Civ MP - criminal lack of QA

[Merzbow]

Internet games:

1. We all know how horrible the UI is in the Internet lounge room. If they had a single QA guy on this feature he would have noticed in seconds that it's impossible to scroll games with the mouse (because the list keeps jumping back to the selected game).

2. People can actually still join a game as a defeated civilization. I mean, how many seconds of QA would it have taken to discover this? This is made doubly annoying because joins freeze the game for at least a minute for everyone, so you have people constantly joining/leaving the dead civs and ruining the game.

3. Games themselves are horribly unreliable. Almost every game I played at some point failed due to the timer freezing. Frequently it looks like a bad join will cause this to happen. I've had the game connection process freeze up at any given point also many times.

4. When you leave a game you get kicked back to the main menu and not back to the lounge. Given that the login process doesn't remember your username or password, it's tedious to have to fully log back in again.

5. From what I can tell the voting process is counter-productive. Has to be unanimous to kick out a timed-out player? This means one grumpy player can indefinitely delay the game. And it seems there is no process to vote out a player either, so this kind of behavior can't be punished. Also, the voting screen doesn't appear to have a timeout on it, so one can just refuse to vote and hang up the game, no?

I gather that private passworded games tend to be more reliable, but still public games should be playable. Given that the SP game for me has been very bug-free, it's puzzling why MP is so badly QA'd. Somebody wasn't doing their job properly.

[Dinner]

Agreed. Per Firaxis tradition the quality control was poor and the game simply wasn't optimized for minimial resource usage. It's still fun but you have to figure out how to work around the bugs plus you need a high end system other wise it will lag like no tomorrow.

[Philciv4]

Civ MP is nearly unplayable on gamespy network.
1. The UI couldnt have been made any worse
2. Games that you finally get started, usually end well before they are supposed to, due to numerous problems including crashing, disconnections, lag, etc.
3. Connecting to games works roughly 25-30% of the time.

The best way to play that ive found is by Dir IP. Less Lag, and easy reconnections when your game crashes.

[Martinus]

I played maybe 20 MP games so far, most of them via Gamespy network. The only case it didn't work was with one player who had some problems constantly and always dropped out. Other than that, I have played games with between 3 and 8 other people, never having any of the problems you guys report. You should check if there is something wrong on your side, since it is not the network.

[Merzbow]

No Martinus, it is not our side, because each of these games that goes south affects EVERYONE in the game. EVERYONE has their timer frozen, sees the game pause for a minute when people constantly join, see people join dead civs, sees the bad seed message, and so on. I know because they SAY SO in chat. Two nights ago there were about 10 open games on public, every single one that was broken with a frozen timer or had some other problem that made it unplayable.