dustyn
Re: Patch Release Date.
For those who are praising SSSI for delaying the patch yet again, consider this:
Empires' life system is determined by word of mouth advertising. With sales figures that have never cracked the top 20 (even on first week of release), and little-no advertising dollars spent promoting the product, this game lives or dies on positive word of mouth buzz. For the first 2-3 weeks of release, buzz was astoundingly good: people couldn't stop praising SSSI's sophomoric effort. Despite glaring imbalances and a game that was not public beta tested (and plays like it wasn't balance tested period), most people thought Empires rocked. After the allure of a new game subsides, the critical eye emerges, and people want fixes and results.
What was SSSI's response to this? Giving their most anal-retentive and critical customers a "beta" patch. This does a few things: convinces everyone that they are actually doing work on the patch (which SSSI needed to prove after NOT supporting EE at all), and follows a very Blizzardesque policy of letting the most adept game players balance the game. It was a brilliant move by SSSI and one that convinced me (and many of my friends) that perhaps they were worthy of the A-list for RTS producers.
Fast forward a month. What went wrong? For one, after a week, SSSI just stopped talking about the beta patch, and stopped talking about the patch period. Rather then release a new "version" of the beta patch weekly (or semi-weekly), they just stopped supporting it entirely. When people inquired about a patch timeline, SSSI dodged questions or released ambiguous answers without any real footing. Finally they release the specs of the patch. And guess what? They're basically the same as the beta specs released a month ago! What HAS SSSI been doing for the past month? It sure doesn't seem like it involves supporting the game.
When your product (and ultimate profit) lives or dies on word of mouth, acting lackadaisical about your patch support is simply going to hurt your bottom line...it's going to hurt your ability to product future titles because your user base has no faith in your ability to support the game. If there's some kind of tangible reason why the patch has been this slow and very little has seemed to have been accomplished in the past month, then release it to the public! Right now the only explanation I can come up with is that SSSI is lazy. Vague generalities like, "we found a couple things" aren't gonna cut it. Cut the crap, cut the BS and give us answers.
The fact of the matter is SSSI has a very poor history of supporting their game (see EE). Regardless of whether or not that is Sierra's fault, it's a black mark, a mark that has to be corrected when game number two hits the shelves. And for a month, I think about everyone had thought SSSI was geared up for pristine support of their games. But what are we supposed to think now? Something has clearly happened that has led to this dramatic - negative - turnaround in Empires' support system. If there's a good reason - tell us - the truth is comforting.