Given the issues with QA, I have a suggestion...

No. What you advocate is basically the outsourcing of QA to the customer base or to be more specific that part of the customer base that is willing to do anything to have the product/patch a little bit earlier than otherwise.

And while this may be a win/win situation for this group (gets to play earlier) and the company (saving money) it will most likely be a big loss for the overall customer base ... and if other companies or even industries would also switch to something like this - and just thinking about it makes me sick - society in general. Why? Because it sets very very negative incentives for the companies in the long run. They could basically throw out any product to the market untested ... or barely so, hoping for their devoted fanbase to right things out. And that's not a market in which I would want to be a customer in.

Companies are responsible for the products they releae. At all times. So don't give them - even if it a nice company like Stardock - an opportunity to shrink on this responsibility. QA is their job, not ours.

Principiis obsta! ... as it was said in ancient Rome. Resist the beginnings. And your idea is a very bad beginning.

Just another thought.

Rabenhoff

This is not an MMO, so there is no benefit to a public beta of patches as there is no "permanent" impact by simply implementing changes live and changing them later if it is necessary.  If there is anything game-breaking, they simply hot patch it in a timely fashion, which they have already done twice now.

It's simply an unnecessary layer that would add more for their employees to monitor, thus adding to their workload.

Everything seems to be working just fine as is.

Without being overly philosophical and theorising about the whole industry and life in general, that is a great idea and the way stardock should go.  In fact I thought it was the way they operated until they strangely claimed this product was "released"...

Early beta testers take their chances and the responsibility that comes with using an early product.  And you know what?  That's fair to these people who take the risks and reap the benefits.  What's far more unfair is when the product is released to "all" as "non-Beta" and is clearly still a beta (or alpha) build with serious stability issues - that simply shows that the beta testers were either not listened to when it comes to application stablity or too much pressure to release something that wasn't ready for "mainstream" customers...

So go ahead, give the option for release 1.09B (or whatever) to whoever is willing to take the risk, with the option to rollback.  If there are some crashes, that's fair.  Beta testers take the risk.  The only difference this time is pay attention to stability feedback and fix most of these issues before it's "released" to the general public.  And pay special attention when people using the latest hardware, latest O/S's, latest drivers have more crashes than people using older OS/drivers/hardware, cause that means something is wrong with internal QA as well...

The poblem wasnt testing. The crashing was known about, problem was they decided to release anyway. Apparently they considered a buggy program ready for release, or so they say.

Well, reality is reality and we've already bought this game, so we have a few options.

1. Help make Elemental the game we all wanted it to be.

II. Sit back and wait for Elemental to become the game we all wanted it to be.

C. Walk away and never look back.

On the one hand, yes, QA is their job not ours.  On the other hand, these are computers.  There are billions of permutations that they cannot account for so there are many issues that simply will not crop up until public release.  That, again, is the reality of the situation.

In a perfect world, they'd be able to squash every bug in a timely fashion.  But this isn't a perfect world and games are not 1mb easy to debug entities anymore.

[edit] And, to be completely honest, this isn't really any different than them releasing the patch public and then finding out it broke something.  This just adds a safety blanket between them and the general public so that people don't go ballistic about patches that break stuff.

I sincerely hope I don't lock this thread, I'm simply speaking the truth, which it turns out, people often don't like hearing. Anyway, I am always shocked when people start making excuses when someone doesn't do their job correctly.

Just look at any modern game released on the consoles, they work fine for the most part, sure they ALL have a few bugs but I honestly hardly ever see them, if they are there they are usually very minor and don't distract from the game. They also work.

You have two issues with Elemental here:

1. Crashes, stability and various hardware configuration issues. This is legitimate, PC software has to deal with this and it's a total pain in the ass, BUT Stardock built Kumquat, a brand new game engine and they set the bar very high to support very low end machines and very high end machines and that means: a whole lot of hardware configurations, but they clearly did not test it on all those hardware configurations, they bit off more than they could chew here it sounds like to me. So you get all the stability issues and crashes etc.

2. The game wasn't balanced and frankly while its much better it still isn't where it should be. This is where testing or QA or whatever you call it completely failed, I personally question if it was ever there considering where the game was a mere 2 weeks ago and before that. There are lots of ways to test as well, you don't always need people, you can also just automate things like tactical combat, so that it literally does run billions of tests against all sorts of unit combination and create some measurements to see where things were grossly off the charts and unbalanced, so you could then go fix them, this, from what I could tell, probably never happened.

The console argument is true with hardware, its standardized, it's easier to support because of that. However you STILL have to test the game out and make sure balance issues are worked out and ensure the thing properly explains how things work and make sure the book matches up with the game. Please, don't make excuses for why they didn't do what they should have done. I believe they have at least admitted to the issues but making excuses for why it went this way is just the wrong way to go.

Its not like all these crash problems suddenly appeared after release. They were well known before release which you would be able to see if the beta forum was still available. Stardock decided to release anyway, fully aware of the crashing, dx9 and out of memory errors.

*That* is the reality of the situation.

FYI, most companies already have external QA test groups to go with their internal QA team.  I've been in some myself, mostly not fun.  Unlike Stardock's open beta process, when most companies start up an external test group on a game(as opposed to the pr betas which are minor polish and mostly advertising after such QA teams have already had a crack at it) they're under NDA, so you never hear about it.

I was held under the NDA I signed for beta testing Warlords: Battlecry 3(don't blame me for the balance, I bitched, profusely:() when they hit me up for QA and market research for Enlight.  I got to play a rather colorful rpg called Scrapland a couple months before it was released, found lots and lots of defects, and gave suggestions and opinions on the various mechanics.  A wonderful experience really, alpha testing Zoo Empire on the other hand... I still have nightmares!

You'd never hear about it at the time though, just disclosing that I had the game would have been a very big no no, potentially ending with my ass in court were they feeling litigious.  Only after product release would I be allowed to disclose anything.  QA is rarely just a group of on site employees, and they're almost never allowed to talk about it.  Idiots repeating word of mouth on a product that gets changed in the interim can cause rather severe damage to a products sales, so they try to keep a lid on such things.

I love how people still line up to to defend SD as they continue to shovel shit out their door as quickly as possible. 

Jharii--no harm done by releasing patches that break the game even more?  You're encouraging developers and publishers to continue this trend of releasing broken products with a path-it-later philosophy.  They've completely lost any credibility with me at this point.  I'm even starting to think that GCII's quality was simply an accident.

I love how people always line up to point out the "error of our ways". We like the core of the game, we see the huge potential, and we want to see it improved. Both the community and Stardock reached out to each other, so we're trying to make the most out of it.

This is the state the game is in and people care about it enough to have it changed for the better. What better way to do so than to utilize the community. It's not like we're doing it for free - we're promised two expansions for free. In purely economic terms, it is a risk for both sides - Stardock wants the game to succeed, so it's taking a risk with further investment into the game taking the player input into account, hoping to recoup on lost sales and trust later. We are sticking with our investment because of the potential of this product becoming what we want, and being rewarded with more gaming goodness for it. Both sides have to make a leap of faith.

Although I really think this whole issue has a much more human face and it would help things tremendously if people stopped dragging pure economics into the equation. If Brad is indeed a hardcore capitalist, he is the most honest/kindest one in the world.

I am sorry this is economically and, perhaps more importantly - humanely - irrational to you.

We were promised two expansions for our initial purchase? I thought it was just one. Nothing is free, the least being our time.

Honesty and kindness would have resulted in a refund for anyone who asked considering the early state of affairs. It's laughable you call anything honest and kind.

Those who are complaining about the game already own it. Hence they own it prior to v1.1. Therefore, according to Brad, they will receive the second expansion for free.

If you actually read Stardock's policy, you can request a refund within the first 90 (I believe, lazy to search for it) days after purchase.

Finally, if your time is all that valuable, why vaste it here?

Yes, we should all put faith in these magical patches, because the ones we have seen so far have been such winners.

As much as I would also like the QA improved like the OP, I strongly concur with Rabenhoff on this subject.  Paying customers should never be treated like QA or expected to find and report bugs.  If SD wants to try something like proposed then they need to find willing Beta Testers who are not required to purchase the game.  I'd rather wait but I also have a higher quality bar to be met or higher expectation for being a paying customer.

I have read other posts about people shelving this game for a month or two and I'm starting to think that might be a sound idea.  As much as I really want to play it some of the rebalancing is not making any sense and there is no forth-comming explanation as far as I have looked for one and asked for one.  I was a fan and now I am on the fence...

This thread is about post-release patches however. Anyone participarting already bought the game, so talking about how beta testers are required to buy the game is off - they already have bought it. The idea was not to treat paying customers like QA, the idea was to give some of the paying customers the opportunity to become part of the QA process for future patches if and only if they themselves wish to be part of it. This is not about them being expected to find bugs, this is about them wanting to find bugs.

That is not the reality of the situation.  They were not fully aware of the crashing.  Stop dredging up old crap and then spinning it falsely.

Leave, then.  Your trolling is growing tiresome.  You've been beating the same drum for two weeks, even though Stardock is working very hard on improving the game.  And you obviously have no concept of what it takes to troubleshoot and patch software, and that adding a beta layer is completely unnecessary for a computer game with no persistency mechanic.