Also, I think the game's soundtrack should be changed to all Journey songs. 

Why don't you make it not suck royally, and *THEN* see how many people are playing it.  You said yourself in another post, *DON'T PLAY MULTIPLAYER!!!  DON'T BUY MY GAME IF YOU EXPECT TO PLAY MULTIPLAYER!!!" and now you're saying you'll update it based upon the number of people playing it????  I'm not the only one that sees the ludicrocity in that decision, right??

I bought two copies before I caught your post about "Don't buy my game for MP!" crap.  Actually, I bought two copies, went "Jesus Christ...this can't be right" then went into the multiplayer forums and saw that it was "right."  I bought it so that me and my wife (and my stepson) can all play the game on our LAN, like we still play Heroes V, and either take turns kicking the AI in the teeth, or go head to head and battle it out.  Our biggest WTF? moment was the lack of tactical battles.  Our second big WTF? moment was how inaccurate Tac battle resolution seems to be, or how much the CPU underestimates the spell "Blizzard."

So here's an idea.  Put Tac battles back into MP before you do anything else.  Just flip whatever switch is in the code to make it Tac battle, or add the switch so anyone who can stand it can flip it on themselves, or flip it off, whatever.  I don't care what you think, or what you think you know, or how you feel about it, or how "slow" you're predicting it'll be, how much it'll suck.  It's not your problem.  It's our problem.  Just put it back in, don't think about it, don't question it, just give us the *option* to wait out the monotony, or combat it out.  It doesn't matter how unfun the game being "frozen" while it says "resolving Tac battle" is, getting bum-raped by the CPU's Tac battle resolution without any choice or option on our part is a lot less fun.  Regardless of the tedium, it will actually allow us to play what's left of this game in a multiplayer setting.  We're already playing the cloth map for performance issues, taking away Tac battles just makes this game like playing "fantasy chess" with a 4-year old.  Just put it in.  It's there, it's easy, it'll make MP actually *do* something beyond flip a coin, and atleast we'll understand why our sovereign died a horrible death.

Then give us some more maps.  Give us some more random maps.  Give us more than 2 variations of 1 choice.

Then fix the bug where it spawns our sovereign right next to a hostile bear that attacks us immediately so we see a book popup with the name we chose for our world, and then the "You lose!" screen.  It'll stop being funny by that point.  Well, actually, it'll still be hilarious to me.

*THEN*.   And only then, come back and see how many people are playing MP, and how we're playing MP, and what sorts of people will be playing MP, and what they want in MP, and start fielding some bugs/balance issues/fixes/tweaks/improvements on MP.  Right now it's the Lord of the Ring's edition of Pong.  We need a little more substance before we'll take MP seriously or we'll even know what we want.

Here's a hint though.  Elemental makes us want to play Heroes V.  Then we go through turns in Heroes V talking about how cool it'd be to make our own Heroes in Heroes V, and how I could deck out my wraiths with Cedar Longbows.

Here's another hint.  We don't even bother firing up Heroes V anymore if we're not playing Multiplayer.  In fact, the only reason (the *only* reason) we bought all the expansion packs was when we went back to buy a second copy as part of a bundle to go back and play MP again.  In fact, we currently own 3 copies (wife, stepson, myself).  Once one of us had the cool new Xpac goodness, we all had to have it.

Here's a final hint.  MP will help balance out SP, but not vice verse.  People will always do strange, unexpected crap the AI will never think of.  If you take an MP-centric stance towards balance, then the SP will fall predictably into place.  If you take a SP-centric stance towards balance, we'll just come up with the "one strategy to rule them all" and call anyone else who doesn't play like that a "noob" and the game will be a boring reiteration of the same strategy over and over again.  Make randomization of resources important enough to cause us to reactively alter our strategies, but not important enough that we just quit-out if we don't start with 1 food and 1 gold at positions 10 and 5.  Give us hope if we don't have it, but make us wish we had it, and care enough to go find it.

I will say, you, and you're entire staff, have made some remarkable improvements in a very short time, and you've all shown a real dedication into making this game into *something*.  I just hope you guys don't put in all that hard work and expect to ride out SP forever.

I strongly agree with this.  Make MP like SP, let people play it for a while, and *then* ask us what we want added/changed.

Best regards,
Steven.

They already said they were going to put TACTICAL battles into the MP version of the game, why are you till whining about this? It isn't going to be right now but sometime in the future, so stop complaining and be patient.

I missed have missed where they said that. Thanks for letting us know .

Cheers,

Raven

I don't really get it... if you look at what they have been doing for the last two patches, it seems pretty clear to me that they are putting in a real concerted effort in multiplayer for Elemental. Now you might not be happy with it, in it's current state, but saying that they aren't trying to improve it is just fallacy. What he's saying in the comment regarding allocating resources to MP is that they have limited resources, and have a LOT of things on their plate right now, so multiplayer won't be a top priority unless there are a lot of people interested.

Let's face it here, SD has NEVER been known for great multiplayer. Their successful games (GC2) never relied on it, and does well despite not having any support for it. In fact, you might even say that they earned a reputation for shying away from multiplayer. However, because people in GC2 were seriously asking for it (along with tactical battles), they ultimately decided to give it a try to see just how much multiplayer have an impact on the game. In some respects, Elemental is a trial run of several things people wanted from GC2, but they couldn't do with GC2, namely multiplayer and tactical combat. It's no surprise then, that neither of these points are up to standard, because they have very little experience in these fields. That doesn't mean that they aren't trying to fix/improve it. You just can't expect people to be perfect from the start.

The main problem right now is that Elemental is a somewhat flawed game, and they are putting in a lot of effort to fix it. But with limited resources, they are focusing on the game itself (magic system, tactical battles, etc), so there are very little resources left for multiplayer. Which is why Brad said what he did.

I'm holding off on Multiplayer until it's all full featured as the rest of the game (especially tactical battles).

So, that would be my vote for "What people want to see added".  I want the SP game, in MP.  Until then, I'm not interested.

That's already the case, Champions are jokes late game.

She's obviously not paid enough for that impossible task.     

J/k.  Still I think it'd be really hard.

I thought MS Word isn't capable of long texts