied.
Yet, as we are talking about an entertainment product, of which people expect to have a good time with, it does not look that good anymore.

Half of the people think that CivV was dumped down (in relation to Civ4/Civ4BtS, as I interprete).
In combination with the 88% calling for a better AI (and AI was one of the main advertised functions pre-release) and 40% asking for re-implementation of previous functionalities/components, it becomes clear that CivV has missed expectations.

Furthermore, we have to take into consideration that CivV is a sequel. The path was already prepared, experiences from the past were easily available.
Popular mods (for Civ3 and Civ4) are available and could have been looked at.

Actually, I would say that only few companies would have the chance to learn in such a detailed way what their customers expect/want/like/accept/tolerate than Firaxis.

Taking this into account, one has to clearly state that 58% of "thumbs up" no longer is overwhelming in any way.
My personal interpretation is that for an entertainment product this is devastating, but others may come to other conclusions.

Furthermore, it seems like the old "followers" have the lower acceptance rate, which is another thing to think about, especially for a niche product.
Obviously, the market for TBS 4X games is not that big. Alienating old followers is very, very risky.

In laymen's terms, Civ4 did so many things right from my point of view, that almost anything that got changed or removed (or added) was likely to be for the worse.

(emphasis mine)

Look at your words.
A game which almost completely changes the way in which the precessor was played runs high risk to fail.

As I have stated already in some other threads, Firaxis would have been well advised if they would have released the game under a different name.
Except for things like technical bug, some balancing and the poor AI (still one of the main advertised things) many complaints would have been spared.

In total, to bring a long posting to its end, Firaxis scre**** up.

Wrong business decision (branding), wrong design (alienation) and wrong technical realization (AI).

there was 40 000 odd playing last night, i dont see numbers anything like them in these polls.

One of those has been me, since I started the game, did 3 turns, became bored and then went to here to read.
Actually, the game is running again in the background, adding to the number of players and adding to my total playtime, but I prefer to stay here.

meanwhile the rest of us ARENT getting sleep or posting because we too busy playing ciV,

(emphasis mine)
As you have done?

I am a huge fan of big empires. I'm not the best at min/maxing so I make up for my lack of micromanagement by being bigger than the ai. I either do this with peaceful expansion, or if I lack the room, war. So I enjoy both peaceful building and war in Civ games. Civ5 doesn't appear to do any of these right.

This.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Look at your words.

Why? Do you think I don't understand what I am writing?

 

[lschnarch]

Why? Do you think I don't understand what I am writing?

No, but I see a mismatch between the words which I have emphasized and what I read out of this statement of yours:

I think some people have this belief that in a franchise of games (e.g. civ series) every new game has to be better than the last. There is nothing wrong with having that expectation, but it will always lead to disappointment somewhere along the line unless the series ends on a high. Whether to set yourself up for that disappointment due to expectations or not is a personal decision.

I think it is very valid for anybody to have the expectation that a sequel get's better.
What other reasons would I as a customer have to buy said sequel?

But as you have phrased it, it sounds very much like "if you had hopes for the better, it's just your fault. Don't expect such a thing"

 

[JLoZeppeli]

Pieceofmind excuse me, i had no problem to pass from Civ 1 to Civ 4, and i also loved SMAC and Call to Power, they are all different games.. It's the first time that i don't like much a CIV game (also i don't like Revolution, but i played it only for short time).

And it isn't about changes, i have no problems with the disappear of sliders, the hexes, the limited resources... The problem is that i think bad of some design choices...

I think that some features are totally not well implemented, and some are out of context in many ways... By poor design and, maybe, lack of time to test their usefullness for the game...

So it is not about the change, but if the change was good or not. I think it is not, in some features, that's all.

 

[PieceOfMind]

No, but I see a mismatch between the words which I have emphasized and what I read out of this statement of yours:


I think it is very valid for anybody to have the expectation that a sequel get's better.
What other reasons would I as a customer have to buy said sequel?

But as you have phrased it, it sounds very much like "if you had hopes for the better, it's just your fault. Don't expect such a thing"

It looks like you are missing the point of my post. You picked out that quote at the end of my post, but do you know what position I was advancing in the rest of that (rather large) post?

In the context of the argument I was making, when I say

In laymen's terms, Civ4 did so many things right from my point of view, that almost anything that got changed or removed (or added) was likely to be for the worse.

I am saying that I am prejudiced by my experience with civ4 when judging whether civ5 is a disappointment (in comparison) or not. In my view, civ5 is, or will be, a good game in its own right. However when compared with civ4, there may be some sense of disappointment.

This is exactly the point I was making in my post, so I fail to see how I am contradicting myself.

 

[zonk]

It may surprise you, but actually I suspect Firaxis did ask the player base what they wanted and took feedback in that way. For example, (and I'm not trying to say this was a good idea - probably a bad move actually) but Firaxis have been collecting feedback from fans on their facebook page.
I think I remember them acknowledging that culture was a part of the game where people wanted to see more depth. People probably also suggested making tech prerequisites less complicated too. That is, now all techs only have AND type prereqs - never OR ones anymore. And every tech prereq is indicated by an arrow now, and the tech tree is much easier to "read". Again I will just say that's not necessarily a good design to have taken, but it probably was in response to player feedback about the game.

Heh - I think I could agree with a general "every player is an idiot but me" (and everyone replace 'me' as in 'me, zonk' with 'you' as in you.. you know what I mean ) -- I'd agree.

As I've said, I do a bit of this type of stuff myself -- though for professional software rather than games, but I think the concept is similar...

One should always solicit feedback, but one should NEVER rotely incorporate it. Our 'good' marketing and product managers understand the value of not just taking surveys and concatenating feedback, but exploring that feedback -- often, with developers -- and moving beyond the "I don't like this" and "I want that".

I'll give you an example -- our previous research platform wasn't at all google-like... We didn't provide a global search option, but this was actually somewhat by design. Though we serve niche markets (CPAs, attorneys, etc) -- we still publish an absolutely enormous amount of content (25 million docs). Forcing users into a select-corpus-first-then-search paradigm wasn't because our engine wasn't powerful enough to quickly search that number of docs -- it was -- it was because we also had logs of what searches were conducted.... and we knew that users were searching for general terms like 'taxes', and to a lesser degree, specific terms like 'excise taxes'... but - even if using the more defined terms, the results were unwieldly... too numerous to be all that useful, even with significant relevancy ranking mechanisms and filters.

Yet - sure enough - what our product managers and marketing presented in requirements for the next iteration was "make it like google".... done and done... and just as anticipated, the complaints rolled in about search results being too numerous. We had provided a wide array of results filtering options -- document types, topical arrangement, date delimitation, etc -- but that didn't matter... The very same people complaining about NOT having the default be a google-like, all-encompassing interface were now complaining because we were TOO google-like.

The answer in our case - a lesson we tried to teach before implementation, but didn't really have success driving home until live - was that it wasn't necessarily the lack of a global search that was drawing complaints... it was more annoyance that clicked selection sometimes didn't stick or infrequent users would get ticked by "please select a content set to search" pop-ups. In other words -- it was more a UI issue than it was an inherent search issue.

That analysis of wants/feedback - that deep-dive into exploring that perhaps the complaint wasn't really what it seemed - appears to have been sorely missing here, to me especially for the non-warfare aspects (honestly, the focus for V development really seems heavily slanted towards pleasing the warmongers -- who solely wanted easier tech pathing to unit types, who were annoyed with worker and city management, and who above all else -- wanted challenging strategic warfare instead the 'challenge' being ever-larger AI stacks).

Which I guess leads me to....

Think about something you consider to be pretty much perfect, but something which is not completely trivial in its design. Take a car for example. Imagine your perfect car. Now imagine that you own that car (or rent it, whatever). Now imagine that you are required to upgrade to the next year's model of that car. Almost inevitably, some of the things you loved about the former design are going to be changed to something you are less happy with. That is 'regression to mean' in full effect. Similarly, if you had hated a particular design, it's extremely likely that whatever they changed for the next year's model would be improvements in your mind.

I guess I feel like the problem is that they didn't give me a new model car that might take getting used to or might even not having the options and styling I liked in the previous model -- they gave me a truck... and they said "we now build only trucks".

As I alluded above, I primarily play a peaceful civ game - I certainly want warfare (and aspects of warfare via diplomacy, etc) to play a part... I always played Civilization - but never got into Sim City - because warfare should be a part of the game... even a key part... I would even accept everything up to a plurality part.

Civ V now seems heavily weighted towards pleasing the warmongers. If they can fix the AI, it might well be a very satisfying hex-based military game. I certainly have and enjoy many such titles -- but that was never why I played Civilization.

Maybe I should have seen the warning signs -- Jon's many comments on Panzer General, etc vs. the obvious fact that IV/BTS looked closely at certain Paradox game aspects (events, leaders, etc).

Maybe I'm in the minority - perhaps the majority of Civ players really just wanted a wargame with deeper cultural, production, and tech aspects than most such titles (if not all... it's not AoE... yet).

As I've said before - and I still haven't been able to track down if it was Sid or Soren from a previous edition or IV - the response to "spearman beats tank" complaints or axeman rush complaints still ring true to me.... "Civilization is not supposed to be a wargame".

I'd really be interested to know if the current Civ team agrees with that -- and if they do agree with that, or say that they do - then I really think they need to take a step back and ask themselves where most of the design, architectural, and development work went... was the majority of those efforts spent on the warfare aspect? If so - then I would say they weren't true to that maxim. What do they think the current needs of the title are... if the answer is fixing the AI to more logically position, deploy, and move its units -- they aren't being true to that maxim.

For the peaceful player, for the builder -- it really feels like they spent a minimal amount of time on the non-war aspects... toss in 3 buildings that have resource dependencies, slap together a different cultural VC, but then spend most of the thinking on how to limit unit bloat, how to present a strategic map that wasn't stack filled, etc.

 

[PieceOfMind]

Pieceofmind excuse me, i had no problem to pass from Civ 1 to Civ 4, and i also loved SMAC and Call to Power, they are all different games.. It's the first time that i don't like much a CIV game (also i don't like Revolution, but i played it only for short time).

And it isn't about changes, i have no problems with the disappear of sliders, the hexes, the limited resources... The problem is that i think bad of some design choices...

I think that some features are totally not well implemented, and some are out of context in many ways... By poor design and, maybe, lack of time to test their usefullness for the game...

So it is not about the change, but if the change was good or not. I think it is not, in some features, that's all.

I can understand that. And I'm pretty sure I haven't made any argument that attempts to counter what you just said. In fact it agrees with what I have been writing in the last few posts of this thread.

For example, if I make the statement "Civ 4 players are the most likely group to be disappointed with civ5", note that I am not saying they don't have good reason to feel that way. I am only making the observation/prediction that they are the most likely group to feel that way. Nothing more. And design decisions are definitely one of the many things that could cause the disappointment I refer to.