It is all our fault

You can't have it both ways.  There were plenty of vocal beta testers that said that it would be near suicidal to launch the game in the current state.  They were right.  The trick is to really objectively evaluate the feedback instead of (as Brad himself admitted) having the blinders on due to passion.

The buck has to stop someplace and that place is not in beta.

Without being part of the beta-process this is my feeling too. There is so many cool things hidden in the game-resources, and many thing that seems to have been gimped in a last minute effort to balance the game. Seriously if the combat/tactics was better balanced, then the strategic state could easily be unresonable unbalanced. This is common in many strategy games, and great for single player, but sucky for multiplayer, but multiplayer then just use pregenerated maps, where single player uses the random maps.

Actually, a lot of those suggestions in the beta are what they're talking about implementing as a fix now. So I wouldn't say it was their fault, I would however commend the lack of anyone saying "told you so".

There is a certain amount of polish these days gamers expect.

When games ships with features missing (and still missing, multiplayer), issues with the game running properly (slowdowns, not yet optimized), broken or poorly designed game mechanics (especially in a game like a 4x), vague and obscure information about what is in the game, or hard to find information buried too deep, and so on. THESE kind of things make the majority of us gamers scream 'WHY?? Why did you release it in such a state, and shoot yourself in the foot?'

No, we don't know all the reasons behind it. We dont know if it was a money thing, or if they got caught up in the passion thing and really wanted to let us play their game thing!

Bottom line: It was not ready. It has made progress, but it still isn't ready.

I do not regret spending my money and doing my part to help a company like Stardock. I am thankful they make the type of games I enjoy. However, had I known what I was getting when I paid for it, I would have held off on buying it for however long it took/takes them to get this thing polished and running the way it should have been running on launch day.

Taste in mouth: Frustrated

Any developer that completely listens to ALL the whiners are to blame.  Having good feed back is one thing.  However, I will admit at times I can troll and I care for games and this company and I would love to see this game flourish.  Does it matter that they listened to too many of the wrong people?  I am to blame for this game too.  After hearing about it, and waiting three days.  I still bought it.  I should have seen and read the signs.  However, i saw and read too many of the faqnbois and too many of the "Stardock can never go wrong" and the "one more patch and it will be magically fixed and perfect" talks.

IF I COULD... I would get a refund.  With that being said, once the game is finished, I would then re-buy it.  However, let us face it.  Not all of us are rich and some of us do live paycheck to paycheck.  Last I heard, I still have to pay bills, go to work, and I am talking to this woman...  or I could play an "unfinished" game that is very expensive.

Cannot blame beta testers or play testers. Beta testers are supposed to find bugs and graphics glitches and such. They should not be giving feedback on game play. Play testers provide feedback on game play. Neither beta testers nor play testers design or develop.

Developers design and develop. If they delegate that task to beta testers or fans, then what you wind up with is same as the camel, which is a horse designed by a committee.

This isn't anybody's fault other than Brad's and Stardock's. As consumers the only obligation we have are to buy the products that are of interest to us. As the developer of this game it was up to Brad and Stardock to put out a product that consumers would consider buying. They failed. All the hype and all the promises were of Brad's doing. What you're saying is that the game failed because Brad and Stardock listened to "us". I disagree with that. I think the game failed due to poor or no planning. That's not our fault. It wasn't up to "us" to decide what things should be in the game. Those choices are made by the same person who told those beta testers with concerns of an early release to basically "shut up, we know what we're doing". The fault lies with Brad and no one else.

Having a better system for uploading crashes and debug logs during the Beta stage of the game would have helped tremendously, especially with the new engine and all.

We didn't get the release-candidate and we got a lot of promised fixes that didn't always work out. (Before the game released, ATI memory leak in 1.05 being completely fixed). And so on.

Whoever yells the loudest gets heard, even if what they say isn't any good. Plus, people don't often point out every single thing they like, but do to the thing they don't like. I bet there are a lot of things I like the way it is now that are going to be changed because of too much whining. Hardly anyone even mentions what play speed, world difficulty, sovereign setup, and AI setup they use when they make a comment on what is 'wrong' with the game, but it all factors in. Bugs are things that don't work right and need to be fixed, but gameplay components change with the player. I hope the game stays great, but fixes the problems with playing it.

imho the easy settlement and resource management are the two best parts of the game for me at the moment (though i wish i could get some decent looking walls that didn't cost a ton of maintenance).

it's the combat, unit design, magic system and stats that ruin the game for me, and on those aspects the testers have been right (imho) from the beginning.

I actually think the devs didn't listen to us closely enough when we said the game is not ready of release. We never even got a chance to test all the components together. Any criticism towards the game as unfinished was nuked by the moderators and Brad himself who told one beta tester to go play Civ5 rather than waste time with this game. It is comments like those that are truly revealing as to the events that led up to release

Guys,

Let's focus the blame where it belongs and that is on ONE person: ME.

I could list out the sins right here:

1. I violated my long-standing tradition of monitoring the forums and playing the game and instead focused on working on the game directly. If I had spent more time on the forums instead of the compiler, I'd have been convinced of having a public Beta 5 and then likely would have just pushed the date back.
2. Instead of focusing on AI, which is my speciality, I focused too much time on things like expanding quests and creating lore thinking that my AI "mad skillz" were enoughto make the AI challenging in a relativel short amount of time - hey, my guys were getting creamed by it, it must be good...not.
3. I played Theorycraft with the game mechanics. They looked so great on paper. 
4. I didn't educate myself on how much more complex the interactions of OS + hardware + driver version -- i.e. I didn't take into account how long and hard it had taken to get Pear (our previous engine) perfected.

I don't think the beta testers were to blame here. Plenty of people made threads about how they were worried about the "release" of the game, and those threads were closed. Beta testers were told that the interior beta was very close to release and in a great state of completion. In fact, I think there wasn't enough beta tester involvement throughout the process. A lot of people had really good ideas that didn't "gimp" the game.

The fact is, as far as I know, there wasn't really a true beta where players had their hands on the final version. Maybe some flags could have been raised. Assigning blame, truly, isn't productive. Better to simply fix and fix until it gets to the state you want it.

You've been eating a lot of humble pie, man. I just want to point out that the Longest Journey also sold very badly when it first came out, and only later went on to be one of the most popular adventure games of all time.

Thank you for your intelligent and well-reasoned post.  Rest assured it will be given all the consideration it merits.

You could have made your point simply by saying something like 'too many cooks spoil the broth'.

this. there were even users banned for their warnings.

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9555703&postcount=67

The problems with the beta were:

• Usually stability was focussed on last so many beta testers didn't really get to test the mechanics.
• Negative feedback without some sort of constructive suggestion was ignored.
• The original plan was to make the game fun in cloth map, then put in the bling. This didn't happen from a game-play or balance perspective.
• Release version was never beta tested (at least not publicly).

In isolation the game has some really nice aspects. Namely, the graphics, zooming to cloth map, the concept of personalising units, the mod tools, the code structure to allow in-depth modding, and so on. But unfortunately the final result is less than the sum of the parts.

I still believe this game can be great.

I'm sorry but no. Not only did I complain about the global resource model I also strongly advocated numerous times for the distinction between races, factions, spells, spell books, etc.

I get the feeling that these two points are the main culprits. From my limited experience at coding my own games, I tend to over-think the whole design part of them, and it's only through playing them that I can realize how wrong the design points are. Players feedback cannot be compared, as it often led me to rationalize their complaints as "not playing the game is it should" or "not understanding what the game is about".

Brad you are way to damned honest. How did you become a CEO again??

Ok, stop apologizing already.
Shitty crappy buggy games gets released all the time, too often, several per month.
At least Elemental is a great game covered with a bug-wrapper, which has already been peeled off to an extent.

I never wanted an apology from you or stardock, i wanted an apology from will wright for spore, from whatstheirname for star ruler, from who'sthevirgin for all the latest NFS games the past 5 years, from whoever for the fail hybrid shit that was command and conquer 4.

Elemental, while buggy as heck at release, was still a GAME. Stop apologizing, just keep up the great work on the patches.

Kind of a strange comparison. TLJ was one of the best adventure games right out of the box, it was an instant classic.

It's hard to understand how nobody remembers a beta that ended less then a month ago.

1. Global resources wasn't a creation of this forum. By far, the most popular economic systems here were the more complex ones that featured local resources and caravans to move supplies around. There's both threads AND surveys to confirm that.

2. The races being "generic" is a function of the lore, and something testers frequently complained about. I don't know where you got the idea that there was a forum outcry for it, because that's just flat out wrong.

3. No testers wanted spells to be generic either.

I mean, come on guys. If we're going to talk about what went wrong in the beta, can we stick to stuff that actually happened?

Yeah, you basically summed up what I was going to say, but far more succinctly. It's hard to see how the OP could possibly have become so detached from reality.

Beat me too it, most major changes did not come from the beta testers.