Elemental and Stardock.
This is the second beta release of a patch for a released product that has terminal bugs. I.e, this time around trying to train units from a certain city will cause the game to crash 100% of the time.
But that's not what's making me rage.
What's making me rage is that their forum is so horribly broken I can't even post a reply to tell them that their game is broken, let alone their forum. "Sorry, your reply got lost in our network code. Please try again for the umpteenth time in another 3 hours."
Jesus fucking Christ on a pogo stick Stardock. You're like a walking cliche of game development sometimes. "Devs always break stuff as they try to fix it, hur hur hurr." In Stardock's case, it's more than a punch line, it's every patch. Not just "hey that doesn't work right." But "BOOM, eat desktop, user." "Play the game with a crippling disability, user."
I want to like this game, and tell Stardock they're doing a good job. I reeaaallllyyyy do. But the bugs hit DF levels of making me not want to play. I can forgive Toady, both because of what I've paid for and what he's doing. Stardock doesn't get that kind of fucking consideration though, they've got a team of people and they got hard cash money for their "AAA game." I can't even bring myself to test the beta patches because the bugs basically hack your ability to enjoy the game off at the knees. "It's a beta, welcome to how Stardock does business" the forum crows.
Fuck that. I didn't pay to beta test their game, and as the months roll by and they milk every last second of Brad's arbitrary 1.1 deadline, even their attempt to de-suck their product is coming off as rushed and incomplete.
For the love of God Stardock, just make a stable build. It's so bad I'm pining for the days of early release, when the performance was terrible but at least CRITICAL game elements weren't totally broken and/or causing the game to CTD. I can't even critique, let alone enjoy, the improvements they are making because the bugs are in your face by turn 100. Turn 100. 20 minutes of game play and we hit a crippling bug. How the hell does that get by Q&A?