NationStates 2

taken from a post by Reploid Productions, Mon Feb 03, 2014 2:07 pm:

The short version: Jolt/OMAC sucks syphilis penis. (And no, I don't know why I latched on to that particular phrasing for voicing my disdain for said companies. I blame a textbook from a 'psychology of human sexuality' class at the time that if randomly opened almost always randomly opened to the section with photos of various STDs, specifically the penis belonging to someone with an advanced case of syphilis.)

The longer version: Jolt (later bought by OMAC) was signed on to develop NationStates 2. They were dragging their feet on it, and OMAC took over the project when they acquired Jolt. Unfortunately, the game that they delivered was plagued with issues, including but not limited to:

• They took the game to closed and later open beta despite the alpha testers saying it was far from ready for that, and without Max's consent. (It wasn't supposed to go live until he signed off on it.)
• It hardly had anything from the original NS2 design documents. What little it did have from those was butchered almost beyond recognition and just flat out poorly implemented.
• Good luck trying to micromanage your nation's stats when your issues are still totally randomized. The world was liable to mass starvation because you never got the damned food issues.
• The trade/war tools once implemented were basically non-functional. The only way to get ahead with them was not to use either.
• The game was divided into "Worlds" of a few hundred nations, so good luck playing with your friends. You were also dropped onto a random continent with people instead of into regions, and you could not change continents. (Supposedly changed later, but I'd quit by then.)
• Needless to say, without regions, the notion of the entire R/D gameplay aspect of NS was non-existent.
• Regions replaced with 'alliances', which had poorly-documented and largely nonsensical tools.
• $5 a month to have a custom flag. Plus lots of worthless little things to try and sucker people into spending IRL cash. Such as "spies", whatever the fuck they were supposed to actually do.
• Similarly, they kept trying to pressure Max and [violet] to try and encourage more people to leave NS1 in favor of NS2 because monies.
• Very counter-intuitive interface that rendered mass TG and effective dossier management more trouble than they were worth.
• Virtually no response from the devs to feedback and bug reports.
• [There was an error processing this design element]
• And the one that still really fries my ass years later: They never paid Max what he was owed. In outright violation of the contract. Or Sirocco for the issues he wrote for them.
• And the other one that still really fries my ass years later: They never did fix that bug that kept a bunch of players from being able to use the old forum back on Jolt, and they had a bad habit (especially toward the end) of trying to step on NS moderation's toes. At least one of our users who was particularly outspoken about how shitty NS2 was they actually forumbanned entirely, which also cut him off from the NS forums. Those sorts of shenanigans helped drive the decision to go back to hosting our own, and thus we got this forum up and running in 2009.

</rant>
And no, I will never tire of that particular rant whenever the topic of Jolt and NS2 crops up.