Ack sorry to come in so late...
So basicly...
A negatively oriented personality will see these lists as a sign of failure....for even having to fix so much...
A positively oriented personality will see these lists as a sign of success...for having the commitment to even fix so much...
So, what orientation is it if you:
See it as a sign of failure... but having the commitment to eventually fix so much? 
And as far as harping on the past goes, the thread is called "A final thought on Taldren" a company that no longer exists in America, therefore there is only the past to discuss. If it's an issue for some, perhaps those people should just pass on by this thread and go to a different one more to their liking?
...and I think that is what happened. In my mind Taldren reached a level of redemption. They stuck with us far longer than they should have by any account. Others as well helped in that regard. I think KHOROMAG was mentioned. There are many others as well.
However I would not be so harsh with Harliquin..I myself am a REALIST. The past is real. Our dreams are fantasy's. This thread is a final thought but the summation should not ignore the parts that brought it to the sum. If there are some who can't handle it maybe those who can't should pass this thread by. Or pershaps the author should have retitled it KUMBAYA and we should all join hands and start singing...Now that's another part of the "glass" as well. That was obviously not his intent. One thing I do not like and it's this; let's not tell people to post because what they say doesn't fit our notion of things. That should be a foul on this forum and a very serious one. Everyone has a say. We are a small community now and do not have the luxuary of intolerance.
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> The speed with which the fixes were delivered was in fact less that desirable, and many players were lost because of the time frame in which they came (personally I feel that too much time was spent on non-critical things like "balance issues" instead of fixes in the beginning, but that's my opinion).
Yes, its one thing not to ship d2 with sfc2, but its a whole new ball of wax when the game takes almost half a year to get playable and get the features promised.
Lets not forget either, they knew sfc was shipping broken and missing core features and did not alert anyone until posts started showing up on the forum soon after it hit store shelves. Now while from a pure cash flow POV I understand why they didnt do such, BUT its was still VERY dishonest and suckered many people in to pay full price for something that was worth, at best, half. And still then your paying them to be their alpha tester. Then some here you wonder why they went under? Many felt screwed per se and with just cause. They gambled if they could shift blame enough and 'try again' with a new product they could keep the losses of paying customers at a mininum. They gambled and lost. Out of everything this aspect of the mess really annoyed me.
> I think Taldren was manned by well intentioned folks who probably bit off a bit more than they could handle and were probably mismanaged a bit. There is certainly blame for the various problems with the games, but I certainly do not believe that it was all "The Publisher" every time. I mean they went through 3 publishers, all of whom had the same problems with missed deadlines and such.
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...because quite frankly he states what many players were saying right after the release of SFC2. I am adding my two cents becuase I DON'T want fiction to replace what really happened. My own rank 10, Ssazzix, a two time SL winner, was thrown off the Taldren board for saying those very things...perhaps not as politely.
There were many and serious problems with SFC2 when it was released. I think they came in three general kinds...one was game balance, the other was just a whole mess of bugs, and the Dynaverse (the big PIE IN SPACE) was dysfunctional. What a mess of spaghetti.
For an online player the game balance issues were paramount (no pun intended). So I depart from Harlequin's own thread in that regard. But HE is right actually. From a business point of view online players usually only represent a fraction of the people who buy a game. SFC1 sold about 400,000 copies and only about a couple thousand ended up online. That's the fact.
However, I think we can see the confusion Taldren had in producing this game by looking at how their first release (as a company) effected the online community. This game shines as a an online product. Few other games can match it in that regard. SFC1 satisfied both communities.
So what happened?
Within a month or so of it's release the Lyrans, most hard hit, were pretty much extinct as online players. That was primarily because they had to wait something like 8 seconds to deploy their primary weapon. Not to mention the fact that the ESG seemed to just float away when it was deployed unless you changed view or went overhead.
The Gorns were the next to go. It took us a while. Since the point defense was bugged we couldn't starcastle anymore. Drones would sometimes take two shots from a phaser one to kill leaving your capacitor drained and your ship rather defenseless except for plasma, an easy mark for a speeding klingon who swoop by, crunch a shield, H&R you then outrun your G or S from 6 clicks. And THATS if you were lucky enough for it to work at all. Tractoring an oppoenent and using our other big tactis was untinkable since most races could easily break kill a tactoring Gorn at that time. At that time we also had no plasma D's. Most of our ships were dead slow because we had to carry all kinds of phony "holding costs" for no reason other than a few influential people convinced Taldren that THAT was the soluton to game balance, stomp on the plasma ships basically. Heck I remember a few ROM ships couldn't even MOVE once they loaded and cloaked. Who was alseep at the switch there eh?
There was definitely a breakdown from the people who advised Taldren on the game. Some influential people had "agendas". I mean when the guy who is writing a tactics and strategy book for the game (SFC2) gets up in the main lobby and starts shouting "NO MORE FREE RIDES" in reference to all the problems they were going to heap on the plasma ships in the name of game balance, I think it was fairly obvious. Thank god I never bought that book...after all what tactics was a guy who admitted he had "retreated" from an AI controlled ship in a "one on one" going to teach me or any other online player about the game? Shame on you if he did...
Anyway no sense in going on for I will dredge up many demons better left locked away in a few million braincells. Go to the readme files in all the patches and read between the lines. One of the reasons why I started posting on the off topic forums and then the "hot spicey" forum is that I just couldn't stand it anymore. It was A LOT nicer to argue about politics than it was to try to convince some people that things were totally screwed up. After all I was just a player, no one special...to them.
So Harlequin speaks the truth. If one doesn't like the truth it's their choice to ignore it; close your eyes and tap your heels together three times (Presto! He is now a negative personality!)...negativity exists as well as positive things. And sometimes they are imbalanced. Sometimes it's good and proper to be pissed off. There were lessons to be learned from what happened at taldren and SFC2. They should not be ignored. Taldren started as a company that seemed to be confused and lacking in programming talent to interpet SFC2 from SFC1. Those programmers learned their trade over time but in this business "there is a tide in the affairs of men"...and it was too late.
I will miss Taldren. In the end they began to listen to the RIGHT people. Honest folks who had no agenda but just wanted all those great players we lost to come back and begin the good times all again.
Well. The ball is in OUR hands now.
Topic: A final thought on Taldren (Read 34100 times)