Is this post serious?  Where do these people come from?

This game has never had the numbers MP wise as most games. 98% of people who have bought it play SP or LAN. Doesnt make the game bad.

+1, and what about the new battlefield plays more like CoD keep these games they way they are and those who like them will buy/play them. give IC some credit man

Official mods? You mean like Civ4 did? Well I guess a few mods might qualify...

Yeah I think the quality of the first post shows the quality of the game he wants Maybe he should learn to debug his typing. I don't ever have problems myself and this company has shown that they really care about the gamers. They care because it gives them money, and we give them money because they care.

They just need to keep that up and we'll all be happy with an expansion. Full agreement with everyone below the first post so far.

nabs420, what you are missing is the fact that a much higher percentage or people with Warcraft 3 play multiplayer, probably 50% or more I would say.

A meager ONE to TWO PERCENT of all Sins players venture online. 1-2%! That's 25 TIMES less than the people who player Warcraft 3 online.

And does the developer of Warcraft 3 offer the awesome support of Ironclad and Stardock? I doubt it.

Plus don't forget a large percentage if not the majority of Warcraft III players are not playing the game but a mod like DotA or team survival.  Some of them have never even played the regular game much less played the regular game online.

desyncing..... I think the game devs have a PAST fix for this....

SAVE GAME

RE-HOST PUG

Ring a bell members how have owned the game for five seconds before bashing it?

This isnt halo wars forum go troll somewhere else @nabs

Well, add 64 bit and quad-core processor support to the list as well, which would support you critieria even better.

There are a lot of cool features that could be added to a Sins 2 to enhance the game play and provide better multi-player support as well (won't list here, no point).

I also rarely have any issues running Sins except for the occasional slow downs due to the single threaded engine. Frankly, Dragon Age Origins crashes EVERY time I play it. Sins is way more stable IMO than that game. Granted it's not multiplayer and it only takes one person to affect a multiplayer game negatively.

I can concede the desync point.  If you remember far enough back, the devs couldn't patch the networking code in the original Sins, so they had to create an entirely new networking engine for the game.  Diplomacy is having desync issues that are being worked on, and this is really not something I run into on other RTSs.  And yes, you can save and resume, but is normally puts you a touch further back, forcing you to quickly remember what you were doing at the time.  If I'm going to praise the game's features, I also have to acknowledge its flaws.

Also, given the wonderful backhistory and learning curve, this game would have benefitted from a single-player campaign...at least a small one...to get new players up to speed.

But, to the OP, this game does not need to be dumbed down...

-Nem

Nabs is a playa, when he says he loves the game he means it.  Apart from Zombies I'm not familiar with the rest of you.  References to only having played for 5 minutes, or needing the game dumbed down are well out of order.  He's too much of a gent to call you either, I'm not.

I'd be happy to team with Nabs against any two of you.  Anytime, trash talkers.

Also, Nabs has a point, the game has suffered from some kind of mix-up where the crashes were reported by the players but not forwarded to the right people, and this has affected the new expansion.  The game doesn't seem to be getting much of a relaunch either- and the expansions were meant to be finished last year.

However I hope that he is wrong, and also that even if work is switched to a second version, then this version with its small but dedicated community can be used as an extended development process for the new one.  The second expansion is not only very non-commercial but the only aspect of it that is at all right is the unlocked limited alliance victory, the rest is underdeveloped.  You can win the relationship victory just with three level of tech research and some defending, the pirates are weird... The new patch has boosted one of the carrier caps too far, which may unfortunately be a critical error, and the developers seem to have lost control and direction.

Yet the developers have persisted with it so far, the last patch was well judged apart from the Skirantra, it took a while to fix major gameplay problems with Entrenchment too, but they were fixed.

One aspect of the damage that is self-inflicted is the decision to have split lobbies.  I asked for this, but only to have lobbies for original, Entrenchment and the expansion separately to replace the useless 'TEC Town' etc lobbies that are always empty, not as a completely separate lobby that it requires a restart to get to.  We could have one combined lobby, and three lobbies for the separate games.  That would seem the most natural way to have it to me...? 

 So.. You want to compete with a game genre that naturally has more players? You are gauging an RTS 4x's success based off of an MMORPG, a lousy one at that, that has its subscriptions because its ridiculously easy and can run on a friggen Athalon?

 My soul hurted there for a minute =/.

Warcraft III is not an MMORPG; it's an RTS.  You're thinking of World of Warcraft.

If Ironclad makes a Sins-2, will it even have an online multiplayer component?  I wonder.  (If not, I won't be buying it.)

The sad fact of the matter is that this game had low player counts from the get go.  The highest I've ever seen was perhaps 280 people on at once, back in April or May 2008.  For whatever reason it just sold to single-player only people and didn't sell to people who play games in online multiplayer.  The minidumps, the desyncs, and the early game hosting problems certainly hurt this game tremendously, but I don't think they're the real root cause of today's low player counts; rather it's the fact that only a tiny percentage of all Sins purchasers ever ventured online in the first place.

I think another part of the problem is Sins DRM.  It's not that the Sins DRM is preventing pirates from updating and playing online, rather it's that it acts as a barrier against legitimate purchasers playing online.  I suspect that the vast majority of Sins players don't know about Impulse or this discussion forum and are probably doing single player on v1.05, wondering why they receive an error message every time they click Ironclad Online.  Heck, most probably don't even know what the Ironclad Online button is supposed to do; when they click on it they probably conclude that it's a broken feature or a feature that was just never implemented.

I don't think that the Sins DRM is fundamentally bad or wrong; rather it's just the implementation.  You shouldn't have to install a special outside program in order to update the game or at the very least it should have been included with the base game and then self-installed with the game installation.  Ideally it would just be integrated with the game itself so that people could very easily update the game.  I would expect that that will be the case with future game releases; but I think it really took its toll on Sins.

It would be interesting to see what percentage of all copies sold ever registered the game with Impulse.

Hes missing the fact that those same players are WoW players playing the game to get more info on the dam mmo if u dont believe me ask some of those 17k players they will tell u the mmo is directly based off the warcraft games lol

So stop using a old game like warcraft as a excuse when most there players are addicted to a mmo called WoW yeh there gonna be poeple playing a rts thats linked to an mmo lol 

dam my buddies for letting me in on this evil info