[HoneyBadger]

In support of 13lackgu4rd's comment: I think that many, if not most, Dom3 players can accept that game balancing is one of the responsibilities of a game's community. It's also more of a subjective "grey area" than broken features/promises.

If Elemental had come out with only balancing issues, I doubt this thread would have gone in the direction it has.

Beta's for ironing out atleast most of the major bugs, and for making sure the game is working well enough to be called Gold. "Crashes every 2 hours or so" should never, ever, be an issue in a Gold version. And this is the second Stardock game that's had this issue. I personally experienced the exact same problem with GalCiv2.

They should have just waited for a holiday release. Yeah, it's difficult to have to hold out for a payday, but look at Blizzard and their successes. They wait until a game is actually Gold, before releasing it. I'm not saying that their 1.0 versions are perfect, they've released plenty of patches (itself a good thing, rather than any mark of inferior coding), but they give quality product from day one, without any insulting "take it or leave it" garbage.

This whole idea of the community being a second or third Beta team is getting out of hand, and really starting to leave a bad taste in my mouth. People volunteer for Beta all the time, so let whoever wants to, sign up and help out, until the game works.
Games are for entertainment, enjoyment, a clean break from work. If I have to work hard just to help a game become playable, on top of my 40+ hour work week, why aren't companies like Stardock paying me, instead of the other way around?