note: This is The Column, a part of Apolyton where primarily Markos and Dan write whatever they want :). Well, not just the two of them. The Column is open to everyone. If you feel like writing, submit your article to civilization@apolyton.net

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#53 THE CIV COMMUNITY AND FORUM UNCIVILITY Dracon doesn't want to listen to excuses -- he wants to see change. #54 INTO RETIREMENT With ToT's release, DanQ voices that it's time to move on from CivII. COLUMN ARCHIVE

The Public are morons. You may question this assumption, however since you are a member of the public, you are a moron, and therefore cannot judge the aforementioned statement.

I however am not a member of the general public, being a computer programmer. I can stand from an unbiased point of view and confidently say that the game buying public, along with most organised journalism are complete idiots.
The public are morons simply because they are easily manipulated, they have little opinion of their own, they also have extremely high expectations.

I think these expectations spring from ignorance. I mean, how do they know how much of a problem it is to remove bugs from our games. It just simply isn't profitable. It is not as if we sell any more games due to or post-sales support. The most profitable thing we can do is sell as many copies as possible, with a minimal amount of bug testing. That is the way of the marketplace. A company is always the slave of these market forces. If you want to blame something for our bugtesting, you should blame Capitalism. Capitalism is also to blame for another bug-bear amongst us programmers. Hardware problems. We try night and day to make sure our equipment is compatible with as many configurations as possible. But consumer choice defies us! If everybody was forced to have a computer with similar specifications as our test machines our problems would vanish. That is why we heartily support Apple Mac in all it's ventures. Buy an IMAC if you never want one of our games to crash.

It seems to me that the majority of our web using customers simply use our forums for complaining. We created those forums to allow the free flow of information. But the majority of posts are just bug reports, or gameplay complaints. This is an abuse of the forums. The endless bug reporting has caused us programmers to stop even reading the forums, what used to be helpful discussion about the social beliefs of the different factions, or a statement of our brilliance has now become degraded repetitive criticism. I said that the public is easily influenced, as they all seem to hold the same opinions. These opinions have slowly spread from a few dissenters, the Yins and Resource Consumers have degraded discussion, and are hoping to turn our customers against us.

We have done some deduction work, they cannot be members of the general public, this is due to the conviction of their opinions. They must be rivals, trying to cause trouble.

The public are like sheep and cannot hold an opinion for long. By the time our next game is released the public should forget the opinions they held about us, the morons will still buy our games. I therefore ask why should we be concerned about our customers? They will always change their minds back within our next release date.

God Bless You All.

The opinions expressed on this page do not necessarily reflect those of Apolyton CS or GameStats. They are just the personal opinions of the writer.