You asked for a refund and then bought the game again? Do you have some hidden pleasure in contradicting yourself?

I'm pretty sure that's exactly what happened.

I'm also pretty sure I'm being sarcastic.

Ironically, Neverwinter Nights was originally going to be released as a set of mod tools only, but Bioware reasonably feared that it wouldn't sell without some sort of campaign, so the single player game was basically thrown together at the last minute using the mod tools they had developed.

All i want just a polished version of Elemental and not another Civ clone .

again +1

"Oh noez he ruined ma Civvi now he will ruin ma Elemental!"

I never played Civ V as I didn't like the reviews it received.  I waited until 1.1 of Elemental was released before purchasing.

All of this garbage about Elemental being tainted by Jon is nonsense.  I'll take a seasoned designer any day to work on my projects.  Has he made some mistakes in the past, surely, but haven't we all.  Any competent person LEARNS from their mistakes which makes their future projects that much better.  As I have stated in other posts, I will wait to see what Brad and company produce before making a judgment. 

I would be remiss if I didn't point out my number one peeves, the CTD and OOM anomalies.  If that could be addressed in the next release, this customer and I think others, would be happier.

Oh yeah...and the reviews gave it a 9/10, too.  It must be true!

  Brad has really a lot of courage to hold all the knocks he got up to now... Let's just see how things will devellop before crying to a disaster. We don't know all the soup that was behind Civ 5 so maybe this guy has something with the Civ5 mediocrity or maybe not... Let's just see what he will do now and here. When we shall see the results... Then we can complain... Or not.

Brads original post has more right in it than wrong but the one thing I will say is that it's a complete falsity that people with ideas are rare. Ideas are a dime a dozen, the difficult part is finding something that your publisher wants to publish.

I mean as a games programming student I've heard atleast 50 well developed ideas this year that would make absolutely fantastic games, which I would buy. But innovation is often left to the side lines in favor of the safe approach that's almost garunteed not to flop.

As for hiring the ex-lead designer of Civ V it's a better idea than it looks. Civ V if nothing else tried to bring change and innovation to the Civ franchise, it failed but failing is part of the process.

And be honest, was it a case of bad ideas or was it more a case of good ideas executed in a poor way?

The idea that it failed is opinion, what is your data to support this?  Sales?  Reviews?  What?  How is it a failure?  I don't accept that as fact, and I am impartial, I have never even played the game. 

I agree with the first statement, I disagree with the second. I know that popularity and quality are two different games (so a game isn't bad just because it didn't sell well), but you don't need knowledge about the gaming industry to judge the quality of a game: you need other qualities and knowledge, like being able to dissect and analyze gaming mechanics and the purpose behind them, and an understanding of mathematics/game theory/statistics and probabilities.

Quoting FrogBoss:

Well if you've been a customer a long time then consider this:

If you listen to the Internet buzz, I'm a moron who couldn't design a game to save his life. Elemental being crummy at launch was due to my incompotetence. I ruined it. That's the Internet buzz.  Do believe that?

Nope it was due to insomnipotence, or was it nincompoopotence.. he he.

And the poop did hit the fan at Elementals release, but thats past tense.

The present, and future, looks potenceially bright, with hirings of well known names.

Quoting ne_javarz

I prefer the gamer reviews over journalists .

Recently saw a new game review at GameSpot, “Super Meat Boy”, Game Reviewer score 90+, users score 63, and the game did look (visually at least) like an average game.