GPG forum censorship incident and the future of SupCom
Yesterday, Unconquerable posted a thread to the GPG forums that was mildly critical of Supreme Commander. He posted some criticisms and some suggested improvements. The thread raged on for six pages. It was quite the hot topic. And then something curious happened. The thread was expunged from the forum. And then, when someone else posted a thread asking where Unconquerable’s thread had gone, that thread too was deleted. Apparently the GPG folk don’t want any negative discussions in their forum. I would maybe understand locking down a thread, but totally deleting a thread? That just doesn’t seem quite right. It almost seems like censorship. And, as everyone online knows, you can’t make an issue go away by trying to delete it. It’s the Internet; there’s always another copy out there somewhere.
Now that the thread has been deleted there is even more interest in it. Numerous people were discussing it on GPGnet, and many of them wanted to see what the hoopla was about. What could the thread possibly have contained that caused it to be deleted? I think the correct action to take in circumstances like this is to address the issue head-on rather than trying to sweep it under the rug. So I cannot, in good conscience, neglect to link to this mirror of the deleted thread that has been pointed out to me by an anonymous user:
Page 1 — Page 2 — Page 3 — Page 4 — Page 5 — Page 6
Seeing as how this discussion apparently cannot be held on GPG’s forums, let’s have it here on Supreme Commander Talk, which is free of censorship. Is Supreme Commander suffering from a too-small community? Do you think the community is dying off? What are the reasons that Supreme Commander is so much less popular than its rival, Command and Conquer 3? Are the steep hardware requirements seriously hurting Supreme Commander’s level of commercial success? Discuss!
Update: More censorship news is coming out. Here’s a tale of woe from one user whose critical post wasn’t only deleted, his forum account was banned without explanation! GPG really needs to take a better tack on this. This is not the way to handle criticism.
April 23rd, 2007 at 11:42 pm
A thousand employees of the thq/gpg empire descends upon you, our ban hammers will block out the sun!
April 24th, 2007 at 12:04 am
Then we shall fight in unofficial forums!
April 24th, 2007 at 12:06 am
> What could the thread possibly have contained that caused it to be deleted?
It would appear, as you went on to suggest, that it was deleted because it was bad PR. Unlike the millions of “OMG A3on sUx nerf roras in the patch or SC is shit kthx” threads, this one was from the most famous player and talking not about the well-established and not-terribly-severe issues the game itself has, but about how there aren’t many people playing SupCom. Which there aren’t, compared with C&C 3. Or with StarCraft, for that matter.
If the marketroids want some snowballing-demand virtuous-circle thing to happen, they may decide to squelch anybody who talks about how it isn’t.
Of course, there’s not necessarily any well-organised policing of the forums happening, so there’s not necessarily any Great Conspiracy behind the deletion. For all we know there’s just a couple of GPG employees tasked with getting rid of any goatse.cx threads they notice, and they took it upon themselves after their fourth beer of the night to try to impress that chick in the marketing department. The forum software may or may not even allow them to reinstate the thread and say sorry, now.
April 24th, 2007 at 12:08 am
Daniel Rutter: The thing is, strict forum censorship is probably worse PR than just letting this thread stick around. Have you ever seen the Blizzard forums for World of Warcraft? They allow much more unfettered conversation. If Blizzard tried to nuke every thread that put the game in a “negative light”, they’d be deleting thousands of posts a day. And yet WoW is basically the most successful game ever. I think GPG seriously overestimates how much damage forum threads can do and seriously underestimates how much damage bad PR can cause.
April 24th, 2007 at 12:24 am
> strict forum censorship is probably worse PR than just letting this thread stick around
Well, sure. Did I at any point say I thought the PR people were clever :-)?
April 24th, 2007 at 12:27 am
i agree that by deleting the thread they have taken a 6 page thread, and turned it into this. which is worse for the image of the game
April 24th, 2007 at 12:28 am
I can’t believe they deleted your constructive thread about supcom; They are like a nation which has stopped listening to it’s citizens.
April 24th, 2007 at 12:30 am
Well they weren’t just saving this sort of action to censor a prominent player. I’m basically a nobody in the community and I had a similar thread deleted a day or two before Unconqs. I was concerned about the health of the online community and wanted some feedback. The thread was deleted before it had more than 6 comments.
This is looking to me like a systematic response to ANY posts that express concern or criticize the health of the popularity of the game online. If I had posted a thread with terrible grammar and lots of leet speak, complaining how this or that needs to be nerfed because it’s ruining the game, the thread would never have been touched.
April 24th, 2007 at 12:31 am
Pretty sad. GPG has lost a lot of respect from me and I’m sure the rest of the community as well. With the way things are going, I’m beginning to believe that the game will never be optimized or balanced and GPG will go the way of S2Games – having made a great game with lots of potential, but never realizing the potential and ultimately fading into obscurity.
April 24th, 2007 at 12:42 am
As said in many of the posts. This thread was not to DEGRADE supcom in any way. it was mearly a very critical stress on the downfalls that COULD be fixed.. the whole EFFORT in the wrong ways is what we where stressing on. with that thread. If gpg is gonna be cry babys that is fine. To be honest . JR was right :). This is like getting a D- on a math term paper.. and throwing it away without figureing out what is wrong ROFLOBSTER
April 24th, 2007 at 12:49 am
I read about a similar incident on supcom-live the other day. It is indeed very troubling. It seems to me that something like this is likely to have a much bigger impact the smaller the community.
While I agree with virtually every point Unconquerable made, it seems to me that the second-best possible thing happened. The best thing would have been for a moderator to come post a response about how all of those issues were being looked in to (of course he would have to be telling the truth) and then he would have to lock the topic or else he’d get flamed for weeks to come. But with what happened, we know that GPG is both aware of and concerned with the issues Unconquerable pointed out.
It’s not like this was submitted via email and was deleted before the devs got to take a look at it.
April 24th, 2007 at 12:56 am
Wow; uh it seems this post is getting a lot more traffic than most.
While we should discourage straight-up deletion of forum topics, there is something we can do as a community to help address the issues Unc (and many others) have pointed out. Continue to provide feedback but through the proper channels. And hang in there until the new patch. Or if you absolutely can’t stand it quit for now but give it another go after the patch.
I have played games that released patches before they should have. It’s not a good thing. Let’s give the guys who designed this amazing game the credit they deserve.
April 24th, 2007 at 1:34 am
lefeu – they should make it so we can give them credit. You don’t give a person the Nobel prize for a cure for cancer that’s missing some critical ingredient that nobody can fathom how to create or how it would exist in the first place. You don’t give GPG high marks until critical issues in supcom are resolved so the game is playable and enjoyable.
April 24th, 2007 at 1:58 am
id just like to say that CNC3 is booring imo and also it will die out soon enough…supcom will live on FOR ETERNITY
April 24th, 2007 at 2:02 am
I think one thing is becoming clear: GPG needs a better policy on how to handle user relations. Deleting threads and threatening to ban Unconquerable, who has done more for this game than nearly anyone else, are simply unacceptable. I’d like to see GPG be a lot more like Blizzard in this regard (and a lot less like it in others, of course).
We all love the game and we all want what’s best for it. This isn’t a battle of fans or fansite versus GPG. It isn’t a battle at all. We just want to be treated with the respect we feel we deserve for putting so much effort into this game. I don’t really need to explain how much effort it takes to keep this blog updated every damn day.
April 24th, 2007 at 2:32 am
To clarify: there are two issues floating around here. The first is the issue of the deleted post. The second is the actual content of Unconquerable’s post.
With regards to the deleted post – I could not agree more that I think it was a terrible, inappropriate thing to do. I hope it never happens again and I hope the justified outcry from this ocurrance is enough to ensure that. However, I hope that we don’t take this too far. We should certainly should be calling for a change in forum moderating policy but talking about losing respect for GPG is a little too much in my opinion (but of course everyone is entitled to his own).
The remarks I made about holding out for the patch and giving GPG a chance to learn were with regards to the content of the deleted post which by the way is worth reading and thinking about.
April 24th, 2007 at 2:42 am
Unconquerable’s thread made a lot of very good points and I think the moderators deleted it because of the clear negativity of the thread’s title. I’ve been in both positions before but think deleting it was a bad decision. the thread was obviously getting a lot of attention and can bring people together. Trying to cover up the situation rather than being honest just saps energy from the community.
As to Command & Conquer 3 vs Supreme Commander, I’ve played both a lot and C&C3 is vastly inferior aside from the expensive cut-scenes. Like it or not the C&C brand is huge and without ads on TV SupCom was never going to penetrate far into the mainstream market, not least because only 10% of mainstream PC gamers will have the hardware required. Lets not blame GPG for the marketing – this is THQ’s responsibility and I don’t think they’ve been trying hard enough.
Total Annihilation was a game that didn’t get the exposure it deserved, and I think SupCom is going the same way. But I don’t think it has failed by any means, the levels of users aren’t far from what I expected. SupCom is so good because of the depth that casual gamers will struggle to grasp. If they dumbed it down like C&C3 so everyone could play the reception to SupCom would have been better, but I’d prefer to have it as it is.
April 24th, 2007 at 3:06 am
One of the main reasons of why SupCom isn’t selling as well as it could (according to the post) is because of the steep hardware requirements. Then it goes on to compare the game to the CNC3, and how it’s doing a lot better.
How can steep hardware requirements be the problem when you need the same “steep hardware” to play CNC3? I don’t know the actual specs, but one of EA’s main bragging points was that CNC3 is the RTS with the best graphics in the market. I’m not saying the steep hardware requirements isn’t what is keeping BOTH from doing as well as they could, but I don’t think it makes sense that this is one of the reasons Command and Conquer is doing better.
Just a thought.
April 24th, 2007 at 3:18 am
2GHz Processor
• 512 MB RAM
• 6 GB of hard drive space
• NVIDIA GeForce 6100 or ATI Radeon 9500 or greater
• Any onboard sound card
Not really that different from SC’s min requirements.
April 24th, 2007 at 3:24 am
i think even if this game was “dumbed down” as you put it, supcom still wouldnt be able to touch cnc3 in popularity. again it all goes back to total annihilation. there is no large following to go off of like the command and conquer series. it is just reality that most people are going favor what they know over a competitor. fanboyism in its truest form. however i can say as a former starfcraft and current warfcraft 3 player, supcom still appeals to me and if i could play a game without crashing id be willing to put up with the small community. 1v1 doesnt really appeal to me in supcom but team games on huge maps really appeals to me.
April 24th, 2007 at 3:45 am
I don’t agree with many things Unconquerable said is that thread.
First (and I think thats the reason it got deleted) is how he refers to EA.
Other, “GPG just doesn’t have the experience and resources to fully balance, patch, test, prioritize what needs to be done”, and I think its totally false. Every company can balance the game with time. Unconquerable talks about the balance in Starcraft and Warcraft III but doesn’t not talk about how many years it toke to get there, and SupCom has only be out for two/three months with only one patch coming out soon.
April 24th, 2007 at 3:48 am
The reason that very few people are currently active in this game is because they are scared of me.
That is all.
April 24th, 2007 at 3:51 am
@Offspriner: CNC3 does NOT require the kind of specs SupCom does. Whatever’s listed on the box for SupCom is really a farce; I have to play on ALL LOW settings to get just okay framerates. With the CNC3 demo I played medium settings just fine. SupCom’s low settings look like total ass while it still runs poorly whereas CNC3 looks much prettier and runs decently.
I completely missed that thread originally and only just read Unconq’s first post… I don’t see what the deal is. That post was very well thought out and he makes several good points. I doubt it was deleted for that, though, else it wouldn’t have made it to six pages. :P
Though only two PC games have really kept my attention, it seems whenever I end up into a game it’s counter to what the blind, idiot masses play, leaving me in a small, niche community. I play UT2004 while everyone else plays CS:S or DOD2 or one of those BF craps. I play SupCom while everyone else sticks to CNC3, SC, or WC3. I play Forza while everyone else plays GT3/4 or nubtard NFS craps. It’s ridiculous.
The only thing I think Unconq forgot was WoW. The effect that stupid game has had on the gaming community as a whole is ridiculous. So many people waste their time chatting rather than playing a real game that it’s really killed PC gaming overall. The image now, I think, is one where PCs are for MMOs while consoles are for everything else. Why else would fucking FEAR on the 360 be at the WCG? Not only is FEAR terrible, but FPS on a console is a total joke. FPS is a PC genre, for fuck’s sake. FPS on a console is like trying to play Minesweeper with a joystick – pure idiocy. So what do we get? Terrible, terrible FPS games that were designed for console play. Sigh.
I think we need to just face the music and enjoy what’s left of our small communities: PC gaming is dying. And rather harshly too.
April 24th, 2007 at 3:52 am
Deleting a thread is never good and I don’t like it either that GPG moderators did this. But despite lots of good, constructive criticism (from Unconquerable and others) there was a lot of bullsh*t in that thread as well; people dissing the zoom and some other features that actually make SupCom a stand-out RTS or just telling wildly exaggerated comparisons. It’s not as if GPG can fix every complaint right away and the temper of some people in that thread and in other threads really bordered on being unreasonable. I guess someone thought too much is too much.
About why SupCom doesn’t seem a smash hit (at least not online): it’s a new franchise (too many people rather waited for C&C3), it’s new to play and to get used to all by itself, as many other PC games it’s a rushed release, people complaining about it being a “game of dots” are too lazy to zoom in to notice the gorgeous graphics (mass-spectacle >>> superdetailed small-time skirmishes of other RTS games), compared to TA+expansions+10yearofmodding it doesn’t yet feel complete, most people don’t come online/rather prefer playing against AI (in my TA-time I was one of those players) and last but not least it’s pushing the technological edge like no RTS before (well, maybe like TA :) ).
April 24th, 2007 at 4:55 am
Pretty poor show from GPG really. I had seen a few deleted before and read the guys thread that got deleted and banned off the forums but this is the first one they’ve removed of some note. It was a fairly constructive thread and the usual retard forum trolls (FunkyKong and co) had yet to get to it.
It was hardly damaging to GPG and if anything was feedback from there conserned customers.
All this will do is force the threads onto pages like this one or other unofficial forums.
April 24th, 2007 at 5:20 am
He who burns books will eventually burn people.
April 24th, 2007 at 6:31 am
I think a reason why the game doesn’t thrive but has so high sales is its difficulty. It took me a good week or so of watching replays and reading posts on various forums until I worked out how to manage the economy to an acceptable degree. Now I was willing to put this effort into the game because I was really enjoying overcoming the problems I faced in the beginning and finally turning into a competent player. I know that alot of people aren’t prepared to put that kind of effort into the game, a game that if you build a MeX before a PowerGen you have severely crippled your economy in the early game. I think that’s why you will see a small community in this game, because they will be the ones who commit to the game they are playing. C&C3 is all jump in and go thrills, its like the FPS of RTS, it has a basic set of skills that you refine till you can do it really fast and naturally without thinking about it too much. So SupCom becomes the thinking mans RTS and in this age of EAism with sequel after sequel of the same thing, we will always be the niche.
April 24th, 2007 at 7:15 am
somehow when I heard it was deleted I KNEW you guys would come through so I’d be able to see what all the hoopla was about! :)
April 24th, 2007 at 7:28 am
In reading some of the posts, it’s funny to see the system requirements on there. Yes, we all know the AI/pathfinding thread is a killer but it’s unknown how you could replace that with anything else. Is there some type of more efficient AI available to be coded? But also let’s see how the patch addresses efficiency and pathfinding improvements.
Also, we all know for certain that if the game was made graphically weaker to make it more accessible to lower-end machines, Unconq’s complaint about system requriements would be replaced with a complaint that the graphics aren’t up to 2007 standards. See you can’t have it both ways. Either the system requirements are high, or the game looks dated (that is, old).
Now as far as what is actually slowing down the game to a crawl, that’s the AI thread, not the graphical requirements.
Also I think the userbase WILL grow, as the game is being sold with high-end processors and GPUs at sites like NewEgg and MWave and ZipZoomFly so more people will be getting their hands on it.
April 24th, 2007 at 7:43 am
http://forums.gaspowered.com/viewtopic.php?p=108610#108610
April 24th, 2007 at 7:43 am
^^^ thread text:
While it’s true you can’t have it both ways (amazing graphics and low requirements), and of course folks will either complain about a game’s high system requirements or they’ll complain that it looks ‘dated’ (that is a synonym for “old”), that’s still not the issue with SupCom.
The issue with SupCom, which is graphically very attractive, is not a matter of hardware requirements. You can get a decent graphics card to play it well – heck, my 7900GT plays it just fine and I’m running High settings except for lesser shadows – the problem that actually slows the game down to a crawl has very little to do with graphical prowess of your GPU or the graphical effects coded in the game.
It has to do with the AI pathfinding code that has to be run by the CPU. You can have a quad-core QX6800 cpu and a 7900GTX and you would be CPU limited in games with lots of units in play, not GPU limited. There is no commercial CPU that will run this game flawlessly when you have several AI armies in play, at least as of today, which is before the big patch.
We are all waiting for the big patch which promises improvements and optimizations in the area of pathfinding and the AI thread in general.
GPG is certainly aware of exactly where improvements need to be made.
If they are able to improve pathfinding routines it will be the biggest difference in the way the game plays and you will see that the game does NOT really have terribly high system requirements, it just needs certain AI code to be optimized before bigger games become playable for more people.
Another good thing to note is that this game is being included in the bundle people get when they buy high-end CPUs (core2duo E6420, E6600, etc) and GPUs (8800GTS, 8800GTX) at major e-tailers like NewEgg, ZipZoomFly, and MWave, so you will see more folks with better hardware coming online for this game as time goes on because folks with systems that will play it best are actually now getting the game in their hands when they get their hardware. This type of bundling is a great way to grow awareness of the game and should entice folks to give it a shot who might not have bought it previously.
April 24th, 2007 at 7:48 am
This game seems to suffer from Microsoft syndrome. Years of hype that have led to disappointment coupled with less than admirable behavior by the company (GPG). Maybe they should start selling SupCom in China for $1.
I waited for this game since TA, as have many of my friends. All of the previews over the years were amazing, but I was always worried that the game would hit my hardware upgrade schedule at the wrong time, especially since I have always used a Mac (The TA port took some time. . .) Luckily my Macbook pro plays the game well, better than I expected.
My excitement faded when I saw how many of the features I was excited about were broken or gone. The air ferrying system is a huge disappointment, as is the ground unit selection and utility. The static terrain is sad. The unit AI is also frustrating, aircraft fuel is a great idea but it needs aircraft intelligence, not some arbitrary proximity to an air pad or landing in a combat zone. The terrible skirmish AI has been partially fixed by modders. Red Alert had good AI, Tiberian Sun had deformable terrain. These are old games, strategic zoom is about the only well implemented unique improvement from TA.
I don’t play online because I don’t have the time to dedicate to an online game, usually I have to play and save and come back later. I am also discouraged from watching replays and reading forums, it seems each map boils down to certain strategies and build orders that take a bit of time to learn. I hate following the same order of battle for a certain map/faction every time I play, the game becomes menial.
I still have hope for the game, I remember Uberhack made my TA experience far better and I hope for similar developments from this community. Hopefully the map editor will lead to a TAMEC like site (the map vault may fill this need)
I know about 5 people with the game, and none have played because of what other people have told them. I have a feeling if the patch is good they will get really into the game, especially with summer coming, but otherwise the game will probably sit unused. There is not much incentive to play when some tells you x and y feature are broken, z feature doesn’t exist, and do you have this computer?
April 24th, 2007 at 8:20 am
Ph4ZeD: they who burn books will eventually burn themselves.
April 24th, 2007 at 8:23 am
The biggest (and one of very few) gripe I have about SupCom is the lack of some basic functionality and features we had in TA and would logically expect to see in SupCom as well.
April 24th, 2007 at 8:25 am
@CedeWeys: “I think GPG seriously overestimates how much damage forum threads can do ”
While I’m not defending GPG pulling down the post I will say this, I disagree with your statement. The forums are laden with tons of whining, bickering, trolls and yes, honest criticism of the game. Honest criticism is fine, but when you have to ‘dig’ for it, it does not foster a growing community. The ‘hard core’ gamers, they’re here already. Or they are going to be once the get the system to support the game. They understand. Done. What you need now is to foster a good environment to get the casual gamers (myself and others who are seeking a new game), to come on out. And perhaps some of them will become ‘hard core SupCommers”.
The problem is that there is so much of it that when someone like Unconq (who is ‘a face of the game’), posts something like this: “That is exaclty the attitude described in the articles, you are A SCRUB. ” and then turns around in another post and says something like: “Disappointing how the SupCom is not bigger”, I have to scratch my head and go, ‘well, duh’. We’re kind of self-fulfilling our own prophecy no?
At the end of the day all I’m saying is we can all (rightfully) complain about censorship, but when it comes down to it, the community’s attitude and the way it presents itself will determine if SupCom succeeds or dies an early death, not some moderator deleting some bad PR on its own site. For me when I decide if I want to buy a game I’m not concerned with wheter or not I can shoot my mouth off in a forum, but can I find a good 2v2 game with good players willing to take me under their wing and show me how to be leet. :-) You should get it CedeWeys, this site is a huge step in that positive direction.
/end rant
April 24th, 2007 at 8:49 am
Does anyone else find it odd they’ve not yet deleted the threads complaining about the deletion? Surely they knew it would all kick off soon afterwards.
April 24th, 2007 at 10:18 am
I apologize, I’d like to clarify 2 things I said: “Dig for it” I meant, it’s sometime very tiresome to read ‘around’ all the flames and obviously pointless forum spam to find the good/honest criticisms.
And obviously I meant to quote Unconq as saying “…how the SupCom community is not bigger”.
In the newcomers area of the forum I even posted a thread explaining how this is a great community
and more people should try 1v1 and other forms of the game, because I love this game.. The General/Gameplay
forums were wearing *me* down. I can’t imagine someone who’s trying to decide if they want to play/buy it or not.
Lastly, I do 100% agree with Unconq’s first point. The system specs to play the game as it’s ‘meant to be played’, large scale big map battles, is just too prohibitive. Hopefully optimization will address this some.
April 24th, 2007 at 10:28 am
There have been more issues with them deleting topics, as stated on the supcom-live.com forum
April 24th, 2007 at 10:59 am
Falcon1970: More than anything, it’s misleading. If they’re going to keep such strict control over the forums they might as well have a large disclaimer anytime you post a message saying “Don’t be negative, or else your post will be deleted and your account may be banned.” And most people seeing that message would rightfully go off and use unofficial forums, where they are much less restricted in the kinds of things they can say and much freer to voice criticism (like here). But they give the illusion that the forum is free and open, and then just try to quietly, behind-the-scenes, nuke all of the negative stuff. Obviously, that doesn’t work, especially when you’re trying to make a six page post that hundreds of people read disappear.
April 24th, 2007 at 11:00 am
On the subject of steep hardware requirements, I can run the game fine on 1280*1024 resolution and on high detail (but no shadows) fine but as soon as too many units start popping up then my fps drops severely, still playable but annoying when you are telling your units to do something and they won’t listen! by the way my hardware is as follows -
AMD Athlon 3200 (single core, I think this is the problem but I have no money :P)
nVidia 7950gt
X-fi Xtreme music
2gb ddr 333 RAM
April 24th, 2007 at 11:18 am
The slowdown in Supreme Commander isn’t a graphical issue, it’s a processor issue. All of CNC3’s battles are relatively low-scale. The same can’t be said of SupCom when multiple players are each approaching the unit limit on a large map. Also, published hardware requirements tend to be meaningless.
April 24th, 2007 at 11:42 am
Oh, just to make it known so that I am not accused of censorship, I have deleted one user’s posts ion this thread. He was impersonating Unconquerable and saying all sorts of nasty things, but the final straw was when he linked to lemonparty. I guess he was one of the bad elements that came over from the official forums, but that kind of nonsense isn’t tolerated here.
April 24th, 2007 at 11:46 am
It’s a very fine line to follow these days. It seems that most new games either appeal to a very small ‘hardcore’ minority player base, or a very large ‘mainstream’ player base. It’s not a problem that’s unique to RTS, either. In team-based FPS games, the game is usually either fun for pubbing or fun for organized/clan play, but not usually both.
The deal with RTS games is that they need to have a certain strategic level of depth in order to attract and retain highly skilled players who form the core of any competitive community, but it can’t be so complicated as to be inaccessible to a casual player. As some people have pointed out in comments here, it’s unreasonable to assume that the average player is willing to read articles and watch replays in order to learn successful economy management. For people who are really into playing videogames, especially the competitive side of things, they don’t mind going through those steps at all. For them, the acquisition of new knowledge that directly improves their skill at the game is fun.
So what can you do? You have the competitive players who are continually devising new and brutally efficient strategies, and then you have the “scrubs”(to crib a term from the competitive fighter genre) who just want to have giant battles with nukes and experimentals everywhere. I don’t really know if there’s an answer to this question. The two categories of players are pretty much incompatible with each other. Naturally some people will have a desire to get better at the game and will begin to read articles, watch replays, and so on… but this isn’t true for most. If somebody only has a few hours per week to play games, you can’t really fault him for preferring a game that provides instant entertainment over one that requires significant time investment(practice, replays, strategy articles, etc) before it really starts to be mentally enjoyable.
As games progress as an entertainment medium, I think it’s inevitable that they’ll follow the same path as music and movies. Most people are going to go for the Hollywood blockbuster movies, and you’ll have a much smaller group of people that live for the weird/interesting/thought-provoking indie flicks. Every once in a while, you’ll have a mainstream movie that appeals to the indie crowd, or you’ll have the indie flick which garners significant mainstream appeal, but for the most part people stick to whichever camp suits them best. As graphical expectations rise for the gaming industry, the cost of producing a game rises significantly, which is only going to accelerate the course towards this future. The people with money who finance the development of new games want a tried-and-true moneymaker, a safe return on investment. Just look at the current situation between C&C3 and SC to see what I mean.
April 24th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
There is no freedom of speech on GPGNet. GPG can do anything they want with content on their forums; the same way comments can be censored here.
April 24th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
Wirtlon: Nobody ever claimed there was freedom of speech on GPG; nice non sequitur. GPG can also shut down GPGnet today and refuse to refund anyone’s money (it’s in the ToS that they can terminate the service at any moment), but they shouldn’t. Likewise, they shouldn’t be censoring forums, because web users generally have expectations of free exchange of ideas and get very pissed off when that is taken away from them. Just because they can doesn’t mean they should, and it certainly doesn’t make it right when they do it.
April 24th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Luckily I can run the game at 1440×900 max detail and have never witnessed any slowdown. If hardware requirements were lower then it’d be much more popular.
SupCom’s Even setting the resolution and anti-aliasing is beyond mainstream gamers. I expect 90% of people who bought SupCom couldn’t run it at default or full detail, and playing any game with a low framerate is going to result in a negative experience. Graphically SupCom is a hardcore game right to the core, and although that’s good for the fans, it’s going to be a big problem for most people. If you know what you’re doing and have the hardware, SupCom is an amazing experience. A lot of people I know, some with good computers, can’t run the SupCom demo smoothly and this is holding the game back. Whether the actual game is tweaked or not, most people will have already come to the conclusion they can’t play it yet. The AI is also to blame, but we don’t all have Dual Core systems.
PC developers need to learn that their games must work off the bat for anyone with a 3 year old computer, then include the option to scale up the graphics to suit the power gamers. With SupCom’s strategy clear from the outset I knew it could never be the next WoW.
Hopefully when people buy a new system SupCom is a game they’ll turn to.
April 24th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
So does anyone want to set up a petition to send to GPG/THQ/Chris Taylor? In addition to it presumably being one comprehensive, cogent document explaining what we, the community, want from them, it would also be interesting to see how many of us actually care. Maybe community concern is limited to a hundred people or so out of 100,000. Maybe we have 10,000 people. We could also explicitly request a written response from them, as this whole thing of moderators going silent an community members endlessly speculating about whats going on is ridiculous.
For the record, I have found Supreme Commander to scale just fine. I’ve got a 4 year old athlon XP 2800+ and a 6800GT. I have to use the /nosound command because of that well known sound blaster slowdown that they haven’t fixed, but 1v1 never slows down and 2v2 slowdowns are rare, and still playable. I even run it at 1920×1200, (and get the same framerate as at 1024×768).
April 24th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
Iilluminate, you make a good point about hardware requirements. They simply are too steep. I spent $1,400 putting together a computer to play SupCom. Luckily I was able to do this because I hadn’t seriously upgraded my computer in three years (thus it was time to upgrade anyway) and I had a good amount of money in savings. A lot of gamers haven’t been able to swing this purchase, especially younger gamers, who are basically just using the family computer which works fine doing email for mom and dad, but not so great with games.
April 24th, 2007 at 12:33 pm
Imperator_Andros: That is an interesting idea. What demands do we have, anyway? It might make sense to draft them here in the comments before writing up a manifesto (as it were). My main demand would be to improve the way community relations are handled. Specifically, I think they should look at how Blizzard handles it. Blizzard deletes only the worst of threads (i.e. the ones that are laden with profanity and hate speech). Everything else they leave open. They don’t try to censor negative opinions; rather, they have enough confidence in their game such that even though there’s lots of bitching (with much of it unfounded), it’s just water off their back. Also, their community managers respond to the players’ constructive criticism rather than deleting it. That’s a huge difference, and it would have been ten times better to do it in this situation than deleting Unconquerable’s thread.
April 24th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
$1400? Wow. Unless you decided to buy a new high-res widescreen LCD as part of that (which in turn demands an expensive GPU to power games on it at native resolution), you should have been able to build a rather potent rig for easily under $1,000.
April 24th, 2007 at 1:22 pm
Jay: But I didn’t want a “rather potent” rig. I wanted a “very potent” rig. And I could’ve easily spent a lot more just by going with a GeForce 8800 and a top-of-the-line Intel Core 2 Duo.
April 24th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Hmm, so the rumours are true… I’m disappointed.
GPG is still the best, but… the image I had of them has been ever so slightly tarnished.
April 24th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
/nosound is where its at. My Athlon XP 2500+ runs the game about the same as you described Andros. I’ve been running it like that for a while, as with sound on, its horribly slow.
April 24th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
“I could’ve easily spent a lot more just by going with a GeForce 8800 and a top-of-the-line Intel Core 2 Duo.”
You spent that much and DIDN’T get a c2d or an 8800GTS? What did you spend your money on?
Oh, did you order this from a website and not build it yourself? That might explain the price. I was assuming you built it yourself.
April 24th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
fwiw, I’m still on an A64 3200+ and 7900GT. I’m planning to upgrade shortly and as of now plan to go with an E4400 c2d, 2GB DDR2, and a 650i chipset motherboard. I’m holding off on a GPU upgrade until ATi’s lineup is announced and reviews are released to see how they stack up against the 8800GTS and GTX. I’d consider an 8800GTS (still not sure if I’d go 320MB or 640MB variant). I’m already running a 20″ Dell 2007WFP (1680×1050) and find it just the right size so no plans to upgrade that.
For the CPU, RAM, and mobo I’m looking at around $450-475 right now. I’ll probably add an aftermarket hsf for the CPU since I plan to overclock the E4400. Figure $50 for the hsf. Throw in a fresh hard drive for around $100 (7200.10 or similar). So $600-650. My current case an Antec P150 (now sold as the Antec SOLO) that I love and would not trade and my PSU is a month-old Corsair 520w.
Planning to spend no more than $350 for a GPU in the future when I upgrade that (ideally less, for example a 320MB 8800GTS for $275 would be nice), so the total remains under $1000 for a full system upgrade, going from single to dualcore, DX9 to DX10 GPU, NF4 to NF6 motherboard chipset, DDR to DDR2 RAM, and a fresh harddrive.
April 24th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
Jay: I did get a C2D, just not a top-of-the-line one. When I bought my E6400 the top-of-the-line C2Ds were $500. Of course, they’ve since come down to about $350, and the processor I bought at $250 is now down to $190. Dang price cuts. And yes, I did buy the parts and assemble them myself. I also have a bit more hard drive space than most people and a really nice case, power supply, and fast memory, so that increases the price a bit. And the sound card I bought (which was probably unnecessary) wasn’t exactly cheap, either.
April 24th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
Personally I think everyone is making a big deal out of nothing. While it is annoying to have worthwhile threads deleted, it also rarely has anything to do with the initial post in the thread. Reading even the first couple of the pages of that archived link up there gives me enough reasons to want to have the thread deleted by itself, let alone having it go to 6 pages.
It probably seems less intrusive to just crop out the bad posts, but when more than 50% of the posts in a thread aren’t worth keeping, it’s probably not worth the time to go through and clean it up afterwards. Unconq makes many good points in his post, and I don’t have a hard time believing that GPG is looking into them very critically.
As for comparisons vs. CNC3, I just can’t see one. SupCom is about economy management and enormous armies, games like CNC3, Starcraft, WC3 are resource hoarding games that funnel all of your attention to the point in the game where you no longer have any choice but to make a full offensive and pray that you win. I think the biggest obstacle that SupCom faces, besides it’s system requirements, is word of mouth. It’s ironic that in the PC world there is very little successful word of mouth, as someone posted above many people will buy games and then never play them because they hear bad things about them. Even your one voice of “the game is awesome you must try it” gets drowned out by what people consider bad.
I’ve got to be honest, when WC3 first came out, it ran and looked like utter shite on my computer at the time. As I upgraded the machine, the game took on new levels of meaning as I was able to raise the resolution and play at higher framerates. I think the same thing will happen here.
I don’t ever remember TA being much more than a cult classic. It’s sad that a game that focuses more on tactics than hoarding doesn’t do well. I’m not sure exactly what it is that makes people enjoy a game where, if you run out of resources, you basically lose the game. I can’t count on my fingers and toes the number of times I had to leave a game of WC3 because we had both lost all of our units and only had buildings left. I can’t stand it when a game attempts to force you down a particular path after a certain amount of “free time”. Build your base, run out of resources, attack.
April 24th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
Sorry for the double post. I should also add that I know several people who play SupCom on less than stellar machines with 7300s and 7100GSs, single and dual core processors and 1-2gb of RAM. It’s not impossible to enjoy the game down there.
April 24th, 2007 at 5:40 pm
GPG should not have censored the original thread, but I don’t think it will cause too much hate so long as they keep their heads down for a bit now (or provide an apology).
As for why SupCom isn’t too popular, I reckon it is inevitable given the style of game they tried to make (i.e. a hard one which takes a long time to master, but has unique features). However GPG could certainly minimize the damage by improving performance in terms of CPU requirements – it certainly is a contributing factor as to why I don’t play much. This is compounded by the fact that the problem scales exponentially with more players, which often makes coop games with more than 4 players sluggish.
I also found that SupCom has too much micro for a “strategic” game. This combined with the strategic view means that you don’t get to enjoy the epic battles so much, since you are busy pushing dots around a zoomed out view. If you could trust the AI to do it’s job well, and had tools for a higher level control over your army (permanent patrol routes are a good suggestion that has been made), you could spend more time planning strategy and watching the chaos! In the same vein, the loss of the base commanders was a real shame.
I can see it as a game partly ahead of it’s time.. perhaps C&C3 is the real problem here, since I imagine GPG rushed SupCom to try and get established before that was released. If there had been 6 months more work (and therefore the average PC would be 6 months better) then it might have hit the ground running a bit better. I just hope there will still be interest when I do get a faster machine.
April 24th, 2007 at 10:54 pm
60 posts. Woo spam!
April 24th, 2007 at 11:13 pm
There has been alot of talk about CNC3 getting the larger community than Supcom, and about how it gets more ‘average joes’ interested. While I agree completely that SupCom is the harder, grander, more intricate game, it would seem that SupCom has still got more people interested.
Take a look at http://www.google.com/trends?q=supreme+commander%2C+command+and+conquer+3%2C+cnc3%2C+tiberium+wars&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all
That graph isnt up to date, it looks like it ends around february, explaining SupCom’s massive rise. But still, in the several months before either game’s release, Supreme Commander got more than all the CNC3 terms combined. It appears that Supcom got greater interest, but maybe there were more old cnc fans who just knew they were buying CNC3 no matter what.
Another problem might be the fact that English wasnt even one of the top 10 languages used to search for supcom. It seems that the vast majority of people interested in the game live in little european countries that pirate almost all their software. A real shame. I really wish that Vista had somehow made DVD authetication secure, because piracy is the only thing killing PC gaming. Its not the quality of the games or the number of people interested or the latest console, its the almost halving of PC game sales since 1998, even as the market grows. This is US only, but I dont see why the rest of the world wouldnt be the same, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_PC_game_sales_in_the_US
April 25th, 2007 at 2:36 am
Regarding Core 2 Duos, the E6300 is the best value for money and will let you play at max detail with no problems if you have a fairly decent graphics card.
I should point out that although C&C3 has a big community the majority aren’t very impressed with C&C3. There has been masses of complaints and it’s clear from general feedback that SupCom has been better received by fans. EA have ran out of ideas and I’m not sure there’s much life left in C&C – and I’m a big fan of the series.
As for PC game sales, reports in the last week have shown a massive surge. “US retailers sold USD 203 million worth of PC games in the first two months of 2007 – a 48 per cent year-on-year increase”
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=24383
April 25th, 2007 at 4:32 am
You know, this is the second time today I’ve been linked to Google Trends. That’s a pretty damn neato graph thinger they got there. But how accurate is it? It says HD DVD is being searched a lot more than Blu-Ray even though news sources report Blu-Ray outselling it by a very large margin.
April 25th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
About deformable terrain: The CNC2 deformable terrain sucked. Absolutely sucked. It was a horrible feature and I hated it. You had to concrete over everywhere or your opponent could bomb your base so that you couldnt rebuild there. Slippery slope feature all the way, making it harder for a losing player to come back. It was one of the worst features I ever saw, especially since you couldnt concrete under a building you had built.
April 27th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
I think it’s quite simply as to why the game is not that popular:
It was rushed out to market. If you think about, it’s been a shockingly short time since the game was first announced, up to the day of release. There are the credible rumours that THG pushed GPG to make a February release date.
I honestly think the game did not undergo enough testing, optimizing, game balancing, streamlining, etc. Basically, the game did not undergo enough of everything.
Then there is another point, which is a complex game like this will never be extremely popular simply due to the nature of the game itself. It doesn’t appeal to the masses because it’s complex, and a steep learning curve.
The fact that the game seemingly was rushed to market and did not undergo enough testing and polishing only makes it worse.
Previews of the game made it seem like the game was very polished, very streamlined, and that even low-mid systems would be able to play it. A lot of people got a rude awakening once they bought it.