A patch appeared and as usual I just auto installed it, but the blurb with it really did get me. I'm so used to the secrecy or seeming elitism from many of the MMO games developers, this guy somehow though instead manages just to write why the changes are made in plain english.
Quote:
Sins of a Solar Empire v1.18 + Sins of a Solar Empire Entrenchment v1.04 Changelist.
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*Warning: This update will invalidate existing save games.
Introduction:
Its been over 1.5 years since Sins was first released and this is Ironclad's 22nd update to Sins/Entrenchment (ignoring all the beta updates).
It really hit us how the gameplay and strategies have evolved since then when we started tracking the source control changes for the siege frigate data which, as many of you may remember, went through a drastic nerfing early in 2008.
Well, now the situation is quite different due to a number of factors, not the least of which is player capability and the defensive measures added in Entrenchment. It was therefore neccessary to bring them back into the roster.
But we didn't stop at siege frigates. One of our primary objectives in this update is to make sure every unit is brought back into the pool of viable tools. In some cases this was as simple as modifying some data but in some cases we completely redesigned elements of them.
Naturally, trying to figure exactly what those changes needed to be was not an easy problem but one of the best ways was to play the game against as many players as possible so we once again took to playing regularly on Ironclad Online.
Unfortunately, we couldn't use our real names because when we did in the past we were the targets of unreasonable unholy alliances. Such circumstances aren't great for collecting data and analyzing strategies. Sorry for the smurfing but it was for a good cause :)
In addition to playing online we've spent a lot of time analyzing feedback on the forums, in particular the great thread by Deceiver_0.
In this thread he collected votes from everyone on a wide variety of issues and presented a consolidated place for ideas and potential fixes.
While we didn't agree with all the suggestions, we did attempt to address what we determined to be the underlying problems but in some cases we implemented the suggestions nearly verbatim.
Special thanks to everyone who contributed to that thread! Also, special thanks to everyone who wrote constructive posts or emails, we couldn't do this without you
Sometimes I see flashes of this from SOE, although it seems to be on the whim of the individual developer, Blizzard though are a different animal, "your in our world" and "its our game" sums up their attitude the best from what I've seen. Recently they did write a series of one way monologue's presented to the community which was actually a step up.
