IceBerg, I didn't say there are no bugs. I said the game isn't "buggy".  No game is bug free.  See the 1.01 feature list, it lists some of the bugs we found.

Maverick: I'm not sure about the CD.  You don't have a CD-ROM drive?

IceBerg1: If you truly read the forums, you would also realize that the "bug" that Maverick and others are running into has nothing to do with the game. It sounds like the copy protection which we have nothing to do with.

Other than the campaign bug, I don't know of any significant bugs that were in the game.  Feel free to list the "bugs" you found. But SafeDisc or whatever not liking some people's CD ROM drives is not our fault. If we had our way, there'd be no copy protection at all (my feelings on CD protection are well known - do a google search on "CD Copy protection Stardock"). 

We're looking through the forums on a daily basis and there aren't that many problems being reported.  That doesn't mean we're not seeing any reports.  And 1.01 is already out which resolves most of the things we have seen.

But Icerberg, make no mistake, if people are going to start abusing us, we'll just turn off the forum and send you guys over to Ubi Soft and let them deal with it. Right now, you're talking to the development team directly. We're not support techs here. We're trying to help.

The game's already been reviewed by Time Magazine, CNN, Gamespot and Wired and guess what? The game worked fine for them. And I talked to each of them and none of them mentioned any problems.  Does that make the game bug free? Of course not, but it does mean that for the average person who buys the game, odds are they won't run into any problems.

All games have problems. To this day, I cannot play Rise of Nations multiplayer. And I even bought the expansion and I still can't reliably play mulitplayer on it (it hangs or crashes midway through for at least one of us playing). Does that make RON buggy? No. It just means that for me, I am running into a particular problem.

So instead of sitting there going from post to post yelling to the world how crappy our game is, let us try to help. Anyone who's dealt with Stardock over a period of time knows we're very honest. And if you have Galactic Civilizations, you should know that. And btw, there were people who couldnt' get GalCiv to run out of the box too. There are ALWAYS people who can't get a game to run out of the box. Our job is to try to help those people. And that's what we're doing.

Maverick: Email me at bwardell@stardock.com and I'll if I can help you.

Well you do make a good case for not including multiplayer in the base game since the things you just mentioned are issues in multiplayer. But are they bugs? Well, it's hard to say because they don't necessarily always happen.  It's how robust the lag handling is.  In 1.0, we tested the game mostly on the LAN and it worked fine.  We also played against some people who weren't on the LAN and it worked fine. 

But then when the game gets out there, and people start playing it behind firewalls and routers and with different latencies, things that didn't crop us when we played showed up. And all we can do is try to make it more robust. That's how you end up with the things you described. 

But this is also one reason why I am not a big fan of making multiplayer games. I bet 99% of the people who buy the game will never even try to play the game on-line.  And yet, that 1% is a) going to require half the QA time and Those who have problems with MP are going to be the most likely to complain on the forums.

GalCiv, after all, had no multiplayer.  And GalCiv 2 won't either.  Most games have multiplayer issues for the reasons I described. I can't think of a single PC game that's come out that hasn't needed updates to deal with multiplayer problems and TPM is no exception.  There is no magic bullet.

woot - it would help us if you and anyone else running into this would report it to Ubisoft.  Ubisoft knows our position on Safedisc already.

And to be sure, we don't know for sure that it is safedisc. I've not heard back from any of the testers who have had the problem you describe to see if our proposed solution works.

Maverick's issue is a bit different, his was caused by the safedisc stuff I believe.

Yours sounds like video card issue.  I'd contact support@ubisoft.com, they'll be in a better position to help you.

And how would you imagine we "fix" it? Safe Disc is applied to an EXE -after- we send them the file.  It has nothing to do with us. All we can do is try to get Ubi Soft to allow us to provide users who run into this problem with a version that doesn't require Safedisc. And to do that, the issue must be seen to be a problem. It would be like blaming us because you had a bad experience in the checkout aisle.

John, let's try to keep things civil, please.

Wootonius:  I haven't received email from you (I put up my email address a couple of times) to see if you were interested in testing a fix.  So do you want to try a fix or do you want to just complain and say how awful we are?

Thanks for your kind words.  Feel free to email me at bwardell@stardock.com.  I'm going to a wedding tomorrow but I'll try to check my email on the road.

On your display issue, try running it as follows: c:\>polmachine w (from the directory it's in) with your desktop display running in 16bit color.  Hopefully that'll do it.  I assume you have 1.01 installed?