A lot of the game breaking AI bugs in the game could have been fixed much earlier with better testers more willing to try and break the game mechanics.  

My general take is that the point of beta testing is to make sure everything works.  In that respect, beta testing was a success.  The number of "my game won't work" bugs is very low.  The problem though is that the beta testing barely touched on fixing game mechanics.  As a result there are now some MAJOR imbalances in the game like unstoppable carriers, infinite move fleets, colony spamming, and blatant and exploitative AI diplomacy manipulation.  The existence of these mechanics issues is EVIDENCE of my claim that beta testers didn't try very hard to break the games' mechanics.  

Which is fine, because that's what we're here for.  

I'm a founder, i signed up before the Alpha or beta test even came out. I did not take part in the Alpha or beta tests though for the simple reason the forum was overrun with some nasty narcissistic fanboy (tongues shoved right up the DEV arse) jerks. Not everyone falls in to that category but there were some very focal unpleasant people on the forum back then. If you didn't want galciv2 remade exactly the same but with 64 bit engine and slightly better graphics you were in for it of some people. 

Now I'm not bothered in the slightest that i didn't get to take part in the Alpha or Beta test. As to be blatantly honest all games now are shipped pretty much in a beta state and companies just patch the living daylights out of the game after it's release, that's just how the gaming world works now. Stardock though have committed themselves to IIRC a 7 years development cycle of galciv3. They're going to be bring out patches, DLC, Expansions all over the next 7 years. So now imo is going to be the most important time to give your input to the devs.  

Mari,

I have read some of your posts. For the most part the tone and how you construct them make me want to scroll past. However, I will take the time to mention a few things.

There is a reason why the diplomacy screen is the way it is and how it has evolved.

In Civ 5 they had diplomacy. For YEARS folks were complaining that the games diplomacy sucked because there is NOT enough information for a player to understand how things are going. This is a game Mari, not real world. The player needs to know who likes him and who does not in order to have FUN. Eventually Civ 5 after 3 expansions finally got the diplomacy right. It is fun to interact with an AI and fun to have one as your ally only to go back and invade later game. 

In reference to some of your OTHER posts I will state that the Developers can make a game that beats you. Its not hard at all. They can give you a diplomo screen where you know nothing and the AI lies to you. They can also make it so that EVERY ai finds you and without handicaps goes strait to your home planet and invades you, game over. The reason games are not like this is, it is not fun. Your ideas sound like the impossible setting on Xcom which is tedious and NOT fun.

You have posted here dozens of times over and over about how YOU feel the game should be. This is fine but you certainly do not speak for me and I suspect for dozens if not 100's of others who also play the game.

Plenty of folks were in Alpha and Beta breaking the game. Our job was to play it, find bugs and see how we can improve the fun factor. Some of your statements are mean and false and do a disservice to those of us who spent time to send in crash reports and exploits during the last year of Alpha and Beta. You could use a bit of diplomacy yourself but that is another topic.

Sure there are ways to beat the AI, sure there are ways to build ships to crush them and sure you can exploit the AI via diplomacy. That is one of the founding X's in a 4x game.

By the way, the developers are a great lot. Thousands of Alpha's participated weekly in how to make the game more 'fun' not 'harder because I can break it'. This discussion is every Friday at noon via Stardock's twitch channel. I invite you to participate with courteous and constructive input.

In the end Mari you will need to team up with someone who can mod exactly what you want. Ask someone to Mod into YOUR game a way to HIDE all the assets that an AI shows and have every response be bland or false. Personally I would never play that in any game but you are free to do what you like.

Cheers,

There's a few bugs here and there that won't get fixed at all because they mostly revolve around using the knowledge of some game mechanics to create a exploitable setup/situation, and only a few min/maxers are using it, and only a little percentage of all players are actually showing at the forums or reading about gamemechanics and all this stuff.

So in other words, closing some of the loopholes would drag away from the fun that the other ~~95% of normal players are receiving - and SD are NOT going to do that.

Besides, it wouldn't really matter. Because ultimately, a powergamer can always observe how the AI reacts, and create unusual or obnoxious situations to which the generic AI might not respond too well to, afterwards putting an exploitive strategy around it. And the only true way to do away with that weakness is to create code that can alter itself like the neuronal plasticity of our brains, or to crudely cut out on the liberty of the many features this game offers to the player (which is actually the biggest strength of the game IMO)

Writing the same old story over and over again won't make them fix that stuff sooner, if anything they'll need more time going through the forum... you're also risking your posts to be silently ignored, there's limits on how much you can annoy people. 

That is not what Beta testing is for. While Stardock pays lip service to the idea that the Founders (and the rest of us in the Beta process) are getting a chance to influence the course of the game's development, that's not really true.

Stardock has people they're paying to design and implement the game. They weren't looking to the Beta process to give them insight into the design. While there may have been a feature or two that the community championed and that made it into the game, from Stardock's viewpoint the Beta process was about ensuring that the GC3 was relatively stable at launch.

And that was pretty successful (I don't play MP so... sorry about the launch issues, multiplayer people).

People were telling Stardock about broken game mechanics throughout the process. Many of the complaints people have been making since the release were voiced at one point or another during the Beta process. Some of those (the low hanging fruit) were addressed, and some were ignored. But again, that's not what Stardock was using the Beta process for.

The problem for "jerks" is that Stardock honestly does not care about your min-max strategy being OP. From their standpoint, if you can beat the game repeatedly using the same technique, then why don't you try doing something different? There's no law that says you have to use the diplomacy screen for espionage. There's no requirement you use the diplomacy screen at all.

I don't agree that the test population is statistically any different than the main player population.   Mainly because I have no evidence to back it up.

The presence of remaining errors does not equate to poor testing automatically.   For all we know the errors were on a list and didn't get fixed in time for release.  Boss says ship, you ship.  Normal business.  The point about the game having very few errors where it simply doesn't work is salient here.  Overall the product was in a good state when released.

That being said, it isn't perfect.  Though the poster has angered people with previous posts we should also avoid getting bogged down with crucifying him.  I think the specific criticism of being able to see all the AIs assets is a good one.  Planets you have not explored should not appear and tech past what you can actively research should not appear.  Neither should money or fleets you cannot see.  This may not matter with super sensor ships but if they ever get toned down (one can hope) then it would make a difference.   Consider the value of this in PvP and that's where the general concept comes from.  I don't think it significantly affects your ability to make trade decisions if things you can't directly see are obscured from you.  Plus it leaves some potential benefits for espionage available.

The OP claims that 

The problem with this is that every one of these issues was discussed during Beta testing.   They didn't magically appear after release, and they weren't ignored by the beta testers.  For example, I am not going to dig it up but I commented myslef months ago on the "excess diplomatic screen info" issue.   The general consensus was (1) that this would be dealt with in the expansion that releases espionage as being highly related, with espionage itself wanting a full treatment far beyond GC2, and (2) having max information, as well as many other exploitable mechanics, made a lot of sense when people were working hard to figure out what was working and what wasn't.   In fact we were encouraged to exploit the heck out of things to see if they would break --- and this makes perfect sense.

The idea that somehow this stuff only could be picked up by "the wolves" after release as opposed to hardcore alpha and beta testers, not to mention the developers and programmers themselves, is (insert your own wording, my Mom always said "don't say anything if you can't say something nice").

(Aside to The_Gear: if you sense something toxic about this thread, you will get no argument from me.)

It is easy to be a farmer when your plow is a pen and you are 100 miles from the nearest farm.

Well, I mean, I was trying to be nice.  You know, it's important to pretend to be nice, as some other people in the forums said themselves. 

Clearly my perception of closed Beta as "nice kind courteous people" is flawed.  I wasn't there, but I was hoping people behaved better there than after release.  Apparently I was wrong. Hmmmmmm.  

Now you've shattered my opinions of people and broken my heart.    

Well, the point of beta testers is for QA - not for making high-level design decisions. Beta testers, by definition, are brought in at the Beta stage, which is after the game is feature-complete and moving into crunch time prior to release. That's not a point in the development cycle where developers are particularly amenable to design suggestions; if a system is deemed to be 'not fun' or 'badly designed' at that point, it's likely to be dropped outright and not replaced because there's plenty of other stuff that needs fixing for the release deadline.

Stardock largely ignoring design suggestions from Betas is pretty much standard practice for the industry. There's a pretty well-laid out workflow for how to build a commercially successful computer game. It goes design->development->QA. The design bit happens BEFORE there's any code, and should be finished and the designer elements of the team moved onto new projects before the developers have finished coding the alpha. Betas arrive at the second or third stage of QA, when the development team is in polishing mode; they shouldn't be adding new features etc by that point, but rather should just be optimizing the existing code as much as possible, fixing bugs like crazy, and polishing. So yeah, they're not looking to be told 'you should rewrite this whole section and make it like this, because I'm a plumber and so I definitely know better than those guys with half a dozen hit games on their CV'. The plumber might be right (he's usually wrong, but not always), and the devs might even agree with him, but there's a deadline to be observed and he's making the suggestion too late in the process.

Actually, there's somewhat more chance of it than there was during the beta phase. For starters, they'll now be looking at producing DLC etc. This is a whole new process using the same roadmap model, so the DLC goes into design phase first - and if the designers want to include a revamp of, say, the economic system, then they're in a position to do that for the first DLC (which is usually in design phase while the development guys are running through the post-release patch schedule). Some of the softcode stuff for DLCs may even end up in patches for the base-game (Paradox, for example, now include softcode changes in base-game patches as standard). Workflow is funny like that. This also means that feedback that may have been 'ignored' during the beta might actually have been noted, and is currently sitting in a big pile of 'things we'd like to do better' for the design team to wade through when they're looking for ideas for the first expansion.

Behind the scenes, most of the game development process runs exactly counter to how players think it does, which is one of the reasons players get so frustrated with games companies.

Pillars of Eternity was also crowd funded through Kickstarter. According to Wikipedia, the kickstarter raised a bit under $4M, which IIRC exceeds the budget for GC3 by nearly $1M. I bet if someone gave Stardock an extra $1M to spend on GC3 the game would have come out a little different.

The point being that there isn't much point to criticizing Stardock for their business practices. The people on this forum have even less knowledge about the details of Stardock's business than they do about the details of the development of GC3.

I think that the game would have benefited from another month or two in Beta (and said so before the Beta finished). But would Stardock the company have benefited from keeping the game off the market for two more months? We just don't know those kinds of details. We don't know what their budget and staffing situation was. We don't know what commitments they had promised. We don't know what other games were launching in the next two months that might steal attention from GC3.

I think that the commitment of Stardock to continuing to develop and improve the game is sufficient to justify their release. If they don't deliver, then they were never going to deliver no matter how much time they took. If they do add features and improve the game then we all get what we wanted (people who like to bitch and moan like babies on the forums included).