In the meantime...

[Hunter548]

They're developing and prolonging a game for basically several thousand people and you're complaining.

LOL.

I paid $20 for a product they decided I needed (And that they decided was ready for market) that is delivering a worse user experience. Seems like people have a right to complain.

[Black Wendigo]

Perhaps the real issue is that Arelith was updated too soon. I think they should have waited 6 months because games often are released with lots of bugs for whatever reason but then six months or so later they are fine. Look at Fallout New Vegas. That is a classic example of a game that was released very buggy and unstable but a few months later most of the initial stuff was fixed and the game is was from then on stable.

I think Beamdog did release the game too early but that is the way most games are released lately. Being small and indie doesnt cut it with me because indies like Amplitude (Endless Space) and Stardock (Galactic Civilizations) have released their games in such a bad state as most have.

Lastly, the criticizm is warrented because they are making people pay money for unfinished product.

[Mithreas]

I wasn't part of the decision to move so quickly, but I was (and remain) fully supportive of it.

Yes, there are down sides. But look at our player numbers - look at the huge number of people (including a number of people now active on the forums) who have discovered Arelith as a result.

At a technical level, I see the arguments for waiting for 6 months. But (with 10+ years of relevant professional experience) waiting would have been a worse decision.
- We would have missed the surge when the game is first released and has the most people interested in it.
- If Arelith, the largest server out there, hadn't taken part, EE would have have had less impact and BD would have been less willing to invest resources in it.
- Perhaps most critically, Arelith's scale, size and dev involvement has been an important part of finding issues. 6 months with Arelith running EE is not the same as 6 months without Arelith running EE - there is simply no other server out there that would find as many issues as we have, so quickly. We push the envelope in a number of ways that are very difficult to replicate in-house in system testing.
- Finding the issues now, while EE is being successful and BD are at their peak level of community engagement, means more things get addressed more quickly than they would later.

Yes, we are going through some short term pain while we work through teething issues. But waiting 6 months would have meant not-significantly-fewer issues, and longer lead times for resolving them, while missing out on a large influx of new and talented players.

The EE transition is about the next 15 years, not the next 6 months. A couple of months of hard work and a couple of months of significant bugs really is not a major price to pay for another 15 years of life.

At least, that's my view on it all!

[With The Sky Below My Feet]

I paid $20 for a product they decided I needed (And that they decided was ready for market) that is delivering a worse user experience. Seems like people have a right to complain.

IDK I guess some of us thought after more than half a year of complaints including pre-release whine (thanks guys) and post-release wail people would have gotten over it by now and take the above mentioned things (see Mith's, more constructive post than mine) as given.

It's not like, there's like Beamdog or something you can complain to instead of bringing it to the Arelith forums again and again

and again

[susitsu]

To be entirely fair, the large fill of bugs has not only caused players not to buy the game, but driven players who did buy the game away who foolishly expected a finished product like I had hoped to see.

It was definitely too soon for the release of EE even. NWNX should have been ready and combat modes at least should switch properly instead of me having to cease combat and then hit something just to get into improved expertise.

There's too many little problems that are, in-fact, game-breaking for some people.

[Liareth]

NWNX should have been ready

Just FYI - NWNX has nothing to do with Beamdog or the EE release. It's an open source project (like in 1.69). Anyone can add anything they want to it.

https://github.com/nwnxee/unified

[susitsu]

Someone had told me NWNX was a Beamdog side thing. My mistake.

[Liareth]

Someone had told me NWNX was a Beamdog side thing. My mistake.

It's actually a "Liareth side thing". I rewrote NWNX on 1.69 for fun. Arelith ran on its code for a long time before EE was known about, even for the Names plugin which was used for disguise names. Then 1.74 became a thing and the code I wrote became the most suitable way to make a maintainable NWNX so we used it. The reason disguise names still don't work is because, unlike most other plugins, there isn't a good way to make the Names plugin work in a version independent way; it would require significant work each update to keep it running. I'm thinking of adding the functionality to the base game instead when I get some free time to do it.

[Aelryn Bloodmoon]

Neverwinter Nights in all forms has always been an unfinished, not completely polished product.

But that is part of its beauty, in a rare and exceptional twist of fate. Despite flaws and bugs that have been and remain in the game, it remains the single best medium to deliver an online table-top RPG experience with other players. NWN2 arguably had a better user-interface (in my opinion) but the game just never picked up the same momentum for a variety of reasons, which means it never saw the same amount of effort into community driven development- which is sad because it was much more visually enticing.

Personally, I was okay with paying twenty dollars just to turn the server list back on, because the only real limitation to your online experience is how many people you can find to play. The fact that they've recompiled the game and done any further developing and coding/bug-fixing is something I'm happy about, and also that I can play in 1080P on my large-screen without giving myself the squints.

When I'm not on Arelith, I dabble in Zombie Survival modules.

[susitsu]

I'm thinking of adding the functionality to the base game instead when I get some free time to do it.

Certainly things to look forward to. As you can see, I'm still playing despite my personal gripes. I'm more disappointed by the loss of certain players than anything else. EE had and has felt like it an unpleasant transition. I think there's no denying this.

[Hannibal]

I pay $20 for my lunch. Tastes great, comes out the other end.

No biggie.

[Nitro]

I pay $20 for my lunch. Tastes great, comes out the other end.

No biggie.

Swap jobs with me. I'd love to afford 20$ lunches.

[Cortex]

I pay $20 for my lunch. Tastes great, comes out the other end.

No biggie.

Swap jobs with me. I'd love to afford 20$ lunches.

same

[Ozzy.nl]

20 euro or 5 euro I realy dont care. The point ia that tue game right now is in a state worse tjen it was on 1.69 atleast then intel gpus still had a chance. And many laptop users walked around Cordor. And what bothers me more is the fact that beamdog knew about the intel problem. And they still released this game that is broken. That gives us every right to complain.

The amount of money is not the issue, it is what they do with it that is.

[Hannibal]

I pay $20 for my lunch. Tastes great, comes out the other end.

No biggie.

Swap jobs with me. I'd love to afford 20$ lunches.

same

no its mine

[susitsu]

Swap jobs with me. I'd love to afford 20$ lunches.

same

no its mine

no seriously i will fight you, give me your job

[Hannibal]

Imagine you're in a $8.05/hr job, and you work hard enough to manage more than 3 hours a day!

You've already made the cost- oh, and now you get 1,000+ more hours of an addictive piece of entertainment anyways!

Value? I think so.

P.S: This thread's been really derailed?