As a (poor) scientist, I love it when anyone pays us to do anything!

I think I cut the bit where I say exactly this - it's tough for them for sure. Vibes is fair - but it's also then fair for people to say "this test needed a bit more cooking"! All still to play for - now we're just excited to see how everything pans out.

I agree - I played since WoL (though Lorimbo didn't play multiplayer at that time) and remember how it was. I was there when the unbuildable supply depots were added. I also played all through HoTS, and even into LoTV where proxy Nexus was legit because of the Mothership Core. I think there are 2 problems here: SC2 was a big lesson in game design, one which might not have been sufficiently learnt in time to put meaningful change into Stormgate. The second problem being that the lessons unique to SG may not have been learn fast enough, especially given the mountains of (admittedly sometimes contradictory) feedback coming from the community. We've been playing Stormgate since October of last year, without, what some feel to be, sufficient changes in that time. This means the game may be releasing (admittedly into early access) with some flaws that should be pretty well known. The downturn in the gaming industry has obviously been bad for FGS with regards to generating additional revenue, but the Kickstarter is, in their own words, purely to supplement for some nice extras and marketing. Inviting the community to playtest is fine, but we think it's made responding to community feedback very hard on them, just because of the sheer volume of it, if nothing else. Making some units OP "so that people will use them" doesn't have that effect, and is a very bad idea for a beta. It completely shifts the meta so that only very few strategies are even viable. For example, the combination of high damage and life Hornets with the invulnerability shield restricted the openers because insufficient anti-air would lose you the game on the spot. This really happened and really did affect the unit usage in the game. I believe that when the game is unbalanced, it's really hard to get good feedback, because everything will be focussed on the balance issue. We're not trying to shit on the game at all. We've both put 100s of hours into the game and want it to succeed. Of the "next-gen" RTS (ZS, BA, SG), I personally like SG the most. I am much more optimistic about the game than Lorimbo is, and I do think (and hope!) that the beta build will surprise people. I always try to finish the sandwich - there's no need to be completely pessimistic OR optimistic on anything ever - it's always best to be REALISTIC - that's the route we're trying to take with this one! This podcast leant more negative than positive though - and there's a lot more negativity that I cut in the interest of balance. We appreciate the feedback, and thanks for watching!

@@AllThingsRealTime First of all thanks for taking time for such a thorough response. I do disagree on your take about introducing new machanics/units and the example you brought is perfect. In the Devestator build the Hornet was so weak that nobody used it, which led FGS to make it super OP in Elephant. I think we could play the build 1 week before Steam Fest and it was actually me who made the Discord thread (after playing 5 IvV games) about needing to nerf them fast or new players would have a bad time. They did nerf them in 2 days, but actually not enough, so they got nerfed again in Frigate. My point is if introduced OP to begin with they would have "figured out" the Hornet earlier. It is a delicate balance though, since you are right that something being too OP can shift the meta in a wrong direction. RTS is the hardest game to make imo and having a lot of experience doesn't necessarily mean you won't make some "silly" mistakes. The easy fix was more frequent patches and i know it sounds like I'm making excuses for FGS, but I really believe a lot of the problems you discussed arose from a shortened schedule for EA. Monks responses indicate it: 1) no time for patching 2) Celestials where thrown quickly together for Frigate 3) his response to Promote etc. I do not envy you having to do a podcast with an Italian. I intentionally left "crazy" out, since they all are, but in a good way 😅 P.S. I wrote "shit on the game", because I was to lazy to figure out how to paraphrase it

@@veseliniliev3361 In an older podcast we talk about the patch, and one thing I said is that I don't see the hornet or the shield ability to be particularly strong, but in conjunction they're way too strong. I think Lorimbo mentioned this in that podcast, and it's the kind of intuition that good game designers *need* to have; some SC2 pros we chatted to saw this and said it would be too strong, so it's not like it should've been pretty apparent to them too. This is the crux of Lorimbo's thought process, IMO. I agree on this point, and said words to this effect in a bit I foolishly cut out of this pod. I think they're hitting crunch time and are trying to get best "value for money" WRT betas. I think pushing Celestials in a bad state, but one that lets you check for bugs on units that aren't going to change much is a really easy test, but one that isn't very much fun to play with. No hate for Italy at all, apart from Euros 2021... I am shocked this is the first podcast I've had to edit though.