Can I please talk to an official of Uber?

Hateful laugh or not, I say thanks

I know better than to debate a mod. I'd appreciate you staying out of this except as a mod. Refs shouldn't be in the fight.

I'll happily debate you on steam where your badge isn't on your chest.

Just for reference and why I won't debate a mod or discuss the rules directly:
https://forums.uberent.com/threads/forum-rules-and-guidelines.444/

I've managed to read through these 2 pages of flaming debates and I still don't get the "opposition" side's overall complaint.
Don't get me wrong - I truly like this game and would be absolutely happy (who wouldn't?) to get the expansion for free, but I can understand the reasons under Uber's move.
There're a couple of saying you can apply to the situation, like "we tried our best, but it was a botch-up as usual" or "this is just business, nothing personal". Every company is greedy to some extent, if you consider marketing analyst-developed ways to getting money out of their customers as "greediness".
Uber had serious blunders and poor choices in past, which was the reason for being suspicious back in the Kickstarter days.
Kickstarter backers were paying for the project to come into existence, and liked the project's idea based on what Uber proposed, and they were rewarded for this intention, because without their money there wouldn't be any PA or PA:Titans. It is written in countless guides for kickstarter newbies: it is a (n almost) non-guarantee platforms for companies not having enough money, so it's your choice to back or not to back based on your knowledge and experience. Obvious things.
Now, PA rolls into Early Access after all the initial funding. And what was originally the idea of EA? "The game is not finished yet and wouldn't be published if it followed a "standard" developing order, but if you truly want to spend money and see how it goes, you have such a possibility". Obvious things.
Uber listened to community, adjusting the game mechanics, but you cannot hold the game in EA forever - 1.0 release, and someone's having troubles playing the game on Linux, someone's dissapointed it's not like TA or SC, someone's complaining the planet editor is laggy.. So the game is basically fun to play and entertaining, but everyone's upvoting reviews shitting over one particular disadvantage, not saying a word about the gameplay.
Numerous updates, fixes, but the game's rating is 6/10, because noone's changing their reviews written at the start. Just because Uber didn't deliver.. what?
KS Goals are achieved, HR company failed, Uber decides to make a surprise and make TA\SC-veterans happy and also improve the rating and make, as someone's said, a GOTY-like edition using their own resources.
And Steam community blew. To those saying "why should I pay $X for this standalone": Uber has made a 66% discount for a more "DLC"-feel to those already having PA. To those saying "I supported the game by paying 90$ in EA, why don't I get the game for free just as Kickstarter backers?" - you might have felt this as a support, and it is support in some way, but I've already pointed out the purpose of EA on Steam. To those saying "Uber abandoned the original PA to make people buy Titans" - when there's a bug in Titans' unit, they fix this in Titans "fork". When there's a bug or a change in the underlying engine, the fixes are committed to both branches, because the software core is identical. To those saying "why is it a stand-alone, not a DLC?" - so this is your complaint? You wouldn't say anything if it was a real DLC with the same cost?
So if I had to tell the situation in a nutshell to someone not related to the game, it will be "They had been successfully backed on KS, got in EA after the initial funding, released buggy, then polished it as much as they could and after a year decided to roll out an expansion\GOTY that wasn't promised. People say it's greedy that they want even more money even after funding and that it's better be a DLC and it's the same game basically and so why not give it for free to everyone". No need to tell how this sounds OTTH.
There are idiots from both sides of the debates and I don't want to base my opinion solely on their insults like "blind fanboy!" or "greedy chicken!", really. I'm happy this thread emerged.
I don't want to comment on your feelings "of greed when I play the game" or that birthday history, but I think that's too much.
My excuses for any grammatical errors or misunderstandings

No one has ever been banned on the Uber forums for having a different opinion to a mod, so I don't see an issue debating things with @cola_colin unless you feel you can't disagree without getting into name calling / other banned activities, which you would get banned for anyway...

That's actually extremely disrespectful. In making that statement, you're accusing Colin of being incapable of honest debate without abusing the powers he has to enforce the rules to gain some sort of upper hand.

As can be evidenced by the sheer quantity of posts on this forum discussing the pricing issue, we are not allowing our personal biases to inform our moderation decisions. Indeed we always hand off any situations in which we have personal involvement for other members of the moderation team to deal with.

The only adjustments that will be made will be for actions that break the rules you just linked. So long as everyone is respectful with how they express their opinions, there is no issue.

This reads very much as "I can't find something to say as a response so I'm going to infer that mods are lying scumbags that abuse their powers".

There is no difference to posting something here, or on the Steam forums. What matters is the content. Either address that, or don't bother.

@bsergent: I cannot answer to your post in the whole lenght, it´s just a too tall wall of text to be commented on in it´s entirety and some parts are just too hard to get for an average non-native speaker like me.
I hope you can understand and accept this...
Just some little comments on special parts:
"I find it amusing that the libertarian free market crowd defending..."
Nothing you write at that point goes anywhere near to what I was talking about, how do you come up with this?
On top of that, reality isn´t forged by once own political standpoints and I can ensure you that I´m nothing near that political spectrum you are referring to! My point just was that you cannot (well, it looks like you think you can) expect endless "real support" for a one-time digital buy. I agree that the platform owner should do give "minimum support", like making something compatible with new hardware and OSes even if the dev passes away if they wanna continue to sell the stuff. But more? Nope, not without contiuing good sale numbers; not in todays political and economic systems and not even in several better ones you could imagine!

"And they charged accordingly." This is simply wrong, the regular KS-Pricing was 20$, the first 5K who wanted even got it for 15$. Just like with the other most ambitious crowdfunding projects like Star Citizen, The Banner Saga, Torment: Tides of Numenera, PA was super-cheap to get in! This applies to most crowdfunding projects anyways...

"Frankly I have little respect for people in it for the money."
So you prefer a game world without professional game developers? Well, that´s an interesting point of view, but clearly these folks work full time/more than full time (well, that´s game dev reality, face it) on there game for their living. Developing a browser or an OS also is only comparable on the paper: Developing a game has a very different role in society than a browser or an OS, on top of that these folks often have another job in parallel, some of them are even in game development!
Anyways, I´m not sure that someone like you should comment on that stuff anyways...
...with such viewings, I didn´t expect you being on Steam anyways. I cannot explain why you buy games at all and don´t rely completly on devs that wanna make you stop paying for games...
(well, this doesn´t mean there has to be contradiction in your point, but from the limited view you gave us it all looks like that)



BTW: It would be nice if you could stop accusing @cola_colin to be "bought" with the 13$ he saved, that´s ridiculous, he stated that he would have bought the expansion anyways. And probably he´ll even do this in practice for GAs...
(I´ll definitely do the same for several friends of mine as well as for several forum-GAs, preferable when it gets released on GOG---if it gets there at all, but I hope so)

That's a technicality. Anyone can label something they dislike as something else to justify an abuse of their power.

I won't debate you either. You called the steam community a "cesspit of vitriol, entitlement and asininity."

@Everyone else
Honestly I think we're reaching the end of the road. I feel I've completely made my argument and form the outset I knew no one's mind was going to change. At this point it's just repetition and rehash.

Now the discussion is getting a little too meta and the mods and their defenders have arrived.

I genuinely thank the mods for not banning me and not erasing/merging this post/thread.

As of this typing the petition has 1783 signatures. (It's a shame not even one or two of them would back me up here.) The size and rise of that number speaks for itself. (Especially if you have any sort of sociology background.)

If someone wishes to parse those numbers and my comments as a lazy greedy attempt to avoid paying for something which in their opinion is trivially priced, then nothing I can say will change that if it hasn't already.

I'm unsubscribing now. I might manually check back later but I don't see me replying at length any time soon. If at all.

I still have hope Uber will do the right thing by giving every previous owner of PA full access to PA, including it's update, Titans. Time will tell if my optimism is misplaced.

If you want my opinion of the mostly-unmoderated Steam discussion forums, it's going to be less polite than @cwarner7264 's.

Also, important note about the English language. "the Steam community" != "the Steam forums". An important distinction, if you're going to play the victim.

I know you're flat-out ignoring my posts at this point, but I'll say one last thing for my own sake:

Please stop being a foot-stamping hypocrite, whining about "mod defenders" while expecting people to take your own opinions seriously. You are not a bringer of truth, or a great peacemaker amongst the masses of warrings forumites.

You're someone expressing an opinion, and you have zero tolerance for people disagreeing with you. Please get over the fact that people are allowed to do so.

Indeed - I saw you quote me earlier in the thread, and I stand by that statement. I gave my reasons here, and that is precisely why you'll have a difficult time convincing anyone from here to engage you in debate there.

EDIT: and actually as @Gorbles points out you've been very cheeky with the wording there. I am a member of the Steam community myself: I have lots of games on the platform. However I do not frequent the Steam forums for any of the games I own, for reasons I've already outlined.

Well, thank you for your honest responses in this thread.
I was inclined to respond to your reply about the unfinished argument, but since you announced to not reply any further I won't do it, just for the sake of not spamming threads with long walls of text that no one reads.
As you said somewhere in this thread: Only time will tell, and I hope you will be positively surprised by PA once again some time in the future.

And that reads very much like "You're just a big chicken for not doing this incredibly stupid self defeating thing I just challenged you to do."

/shrugs

I didn't challenge you to do anything, I simply pointed out how your behaviour was, in fact, already self-defeating.

Impressive that you had to spell it out, though

All this thread proves is that you can't argue with a mod. Never give a fanboy power people. It's like feeding gremlins after midnight.

All I see is people arguing.

As you do seem to be sill around, I´d like you to comment again on #2 at least:

What was your idea behind saying that thing in the first place? I just wanna know, as I do believe I missed something out...

Wow too much to read here. I'm sure UBER is grateful to every KS, EA or release sale, every sale helps the develop "there game" which i'm sure is a work of love and passion for them.

I agree the big issue in relation to greed but i don't believe it is from UBER side.

Please sir can i have some more!

Long live PA, long live UBER and many more expansions for PA in what ever form.

wat?

@bsergent let me feed you a little, you said: "This is close too, but again no because forks don't kill other branches. Also forks are an open source thing. Forking closed source code in some senses isn't even possible because closed source by definition has a single point of control and hidden source code."
You have no idea. You have access to a lot of knowledge (the Internet) but you say a lot of stupid nonsense things. I read half a post of yours and that's enough. Just an advice, learn about the topics you're gonna talk before talking.

this is really out of hand, everyone calm down.
locked