A denial of service attack?

How... petty. The mindset of some of these people is absolutely astounding...

A DOS attack? It's just too bad you can't hack them back.

People really are out of control when it comes to games and "balancing". It's pretty much impossible to balance anything for anyone unless everything is the same. What work's for great for one person may be awful for someone else, but is it 'overpowered' because the person it works for uses it incredibly well?

My personal belief is the best way to balance a game is to ignore balancing all together, there will be hardcore players out there who go out of their way to perfect the use of the 'underpowered' team/character/side(whatever). Personal strategy and ability is the biggest factor in gaming, some people jsut refuse to admit they arent TEH UB3R PWN0R!!1

Consider FPSs, not that teamplay snail-paced 'tactical' FPS crap, but real old school high-speed deathmatch frenzy style like Quake. I can't tell you the number of years I spent playing Quake 2. Some people swear by the rocket launcher, other people claim the railgun to by the holy grail (spawn a very popular mod Rocket vs Rail), then you have weirdo's like me who perfer the machine gun over all the weapons. Are these weapons balanced? I really don't believe so, nor do I think they are meant to be, as the average person who played these sort of games switch weapons whenever a 'step-up' is available. None-the-less people find ways to make the 'weaker' weapons work. (I chose to use FPSs as an example because it's much easier than dissecting 16 playable races and 50 various skills involved in RTSs or MMORPGs)

Take a minute and think about StarCraft (I personally perfer AOE2 and Tiberian Sun). In StarCraft you have 3 very unique playable races, how do you even compare these races as they are so different.

Last but not least, I played Planetside for sometime, and I parcipated in it's beta. I was on the New Conglomerate, a side that was deemed "underpowered" but always seemed to control most of the maps... Anyways, there were 3 sides, each had an anti-vehicle weapon, the NC's was a rocket launcher that's missle was steerable. Everyone cried nerf in droves, however, if/when they tried the weapon they would be the first to proclaim how difficult it was to steer and also how vulnerable they were while the controlled the missile. None-the-less is was nerfed, then beefed up again, and by the end of the beta period I don't even think the devs knew what was going on with it.

I went on quite a tangent. But my point is, games involve skill and thought, there will be people out there who are better players. Accept it and move on. If something is underpowered then let it go unused (as the protoss oh so often are) that simple, whining about it is likely to mess the experience up for everyone.

It's a shame that devs have to put up with this sort of thing and that it'd even turn into something like DOS attacks, they put more thought into the game than anyone else and would know it's inner workings and would have the best idea of how to keep gameplay fun and fair, have some faith in them. And really has anyone ever up and quit a game because their 'ultimate fire pillar of doom' spell costs 13 more mana?

I fully expect you to ignore the tantrums of the hardcore multiplayer crowd when it comes to your fantasy game. I want cool features and cool things to do, multiplayer balance be damned!

I am an avid player and have been since Ultima on the Apple II, but I never play multiplayer. Every time I tried I ran into player after player who played the exploits instead of the game. I've had many games that had multiplayer options and have never been interested in ever playing them.

I have been pretty busy with what little spare time I have had for gaming beta testing TA. I have heard great things about Sins of a Solar Empire, and I am likely to try it even though it has two of my biggest red flag words. Real time Strategy and Multiplayer. Still I am willing to spend my time and money because of the experience I have had with Stardock. I am betting that the single player mode is worth playing and the game has not been ruined catering to the multiplayer crowd.

If Stardock in the future decides to add a multiplayer option to CalCiv2 I won't be complaining. I am perfectly happy to let others who enjoy that experience have it, but I an not willing to play, beta test or buy any multiplayer expansion.

Scincerely,

Scintor@aol.com

The last RTS games I actually enjoyed were Dune and Dune II which were the only RTS games that the mechanics of building up your forces were not contrived and counter-intuitive. Everything since then seemed to me just to be bad knock offs of those originals.

Scincerely,

Scinotr@aol.com

What I don't understand is why developers of Multiplayer games focus on balancing the game out.

People need to understand that everything has an advantage and a dissadvantage. Some Races/classes will have an advantage over another Race/class just as they have advantage over another Race/class.

A large group of people can't be exactly equal.

In my opinion just go ahead with Multiplayer in this or the next Galciv if thats what you want to do or not. Focus on allowing players to be creative and players will want it and play it regardless.

Quicky comment -

I have tried MMO, a few times... AoK, Civ2 and what else and what comes forward in my mind as a common impression is these short sentences;
- LAN, p2p, firewalls (UDP-ports included) are techno gizmos tricky enough for the cpu'impaired.
- Chat message #1; "How oldar yo?"
- Click, Offline.
That's the last ANY Multiplayer stuff have seen of me, ever since.

There is absolutely NOTHING more a game can give me other than locally maintained TBS (and maybe, an extremely rare jewel of an RTS) vs good Ais & if you know me in general, *the* whole (as in, complete, wild and amazing) Sci-Fi experience.

- Zyxpsilon.

Sorry about the Dup...

No, I think everyone in this thread has been limiting their complaints to the _hardcore_ multiplayer people. Those are the people who play really competitively, always worrying about ladder rankings, scores, etc., so they get their panties in a bunch if they feel choosing one race over the other gives someone an unfair advantage.

I'm a fan of multiplayer myself, and I'm glad that the fantasy game will have it. As someone else pointed out earlier, imbalanced races provide a nice way of giving someone a handicap if the players are unevenly matched. Even when playing co-op against AIs, if one player is better than the other, then it's handy to give them a more difficult race to play.

I'm also confident in Stardock's ability to ignore the outcries of the vocal minority. If they were less resistant to such things, then GalCiv2 would now have multiplayer, carriers, and stealth ships.

I imagine you have to be rather thick skinned to field that stuff without getting really discouraged. I'm pretty used to the mostly casual and relaxed tone of this forum. I had sit back a little after reading a few of the hostile and unwarranted posts over at the Sins forum. I won't be spending a whole lot of time there.

I'm not a big multi-player anything for some of the same reasons you see those hostile posts in the Sins forum. I'm quite happy with the Sins 1.03 update and I think it's great. I'm really enjoying the game and the update added some very nice features. Unfortunately, some of the Sins players take the stuff way too seriously. I mean com'on, it's a game, right?


Get it, you'll be happy with it. The AI is really smart and it actually took me a while to figure out how to beat them, even on Normal difficulty. Go TEC!


Yea, we've had a few temper tantrums over here regarding *major* changes we didn't like, but I was actually surprised by the reaction at the Sins forum over what I think are fairly trivial tweaks.

not-Mom will have multiplayer, it'll just be a different game at multiplayer. I'm not willing to cut out features on the single player version and I'm too old and cranky to compromise on that.

Huzzah! I was a little concerned that you might be forced to dumb it down for the masses. I'm not much of a MP fan myself, for the myriad reasons already stated, but the idea of being able to play against some of the smart and talented members of this forum has me sold.

Mr. Wardell, thank you for having high standards, and sticking to them. It's the reason that I'll keep coming back.