Why the suggestions we make to Stardock suck and why they'll get better

from Elemental Forums

We make a lot of good suggestions to Stardock on things they can do with the game. A lot of stuff we've talked about in the community has made its way into the design and they've profoundly shaped the direction of the game. Major changes have been made to the way things work as a result of our direct input to Frogboy and others.

This kind of open beta is really unique and has allowed the community to really have a role in the development of the game and Stardock will get a lot of respect for that.

Unfortunately we've also made a lot of really stinker suggestions, like suggesting they switch to hexes in the last three months of development or demanding the option to have turnbased AND realtime battles, making them write two combat systems and two AI sets.

Terrible suggestions don't just frustrate us, they also frustrate the dev team at Stardock:

The problem (And a growing frustration of mine to be honest)  having no idea what is hard to do and what is easy to do. - Frogboy
End of quote

 

Why do we make terrible suggestions?

  • Some of us have never written a single line of code in our life.
  • Of those of us who do write code, a lot of us have never worked on any games.
  • Some of us are not the sharpest tools in the box (I'm one of these).
  • Sometimes we're just making a "wouldn't it be nice if," suggestion that we don't reasonably expect to be implemented
  • And some of us have no clue about what's "reasonable" and what's not.
  • Some of our suggestions, while good, don't fit with the intended direction of the game

How can we make better suggestions? We can research what we want to say and carefully think it out. We can talk to other community members and "test" the idea with them. We can work on our writing. A short, well-written post describing what you'd like is worth a dozen rambling, stream-of-consciousness mumblebabble posts. The best tip for this is: reread your post before hitting submit. Go back and fix sentences that are difficult to follow.

Some of us can also just stop making suggestions, especially if the suggestion involves turning Elemental into King's Quest or King's Bounty or whatever. Yes, put down the keyboard sir.

 

Our suggestions will continue to be terrible.

Yes, we can improve the quality of things we suggest, but at some level we're going to continue to make bad suggestions. There's no way around this, and even the most experienced I-eat-code-for-breakfast-and-wrote-half-the-games-you-played-growing-up grand master is going to make a couple of stinkers now and then.

Why?

Because the amount of information available to us is very limited. At this point we don't have access to any of the python or xml and can only hazard guesses about what is and what is not a fast change. We do not know if the number of special units in a faction is limited to one due to hardcoding or if it's just a matter of adding another XML field. We don't know how much of the random map generation occurs in C, whether or not we have VBscript from the dxpacks. Is the random name generator written in C? Python? A list of names in an XML file? No clue.

They are going to get better.

When the Modding Beta is released, we're going to have a whole new slew of information to work with. We'll know the capabilities of the game from the XML. We should be able to use most of the in-game editors. Just from seeing the XML our ability to make timely suggestions is going to increase tenfold.

And for the first time members of the community are going to be able to answer questions about whether "X" is possible. Not only are we going to have good information, we'll be able to try out our ideas first in a real game, experiment and report back our findings.

Let's be realistic: feature lockdown is July 16th. The window to make feature suggestions will be narrow. We'll definitely be able to make UI suggestions, balance suggestions. And we know this game is going to have some legs - the features we suggest can make it into the post-release patches and upcoming expansions. Importantly, good suggestions will also make it into community mods.

 

Don't fear the feature lockdown. It actually means we'll be able to get more information and offer better-informed comments. Once the features are nailed in place, it is unlikely the format of the models will change, meaning we may receive the .hkb model exporter. All of a sudden all of the model artists out there are going to be able to contribute to the discussion, spot errors like missing specular maps.

A feature lockdown also means no new code is coming in, except for possibly AI. Stardock may choose to start releasing the python code, and we'll be able to spot errors and suggest new algorithims to calculate things that improve speed and reliability. We'll also be able to temper our expectations about what the game is and is not capable of before release.

A feature lockdown also means the development speed will pick up. There'll be fewer differences between the public build and the internal build of elemental. The polish of the game is going to pick up. There'll be, paradoxially, more time to talk about new features, features that we can hope to see post-release or in an expansion.

 

So the next few days should be exciting. I'm looking forward to giving the tires a good kick and reporting back my findings.

Happy modding!

elemental
10,956 views 11 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

I disagree with your post. A lot of "bad" suggestions come about not because people simply wish to have some feature implemented from another game or w/e but because something isn't jiving very well in the current build. Let's use your example about implementing RT tactical combat. If someone were to suggest this and want it implemented right now, then yeah, Brad or whoever is reading the post will say that it obviously can't be done. Being the game designer though, he will go a bit deeper and the idea behind the post, however, will not be dismissed. Brad will ask himself: "Why is this player suggesting to have RT tactical combat?". Perhaps the player made this suggestion because he felt tactical combat right now was too slow or maybe the battle did not flow very well. I just don't think bad suggestions exist: An astute game designer will always find something of value even from a "bad" suggestion.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

[double post]

WindowBlinds - Free yourself of the default settings, customize your desktop.
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

I find that some post are

reasonable. Easy to fix and great addition to the game

conflicting. Like people wanted the hero or champions to have more personality and skill. Great idea. But there were a 100 different ways people wanted it to be like.

Improbable.  Devs cant make super major differences to the game, and they are on a limited budget.

 

Either case i enjoy seeing these ideas. At first i wasnt sure if StarDock would add them since b4 beta 2 started they said they were pretty much on lock down back in early June. But look at all the stuff they added DUE TO SUGGESTIONS.

 

While they are approaching the suspected due date, i still think there needs to be lots of improvements, beyond tweaks and bugs. If they want this game to be well received and sell well they could hold off a month or two.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Thanks Grove!

They can't hold off on releasing the game for a few months because if they do they'll miss the spot they have reserved on gamestore shelves. Buying a spot during christmas is too expensive/difficult (this comes straight from the Devs themselves) so if they miss August 28th, the game will slip to next year for release.

 
Marlowwe,
 
your post is great but I think it needs more cowbell.
Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

We enjoy reading all suggestions. They don't frustrate us.

Often time, a suggestion may be "impossible" to do but they get us thinking in different ways.

A suggestion often exposes an underlying fault in the game. For instance, some of the recent suggestions were really proposed solutions for an underlying problem that the game wasn't sufficiently engaging.  So while we couldn't implement that person's suggestion, we were able to look at doing a host of other things to address the root issue.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Grove's post really sums up the types of suggestions well. Some are good, some are conflicted, and some are impossible. I'd say most suggestions are valuable, either at face value, or as insight into how people are perceiving the game and the kind of problems they want to be overcome.

Global resources vs. local resources came out of the conversation about cities being broken.

I'm hoping the modding beta will help inform our next round of suggestions to you.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

As one of the few people here who is both a coder, and have worked professionally in game development (although not as a coder) I can say that the game should become an entirely different animal between the feature-lock and release as the game gets balanced and tweaked. FrogBoy has given the absolute minimum amount of time to balance before Gold (I think he said we should expect a Day-1 patch so they can keep working while it ships). Since most of their time after this will be on balance, I expect there to be little in the way of new art, etc. until after release. Because of this, I would like to see the python and hkb converter released as soon as possible after feature lock... This way the modders can get to work and hopefully have some stuff ready to release on launch day!

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

A lot of suggestions are good. Hexes are a lot better then squares for a number of reasons, particularly diagonal movement with squares being wonky. The only problem with the suggestion is that it needed to be made 8 months ago.

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Tridus, reply 8
A lot of suggestions are good. Hexes are a lot better then squares for a number of reasons, particularly diagonal movement with squares being wonky. The only problem with the suggestion is that it needed to be made 8 months ago.
End of Tridus's quote

 

More like 18 months ago (at the least).... That's the kind of decision that needs to be decided VERY early in the development cycle.

Reply #10 from Elemental Forums Top

Unless there's a real flood of suggestions, I think it's up to the developers to weed them and get what they need/want from them.

 

I didn't play the beta, but watched some videos. It's looking nice, although I think it could use a lot more sound FX. That includes the UI. Is that expensive? Is that hard to implement? Would it make loading times longer? It's not up to me to decide. I just give my amateur opinion.

Some guy might not buy the game. You could ask why and he would answer "because it doesn't have an X feature" or "i don't like Y in this game". You could say "but X it's too hard to implement" or "Y would be impossible in a limited budget". Still, the guy would answer "whatever, I'll buy what I like".

 

Maybe if the developers had heard about feature X, might have come up with the Z feature and with that change the opinion of that guy.

 

So let all the suggestions keep coming. Anything might count.

Reply #11 from Stardock Forums Top

I like Frogboy's response here.

I am only now starting to get interested in Elemental, mostly because I play these kinf of games multiplayer and the info on multiplayer is a little laxed at the moment. Still responses like those only instill confidence in the company behind the game as opposed to the kind of stuff you see coming out the Blizzard/activision, EA and other type camps... aka fk off and give us your money.