Thank you for your many insightful posts. 

Everyone else . . .

quick thinking apocalypse

When Impulse was announced as the future direction for distribution, I kept my peace.  I didn't like it - no sir.  I have a multi-terabyte library that I keep all of my patches and whatnot on, because I've been there - my internet is out for a week due to bad weather/act of God, and I need to install a game, patch it, and play it, to keep sane.  I wasn't going to be able to do that anymore, and I was pissed - but so were others.  I let them do the ranting and raving to which I couldn't have added anything constructive.

Now that its come out, I still have mixed feelings on the matter.  For one, I love how easy it is to install my games.  I lost my DVDs (since found) in my move, and couldn't play Sins.  Then I remembered Impulse - I was actually thankful for it.  I still wish for seperate patches, but given where I live now, and availability of fiber internet, I don't honestly concern myself too much.  What the future holds insofar as availability is a matter of conjecture, but I suppose we'll burn that bridge when we get to it. 

My only problem with the entire process isn't even directly related to Impulse - we had a fun time installing Entrenchment for my buddy when he registered the expansion with a different email address and he couldn't play immediately.  (It took about 5 minutes to resolve, via email, a turnaround that is worthy of a standing ovation - but why did we need to do this AT ALL?    )

Anyhow, kudos to Stardock and Impulse.

For the two guys above this post

IMPULSE HAS AN ARCHIVE FEATURE - IT ALLOWS YOU TO ARCHIVE AN INSTALL!!!

This means you can store a copy for later installation - the only issue is that the achive file is larger then a patch, but it sounds like the first guy has the disk to spare....

he definitely means you don't need the net for impulse to run

billion of flys cant be wrong...

Because a shotgun to your face wins me every argument, makes me right and works pretty much every time. Its called anarchy, move to africa for that.

Well i'm not a big fan of Impulse either, so if possible i try to get them from someone else.

Software a user doesn't really need always feels a bit nonserious for me, like mal- or adware, especially if it behaves like this resp. Impulse and puts itsself everywhere in the OS, someone has to click 2mins around to get rid of its appearance. Feels like buying a mobile phone and getting a washing machine or a subscription for a mag i dont want to have. That's for me the biggest annoyance factor. To get updates isn't faster, it's only more fiddling around. Takes more time to get the files you want, and if you lose these or your reg data, you have to redo all the process from the beginning on just to get a few megs. Loading it directly would take 1-2 mins. Last but not least it does not enrich the security anywhere compared to common solutions. Involvement of a community in order to make a game better, doesn't look like that was really supported or desired. The poor usability and demand of these forums compared to similar products represent all of that.

I'm sure it has no long-term future, especially if it stays like this. Customers want better and easier solutions, not just for the distributor. A web platform can be a better solution for that. A program isn't really needed or practical and ironically more expensive. Just imagine you need a special software to download Impulse itsself. Thats like most of your customers feel, mr.1 ceo. I wish there would be more understanding instead calling your customers idiots because they are not happy with this solution. Either your customers ARE idiots or ... You're free to shame yourself a bit now. (i'm glad that i'm not one of your customers).

Nothing like calling the bearers of legitimate complaints - your customers - "trolls" and "cranks" in a public forum. Jesus christ.

I never said they were? But considering the conduct here of those with a different point of view about Impulse than the "party line", I can't really classify them as either. Cranks make predictions while being ignorant, trolls try to stir up crap using as little effort as possible. I think it's much more a "troll"ish behavior to make a hit and run one-sentence post calling somebody a 'troll' because legitimate 'trolls' don't make coherent multi-paragraph arguments.

Look, the biggest PR position I've had is fill-in because I'm high-up on the totem pole on a TC mod. But even I know the response to this sort of thing isn't calling names as an executive of a software company. You say "thanks for your interest, we launched Impulse to bring you blah blah blah", you do the equivalent of sending the form letter. Even when NASA, public figures, JPL, people like Hawking get letters from legitimate "cranks", they don't reply with "you're a god damn crank". And sure, if Stardock wants to be refreshingly human about responding to customers on public forums and call it as it is, that's a fine stance, but I firmly believe that that entails putting more effort into relating to their issues and discussing them on a equal playing field, not pulling the 'well you just don't get it so you must just be a moron' card.

I realize I'm responding to an argument that's half a year old, but let me at least clarify my position. It's quite obvious that Stardock switched to Impulse and dropped offering patches more out of sake of profit and the platform being ready for public consumption than the various theories they're putting forward. That is fine. Impulse may be flawed in execution, but so is Steam. That's fine. What's not fine is putting up this smokescreen of "well we did it for user convenience" which magically happened to coincide with the thing going out of beta. Or saying it's somehow "less than" traditional DRM even though today, games unpatched typically are about as playable as games not installed. Or ridiculous strawmans like "So you think that the developer of a game should just put out the full game as a big .zip file and rely on the honor system? Perhaps you should start a company and try that.  Good luck with that." wbich disregard the fact that a close sister to the 'patch -> CD key' method, requiring a CD key to create an online account, has been widely implemented for years as the preferred method of excluding pirates from your network infrastructure if it costs to maintain and perhaps even making them pay for the full game to enjoy a robust MP experience.

As a result those left defending the company resort to ridiculous fallacies and personal attacks like "if you don't like Impulse you must be a pirate" (paraphrased but entirely truthful in representation, see page 8) and "if you don't like it code something yourself" (which is utterly ridiculous) and "if it's free you shouldn't complain" (I'd like to hire a dump truck to unload a cargo of cow poop on his house then tell him he can't complain since I went to all that trouble to give it to him free). If it wasn't enough to have the CEO of the software publisher abd moderators bitch-slap you, you have unchecked white-knights do it too. A formula for a pleasant experience and one that ultimately encourages you to buy Stardock software this is not and while I already feel burned by Ironclad on the mod support thing with Sins I feel a lot more burned here even though I don't even have any technical problems with Impulse anyway.

WooT!  This thread is awesome for Sunday am coffee (2 cups!).

Stardock/Impulse/Ironclad are great.

Dont feed the trolls!

What do you mean 'for each disk'?  You can install all three then do the update in one go.  Or do mean that it took over 4.5 hours and you divided the time the number of disks?  I know the reason SoZ takes so long to update, they somehow managed to make its install delete one of the key files for the MotB campaign(Something like 200 to300+mb in size).

Regardless, it does show how Impulse's method of downloading is much better.  I myself updated my NWN2 install from the SoZ base to the latest version and it took some time(atleast 1-2 hours passed before I stopped checking it and went to watch TV), having to get the missing file increased the time it took me to update by quite a bit I think.(I still can't figure out how they managed to make it delete the file by accident ....)  Plus Impulse has very good download speed.