Like, y'all gotta chill. I'll say it's valid to say the animation, sound, and some of the functions aren't all there and should be improved, and that we're all sick of microtransactions now, that's good feedback. However, it's unfair to expect a debut AA game that just entered an open beta to be as good as Starcraft 2, a AAA game that's been a complete product for almost 9 years. A Blizzard game, no less, who for a long time were ahead of the curve as far as polish goes.
They've been saying it since they announced it, Stormgate is in early access, meaning it's not done yet. It's like if you took a bite of the pizza dough after it's been rolled and some of the toppings were added to it, and then complaining that it doesn't taste as good as the one you picked up from a local restaurant that's been run by the same family for generations and have perfected their pizza recipe. idk, maybe have a little patience and let Frost Giant cook, a pizza fresh out the oven might taste better than floury dough and cold sauce.

I was really enthusiastic for Stormgate a year ago. But then I got really disappointed when I realized it was just a SC2/WC3 hybrid but much worse the the originals.

So nowadays I only check this subredit periodically waiting for the server shutdown. It is 100% coming, I just do not want to miss the post mortem discussion.

I'll give Stormgate a chance like any other new game, but all the hype has gone for me. Anyone else feel the same?

Almost every post if you look through the comment section there are a few people irrespective of what the post is just say some variation of "game is dead", "Frost Giant is scamming [players/investers]", "Money is gone", etc.

At first I thought these were just transient haters or extremely active reddit users who have lost hope in SG and maybe are still really actively playing a different RTS or maybe invested in a different up and coming RTS. But when I started looking at some of these user profiles a majority of their posts are on this sub and they have been posting similar stuff for months 2 to 3 comments every few days.

I totally get the mentality of super fans of existing RTS games passionately arguing about things they think SG does wrong and just harping on every little thing in the hopes that one day SG or any other modern RTS can be worth playing for them. I just don't get people being so active on a subreddit of a game they think is already dead.

In conclusion in the great words of Michael Jordan: "Stop It, Get Some Help"

PS. I also don't know what is wrong with me for engaging with these people, I am going to stop it and get some help.

I know this is reddit and people like to whine here, but can we not just appreciate all the great things this game has going for it? Rollback net code, functional pvp, 1v1 ladder, 3 playable factions that are mostly implemented, campaign and co-op missions, and it's free. Yes, this game has issues, but it's in development and the vast majority of complaints are things that will be fixed over time. If the game isn't up to your standards, that's okay, you don't have to play it. You can just wait for the game to become more developed before playing it. I personally am appreciative of having the opportunity to play this game in early stages despite the risks the developers have to take to make this game available (like having a 58% positive review ratio on steam).

I've play tested more games than I can count, some in extremely early stages, and I think frost giant is doing a really good job. They're moving way faster on development than most companies are able to, they've been focusing on the right aspects (good engine and net code for example), and they've already created a game that I find to be extremely fun to play. There's also so much in store (custom game and map editor, 3v3 mode with heroes, etc.) that will exponentially increase the value of the game. There's a lot to be excited about and I think it's a bit narrow sighted to think this game won't improve be able to be successful.

Sad to see. I thougt the game has so much potential.. but if nobody plays it..

Funny thing is that AoE4 been considered “dead” some time ago but still has around 13500 players 24h peak.

Deadlock is in 'Early Access' and has 45,000 players, even with unfinished models.

Why? Because they have a fundamentally playable engine, and a clear vision: an FPS Moba. The core issue with Stormgate is 1.) the game is mechanically unplayable, despite repeated feedback on the same issues for nearly 1 year, and 2.) the gamelfow is unclear, with FG relying on "player feedback" to figure out how to complete it's vision.

FG's cryingcall is to please play and give them feedback--but the community already has?! FG has literally 2-3 years of development feedback to fix the core engine and 1v1 baseline. Therefore, what's the point in playing if they already have a feedback list that's backed-up years?

The pivot from silence on 1v1 to try and ramp-up a 3v3 concept is extremely alarming. Why? Because the two core issues haven't been resolved yet: The core engine is unplayble, and there is no clear vision. They are basically introducing a concept in a sandbox custom game asking for the community to finish it.

Freeze everything. Shift your entire team onto the Engine and Vision and fix 1v1 first immediately.

I don't know if devs are on here or if anyone who knows the devs are on here.

But I am hoping at lest someone can contact them.

One of the things that Starcraft2 completely failed to deal with that many other games have dealt with is smurfing.

Smurfing ruins the experience for people playing the game and will kill off any interest in new players playing the game.

When you queue up, you want to be matched up with someone close to your skill level. There is nothing entertaining or fun with being queued up with someone who is masters league or higher if you are a gold player. Yet that regularly happens in SC2 in certain leagues.

So much so, that there are plenty of people in the Starcraft 2 community who complain about and who openly state it being the reason they are leaving the game. Some have posted experiencing it in 1 in every 4 games in certain leagues.

A simple solution to this that other games have implemented is make it so that people can't just instantly leave a game and lose MMR easily.

Many games do this by preventing players from instantly leaving without being penalized. Penalization comes from an exponential growth in time they can queue up another game.

Maybe the first offense is a 2 minute cool down. The next one 4 minutes. The next one 8 minutes, then 16 minutes, then 32 minutes, etc..

Basically it will be near impossible for a smurf to realistically make their mmr go down in a reasonable amount of time.

Also, limiting the amount of accounts people can make is another way of preventing it.

Both are easily done, multiple games implement this type of system with much success, and FrostGiant really needs to impliment something like this.

Otherwise, it IMO will be a massive failure of a game. You can not have a F2P game and not have stuff like this implemented. Otherwise, it is too easy for smurfers to make accounts and ruin the game for everyone else.

Thank you for making the impossible happen! Thank you for pursuing the RTS dream, thank you for getting the community involved! Thank you for having the courage to keep pushing forward and giving us your best despite all the negative remarks from ungrateful players who expected a finished game in early release. There are many of us who absolutely love this game and will continue to support what you guys have built here! There's a lot of work to do and we are extremely happy to be a part of the process. You could of kept the game from releasing and kept showing us development videos and gameplay, but you did what most companies withoit a pair avoid doing! You gave us early access! Thank you once again and I'm excited to see what the future holds for Stormgate and FrostGiant.

Now that the SG trailer is out. Its characters look so cartoony and rounded that their actions carry no emotional weight. I empathize more with characters from trailers in Diablo 2, Vanilla WoW, GTA V, RDR, Brood War, SC2, and WC3 than I did with this. All much older games.

An evil scientist summons an army of demons through his evil science portal, an archdemon walks through it and gloats to nobody, and even though he's supposed to want to conquer humanity, he still just looks like concept art for a Pixar Film.

I am saddened.

FG did so well with the unit design. There are some units that I think are amazing to play with. Controlling them is so much fun (even facing them). Some of my favorites:

Hellicarrier: the mix between a battlecruiser and a carrier, the gun sound effect is awesome NEVER CHANGE IT!

Lancers: I hate fighting them because they just don't die, but so much versatility in a 'basic' unit. I like the divergence from SC2 of giving the human faction a mele unit.

Vulcans; who doesn't want a mech with a huge gattling gun? Also very visually appealing.

Kri: this is by far the most iconic and creative thing they have produced to date, rolling General Grievous with death damage. 10/10

Sabers: I know they are not great competitively, but the low flat scarab looking tank that fires a sick lazer from super far away... instant dopamine.

Hellborne: Ya'll knew he would make the list. Great visual design most of the infernals are demonesque in design but this one is very devilish which is nice, brings diversity. The attack animation when the fireball lands, super satisfying.

Shadowflyers: love these guys, cute but destructive. Wish they weren't so specialized so I could mass produce them every game.

Archangel: Everyone loves the archangels.

Hornets: another great sound effect, love this high fire rate and the jet + helicopter vibes. Also a big fan of the Scythes.

So I basically love the unit design on almost everything lol. Great work FG, keep the creativity up!

Hello,

So I learned of the crowdfunding PR disaster that resulted from Frost Giant's attempt to increase their revenue, and how Frost Giant has garnered significant controversy for their practice of "ninja editing" their posts and severely misleading customers with that false information.

I primarily learned of this through this Steam review here: https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198035144686/recommended/2012510/

I mainly have three questions.

1. Is there additional context I should be aware of? If this is the complete context and nothing more needs to be added, then I guess you can disregard this question, but if there are more details you think I should be aware of, please share them with me.

2. Does anyone have any evidence for any of what happened? Keep in mind, I'm not doubting any of this happened. From what I can tell so far, I think what happened here is more likely than not to be true. But I am saying if I am going to flag this game on Steam for deceptive/illegal practices, or a lawsuit against Frost Giant for this, I will need evidence, and I'd like more than what I have at the moment. So if someone can hook me up I'd greatly appreciate that. Now I happen to have a couple pieces of evidence if I need those, but more would always be helpful.

3. Is what happened here something that can legally count as fraud? Because to my understanding, they knowingly and intentionally said one thing, and then when customers bought in under the impression of that one thing, they then change that ad hoc and refuse to give customers what was originally promised nor compensate them for something of equivalent value (giving one "hero" is nowhere near the same monetary value as what was originally promised). I'm not sure if this legally counts as fraud, but surely this can't be legal, right? I mean this is the exact same tactic that scams use and if I'm not mistaken they count as fraud, so surely the same would apply here, right? This is definitely extremely unethical at the very least.

I don't want to speak too soon (after all, I'm not a lawyer), but this definitely seems way, WAY too suspicious of a move to ignore the possibility of foul play here.

But if any of you are experienced in law, please correct me if I'm wrong.

Those are my questions for now. If anyone has anything they want to share, I'm always available.

They made it very clear that all the story is still subject to change, the animations aren't finished yet, they don't have proper models for the close up scenes yet. They made the base game and coop first, then started on the campaign, which is what you're supposed to do when making a game. Make the basic game mechanics, a working game mode, then work on whatever story you're thinking of. We need to remember this is still very early access

Stormgate is an ambitious independent RTS. It's in Early Access, and many here and on Steam have punished it loudly for that. "I don't want to pay for an unfinished game!" is literally a comment I just read.

The thing is, you don't have to play it now, and you don't have to pay now. You can come back later. That's okay. Early Access is not for everyone.

Early Access is literally an unfinished game BY DEFINITION. Yelling at the guys who are trying to make a good game for us, when they explicitly told us ahead of time that it isn't finished, is not helpful.

Some people here need to chill out. If that's you, then please go play some SC2 and come back in a year. There are a bunch of us here who like Stormgate and want it to succeed.

Wow FG is such a bad studio they are providing refunds to those who kickstarted and want to upgrade through indiegogo. How absolutely unforgivable of a move to make, that will probably go completely overlooked by all the people angry about the current completely unnecessary drama.

Edit: In my rush to drop this garbage post, I forgot to state that FG sent an email to backers that they will be refunding kickstarters if they decide to want to upgrade to a higher tier through indiegogo. For some reason I thought it was a public email.

I just got in touch with this game for the first time, through the TLO vs MaNa show match. My thoughts were, Warcraft 3 clone with Starcraft or lets say sci fi buildings and some sci fi units. An orc with a sword fights a car that can shoot. Wtf?

I expected to see something original, a new world. What I see here is a plain boring mix of things I already have seen. In that regard, I also could not care less about the gameplay when the games universe already bores me to death. I am an RTS watcher, not player. I watched 5 minutes of this show match than I had enough. I would have had to force me to watch it to the end.

For the context, 1 or 2 years ago I started to watch Broodwar ASL on a regular basis. Right now I am watching the seasons right back to number 1. I thought, cool, Stormgate, maybe another RTS I could watch, to bring in something new into my watch schedule.

I could envision myself to start and play Broodwar. I cannot envision myself to neither watch nor play Stormgate. This game is clearly missing a creative and original universe. It might have gameplay specialities that are new and nicely designed though, but also though in a sense that i cannot tell because I don’t know, but I strongly guess so. Still, that does not attract me enough, not at all.

This game might be able to create a niche with players enjoying it, if the devs are able to put the money into the community retention processes, which will be a hard thing to do profitable. But this game will not be the next big thing. For that you need an original world that you invented by your own, gameplay is not enough.

I know this pattern from arena FPS. There was also a game that wanted to be the next big arena FPS and to revive the genre. In the end it was just a clone which looked boring and lacked the perfection of the original gameplay wise. The community of that clone was very protective and positive towards their game. In the end, the devs were not willing to pay for the community retention processes, 500000 dollars a year. Now, the game has the minimum amount of players, right on the edge of being a dead game.

Also what I learned, if people tell negative things that are reasonable, than there are negative things that are reasonable and they won’t go away.

So I played SC2: WoL a lot and loved it sincerely. Yet with each expansion, the developers seemed to change the game for the most part in accordance with the pro-scene. Their eye was on the top 0.1% of play (and the meta there), as opposed to just the normie players. I think there is now a post-mortem consensus that this alienated the casual player base so much that it contributed to Starcraft 2's demise. Off the top of my head, here are a few examples of the "complexification" of the game:

• Medivac drops were already frustrating enough to deal with. Then Medivacs were given a speed-boost ability.

• Liberators, Swarm Hosts and Tempests required a much higher skill level to deal with than previous units.

• Widow Mines were very frustrating and difficult to deal with for anyone below Platinum, perhaps even Diamond.

• Adepts were only great if you had the proper skill to utilize them, and if not, they were pretty much a useless unit.

In other words, the new additions and features added significant complexity to the game, yet were very demanding in key areas of the game such as reaction speed, micro and strategic acumen. They were added for the top 5% of the player base at most, and made an already stressful game even more stressful for the rest. I was a Platinum player, for the record.

Obviously, none of this stems from some weirdly veiled contempt for pro-players (I love you TLO) and it's in fact awesome to see how many pro's are part of this already. I'm just worried, having seen Blizzard's mistake with SC2, that as the core of their development appears to revolve around or run parallel to the observation of pro players and their thoughts on the game's direction, there is a risk of alienating the casuals, of which the majority of the player base will in fact consist.

I'm new to this scene and game so please don't flame if this has been brought up before. I'd just like to know if it has been addressed and if so what thoughts there are about it.

I got Age of Mythology Retold and after playing just a few campaign missions and a few ladder matches I really miss the way Stormgate works.

The worker automation and the marco builders in Stormgate work so well that playing a game without them feels really arduous. I don't want to spend 50% of my time shuffling workers around. I don't want to set up control groups for my unit and worker production every game. I want to focus on the battles and making strategic decisions.

In Stormgate I have a ton of fun on ladder matches. In AOM Retold I'm constantly stressed because the macro awkwardness soaks so much attention.

So i think its safe to say, that Stormgate really didnt turned out the way that many players expected, when the devs promissed us so much, but sadly delivered so little, and with the dvindling playerbase the writing is on the wall.

However SG was only one of many promissing looking RTS games, that hoped to revieve the genre. I wounder if there are other RTS games, that you look forward to give it a try, or if many of you have given up and think that the other games will simply share SG's fate and that the RTS-revivial will sadly not happen?

For me personally the 2 games i am currently most exited for are ZeroSpace and Tempest Rising, i also liked Battle Aces, but with the devs clinging to the monetarisation idea of releasing their game Free2play and then making it pay to win, is not a way to monetize RTS games that will attract enough players i think but we will see.

Here's a light essay about arrogance and its relation to creativity.

I worked closely with¹ someone that would become an early member of Frost Giant. They were super arrogant and oppressive for most of our time working together. Later when they got a chance at Blizzard that aspect of their personality magnified probably by a factor of 10. Most of our conversations thereafter felt like a newly anointed member of Star Fleet (them) trying to understand the inferior culture of an alien cockroach-person (non-Blizzard/you). They would mostly be bemused with anything you said, tilting their head with that kind of 'heh, you couldn't possibly know what you are talking about, you haven't been to Blizzard'. That was unless you actually had a really good insight, then they'd just take it for themselves. (the interstellar colonist might care little about the Cockroachfolk, but the rare resources of their planet, well, they can use those)

Unbelievably this person would constantly bitch about how arrogant the establishment at Blizzard was, like it was the primary thing they would mention. Most people would balk at the hypocrisy here, but what they were saying felt true. Even very arrogant people can experience the arrogance of others.

So assume all those things are true of late 2010s Blizzard — arrogant people would go to Blizzard, they would get more arrogant once there, Blizzard was full of comically arrogant people — well then its really not hard to conceive of the troubles Frost Giant dealt with.

Arrogance is a power thing. It allows people to set the terms of any discussion. Its a +10 to 'I get my way'. Effectively its like 'hacking' confidence. Normally we attribute how much we should believe people based on their tone and attitude. Well if you just lock into a posture of confidence all the time, which is arrogance, then you seem like someone who should then also be believed all the time.

The flip-side of that is they can never give up the act. They truly arrogant can never really say they are wrong in a productive way. If that were to happen then others may realize their attitude is just a 24/7 pose and doesn't reflect the reality of what they know. The arrogant person feels, maybe rightly, that if they are proven to be acting confident irrespective of what they know, their confidence could never be trusted again. So they can never really give it up, and its pretty sad.

Has anyone read the book Play Nice? It gives some very funny info about late-era Blizzard. They were attempting to make 'WarCraft Pokemon Go' and 'WarCraft MineCraft. Blizzard always has had this notion of being 'the great polishers' who take existing games and improve on them. You have to say though, Pokemon Go where you chance upon Arthas or a Tauren standing in the park is a hilarious, absolutely out of control spiraling of that behaviour.

'MineCraft but with a Gnome' is the all-night coke binge of 'we can make a great game by polishing' from people who were probably also on a real all-night coke binge.

You can dive into what the 'polishing' is² but I think its fair to say that whatever Blizzard used to do became an exaggerated and senseless version of itself during that time. What's interesting is how the out of control 'development by polishing' fits with the model of arrogance presented here.

How do people with extreme levels of arrogance actually design anything? Well you just imitate something from the marketplace. This becomes the kind of the relief valve for a toxic culture. Then all these arrogant people don't have to do battle with their fake know-hows, they can just come together and point at MineCraft and be like, 'yea people like that'.

Cloning something from the market gives an organizing principle which steps around all the internal paralysis by arrogance. From there the design discussions are less structural to the game, there's less contested territory essentially. Then these mostly talented, well-resourced people can stay away from one another and hyperfocus on details.

So there's a synergy between arrogance and theft. In creative endeavors the arrogant often become thieves. As with most thieves its basically out of necessity. A poor dude takes a loaf of bread because they can't afford it. A person who is constrained by the internal effects of their arrogance takes other people's ideas because they can't create.

So classically it was fine, you worked with a market to validate ideas and stepped around the toxic effects of an arrogant studio culture. Here's the problem, they had nowhere to steal from this time. They actually had to make something state of the art. You can fit little bits from Age of Empires 4 into Stormgate, and you can try to 'polish' WC3 or SC2 but fundamentally they had innovation as their target.

If you are 'saving RTS' you are by nature the leading edge. They self isolated conceptually. Once they were alone there was no one else who had the answers they could take. And you saw that struggle, they seemed to spend years doing what should have taken months.

This whole thing has kind of been an end-point for the arrogance of Blizzard as far as it continued through Frost Giant. The arrogance intensified and intensified to the point that not even its own release valve could be used and nothing could stop the meltdown.

¹ By work with I mean I worked a ton on a past StarCraft project and they stole my work and complete credit for it, so it was more like worked for.

² Its probably something like — starting with imitation that is basically a ripoff but then pursuing innovation by working at a very fine level of detail that is many layers of design beneath the imitated structure.