As I write this, it’s 8:30pm on New Year’s Eve.

Maybe it’s the 20 margaritas.

Maybe it’s the head trauma from Dick Cheney.

Or maybe, just maybe it’s just a good old fashioned epiphany but the fact is, the Stardock community rocks.  Such a statement has to be quantified here lest it be a generic markety-sounding thingy.  Let me outline what makes users in our community special.

Number 10: If I say “Stay awhile…stay forever!” Our community will have the highest concentration of people who know where that comes from.

Number 9: When Stardock screws up or doesn’t do something as well as others, our users don’t just complain but instead make posts with suggests and ideas on how to do better. They’re not just “customers”, they’re part of the solution.  Example: Impulse Christmas sales weren’t as good as the ones on Steam or Drive2Drive.  Everyone upped their game. Impulse didn’t up it as much as it should have.  Did users just complain? Nope. They gave ideas on how we can do it better next time.

Number 8: Users help users.  When Demigod shipped the multiplayer servers completely fell apart when a significant number of people were online trying to use it.  Rather than there being some huge user firestorm, instead, users stepped up, volunteered their precious free time to help us and allowed us to develop a completely new system from scratch in less than 3 weeks including a world-wide client/server proxy network. 3 weeks. No way that could have been done without active user help.

Number 7: Less toxic-users. Multiplayer gaming can be pretty rough.  And while there are certainly griefers in Demigod and Sins of a Solar Empire, compared to what people run into typically online, the communities are incredibly helpful.  My 13 year old son got online to play Demigod and joined a “newbie game” that was run by a seasoned member of the community who showed the newbies the ropes on how to play. 

Number 6: Civility on the forums.  As people know, Stardock’s various communities are linked together.  You might be reading this post on Impulse, WinCustomize, JoeUser, Demigod, Sins, GalCiv, or some other site. As some know, we barely moderate the forums.  And yet the forums are pretty tame, polite, and full of helpful people.

Number 5: Design by users. Anyone who has been part of a Stardock beta knows this but we put out our betas when they are “alphas” (and that’s being generous with the term). Our users help design our programs.  Whether it be Elemental or WindowBlinds few communities have had such influence over the course of the industry as these people. 

Number 4: Political Nirvana. While outside our community I’ve been called everything from a “Neo-con” to a “#$#% tree hugger” you guys in our community know that we’re all everywhere.  Let’s face it, only a privately held company could literally support discussions in their public forums that range from Global Warming to Evolution to whether Laura Croft is hotter than…oh, nevermind, no one is hotter.

Number 3: Statistical odds of someone in our community liking Simpsons, Family Guy, and/or Monty Python are approximately 100%.  (these questions are asked as part of our job interview process – unless you work for the government in which case of course we don’t ask those questions…)

Number 2: You’re a PC user. You make no bones about it. You don’t like your games dumbed down. You don’t buy into “piracy” as being the end all answer as to why the latest console port that requires an 12-core I9 with 4 nVidia cards to play didn’t sell as well as it should have.

Number 1: Excellence is a reason unto itself. You like or community because we’re inclusive.  If I buy games off of Steam or list Left4Dead as one of my favorite games or post news items for Disciples or Space Empires IV or what have you, you guys understand why I did this.  Supporting excellence in all its forms doesn’t mean artificially limiting ones choices. We don’t take sides even if it means we literally host our competitors software on our own servers to ensure the world sees it.

Happy New Year everyone! 2010 is going to be awesome. I PROMISE!