Malfador, is it time you had a QA department?

From what I've read he did have a Q&A. But it wasnt and couldnt be funded well. All Q&A firms want money. I think the guy and his team are doing the best they can under the circumstances.

MM is effectively a one man operation with the majority of the work done by Aaron Hull. There is a team of Beta testers who have done and continue to do the Quality Assurance supported by customer feed back from this forum or direct e-mail to MM. The game was released in the last quarter of 06 and we have had four patches released so far and it looks like another one is in the works as Change log 1.21 has just been posted. Most of the bugs are fixed even if the game was not quite up to scratch at version 1.0 it is now. It does still play up but the bugs are getting increasingly obscure.

One tiny, niggling little detail. The man behind MM is Aaron Hall, not Hull.
And though it's been said a number of times already... The beta testers had reported 99% of the bugs that afflicted the game upon release, yet the decision was made to release the game before it was ready, for reasons I won't speculate on.

Suction feet are not to be trifled with!

Good points drop Aeron an E-mail at with them and welocme to the comunuity.

Maybe he should try what GalCiv is doing... anyone who has bought the game has the right to play the betas
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There are 10 types of people in the world:

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

The probem is not finding the bugs, it's getting them fixed with only one coder.

that being said, some monkies doing regression testing would be more than usefull, regression is something that really needs pay.
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an se5a is a ww1 fighter, it is also a car.

I'm new to the Space Empire game series. GalCiv was my first foray into the 4x world of gaming. I liked both galCiv and Galciv2 and now SEV. The reason is that I like when a comapny truly supports a game. Being a computer gamer for the last 20 years I truly appreciate when a company supports their product like Hall has. I

I like the tremendous depth the SEv has, and in all fairness to release a game of this magnitude, even with the bugs, is a valent effort.

I just wanted to say thanks, and continue the great support.

-A new fan of the series.... (even if I can't complete the game yet LOL)

I agree with you. The shear scope of SEV is absolutely amazing. I'm continually finding new features that I did not know about before. I do not think that the multitude of patches is anything to be concerned about because the game is so large that there is absolutely no way that every bug can be found before release. I am just glad to have gotten this game because it is not only an excellent strategy game, but also has good graphics for its genre and incredible customizability.

This sounds to me like a call to change how MM does business. What may not be apparent is that doing business like every other game company out there means being a publicly held company that can be bought out by other, larger game companies that care far less for product quality than they do for getting your dollar.

It may be just that I'm an old fart, but I recall when there were a lot of smaller game companies, they all were owned and operated by gamers, and they all worked hard to make good games instead of money farms. MM is a company that goes back to this (to my perception anyway). And since it has to compete in a world that is now dominated by money grubbing game farms, there are going to be trade offs to get good games out without the proverbial selling of the soul to the devil (big game farm companies) to do it.

SE V is a good game, bugs or no bugs. MM is a company that is actively working on removing bugs, even as it has to toe a distributor line in marketing the game with them (which I have no doubt was a bitter pill to swallow). All that considered, I am more than happy with the game AND MM as they are, and am extremely happy MM isn't selling itself and it's future interests off to "improve quality control."

Yes, but the cemetery is full of game companies with good games.

You may like it or not, but MM has to sell games to survive. In my opininion, it was a serious marketing mistake to launch SEV with so many bugs. It could have been better to wait some weeks (the time it took to make patch 1.17 or 1.20) and launch a more polished product.

Don´t take me wrong. I love this game, and I like to see MM and this whole comunity fixing bugs and making wonderfull mods. And I have patience, because I know that SEV is getting better day by day.

But... The common game buyer doesn´t know all of this. And he doesn´t have patience. He has paid for a game, and he wants to install it and play without issues. And if he finds game crashing bugs, he won´t be happier listening "hey, wait one or two months, MM will fix them". He will probably feel cheated. And that is bad for MM, because angry buyers won´t buy SEVI, and will probably tell their friends not to buy SEV.

SEV is a great multiplayer game, and this has a "cascade" effect on buyers: If I like the game, I will tell my friends to buy it, so we can play online. But if I am unable to play because of bugs, I´ll look for another game for online gaming. Again, it is bad for MM to make buyers angry.

The game was launched on 10-11-2006, but it´s been barely playable till patch 1.20, released on 12-18-2006. This means more than two months... How many buyers have gone angry with the game in this time? How many future buyers has lost MM?

Better invest a bit more in quality control than lose buyers. I don´t want to see MM buried.

I´m not only talking about hiring Q/A services. MM is a small company, and maybe it can´t afford that. But there is a great community here, with a great knowledge of the game mechanics that can be very useful.