Every community, especially one as close-knit as JU's is going to have melodrama. 

Sometimes, it's like watching a car wreck. You don't want to look but it's hard not to. Drama, intrigue, gossip, they're hard to resist.

I tend to be a pretty plain person.  I think that's why I've stayed interested in on-line communities for so long or at least survived them this long.  Being straight forward and consistent is, in my opinion, the key to thriving long-term in an on-line community.  The flame that burns twice as bright lasts half as long as they say.

What I'm going to discuss next is going to relate to a recent melodrama. But the words will remain applicable into the future because what has gone on recently will happen again and again and again. The actors will change but the characters remain the same.

1) What is and isn't out of bounds on JoeUser?

Your blog is your blog. You are free to write about anything you'd like as long as it does not contain the name of a person in the title and isn't essentially a personal attack on another member of the site.

However, IF you choose "Display this article in the forums as well" then it enters the purvue of moderation. This option is on by default. If you want to vent about something, that's fine. But as soon as it goes onto the global forum network, which is syndicated all over, then we care what is on that blog. It's the classic "your rights end where someone else's begins".

2) JoeUser is not a for profit site. It's open to the public to use but the admins aren't your servants.

This is something we're particularly sensitive about.  In a recent post I wrote to the effect that I didn't care if there were bloggers here.  And I don't.  But that's not the same as saying that we don't want bloggers either.  We're neutral.  We have the site, it's free to use. We hope you enjoy the site.  All we ask is that you treat the admins with a basic level of respect and most of all, do not treat us as servants. 

Think of JoeUser as a big party.  It's an expensive party but that's not the issue until someone starts acting like their presence on the site is somehow helping "pay" for the party. 

But like real world parties, guests can be asked to leave.  If someone is being disruptive to other users they'll be warned. If they don't heed that, they'll be asked to leave.  If they're really aggravating the admins, they'll be warned. If they persist, they'll be shown the door. And yes, if someone is on another site saying nasty vile things about the admins or site while at the same time making use of the blogs, we reserve the right to show them the door after giving them time to copy their stuff to use somewhere else. 

The specifics of the LW incident

LW was a prominent member of the site. One of my favorite bloggers. Her husband, Simon, had been on the site a long time as well. He was, to say the least, not one of our favorite bloggers.

Simon wrote a blog, the topic is irrelevant at this point because it's not related to what happened next.  I went on and made a fairly rude comment that was in the spirit of article (the article basically argued how stupid Americans were). 

One of the things that I try not to do is throw in people's faces failings/weaknesses/sensitive issues in an off-topic way.  LW, for instance, once was a member of the KKK. It annoyed me to no end to see people trot this out every time they were in a debate with her regardless of what it was. It was, in my opinion, a very low blow to do that. If they're discussing race relations, okay maybe. But throwing it into a discussion on religion or taxes is simply uncalled for.  So while I may be rude to people on occasion, I don't trot out what I know about people in order to discredit the person.  My rudeness is usually in attacking the message, not the messenger. I sometimes fail that distinction, I make a lot of posts, so it's all in the percentages.

Anyway, Simon responded in a way that really aggravated me by attempting to dismiss what I had to say by instructing me to go back to using JoeUser to peddle our products.  So I made clear: I am not above removing a blogger for pissing me off. 

Simon's next response essentially escalated the issue by telling me how i should run a business and other such things. Like what?

"And yes, despite this display of childishness I am still considering blogging here should the site ever start charging. Though your service of JU had better improve a thousand-fold if you want to keep your current clientele here." and "Get the knot out of your panties, quit squalling like a scalded brat, and address the argument. Or stay away, if it freaks you out. Either way, next time you want to stamp your feet and threaten, try remembering that you don't attract customers by trying to bully them."

Anyone reading this who thinks that we should put up with that should cut their losses now and leave. There are no circumstances where I would ever tolerate a user talking to me in this way on JoeUser. So if you're feeling like "big brother" is squashing your "free speech" rights by not allowing you to insult the admins in the most arrogant, nasty ways possible, then this place isn't the place for you.  I'm very comfortable with the line being drawn here. 

Some people would feel what he wrote was perfectly okay and that's their right to think so but it won't fly on JoeUser.  I won't put up with it so I'm entirely fine with people who think that kind of behavior as being acceptable leaving.  Incidentally, the entirety of what he was responding to was "I'm not above making blogs or users disappear from public view simply because they got on my nerves.  You can be "confident" about that."  That was what I said that resulted in what he wrote.

I could have responded very harshly since I know Simon and LW's personal circumstances.  It was very tempting to do so.  But I didn't.  Instead, I removed him from the site.

LW, as his wife, decided to leave with him.  While that was sad, I could understand it.  My wife would do the same for me.  Over the weekend I moved him from Exiled to PermBanned. This had the side-effect of doing the same to LW (which wasn't the intention) since PermBans take IP addresses used into account. They have the same IPs, so bam. A weird scenario where a user of normal access is also banned (hey a JU first).

This is where the facts end and from here we get into speculation.

However, given how long JU has been around and how consistent I think things have been run over the years, there was nothing in their previous experience that would have led them to think I was bluffing.  That I would back down.  So in essence, Simon chose to get himself kicked off, probably knowing that his wife, who spent years building something here, would follow suit. 

I'm not even sure they realize (or admit anyway) that Simon's behavior was totally out of line and unacceptable even though people in the past have been exiled for doing much the same thing. 

People rarely get exiled. But at the same time, we won't take abuse from users. A user will get a warning if they're trotting over the line. But after that, they're gone.  We also exiled Furry Canary as well for much the same thing. 

Cleaning house

With the upheaval, we looked at this as an opportunity to clean house a bit.  Cliques form and they drive people away.  I'm not happy to see LW go. I enjoyed her writing even if she was a toxic user. She drove other people away through bullying and domination. Or she played people to get them so riled up that they would get themselves exiled by going way over the line. I remember one person emailing me with a certain level of half-admiration/half-loathing in the way LW could drive others of the edge.  Anyone remember Dabe?

What has saddened me about the LW situatoin is how quickly friendship turns into demands for submission.  We don't make demands on users other than to not abuse us. We want people to have a good time. If staying makes them happy, then good.  If leaving makes them happy, then good.  I was saddened to see that LW took her voluntary exile as an opportunity to try to play the role of some sort of rebel leader against "the man" and labeling me as the  "king of petulance". For what? Because I got rid of her husband for repeatedly insulting me, name calling me, etc. on my own site that I share with him free of charge? Shame on me I guess.

I've also taken this opportunity to show another blogger the door after they were going around on other sites saying that JoeUser is akin to "Hitler's Germany" (which would make me Hiitler in this analogy). We have given them 10 days to copy their contents so that they can move them but simply put, the "Reich" doesn't way to pay to host their blog.  If someone thinks JU is so bad that it can be compared to Nazi Germany, then why would they want to have a blog here?

What makes JoeUser different from a blogspot or whatever is that it's a blog community. Our blogs are interconnected. It's a site designed in a way such that lots of people will read what you write.  We want people to have a good time here.  But WE also want to have a good time here too. It's no fun when you come onto the site and there's a handful of people sucking out the fun for us as well as plenty of other people.

As interesting as melodrama is, it's taxing. It sucks up energy.  I respect LW's decision to leave. I understand it. I will miss her writings. I liked her articles a lot. But I'm not going to miss the melodrama or the polarizing nature of her presence.  I'm almost not going to miss the clique-building.  And I'm not going to miss people who think it's okay to come over to someone's site and crap on the people who running it.

The site isn't about us. It's about the people who make blogs. Who share their writings. Who share their thoughts. It's what makes JoeUser special.  When people start excessively focusing on individual members of the site, we're all poorer for it. 

This situation will rise again. There will be more Wisefawns, Little Whips, Sir Peter Maxwells and other colorful characters who shine twice as bright in their time but eventually self-destruct. It will keep happening over and over again.  It'll pass.  Some people will leave in protest and new people will join. 

Here are the top 10 most popular skinners for the month of February.  Downloads are UNIQUE user downloads.

Some people have argued that JoeUser makes money from ad revenue.

Of course, the real question isn't whether it makes money but rather it nets money.

Here's what it "made" in February:

That's 164,337 impressions for the google ad. 93 click thrus. .1% conversion rate for $15.66.

Now, I don't think anyone needs to be an IT manager to know what the net revenue is.

But that's fine.  The site doesn't have to make money. It only costs marginally more to have the site available to the public as opposed to just Stardock personnel for syndication purposes.  I'm only posting the ad revenue for those who think that web ads are somehow big money.

It's hard to believe now that there was an internal debate about adding the ship design feature in which players could customize how their ships looked by adding 0-sized "extras".  Ship design has become almost a game unto itself. Check out some of the starship designs from this thread. These are in-game ships designed by players.

 Lots more in the thread. Check 'em out!

Later this week PowerUser.TV is going to be putting up interviews with the Galactic Civilizations II team.

But as a warm up to that, below is a link to this week's episode that talks about Computer Gaming World eliminating ratings from their reviews (i.e. no more star rating, no rating at all).

Take a listen, tell us what you think.

Game reviews keep coming in.  Here are a few that caught our eye:

FiringSquad is one of the sites I go to to check out whether a game is good or not. We held our breath to hear what they thought of GalCiv II.  You can see their review here.

James Allen is a well known gaming blogger.  He's a one man review machine. You can see his review here. Incidentally, we're interested in hearing about any blogger reviews.  So let us know if you see them.

Eurogamer's review is up. I tend to like Eurogamer's review and agree with much of it but their rating (8/10) was a bit of a bummer since it dropped our average down. And disagreed with some of it. But it was a very well done review IMO. You can read that here.

One thing that is a bummer about the game industry is that the way reviews are done discourages doing updates.  Most of Stardock's business comes from utility software and magazines like PC Magazine and such will re-review our various products every year or so based on the current state even if those updates were free to customers.

By contrast, in the game industry, it's rare to see anyone take a look at doing a review of the same game but updated. Once in awhile an MMO will get a second look but that's about it.

So what game companies seem to do is only put bug fixes into their updates and then charge people for new features in an "expansion".  I'm all for expansions, but putting in features based on user suggestions into free updates strikes me as good business -- makes people more likely to buy your next game.

So even as we take in suggestions and implement them in (look how much has already gone into 1.0X and we've been out just over a week and wait till you see the 1.1 list of new features) those improvements won't ever be recorded or looked at by reviewers.

I think that's one of the reasons why many game companies don't do updates. They don't get credit for doing them so they only put in bug fixes and charge for features.  Stardock's always made games but our experience on the utility side of things has taught us that doing free updates that add new features pays off.  But it would be nice if reviews took that into account.

Not that we're complaining, thee major game magazines have been kind to us. 9.0 from Gamespot. A- from UGO. 4.5/5 from GameSpy. But hopefully at some point we'll be able to talk them into looking at some future version of GalCiv II and see how much it's changed/improved based on the suggestions you guys -- our customers -- make.

Galactic Civilizations II v1.0X has been released.  If you have previously downloaded one of the pre-releases you'll want to update to this version.  Version 1.0X inclues a bunch of new options including GPU throttling, video controls, tweaks to game balance, bug fixes, and much more. In theory this version should resolve all known compatibility issues that we have control over (users absolutely need to make sure they have recent video drivers and if they have a dual-core AMD to make sure they're running the latest chipset drivers if they run into any issues).

You can read the full list of changes HERE.

A lot of time has gone into cleaning up the ship design stuff.  The ship designer in the game has kind of taken on a life of its own. We're glad people love it. We've done our best to make things like upgrading and modifying easier to do in this version and more robust.  As one person in the forum put it, it's like having a CAD program bundled with a game (though a lot easier to use of course).

You can download it from Stardock Central or from the Downloads page.

Today something unprecedented happened -- for us anyway.  Several retail chains re-ordered more units in a single go than their initial order. EB Canada, for instance re-ordered a very large number. Yay Canada!

See, typically what happens at retail is that you get your initial "sell-in".  Re-orders are only designed to bring stocking levels back to that initial sell-in level. So over time, the game fades away. It's very unusual for a game to actually increase its retail stocking after the release.

So now we're in unknown territory.  We no longer have any idea how many units the game will sell.  The first one sold roughly 75,000 units in North America and roughly that many overseas / electronic. We've shipped around 50,000 so far and we're starting to run into a back order so availability is going to get tight in the coming days as we're now rush manufacturing another batch to handle. 

This all happened before the reviews even started to come out. The reviews should certainly help. But it goes to show how powerful word of mouth is.  And if there's other small developers out there, bear in mind, Galactic Civilizations II had only a handful of full time developers and roughly that many artists on it.  If you're at home, open up one of your game manuals and look at the credits to see what's the norm. 

You can be a small development house and still make a game people like. Word of mouth is absolutely crucial. I also am convinced that having the developers themselves interact in the forums directly is important as well. It lets us hear issues people run into.  We've also learned a lot in the process.  I also think that putting out timely regular updates is key as well. In fact, we're planning to put up the final version of 1.0X tonight.  Lots of new video options, AI tweaks, glitch fixes, that nasty hard drive formatting bug if you're using an ATI or nVidia card (just kidding) should help spice things up.

Once 1.0X is out, we'll start talking about what we want to do with 1.1.  We have a lot of ideas ranging from random alien players, being able to create your own custom players, UI support for mods, and of course putting in user requested features, tweaks, etc.  But that'll be in a few weeks.  1.0X will likely be the version where we take a bit of a breather.  People who visit our IRC channel (#galciv on irc.stardock.com) will be able to access our daily internal build if they're feeling particularly masochistic.

So stay tuned, we'll keep you informed on how things are going.  And don't forget, if you see the game at a retail store, take a picture, put it up in this thread, and win a chance to get a free GalCiv II T-shirt.

You'll be able to get updates over in the Downloads area.

World of Warcraft is one of my favorite games. I was in the beta from the start of it and when released, re-did my Paladin. And it was good.  I didn't really pay much attention to all the numbers. I knew that doing X was better than doing Y.  I didn't really know how much better it was, I just knew it was from the description. 

My Paladin today doesn't resemble too much my Paladin of that initial launch (let alone the beta). A lot of that is from player feedback.  Third party tools combined with players putting all the stats together resulted eliminating a lot of the "fuzzier" mechanics. Things like "Procs" got dissected and analyzed at levels I couldn't even imagine.  That's not necessarily a bad thing mind you, it just means the game has such large appeal that it's attracted both the casual gamers and the ones who want to understand the ins and out.

The first Galactic Civilizations was all fuzzy math.  Even I would have a hard time explaining with precision how morale worked or how production worked in terms of putting together a formula.   In GalCiv I, your planet quality was central to everything. Various planetary improvements, morale, and bunches of other attributes got in there to do all kinds of multiplications to the various numbers.  The order of some of these mattered since there'd be an addition here, a square root there.  The system was designed essentially that building improvement X was better for production than improvement Y.  The numbers, in essence, were all relative to one another.  Someone looking for an entertainment network to make their morale go up by 15% would be sorely disappointed.

For the sequel, I wanted to dispense with as much of that as possible. A factory would build X production units. A research center would produce Y research units. Period. How much of its capacity was used depended on how fully funded the building was.

Entering the sausage factory

Things get murky when you start dealing with civilization ability points.  One might argue that if I have a planet where my approval rating is 50% and I have a morale ability of 10% then my approval rating should be 55% (50*1.1).    And if I build an entertainment network whose job is to improve morale by 20% that my approval rating would then be 50*1.3 = 65%. 

What about production? If I have a factory that produces 10 units of production and it's all on social production and my social production ability is 20%, then my social production should be 12?  Sure.  But should the player be charged the 12 units? Or should it be 10 units with the other 2 production as bonus?  That's the way it is on research.

Speaking of which, if I have 10 units of research being produced and my research ability is 50%, shouldn't my research by 15?  No argument from me.  On the surface, that's how it should be.  And indeed, often that's how things start out.  Then you have human beings playing your game and all those good designs go out the window.  Probably the biggest reason for that in this particular game is from the mining resources. 

There are research, military, economic, influence, and morale resources.  To keep the game from being too complex to the casual user, starbase modules that mine these resoruces are the same no matter what type you are building on.  That is, A mining barracks adds say 10% to your ability regardless of whether it's a morale resource or a weapons resource.  The problem is, a 10% bonus to research is hugely different than a 10% bonus to morale which is a huge difference form a 10% bonus to weapons.  I mean, heck, if I have a ship with 8 attack, I won't even get an additional point.

And we're just getting warmed up.  Should a 10% bonus to your morale ability increase it by 10%?  Or should it add 10 points to it?  That is, if my morale ability is 10% and I mine a morale resoruce for 10%, should my morale ability be 11%? Or should it add 10% to it and make it 20%?  We add it because otherwise, any semblance of balance could go out the window (create a civ with a 80% morale ability natively and then these percent multipliers would get crazy). 

Has your head exploded yet?  Because it just keeps getting better. In order to have some semblance of balance, we mess around with the ability values in order for them not to get out of whack.

That morale ability?  fCivABilityFactor = pow(fCivABilityFactor,0.80f);

At release, Your Civ Ability at morale was just that.  But it turned out on a large galaxy you could have several morale resources cranked up to over 100 points each.  So suddenly you could have 100% taxes and 100% morale.  Oops.  So it was changed .95, then .9, then .7, then back upu to .8.  That's the sausage factory that's game development.  Where all your nice clean, elegant mechanics start to get murky.

Your research ability? It's chopped in half for the same reason.

Government waste

And what about "wasted" social production? In GalCiv I, military and social production was wasted even if you weren't building anything. 

For GalCiv II, we decided to eliminate that.  If you weren't building a ship or an improvement, you weren't charged for that production.  That makes sense.  Except, well, it turned out that players couldn't control their economy if social production was handled that way. 

What happened is that say you're playing on a really large galaxy with 100 colonies and your economy is producing 5,000 net revenue per turn.  Your planets have no improvements being built.  Then an alien offers to trade you xeno factories.  You take it.  Then suddenly your net revenue goes to -2,000 per turn.  Huh? What happened? All your planets started upgrading their factories and all that social production started to get charged for again.  Yikes! Worse, it would gradually come back down as those improvements were completed all without the player doing anything. 

Given that there's people who find the economic system in GalCiv II to be complex (what? separate tax and spend sliders?) having massively changing net revenue without user intervention would have put them over the top.  So we ended up charging for social production.  Which, is probably more realistic anyway and requires the player to put a little bit of effort into making their government more efficient.  Still, it's not ideal because it has to be rationalized.

One of the ideas we had was to have social production go towards approval rating.  But it's the same problem. Players see their approval alter by moving the spending slider and it's just another complexity.

Another idea was to have social production be added to military production on a given planet if there's nothing else to build.  This is possibly more doable.  And if there's no ship being built, it would still be spent.  But at least that way, there's some benefit.

You have the power

Just like with World of Warcraft, games, especially statistics laden games like Galactic Civilizations are designed to evolve.  We'll listen to what you have to say and together we'll keep improving the system.   But never think there's a "best" system.  There is only, at best, a system that annoys fewer people than the alternatives.