It’ll take a while to sift through my records - I’ve got well over a thousand emails covering Infinity, most of which were several years ago, and that’s not covering other forms of communication. I’ll see if I can determine who is in charge of Infinity at the moment as well.
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I keep trying to find a post where someone from Modiphius in any way acknowledges that they’re still, right now, today, taking money from people for a game they know to be published with broken info and that, in something like two years, they’ve seemingly made no attempt to remedy it, outside of posting on a social media site nobody ever used and which has been deleted.
Wtf? You can’t be arsed to pull up your notes for your customers?
Nathan already said it will take time to check the several years old notes. Getting agitated about errors in rules books is understandable, but insults are not very motivating to speed up the process.
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I take your point, but I don’t feel as if I insulted anyone. If anything, we are the ones who are being insulted here. To wit:
An insult is something that sullies someone’s reputation through scurrilous assertions. The reality is that I’ve stated simple observations of things that are published on this forums, for all the world to see. (They just happen to be observations which sum up to a not-so-flattering picture of customer service and integrity at Modiphius. Again, they are still charging full price for this product, and while “checking thousands of emails” is a real pain in the neck, I’m pretty sure I paid someone to do that work when I bought the product, so cry me a river.)
This thread is two years old. I feel confident that a) emails could have been read by now and b) this could have been anticipated and planned for–perhaps, for example, by not simply relying on Outlook as your bug-tracking software. That’s a foreseeable problem, left unsolved by bad decision-making.
I am not sympathetic.
My conflict is pretty simple: I love just about everything Modiphius publishes and I want to spread their games to all my tables, but I cannot recommend to my players that they invest their own hard-earned money into a broken game whose developers don’t seem to care much about doing right by their customers. Again, this isn’t some small rule errata that you can write a sticky about; this is all the stat blocs for all the careers being ■■■■■■. I didn’t even realize I was doing so, since there’s no official mention of this huge known issue; instead, I was embarrassingly alerted to this fact by my players who were getting excited to learn the system … it totally crushed the enthusiasm at my table; frankly, I felt that I had let my friends down by recommending everyone go out and buy the damn PDF.
Certainly that isn’t how Modiphius would want its customers to feel about purchasing their products. Yet, that’s what this amounts to.
That’s not cool. That’s not a smart way to reward the people who buy your games, especially when you’re a niche publisher.
The fact that more people aren’t loudly complaining about this on these very sparse forums, I fear, only makes that last point more dire. It speaks to the fact that we are a relatively small audience. We all know what the “big” game publisher forums look like, especially when they ■■■■ up and publish broken material; that Modiphius is spared the flames by and large indicates to me that they have a small and dedicated customer-base. That’s a great asset and good news, on the one hand, because I want Modiphius to succeed long-term, but if you don’t tend after that flock they will wander off eventually. And even if they don’t, if you’re not doing everything you can to get those adherents to evangelize for you in the marketplace, you’ve got a short runway. You’ll run out of money sooner than later. Small dedicated audiences have to be empowered to evangelize and spread the word in order to scale one’s market share–it sucks that I can’t stand 100% behind the Infinity system, and, more importantly, behind the publishers. What proof do I have that they GAF about this? None. There isn’t an apology or acknowledgement outside of being called out on the forums for months, then finally saying “one day I’ll get around to organizing my emails about it,” nearly two years ago. Give me a break. FFS, just publish a Word Doc with the errata … it’s called a Good Faith Effort. Give us one.
That none has even been attempted, to the best of my (or my players’) knowledge, is the only insult here.
Here’s the thing: I posted saying that I’ll look into it, but that isn’t really my job. I haven’t worked directly on Infinity in years (and even when I did, none of my work covered character creation, so I don’t personally have any drafts or notes regarding character creation, meaning I have to find out who does have those things), and my working week is filled up with development for other games, so getting back up to speed on Infinity to check up a problem that should’ve been solved by someone else ages ago (and which, until the start of this month, I was under the mistaken impression had been solved already) is simply one item on a very long to-do list, a list further complicated by recently having to send my laptop (the device upon which I do all my work) in for repair and finding that it can’t be fixed, and by also having to search for a new home in the midst of a pandemic. Oh, and the pandemic too, because that’s causing all kinds of disruptions.
Yeah, I understand you’re frustrated and annoyed by this. I would be too… but there’s only so much that I personally can do about it.
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Better it takes time and get done right than done fast end gets messed up again. Thank you for taking time to look into this when you can.
Thank you for your response, sincerely. I can certainly understand not having the time to handle a problem that isn’t your job; as you say, because you replied earlier saying you’d look into it, I reckon you became the inadvertent face of the company on this particular issue and I appreciate that you can understand why that might be the case, despite not having the bandwidth to fix the issue yourself. I could be mistaken, but if memory serves, this thread, which has existed for years now, has only been addressed by you…a person whose job this is not. With that context, your earlier reply tacitly offering assistance is admirable, but having to rely on that type of thing is not only unfair to us as customers, it is patently unfair to you, as well.
With all that being said, can you suggest to this community (or at least to me, if nobody else has this concern) a more effective way to seek a remedy or otherwise express my dissatisfaction with the powers that be at Modiphius? It doesn’t seem likely to do much good, but I was raised to advocate for myself and speak truth to power, so … you know.
Thanks in advance, and thanks again for giving me your perspective.
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I agree with Maxspire, I feel like the infinity line up is not properly managed. Sure @Modiphius-Nathan, it’s not your job and trying to actually do something is cool, but the real question is who’s in charge of the infinity products, because he should be the one checking the forums from time to time and actually respond to customer’s issue. I love the work done on infinity, I believe it’s the best 2d20 iteration, and petty much the best realistic scy fy rpg out there both from a game design standpoint and a setting standpoint.
However the line up is years behind it’s schedule and the Core Book still present major errors.
There should be a product line manager or a community manager responding to the community, but I’m starting to wonder if there is even a manager on the project.
If lines of communications aren’t open with the community I’m gonna start to make some ruckus, ranging from sending mails to modiphius support to contact corvus belli and complain about how the licensed products are handled.
And I’m not even talking about the usual bad reviews online.
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That is my impression of the Infinity RPG, too. It is a real treasure, so it should get a bit more attention and care by Modiphius, I suggest.
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I think a lot of Modiphius IP’s needs more TLC overall, not just the big ones like Star Trek.
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I don’t particularly care that there have been delays or whatever we call 24 books not being delivered in one wave 4 years ago. I didn’t back the Kickstarter but I would have if I had known about it. But I have played independent RPGs that took 7 years to produce that large of a reference library, so I understand it taking a long time to fix errors if they get fixed at all.
There are something like 6 unpublished books in the Infinity line, and rather than ask when those are coming out, I’m wondering if a revised edition of the core book is coming, like for Star Trek, once those books are released. If that’s where the corrections with be and if the combat dice will be brought in line with later editions in that hypothetical book.
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I hope it don’t the others games using the combat dice with effects on 5 and 6 tend to go toward powercreep.
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Lot of groveling going on in here. Two PbPs in and me nor my players have never noticed that this one small little error in the career stat blocks to have affected… anything. So there’s a lot of smoke in here but I don’t see no fire that needs immediate attention.
Secondly, if anyone has any issue with how slow and behind schedule the Infinity line is… you can go and yell at Corvus Belli for that. There must read and clear EVERYTHING (if it doesn’t it gets to be rewritten and cleared again) for the game line. The Spaniards aren’t exactly fast in this department and also CB cares more about its own product lines first. So every time there’s a new book or update (since the RPG was kickstarted CB has released: N3 Human Sphere, Uprising, 3rd Offensive, and a whole new edition) and guess what suffers? The RPG. The fact they’re still rolling out books (we have 10 sourcebooks already) shows they’re looking to complete it no matter how slow CB wants to be.
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Immediate attention? The probleme was reported 2.5 years ago mate. And about the delay, while it’s not a major issue for me, you can’t blame corvus belli for taking care of their ip, and it’s up to a project manager to anticipate bottlenecks.
I would say the real problem is that in order to get any kind of attention,let alone answer,you have to cry, scream or beg everytime. To get some answer to a problem a few month ago I literally had to hijack a thread on another section. And it’s not like I enjoy this kind of thing.
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The combat dice difference is the main point of confusion my players have between Mutant Chronicles & Infinity and Conan & Star Trek. More than imposing the “5” result to be an effect, I’d just like to know if that’s going to change. Knowing makes it easier to sort the confusion.
I neither expect it to change, nor do I disagree that post-Infinity PCs tend to be a little more badass. Personally, I kind of wish half the dice were blank in every 2d20 game but that is not going to happen.
I know it was 2.5 years ago. Then some came along and billowed out a smoke stack for something so incredibly small that it was forgotten about 2.5 years ago. The problem is small and really inconsequential to the game as a whole where a fix isn’t needed. If you yell enough like a child though I guess one can get it fixed. That or be ignored and forgotten to time.
I don’t blame CB for taking care of their IP. I call them out for being slow when it comes to the RPG and they’ve been slow with it when they’re not working on their own products. Mod isn’t going to treat CB like some freelancer writer. What they should expect is a decent turn around time which they rarely get it seems.
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That, I see decidedly different. It is quite a significant problem that needs to be fixed.
And there were fixes. Between different versions of the PDF of the core rules you find some, though not all, of the Carrer Attribute bonus values changed. Apparently, some fixes were applied, but not to all Careers and it is still unclear, whether any fixes had been applied to the sourcebooks, especially the earlier ones.
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Maybe one solution could be, that we post in a separate thread suggestions how those affected Carreer Attribute bonus values should look like. This would be a fan-made fix - and it could include the sourcebooks.
And maybe, one of the Modiphius developers takes a look at those suggestions and simple gives them an OK or Not OK, to minimize the effort they need to put into it.
And even more “maybe”, there could be a corrected PDF of the core rules and - if any - of the sourcebooks put up for download by Modiphius after some time.
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OK just because we don’t agree doesn’t give you the right to speak to me this way. I ask you to speak to me with respect or we gonna have a problem.
I’m not acting like a child, I’m acting like an angry customer who kept his cool for years.
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Easily offendable I see. Grow some thick skin or bounce off to a safe internet haven where your feelings can’t be hurt.
Respect is earned not given. I don’t see anywhere here where you’ve earned it.