Disagreeing = Opression

Buffs and gems are separate in Godus, as explained in my prervious post. To buff something does neither requires nor uses gems, however you can accelerate the rate at which something completes (building/farming/mining) by spending gems.

We will be sharing details on how you can accelerate the rate of production on PC - which, for the record, will not require any micro-transactions (i.e. in-game purchases for real-world money) - later this week, most likely on Friday.

EDIT: I'm debating this with you only because you implied that I was erroneous in my use of the term buff in a previous post on this forum, and I'm merely defending my position as being the more accurate.

I'm working on the understanding the we will fulfil all of our original Kickstarter pledges in the fullness of time. I'm very much looking forward to seeing what we achieve in the PC-focused sprint. I honestly believe Peter when he says that he still wants Godus to be a great game on PC for PC gamers. I mean, the guy has made some terrific PC games before whose mechanics still hold up today, so from where I'm sitting making Godus a great PC game for PC gamers is far from impossible given his track record as a designer.

This is what I smelled and henceforth took issue with. The term buffs in other senses might be fine, but this is pure and simple the same as SO F2p buffs. 

I don't trust the interwebz to be 100% accurate in regards to historical facts, especially when it comes to terminology or slang, unless you're reading a certified publication or knowledge archive database - and even then.

Now... the term 'buff' to me does not make me think of f2p games at all. Of course, I don't really play any f2p mobile type games, so I wasn't even aware thia term would even be used or apply in f2p. Instead, when I hear 'buff' I think of RPGs, FPS, and RTS games among others. Although I didn't use or encounter the term much back then, it has been in my vocabulary since at least the 90's - and i don't mean the term 'to buff' meaning to polish or fluff something. We used it losely, and rarely, in tabletop pen & paper rpg games (we used the term 'buffer') to represent any kind of enhancement or protective effect (usually spells) genarally in regards to affecting damage. When I started playing MMOs in the late 90's early 2000's it was slowly becoming a common term. I know terms evolve over time, but to get upset claiming that the presence of 'buffs' - even used loosely - in Godus as evidence it's a F2P game is just ridiculous.

'The ends justify the means', in other words.

To me, see, pitching a cross-platform persistent game, and selling a product to people, relying on them for crowdfunding, even, then doing a complete 180 and producing a FTP game as the mobile part when in fact during the crowdfunding campaign the notion of FTP was explicitly denied, is extremely duplicitous and one can easily argue fraudulent.  Even were the game amazing, the above would still leave a sour taste in my mouth.  I know none of the above has much of anything to do with you, but you do work there so just wondering your perspective, so thanks for sharing that, at least.

The aggressiveness and necessity of our monetisation mechanics are greatly reduced in comparison with other F2P games. A lot of games force you to spend money to progress within the first 10 minutes, in Godus that's simply not the case. Additionally, in Godus we always provide the player with something to do - everything from Voyages to manually speeding up building progression by boosting the Inspiration levels of individual workers.

In terms of how we balance the game and our design philosophy, our goal is to be much less exploitative in our monetisation techniques than other F2P games and we don't want you to feel that monetisation is invasive to your gameplay experience.

Your not being a dick, but it is nit picking a bit. I heard the term "buff" and I knew that you already had a gem shop and so I assumed that you be using your buffs as a way to make money from your gem shop. I did this because several of the F2p, I played did this. Now, semantics aside from what you just said I was right and although the term "buff" was not created by F2p, when you add it to the mix with gems, it becomes exactly what I was afraid of.

For the record, because of my experience with F2p and buffs and gems, I now cringe at the sound of both terms even if I were to hear them with any other non F2p like Wow or Sims. If you use your gems to buy into or out of buffs, then it sucks big fat donkey cajones.

Having worked both for and at publishers, I still hold on to the fact that free of publishing constraints (even DeNA feels like more of a distribution + marketing deal given how little impact they have - no exec producers or exec designers involved), Peter will be able to achieve his vision in a more complete and fulfilling way than at any other time since the Bullfrog buy-out.

Peter doesn't want to make a bad game - really, none of us do - and we all want the PC version to be a truly great game. The proof of that, for me, will be in what we achieve with the PC-focused sprint later this year.

This isn't entirely true from what I've seen and is mostly representative of a misguided design mindset. If you try to suggest your game is better simply because it makes it take longer to reach the Cash Prompt, you're screwing up the entire design making things sluggish and unpleasant (which has been seen with the current construction timers). Following that, you're not doing a very good job right now at avoiding Cash Prompt Intrusion since any time you get close to low belief, you're nagging at the player to visit the Gem Store with Belief Packs and any time you visit the Timeline, you're being nagged at with Sticker Packs to, again, visit the Gem Store.

I like the idea, to a degree, but everything about how you're approaching it right now outright sucks. If you don't want it to be invasive, your best approach was in the old 1.03 version where it was left relatively subtle, gem costs mentioned on the edges of cards (not jumping out at you every so often) and interwoven with the building descriptions to accelerate the belief generation. That's the better way to handle it and be subtle, then you just need to reimplement gem veins (alongside retaining the hidden temples) but automatically add the mined out gems to your stockpile and recalibrate the timers to not be seem nigh impossible to get through without spending money to speed them up.

That's the fairest way you could approach this and has been seen loosely done in some other games (e.g. GW2 gold-gem exchange, EVE ISK-PLEX exchange, WildStar gold-CREDD exchange). Honestly it'd even be relatively innovative since instead of creating competing/dual currencies, you're unifying them, but that brings a host of its own problems since it encourages you guys to make it take longer to mine gems or receive fewer from temples as it removes an incentive to buy them. However, if I was creating a F2P game, my first goal would be to make it good, my last goal would be to try to balance the whole around monetization, but then, that's why I never want to find myself making F2P titles because that's a near certain way to bankrupt myself.

...Which is also why I think the whole F2P model is the worst possible design model for a game because it's very good at putting money at the forefront of your thoughts rather than quality game design.