I hope the game is better than my terrible first impression of Stardock Central

from Sins Forums

Been desperate to try this great looking game here in the UK so decided to go for the download ahead of the UK release. Thought it would be easy, anything but! To start with, when I start SDC, it asks for a user name and password, despite that being implied as optional when I purchased. Dutifully I type them in, but I repeatedly get "Your nickname is in use", with nowhere to type a nickname. So I bypass the login screen, and follow the instructions from my purchase to register my game. The SDC GUI isn't very much like the instructions suggest and I have to guess how to proceed. Multiple attempts at registering seem to fail silently, and finally I realise that login really is required-- so I locate the screen with the nickname, and type the same password I used when I purchased, but it turns out that I need to use an activation URL from an email I've been sent -- nowhere in SDC does it suggest that I will already have received this email and I should check for it. Did the people who developed this thing not realise that people buy and play games for fun? -- the reason I bought the game is cos I'm tired of the real world and want a break from hassle, not more form filling bureaucracy.

I remain optimistic about Sins itself... I'm a big fan of turn based strategy and enjoy RTS games too like C&C (in moderation), total anihilation (not in moderation), etc.

T

4,643 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Sins Forums Top
Yeah...

What can I say, every now and then someone spaces out and doesn't immediately grasp how to use the system. I found it very easy, and future purchases through Stardock are even easier. If you tried setting yourself up on steam, you'd find a much larger hassle from them. It's one of the simplest and most user friendly digital distribution systems for games.
Reply #2 from Sins Forums Top
I never had any trouble. But SDC is a bit unintuitive, finding where to register you're game is in a bizarre place. Haven't they released Impulse yet though? Which reminds me I should upgrade one day.
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Reply #3 from Sins Forums Top
Impulse is in public beta and is so much easier to understand and use.
Reply #4 from Sins Forums Top
I know Zubaz posted but I can't see it yet, however:

Impulse is in Open Beta phase right now, and it's a tremendous upgrade over SDC. SDC is a very old system, and it's being phased out.

Check out Impulse at its site.

You can download the beta client and play around with it. It is much better.
Reply #5 from Sins Forums Top
For lack of the edit button, here's the working URL, the plain .com doesn't route to the correct page, apparently :P

WWW Link
Reply #6 from Sins Forums Top
Reply to Tone 22

The same exact frustrating sequence of events happened to me when I purchased Gal Civ II Gold.

From the `nickname in use' issue, I just forged ahead, trying every screen and log in approach I could. After about 15 minutes an email showed up. When you buy the game, it doesn't tell you an email will arrive sometime later. It just points to the url and says `download this and then type in serial#'. Well, obviously, following that instruction will never get your game downloaded.

I was seriously worried at one point that I wasn't going to be able to download the actual game!

Thankfully, 2 things occured to make it all good.

1) Once I activated the link from the email, the download proceeded at close to 1 meg bandwidth, which is about twice the speed of most downloads that I receive. So that made me think that they actually had a class act going.

2) The game, Gal Civ II Gold is awesome, the nicest graphics/interface and most fun turn based game I have played in a long time.

Now, I just found out about `Sins of a Solar Empire', so that is next on my list!