Creative Assembly Business Practice Discussion Thread (Attila)

[Huberto]

Noble cause indeed. Telling everyone the same for these few years yet still here.

Yeah I'm still here along with others who are still making noise. And guess what? It makes the games better!

Not sure where you were in the great HYPEEE! run up to TWR2's release, but I was right here telling it like it was. And what it was wasn't pretty.Now we have a year's support and fifteen patches later you don't seem to realize that something out of the ordinary just happened. Almost as if you wished that companies had disastrous rushed releases all the time and...that they always spend a year fixing their design mistakes because they have nothing better to do.

So let's raise a glass to "Draco" and "Trample," and hope we see them again soon in Attila: Total War!

[texoman81]

Complaining about business of the company which you have proudly claim to have no intention to do business again ? Please don't put words in my mouth of things I did not say.

I said which i will not buy from unless changes are made and not until i've actually tried the game out. I never said i'm not going to buy no matter what they do. You are the one trying to put words in my mouth what words do you think i put in yours? I am not planning on buying Attila based on what we've heard so far and the actions of CA over the last couple years. If things change drastically i could change my mind. Only about 21% of the people on the forum plan to buy the game at this point (there is a poll) so should only those people be allowed to post on this forum? If the next title after Attila was Hellenic Age or Medieval III and had a new 64 bit engine, had all the features of past titles and was fully moddable i would definitely buy it.
The only valid point you've made in your many replies to my post on the tread is that there is indeed many of the same people working for CA now that were there when Rome I came out. But even on that i said probably not as i was making an assumption and was not presenting that as a fact. I could have googled credits for the games if i wanted to as easily as you did but that wasn't a major point. Pointing out that part of what i said was opinion was pointless. Almost anytime you use the word better its subjective and an opinion. We are on a forum, which by definition is for sharing different points of views and opinions. This is a thread for people to complain, there is no reason for you to act as CA's defender, unless you are on their payroll.

[LestaT]

Yeah I'm still here along with others who are still making noise. And guess what? It makes the games better!

Not sure where you were in the great HYPEEE! run up to TWR2's release, but I was right here telling it like it was. And what it was wasn't pretty.Now we have a year's support and fifteen patches later you don't seem to realize that something out of the ordinary just happened. Almost as if you wished that companies had disastrous rushed releases all the time and...that they always spend a year fixing their design mistakes because they have nothing better to do.

So let's raise a glass to "Draco" and "Trample," and hope we see them again soon in Attila: Total War!

I said which i will not buy from unless changes are made and not until i've actually tried the game out. I never said i'm not going to buy no matter what they do. You are the one trying to put words in my mouth what words do you think i put in yours? I am not planning on buying Attila based on what we've heard so far and the actions of CA over the last couple years. If things change drastically i could change my mind. Only about 21% of the people on the forum plan to buy the game at this point (there is a poll) so should only those people be allowed to post on this forum? If the next title after Attila was Hellenic Age or Medieval III and had a new 64 bit engine, had all the features of past titles and was fully moddable i would definitely buy it.
The only valid point you've made in your many replies to my post on the tread is that there is indeed many of the same people working for CA now that were there when Rome I came out. But even on that i said probably not as i was making an assumption and was not presenting that as a fact. I could have googled credits for the games if i wanted to as easily as you did but that wasn't a major point. Pointing out that part of what i said was opinion was pointless. Almost anytime you use the word better its subjective and an opinion. We are on a forum, which by definition is for sharing different points of views and opinions. This is a thread for people to complain, there is no reason for you to act as CA's defender, unless you are on their payroll.

So all these not buying hate CA stuff are just some juvenile reverse psychology thing eh ?

[texoman81]

So all these not buying hate CA stuff are just some juvenile reverse psychology thing eh ?

no they are rational decisions by adults on how to spend their money. Nothing reverse psychology about it, reverse psychology would be saying they shouldn't change the game in order to get them to change it. I don't think you know what words mean much of the time. If the game is worth buying, we will buy it, it it is not worth it we won't, the same with any product. We are simply telling CA what we would want and be willing to buy and what we don't like and therefore will not buy. Because of CA's dishonesty with us we won't preorder again and its now seeing is believing. We don't have a personal vendetta against CA or their employees. I'm not going to not buy a game that i would like out of spite from previous actions of the company. You still don't get the absurdity of constantly coming to the complaints threads just to argue for the sake of arguing with no valid points to make. If you like what you've heard about Attila go to the praise thread and say what you do like about it. You don't see any of us who are unhappy with Rome II or Attila going to the praise threads and trying to dispute everything said there.

[Celtoi]

As I was politely pointed here in another topic.

1. Find it odd that CA releases EE, after having to wait almost a year for it to be bugfixed, only to announce it's Attila is to be released 6 months later. So basically when you buy a CA game play value is 6 months?
2. How does CA expect there to be long term commitment to a title with practices like that?
3. Why not put family trees in an expansion for Rome II instead of Attila, when so many people asked for it. Why not take a Paradox Interactive approach and build on the longevity of titles with expansions such as CKII and EUIV? Attila for a fair price, could have been a great expansion for Rome II, improving on that game.
4. The marketing on Attila is revolting. Quite a number of things that have been ignored and said it would not happen the last year and a half, now all of a sudden is possible. New graphics for sea and land will make the game and more beautiful and more optimized. CA wants to add fires everywhere, yet one of the main sources of lag the last year and a half was smoke from fires. Is CA overreaching itself too much?
5. Are YouTube commentators reimbursed/ paid to fly out to presentations? And if yes, if they do not provide positive reviews are they banned from further engagements? Is CA using a press bridle/ paying writers to write articles/ comments?
6. Has all this been calculated in before hand (profit/ loss margins), and were the numbers even so that this course was taken?
7. Was CA aware of/ working on Attila, and things such as the family tree to be in Attilla, when Rome II was released?
8. Why were customers not told that in a future Rome like total war game family trees would appear again? Was CA afraid of unsatisfied customers if they would have announced that earlier?
('family tree' being one of the most requested features for Rome II after release, and one which CA was consistent of that it would not appear any time soon, however at the release of Attila did not want to dissapoint the fans as they are so important. The fans, customers, wanted the family tree in Rome II. A similar situation with the unit cards (and how the notices are displayed.))
9. What is the multiplayer community expected to be for RomeII? And will the release of Attila influence this in anyway? Will the multiplayer community become too fragmented? Not everyone has or wants to spend the money on multiple games taken place in Roman Times released by the same publisher. (especially if it takes a year after release to be up to par in an EE edition (which is almost right away obsolete again)).
10. The strategic map announced for Attila was already announced more or less for RomeII, this is not a 'new' feature as such, and was dumbed down for RomeII at release. Will the same thing happen with Attila? Should CA be more careful what to show in pre-alpha releases, and state more clearly the odds of those features getting into release? Not only based on what is shown, but how presenters pitch the product? (e.g. customer expectation management).

I will not pre-order Attila nor buy it on release, and probably a year or more after on sale somewhere, if ever. Several TW games continue to have bugs, which CA does not fix, while still selling the game. I don't see Attilla to be any different at the moment. When I first played a total war game it was magic. That magic is gone. Replaced with the negative experience of things like Empire, Rome II and follow up Napoleon and Attila (which in the trend of CA's renewal business model one can't even play as Attila?). Attila looks awesome, but so did Rome II on pre-release alpha.

Judging by the very tempered reception of the release, I'm not the only one that is completely lost on the product promotion and development of CA.

The presentation of the game itself looked awesome. Credit where credit is due. However pre-alpha presentations and demo's have left people excited before, with not getting the same results on release, and leading to day one apologies from CA, and a year and 15 patches later the (almost immediately obsolete) EE edition. Is development going faster (in a business model) than fans can keep up?

Wow!!
This really nails it: such well overthought questions that actually justify to be answered by CA to the loyal fanbase.
I could not have put it down better myself (+rep. for that)
And also totally agree with your conclusions and statement.
I, myself, will NO-WAY pre-order ANY game again EVER !

[AnthoniusII]

Shogun Total War Developers.

RTW Developers.

M2TW Developers.

ETW Developers.

Rome II Developers.

I see those who mainly have the final say are those who were from the very beginning.

They had ONE chance and they missed it!!
The results are more than CLEAR to us all!

[the_eye]

They had ONE chance and they missed it!!
The results are more than CLEAR to us all!

Indeed, they must be kicking themselves.

[Butan]

Indeed, they must be kicking themselves.

For the apparent few who played this (I'm a part of them), its BAI is 100x better than any Total War I've seen (both vanilla or modded).
If they had recruited this guy and somehow given him the keys to develop a similar BAI, oh my god what would have happened to the TW brand: it would have jumped through the roof in terms of realistic human-like challenge! That truth doesnt take into account sold copies, some still dont make a difference between commercial success and quality games... To be happy that overhyped games sell well over extremely innovative ones is being a complete ass in my book.

CA/SEGA last years marketing strategy doesnt encourage greatly improving their game: they prefer to cut content, put back some for a price, then release the next game with the rest. More money, more customers thanks to the fact they have a genre monopoly, everyone's happy but the players*


*not counting fanboys

[texoman81]

Indeed, they must be kicking themselves.

we all know the only reason Rome II has the numbers it does is because of the number of preorders due to lies told before release. Also Total War is an established series with a huge budget. The Rome era is way more popular worldwide than the American Civil War. I'm sure most people who bought Gettysburg were satisfied with and and still playing it and not angry like total war customers. Sales also don't even mean quality anyway, i mean is Britney Spears one of the best singers of our time. Though i realize all they care about how much money they made, but they will sell less on future titles because of the disaster that was Rome II. And even with all this, it only went 1x platinum, like most total war titles. Rome II should have done 4-5 time that amount.

[the_eye]

we all know the only reason Rome II has the numbers it does is because of the number of preorders due to lies told before release. Also Total War is an established series with a huge budget. The Rome era is way more popular worldwide than the American Civil War. I'm sure most people who bought Gettysburg were satisfied with and and still playing it and not angry like total war customers. Sales also don't even mean quality anyway, i mean is Britney Spears one of the best singers of our time. Though i realize all they care about how much money they made, but they will sell less on future titles because of the disaster that was Rome II. And even with all this, it only went 1x platinum, like most total war titles. Rome II should have done 4-5 time that amount.
With all that said i don't think hiring Darth Vader would have made a difference. After all they did hire Jack Lusted who also did great work as modder.

From the steam reviews:
Average hours of Ultimate General: Gettysburg played by those who recommended it (first 5 reviews): 14 hours
Average hours of Ultimate General: Gettysburg played by those who did not recommend it (first 5 reviews): 17 hours
Average hours of Total War: Rome II played by those who recommended it (first 5 reviews): 214 hours
Average hours of Total War: Rome II played by those who did not recommend it (first 5 reviews): 143 hours
And we've already established that Rome II beat its sales expectations, the idea that it 'should' have sold 4-5 million is an opinion completely unsupported by evidence.

[Huberto]

From the steam reviews:
Average hours of Ultimate General: Gettysburg played by those who recommended it (first 5 reviews): 14 hours
Average hours of Ultimate General: Gettysburg played by those who did not recommend it (first 5 reviews): 17 hours
Average hours of Total War: Rome II played by those who recommended it (first 5 reviews): 214 hours
Average hours of Total War: Rome II played by those who did not recommend it (first 5 reviews): 143 hours
And we've already established that Rome II beat its sales expectations, the idea that it 'should' have sold 4-5 million is an opinion completely unsupported by evidence.

Why are you comparing apples and oranges? Darth's game is fabulous but you'd be hard pressed to squeeze twenty hours of game play out of five to ten play throughs. How many hours does it take to play through TWR2 grand campaign, just once, not auto resolving most of the battles? 40 hours? CiG? HatG? Octavian?

[AnthoniusII]

True...Simply compare "vanilla" AI of ETW,NTW,Shogun II TW with the ones of Darth's for the SAME GAMES!!!
I play Shogun II again but now with Darth's mod and for the 1st time i see armies re-locate their standing position, trying to manuevre and get over my army's sides and all in NORMAL dificulty when same AI behaviur i have not seen in vanilla Legentary level!!!

[Humble Warrior]

we all know the only reason Rome II has the numbers it does is because of the number of preorders due to lies told before release.

It will be interesting to see what happens with Atilla after the pre-order scam of RTW2. That's the only reason why it sold as well as it did. I suspect even shareholders and SEGA bosses don't really understand this as CA might simply have shown them the figures and nothing else. Ca certainly still talks about RTW2 to 3rd parties as if they don't know what really happened. There's no way Atilla will do as well as RTW2, no way.

...Unless CA pulls out the marketing scam of the century.

It's possible CA are already preparing SEGA and shareholders for lower profits using excuses like, `RTW2 had 10 years behind it. Atilla can't match that`, possibly avoiding reasons why Atilla won't do as well, etc...

Let's not forget that CA have never acknowledge RTW2 to be a buggy broken game on release and still has some issues even now.

[Sharpe]

Indeed, they must be kicking themselves.

Haha, inciting major bum-pain.

10/10

But let's not compare a certain modder who didn't actually change the AI at all in his mods and CA.

[texoman81]

From the steam reviews:
Average hours of Ultimate General: Gettysburg played by those who recommended it (first 5 reviews): 14 hours
Average hours of Ultimate General: Gettysburg played by those who did not recommend it (first 5 reviews): 17 hours
Average hours of Total War: Rome II played by those who recommended it (first 5 reviews): 214 hours
Average hours of Total War: Rome II played by those who did not recommend it (first 5 reviews): 143 hours
And we've already established that Rome II beat its sales expectations, the idea that it 'should' have sold 4-5 million is an opinion completely unsupported by evidence.

where was it established that Rome II beat its sales expectations? It had the largest budget and most advertising but its not the best selling Total War game. It sold half what Empire did and about the same as most others. It beat PREORDER expectations. Those were 7 times that of any other Total War game, but then we saw the real Rome II instead of purchasing based on lies. About 60% of the sales for Rome II were preorders. I promise you that CA didn't go to the trouble of all that hype expecting sales similar to previous titles. Last official count i heard was 1.3 million, and i doubt its gone up any since then especially after the announcement of Attila.
This is post 175 in the Compliant threat for Attila just based on its announcement. There are another 43 complaints in the official complaints thread. There are only 23 posts in the praise thread. For Rome II its 3,563 in complaints, 1,267 in business complaints but only 378 in the praise thread. Even after one year and 15 patches, a TWC poll shows only 45% of people are happy with Rome II. And its actually lower than that because of all the people that uninstalled at launch and have never came back.

[Huberto]

where was it established that Rome II beat its sales expectations? It had the largest budget and most advertising but its not the best selling Total War game. It sold half what Empire did and about the same as most others. It beat PREORDER expectations. Those were 7 times that of any other Total War game, but then we saw the real Rome II instead of purchasing based on lies. About 60% of the sales for Rome II were preorders. I promise you that CA didn't go to the trouble of all that hype expecting sales similar to previous titles. Last official count i heard was 1.3 million, and i doubt its gone up any since then especially after the announcement of Attila.
This is post 175 in the Compliant threat for Attila just based on its announcement. There are another 43 complaints in the official complaints thread. There are only 23 posts in the praise thread. For Rome II its 3,563 in complaints, 1,267 in business complaints but only 378 in the praise thread. Even after one year and 15 patches, a TWC poll shows only 45% of people are happy with Rome II. And its actually lower than that because of all the people that uninstalled at launch and have never came back.

What he means is that TWR2 beat SEGA's published forecasts for sales before the game was released. He is correct, at least for the period April 1, 2013 to March 31, 2014.

Haha, inciting major bum-pain.

10/10

But let's not compare a certain modder who didn't actually change the AI at all in his mods and CA.

You should play Ultimate General Gettysburg. It's got very good battle AI. You might change your mind about Darth if you played his game. Or perhaps that's a disincentive.

[the_eye]

Why are you comparing apples and oranges? Darth's game is fabulous but you'd be hard pressed to squeeze twenty hours of game play out of five to ten play throughs. How many hours does it take to play through TWR2 grand campaign, just once, not auto resolving most of the battles? 40 hours? CiG? HatG? Octavian?

I was responding to the comment that

I'm sure most people who bought Gettysburg were satisfied with and and still playing it and not angry like total war customers.

The figures do not support the conclusion that people are still playing Gettysburg, although I didn't realise it was as focused as you say.

But let's not compare a certain modder who didn't actually change the AI at all in his mods and CA.

It made more sense prior to the moderator edit.

where was it established that Rome II beat its sales expectations?

Page 4, Post 69, as Huberto explained.

It sold half what Empire did and about the same as most others.

The others have been out a lot longer. Only CA and SEGA know how many copies the other games had sold at the same point it their lifetime.

Last official count i heard was 1.3 million, and i doubt its gone up any since then especially after the announcement of Attila.

My statistical analysis puts it at about 1.4 million prior to the free weekend.

This is post 175 in the Compliant threat for Attila just based on its announcement.

The thread title is CA Business Practice Complaint and Discussion Thread.

There are another 43 complaints in the official complaints thread. There are only 23 posts in the praise thread. For Rome II its 3,563 in complaints, 1,267 in business complaints but only 378 in the praise thread.

And there were 4798 posts in the two Empire: Total War complaint threads too. Yet CA are still here and Total War is still selling.

Even after one year and 15 patches, a TWC poll shows only 45% of people are happy with Rome II. And its actually lower than that because of all the people that uninstalled at launch and have never came back.

OK, answer me this. If Rome II has sold fewer or the same number of copies as the other Total War games, and is less popular than the other Total War games, how come there are far more people playing Rome II now than any of the other Total War games since Empire at the same point relative to their releases?

In fact, Rome II is being played by more people 400-odd days after release than played Empire and Napoleon combined 400-odd days after the release of Empire (and 25-30 days after the release of Napoleon).

[Sharpe]

You should play Ultimate General Gettysburg. It's got very good battle AI. You might change your mind about Darth if you played his game. Or perhaps that's a disincentive.

I was talking about him in modding terms rather than game design.

I have no interest in the game, looks a bit tame. I need action.

[AnthoniusII]

But let's not compare a certain modder who didn't actually change the AI at all in his mods and CA.

Thousands of players have diferent opinion than yours! Either you are right or the are fools!
Let's suppose you are the wise guy and you are right...
Look your face on the mirror and as a wise guys answer those questions with reasonable answers:
If CA was right that AI in its own games could not be changed then why an AI modder of Rome I is NOW a CA developer?
Why that ex-modder was compited for the SAME dev place with Darth???
Why Darth mods are 1st or among of the top of every TW mods especialy ETW/NTW/Shogun II ones?
Why CA has for the 1st time in TW chronicles the AI codes in the hardcoded list?
Why -having AI development out of modding limmits- CA CAN NOT fix Rome II AI after an entire year????

[Abdülmecid I]

It sounds like a classic tantrum between modders, with each one supporting his buddy or fighting his "enemy". A bit childish, but I'll stick to the fact that Darthmods are the most popular in ETW and ntw.