[S.R. Krol]

Originally Posted by Mike_T

Do you represent Shrapnel on these boards? If so, can you (or someone else from the company) please answer the points made in my post at the start of this thread? Thanks.

I wanted to pop in to discuss the developers can't post bit, but I'm definitely not the ultimate authority. I have made sure others are aware. As far as the original points judging from the forum threads I'm assuming the main complaints are the MP issues. As briefly mentioned in my original post I personally don't have an ETA on a forthcoming patch so I can't say more than that. Sorry, wish I did have some sort of concrete date.

Originally Posted by spilblood

But there's still the problem that Shrapnel simply released the game too early before it was properly finished. You should have given Malfador more time for beta testing.

Now this I think really needs to be addressed. We are truly an independent publisher. We do not own any of the developers. We do not force them into some sort of servitude like the big guys. Our role is to let developers concentrate on their games while we worry about the boring, nitty-gritty details that come with gaming.

As such we have never, nor will we, set release dates. We are not beholden to stockholders. We are not beholden to the fourth quarter Christmas rush. We don't need to get our games on store shelves. Heck, our internally developed game--All American--has been in development for twelve years. It would be pretty hypocritical of us to force a game from someone out to the public when we don't even do that with our own game.

We release a game only when the developer feels its ready to be released. In the case of World Supremacy Malfador was ready to release it. It went through beta testing here and as far as I know Malfador had their own group also before coming to us.

Originally Posted by ScottWAR

The reply was that Shrapnel discourages developers to post in the forums because they would rather handle game issues through support tickets. The person in your support dept MAY have meant that shrapnel discourages developers from posting in the fourms about game issues.......and not in general.

This. The reasoning for this is twofold. First, we like to keep track of support issues and would rather have all support issues go through our system (not that this always happens). Second, many support issues are general enough that the developer doesn't need to be bothered. Obviously we can't examine AI issues as an example, but bad video card drivers would be an example of something that a dev wouldn't have to be bothered with. So yes, we'd rather not have the devs worry about general glitches, after all, that's part of our service to them.

While none of this may have resolved anything at least hopefully everyone has a better understanding of some of the reasons behind some of the actions. Malfador has been around the block long enough in game development to have no reason not to examine the issues being raised. After all, I'm pretty sure he wants his game to succeed, too.