I have experienced a number of bugs that cause me to CTD. This is to be expected in a beta, however each time I go to start the game back up, I've noticed that I'll have to run it four or five times before my computer will perform whatever dark arts are required for me to connect to the Stardock servers so I can actually play this game. I can understand the initialization/installation requiring my stardock account information. However the fact that, every time I run the game, I am required to connect is keeping me from being able to play. I have a 1.5mbps DSL connection, and it is shared between myself and two others. I am practically reduced to dialup speeds (or worse) often times, if anyone decides to stream video or anything like that. I have repeatedly been kicked back with a message to restart using "username" "password" tags, but as the information in my registry isn't corrupt I can't imagine that would help with my current situation. I am reduced to running the game four and five times to reinitialize after a CTD. What if I was on a laptop, and wanted to play somewhere away from wifi? Or if my internet went down? Will the game even run then? Because I guess if it will I could always disable my internet to try to play.

When I first started playing I had a lot of deja vu from Elemental. I was able to get past my initial boredom and actually see a kernel of what you're driving for. However as soon as I started to experience any enjoyment, I began to have CTD issues that I can't repro at will, and have to run the game several times before I can get back in. That is getting old, fast. To make matters worse, when I click while on any loading screen in Elemental, Windows 7 declares the program as non responsive. Telling it to wait for a response never gets me any results, and I have to force the program closed and start all over again, trying to successfully authenticate my account information. When I can play for more time than I spend trying to enter the game, I have liked a bit of what I have seen.

Is the game itself going to suffer from the same sort of draconian DRM as this beta? Should I just wait until further along in the beta or release, or will I suffer these same sort of problems then as well? I don't mind playing betas, I actually like contributing to bug squashing efforts. I like being able to identify a bug, and figure out how to reproduce it. I enjoy contributing to ideas on how to improve the game and gameplay before the game goes gold. But spending 10x the amount of time trying to get the program to run because my internet sucks... Well, it sucks.