Read a really good article at Gamespot today about the dangers of gamer entitlement.

http://au.gamespot.com/features/the-dangers-of-gamer-entitlement-6350732/

Sorry gang,

I decided to not allow our next two titles to be available at retail (Sins rebellion and Fallen Enchantress).

The cost/benefit ratio just isn’t there at this time. 

It is cool to tell people your game is at the store. But as a business, until the retailers adapt, it doesn’t make sense to deal with them at this point.

My generation (>40 years or older) don’t often see the power of the online world.

But I know lots of people are like me out there.  I just enjoy the sentience of other people. You know what I mean?

Wouldn’t you agree it’s cheating if the game doesn’t provide you with UI features that the AI has easy access to?

The AI can send 8 armies from distant cities to converge on a target city at the same turn.

I can’t easily do that, as a human. Therefore, I didn’t really lose. The AI cheated.

I wonder sometimes whether PC gamers realize that game developers in the PC game market don’t consider each other “competitors”.

People from Valve, Blizzarrd, Bioware, all the way down to a Stardock consider ourselves on the same side.

Who do you think we get to hang out other than with each other?

I’m one of those people who have traditionally disliked tactical battles because I hate having to fight all of them out.

In FE, my goal is to make it so that the AI does a pretty good job of fighting the battle for you. You’ll still want to fight it out if it’s a close thing or if there are particular units you want to spare. But overall, it does a decent job.

Right now, I’m still toying with the concept of having units retreat from battle to let others take their place. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not in *this* game given the game mechanics. 

Here’s a battle where my side lost but in 0.77 would have been a walk over because the tactical AI sucked so badly.

http://screencast.com/t/Uj0Wp0DAU

Also, fun tactical battles:

[Warning: Explicit]

One of the big changes in FE beta 2 that wasn’t in GalCiv II was the concept of army groups. 

Who here is a WW2 history nut? If so, you know what army groups are.

Well, I put in army groups to fix a different flaw in the AI but I didn’t recognize the issue they created. The AI is now really good at having armies from different cities converge on a single city on the same turn (the AI treats army groups as a single unit).

I’ll await feedback but I’m thinking normal is too hard now.

Between the Nanny Statists on the left and the thumpers on the right, I just can’t get excited about politics anymore.

I really don’t need anyone to tell me how to live.

I also really don’t care to hear the religious beliefs of a federal candidate. Why tell me? Are you hinting that you’re going to use the power of the federal government to compel me to live by your beliefs? No? Then quit talking about them. I care as  much for a Federal candidate’s religious beliefs as I do to who their favorite NFL team is. In other words, not at all.

It’s a no-win situation if you’re an actual political conservative (as in, limited government, personal responsibility, capitalist). 

You have Obama and his ilk trumpeting that it’s somehow a good thing for the federal government to require private insurance companies to provide birth control as part of their policy. People think this is a good thing? Really? Forget your position on birth control for a minute – you think the federal government should be able to tell a private company that they have to include? Can’t people decide for themselves?  This is why insurance costs so much – the government requires them to cover the costs on all kinds of things whether they’re applicable or not.

And Santorum…ugh.  He gave a speech talking about Satan and his diabolical plans for the United States. This is the sort of talk that allows politicians to justify all kinds of meddling into our lives. You know, “for the children”. 

It’s hard to believe that our dog Bailey was just born one year ago tomorrow.

Here’s how she looked 1 year ago:

At 4 weeks:

Here’s how she looked at 8 weeks.

Now, fast forward about a year…

Anyone know when Visual Studio 11 is supposed to come out of beta?

A lot of people who read these posts don’t know me. This post comes from my blog site (http://draginol.joeuser.com) but gets syndicated out through Stardock’s various forums too.

I’m the President & CEO of Stardock. My day job handle on the forums is “Frogboy” (I post occasionally on WinCustomize.com and the other Stardock sites).  But I never intended Stardock to be my career.  I started this company to help pay for college at Western Michigan University, which was the cheapest university in the state at the time that offered engineering classes.

At the time, I had multiple jobs at once.  I taught Assembly language labs for the EE department (micro controller stuff), substituted for professors in freshman lecture classes for the EE department, was the assistant to a Geography professor, worked at Babbage’s (game store).  This was all until I could get a real job.  And when I finally graduated, it turned out Stardock was the best opportunity, so I stuck to it.

Most of the things I’ve worked on have been extremely cool but not necessarily commercially successful.  If we had patented our stuff, I suspect we’d be having a different discussion.  

The thing about the technology industry, whether it be game related,  enterprise related or non-game related it is that it’s always changing. You hear that a lot but I mean seriously, it changes fast.

There’s been a lot of highs and lows over the years. The biggest professional heart breaks of my career were small projects (relative to the rest of Stardock) that mattered a lot to me personally. The most recent was a PC game called Elemental: War of Magic. 

I wasn’t that involved with that game until the end and at that point, my job was to salvage what I could.  It was that project that I discovered cognitive dissonance (technically, there was an incident with an Impulse released title called Warlords: Battlecry that gave me a taste of that).  I thought the game was really good at the time we released it.  But it wasn’t.  I lost a lot of confidence in my judgment on such things.  I was fortunate enough to be able to bring on incredibly talented people who I am proud to say have become good friends to direct these endeavors going forward.

Right now, the games group is concentrating on a new game, Fallen Enchantress. I think the new beta is pretty awesome. But then I remember War of Magic.  I’m a lot more distanced from FE than I was War of Magic so I feel a bit more confident.  But I also wonder whether I’m just becoming part of an increasingly smaller generation.  That is, gamers now expect to be hand-held.  Put a “!” above everything. Walk them through it all.  I really hate that. I liked Ultima IV where I had to question people in town, take notes, and put together the next steps myself. I seem to be a minority.

I don’t really have a theme to this blog post.  I just really hope people like what Derek and his team have done with Fallen Enchantress.  This week will be Beta 2 of that game.  I hope people like it.  I know I do.