Correcting the Steam misinformation

I liked your thread, Quitch. Unfortunately, it received about the same reaction I expected it would. :-/

Because he's tied to Exodus, which is tied to Uber.

Not really sure what reaction you expected.

It fails to address the actual criticisms behind it being removed from the store, hiding reviews, etc. They've been covered in the other thread so I'm not going to list them here.

And the whole "no split in the community" argument is defunct. Yes, it will split the community, for the simple reason that nobody playing Titans is going to want to play without the new units. There's no reason to do it, and since you can no longer buy PA, it's just going to slowly starve off that multiplayer base, and it was already shrinking.

In short, if I want to continue playing multiplayer, I am required to buy Titans, else there's only going to be a handful of people to play with. As it stands there's under half the people playing PA as there is Titans.

You seem to know how exodus is structured better than i do....impressive.

And still for now the amount of players playing PA vanilla seems to have gone up compared to before titans release for now.
Yes long term you will need titans to play online with the vast majority of the players.
Just like you need Forged Alliance to play SupCom online.

From past RTS I'd say there won't be much of a split. The vast amount of players sees enough value in the addon to buy it and you get additional players who either didn't like the base game or only bought the game after the expansion had been added because they wanted something only the expansion has.
For the player base of PA as a whole this is good. If you for some reason like PA vanilla more, than yes this is bad for you.

Vs. what? A DLC? That wouldn't do the same thing?

The main difference though is you could still buy SupCom after FAs release, and that this is more comparable to the SupCom2 DLC, but that's debatable. The argument that it isn't going to cause a split is still incorrect though. It is.

Even if there are more folks playing now (I don't know how many were playing before Titans) it has still split the player base. That's not really something that can be denied.

No DLC would too. I don't have issue with the fact that it would split the player base, I don't understand why folks seem to automatically assume I'm against DLC or expansions, after all I own SupCom, I own FA, I own SupCom2 and the DLC.

I'm just pointing out that saying it wouldn't cause a split is plain incorrect.

My apologies, I did assume though in a different way than you wrote. I actually assumed you wanted Titans as a DLC instead of a standalone game, because that's what I've seen a number of other people write. Things such as "why wasn't this just a DLC?".

Ya, regardless of the fact that Titan is backwards compatible for multiplayer, whenever new content is released which isn't accessible to everyone, it splits a community. It's nothing new, so I don't understand why some say it won't happen here nor do I understand why some people are really upset about it.

Why should you not remove vanilla PA from the store? What purpose does keeping it on the store prove, assuming the games are of relatively similar pricing (which they are) and content (which they are)?

Simply stating that the removal itself is shady, doesn't in fact make it shady, especially when there are no logical reasons I've read to keeping it. I'm welcome to hear some, and I have asked before (on the Steam forums I think though, not here).

Hiding reviews is obvious. The Steam Review system is not perfect. It is not a fair system, and it often doesn't represent the true quality of a game. The fact that people are intentionally, and in significant numbers, abusing that platform right now with TITANS is irrefutable evidence of that. That said, this does not mean that the main reason for providing TITANS as the new platform going forward was to hide the reviews. It will have simply been an additional factor in making a decision.

Unless you think reviews of PA from over a year ago are still accurate as of the TITANS launch this week?

If you want to continue playing multiplayer with the active PA scene, you will need TITANS. The same goes for every single multiplayer game in existence that ever received an expansion pack. If you want to play with friends, you can stick with PA. If you want to start up a group dedicated to classic PA, you could take the initiative and start that up as well.

There are options available to you, easily. Why haven't you considered them? Why are you criticising Uber for a expansion model that many other RTS developers have followed?

I mean, I do think it should have been DLC, but that's because I don't think the original should have been pulled from the steam store. I can see why they did it, I just don't agree with it. I understand why people are upset about it, they feel like they're being forced to pay extra should they want to play the multiplayer, while other people did not.

Except there are many other games that have done stand alone versions, that haven't removed previous versions. That is what makes it seem shady. As to reasons? I've stated this else where, but, they could have easily kept PA on sale and added the option to upgrade, one reason they may have removed it was so that people were not able to redeem the extremely cheap keys from previous sales and then get the DLC, something I have done a few times for games in the past.

As it stands now, anyone wanting the new content (not an existing owner) has to pay full retail price.

That doesn't mean hiding those reviews is an appropriate response, as I've stated, I use reviews like that to see the development history of a game, and what I'm buying into. I've also stated I think EA reviews shouldn't be applied to the release versions score.

For example, if say people had been asking for features that were promised, complained about it in an old review, and then I saw it was released as DLC, that would look pretty bad. I wouldn't want to support a company that does that. (Not saying that is the case here, but an example of the possible uses of old reviews).

I've already covered these assumptions of yours in previous posts, please read back over my comments since you're making accusations against me without knowing my stance on the matter.

I made no assumptions. I was asking your questions, and you deigned not to respond, citing me making assumptions. You are criticising Uber; fact. You haven't considered playing games with friends or starting a Classic PA Steam group as viable options (i.e. you've dismissed them on some level already).

There are other games with standalone versions that existed when Steam Reviews didn't. There are always counterexamples when talking about the sheer number of games that exist. Saying that "other games haven't done with Uber have done" is not automatically a reason for Uber being shady. That is a logical leap that you have chosen to make.

And if Uber want to stop the abuse of old game keys being redeemed just to get access to TITANS, that is entirely their perogative. If you want to call behaviour "shady" as it pleases you, then don't be insulted or otherwise personally offended if people assume such behaviour is also underhanded.

Anyone wanting the new content has to buy the game at full price. This is how buying games works. I fail to see anything shady about charging full price for a full game. Do you expect people (who I presume aren't yourself) to be entitled to a full game for . . . not full game price?

It's great that you use reviews as they're intended. Sadly, other people are not, and thus, they are not an accurate representation of the product itself. The fact that you want Reviews to ideally reflect the product doesn't mean that Uber aren't allowed to protect themselves from Valve's laziness in not fixing the system.

I say this: there have ALWAYS been expansion packs that caused mass exodus to the new Standard. I own still some of them, examples being:

C&C Red Alert (Aftermath)
Homeworld: Cataclysm
Age of Empires II: The Conquerors
Red Alert 2: YUris Revenge
WH40K: Dawn of War (Dark Crusade)
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance
Diablo II: Lord of Destruction
WoW: Every Expansion Ever

All but two required the Base Game to play. Which two is? Oh. Forged Alliance and Homeworld Cataclysm, two games accused coincidentally of being "cash grabs" for not offering this in the base game, whilst also being master class titles.

But no one can disagree that all the above titles are steller examples of superb games. All the Vanilla games quietly faded somewhat after the expansions came out, so what does it truly mean if PA follows the same path? Very little, if anything. The point I feel is irrelevant, if not in fact a historical indicator of a successful game

You're wrong about Homeworld Cataclysm; most people tended to prefer HW1 because Cataclysm was firstly quite different, and secondly the Beast faction that was more similar to HW1 had an exploit that took forever to be patched out that stigmatized it in multiplayer.

Well, good work @Quitch, but saidly it didn´t seem to help a lot.
Well, good work @stuart98, awesome thing that it seems to help a lot!

Well, the idea was often voiced in the community that PA needs a relaunch to get rid of the old reviews, both from users as well as from professionals, as a big, celebrated rerelease leads to re-reviews from game magazines as well. (throws in a new Metascore, which is also very )

Although I´m no steam user (might be quite obvious that a DRM-opponent and GOG-fan is no SteamUser...) I read through many of the Steam-Reviews and the vast majority was utterly flawed. Even the negative ones you can read NOW are showing off better execution in general, and, which is quite a shame for gaming magazines, even many magazine reviews were flawed and full of mistakes. (like pointloss in two different categories with one contra point or simply noGOs as substracting points for "not having shields" or "not featuring experimental units"---like every RTS needs them, although, as we now can see, the latter rock in PA nevertheless... )

To put it in a nutshell: Yup, you´ve got a point, but the reviews were simply to bad-crafted anyways to accurately serve you purpose!

We can't know how many lurkers either thread has helped really.

Your argument is nonsensical because this split you speak of will have little to no effect on the PA community. There's a reason Uber gave people who already have PA a huge discount - they want them playing Titans. Anyone who doesn't buy it in the next week will quickly realize the worth of that $13 expansion and upgrade. There will be very few people with the base game by the end of the month. In addition, loners in MP who are still on Classic PA will start to run out of people to play with and upgrade for that reason.

To top it off, even if we entertain the idea that Uber's mechanics for getting people to upgrade doesn't work, they've put in place a system that lets both sides play together if need be. It won't happen often because Titans is an awesome expandalone and people want to play it, but it's still usable.