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Jonny Shiloh posted:I'm struggling to understand why Mariina's going so hard on this "blame the customer" strategy (there's honestly very little "toxicity" on the PDX forums, the mods are extremely thin-skinned and any sarcasm or criticism tends to get modded out pretty quickly), maybe she's just super-confident they'll regain their numbers once the asset editor etc. and then the console version arrives. I mean, it's a bold move after this poo poo show, she'll have earned her bonus if it pays off I guess. There's definitely a lot less toxicity on the forums than there used to be. There's also a lot less posts. The devs don't post directly, the community manager just acknowledges that some bugs exist, and there's word of the weeks starting up again where they say nothing. If there wasn't toxic posters there, there wouldn't be much of a community left either. I was a lot more sympathetic to them on release, and a lot more against angry toxic posters. At this point I have no room left to care either way, just shut up and fix your game already, the angry posters are at least more interesting to read. Anyway here's my chance to bring up my real toxic-self and say the hot take I've been saving since before C:S2 was even announced: I think CO are mediocre developers in way over their head, who released a mediocre game in C:S1 that was only good as a renderer for 3d cities when coupled with tons of mods and assets or just very careful building without them. They've kept making the same core game from Cities in Motion through to C:S2 and I don't know if they're capable of learning how to make an actual fun game. At the very least I wish they weren't allergic to just saying "we hosed up and this game wasn't ready for release, here's our vision", but frankly I don't know if there's even a vision for this game.
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Jan 15, 2024 22:18
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To be honest I've moved out to about 93% of the way to writing Paradox off as just another company that went public and went to poo poo, and in this particular case are traveling down the road of doing to CO what EA did to Maxis. e: though I hasten to agree with the post above that CO are not and have never been anywhere near Maxis' league as a city sim developer
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Jan 15, 2024 22:29
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piratepilates posted:There's definitely a lot less toxicity on the forums than there used to be. It's a common thing these days - people who are angry can be labelled "toxic" whether their anger is justified or not, and once that poo poo is flung, it sticks. This leads to the situation where, in this instance, people complaining about paying £80 for a game that was released in an "Early Access" state after a "stellar marketing" campaign can be categorised as "toxic" and ignored. As I say, Mariina's apparently sticking to her guns and making GBS threads on the community, I guess in the hope that the white knights will ride to the rescue, thank her and the team for their transparency and wish them well in their ongoing efforts to salvage something out of this game while they stick a big Finnish dildo up their arses and charge £80 them for the privilege. Sorry, my real toxic-self slipped out there 
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Jan 15, 2024 22:30
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game developers/publishers should not have forums. no good comes of it.
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Jan 15, 2024 22:56
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Cygni posted:game developers/publishers should not have forums. no good comes of it. pdx forums have been good for us because it scared johan over here so we could yell at him instead
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Jan 15, 2024 23:55
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Man it’s nuts that they’re going to try to push “actually the community is bad.” How do game company communicators of arguably objectively, currently poo poo products not look at what Hello Games did with No Man’s Sky and go “if we want this to eventually succeed, we should shut up and fix it.” What’s the end game of talking about toxicity? I’m sure there’s plenty of ragers who suck saying poo poo they shouldn’t, but “don’t do that” isn’t going to change anything for them or for the devs. Feels like such a weird tack to settle on.
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Jan 16, 2024 08:59
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If there was some specific incident to address then yeah maybe it deserved mention, but as it stands this is a really dumb thing to talk about in a communication like this. If there's a problem in the community then sure maybe you need to change something, but you probably shouldn't actually mention it at all as a company. Just tell the forum mods to crack down, or pull back without actually saying so, whatever. But as it stands it just seems like they're upset that people are upset and mentioning it. All this will do is embolden any actual trolls and annoy anyone else who is upset about the state of the game or the rate of progress because it'll feel like we're being admonished for having expectations on a product we spent a bunch of money on. Tbh I don't think it's on the same scale as NMS, more like an obvious beta that should have had EA, but it's still a wise place to look if you hosed up like this. There's not a lot they can do to speed things up, I'm sure, and I appreciate the regular communications personally even when they don't have a lot to say. But they should probably explicitly apologize for the state the game launched in (regardless of how much the fault is their's) and idk if not offer refunds maybe comp a free DLC to preorders and purchases before a certain date? An awful lot of people are comfortable enough because we feel like we did have a decent bit of fun for a couple dozen hours and can wait for things to be shored up, but... it kind of feels like CO knows this and is complacently relying on it? Like "oh yeah launch went real bad, but it'll be okay once it's patched and mods are out" is kinda the attitude? It may be true but it makes the customer feel like a sucker.
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Jan 16, 2024 10:18
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Cygni posted:game developers/publishers should not have forums. no good comes of it. Game companies could also stop releasing unfinished garbage
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Jan 16, 2024 10:28
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Kinda tone deaf to release an obviously unfinished product then have a passive aggressive moan about your customers' feedback. I guess CO were more used to the lower pressure that came from the unexpected success of CS1 after the failure that was SimCity 2013.
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Jan 16, 2024 14:10
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Truly do not give a poo poo about whatever flak the devs are taking for this game that I have not bought because by all accounts it is not good. Only want to hear about their plans to fix it. Interesting strategy to focus on the former and not the latter. 
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Jan 16, 2024 14:55
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AttitudeAdjuster posted:Kinda tone deaf to release an obviously unfinished product then have a passive aggressive moan about your customers' feedback. I guess CO were more used to the lower pressure that came from the unexpected success of CS1 after the failure that was SimCity 2013. Yeah it's not going well over there at the moment... in a way, I've got to say Mariina's unfiltered shoot-from-the-hip style is quite refreshing, particularly from the CEO of a games company with so much credit in the bank but boy oh boy is she using that credit up fast. I'm honestly not sure where she goes from here - she's more than once turned on the community before showing contrition (albeit for the way she worded it rather than the sentiment behind it) but she's now seemingly decided it's the right call to go back to slagging off the people who bought her product and are expressing their dissatisfaction with it, and the lack of concrete information about when it will be sorted out. What's that noise I hear - oh yes, the sound of a thousand PR professionals crying out in pain.
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Jan 16, 2024 15:20
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I think she’s a big detriment to the company and will probably end up having to step down if she continues this PR “strategy “
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Jan 16, 2024 16:16
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Dpulex posted:Game companies could also stop releasing unfinished garbage People could stop making it profitable for them to do so by not preordering
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Jan 16, 2024 16:21
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Cities Skylines 2: be mad, we already got your money
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Jan 16, 2024 19:37
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Is there really no tentative release date/quarter for mod support yet lol
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Jan 16, 2024 19:54
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buglord posted:Is there really no tentative release date/quarter for mod support yet lol Hey now, it's "in a few weeks", we hope, still tenative. edit: For a fun exercise, go on the Paradox Plaza forums and click the "Show only dev responses" button. In the main "Cities: Skylines 2" forum? Only 6 threads show up, one is the sticky for the wiki. The other 5? Only 2 of them have had a reply this year. Bug Reports has more, although I think all of those are just the community manager saying "we'll look in to this!". Suggestions? No threads, none. Analyze and Speculate? None again. Everything in the official forums about this game has come entirely through the dev diaries, and the word of the week's by the CEO. It's really frustrating to see complaints from the CEO about toxic comments when the developers themselves silo'd themselves off from the community. piratepilates fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Jan 16, 2024 |
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Jan 16, 2024 19:56
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Sounds pretty terminal tbf. If 3 guys with hacked access to the game have been able to release multiple hotfixes as unofficial mods but the net result of the entire developer team for a month is a CEO complaining about the angry customers is pretty funny though. Skylines 1 existed for so long beacuse of its fanbase growing and purchasing DLCs over the years. Also I totally forgot some people have already paid for DLC as part of the bundles they bought. That DLC should already have been released.
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Jan 16, 2024 21:16
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It's been delayed so they can focus on getting mod support done, so other people can fix their game for free like they did last time
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Jan 16, 2024 21:18
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Haven't the past 3-4 weeks been basically dead because end-of-year vacations they can't not give.
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Jan 16, 2024 21:37
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Kyte posted:Haven't the past 3-4 weeks been basically dead because end-of-year vacations they can't not give. Yes, they're Finnish so they get vacations. They have to be at work to make patches, hence the lack of them for a few weeks.
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Jan 16, 2024 21:40
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Has PDX always been Finns? Could have sworn they were in Stockholm for some reason. vvvvv: many thanks 
buglord fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Jan 16, 2024 |
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Jan 16, 2024 21:41
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buglord posted:Has PDX always been Finns? Could have sworn they were in Stockholm for some reason. Paradox is a Swedish company. Colossal Order, the developers of Cities: Skylines, are a Finnish company.
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Jan 16, 2024 21:42
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buglord posted:Has PDX always been Finns? Could have sworn they were in Stockholm for some reason. Paradox dev studios, and the original Paradox company, has always been Sweden. C:S2 is developed by Colossal Order, who has always been Finnish, residing in Tampere. Kyte posted:Haven't the past 3-4 weeks been basically dead because end-of-year vacations they can't not give. Sort of. The community manager posted on the forums at some point clarifying that they (CO in general) only actually had like 2 weeks worth of vacation for holiday. Everyone assumed it was like a full month off, probably because that was the gap between patch and next word of the week. On the one hand, nothing really gets done around Christmas in general at companies, so its not unexpected. On the other hand, they've also had a few weeks back at work and the only update they've been able to give, and only vision they've given for the year, is "mods are coming at some point".
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Jan 16, 2024 21:46
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I'm glad they have good vacations and I don't for a second mind or resent the impact that has on any schedules, but it's not like it's an unpredictable disruption they couldn't have planned for. They needed to come back with news and like a roadmap or something.
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Jan 16, 2024 22:35
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Watch the next announcement be the console release date and how they're focusing all resources on it
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Jan 16, 2024 22:50
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Away all Goats posted:Watch the next announcement be the console release date and how they're focusing all resources on it LOL, cue PC gamers going ballistic, although honestly I'm not convinced CO are going to be able to pull off a console release at all given the huge problems with the PC version of the game.
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Jan 17, 2024 00:00
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I don't get this style of development at all. Put a few people on bug fix duty, lowest hanging fruit first, focus on bugs that don't involve the asset pipeline. Release a new build every few days to show that things are moving. It's TYOOL 2024, build automation is an old hat. If your product is perceived to be broken, show that you are fixing it and people are generally much less hostile.
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Jan 17, 2024 00:00
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Yeah IDK what kind of kilju they're drinking, but they released an early access beta as a full game with a full game price and after almost 5 months it's still not 1.0 ready. Of course people are mad at you. I think most people would be happy with just a changelog or a roadmap, but half this post is them being defensive. Anime Store Adventure posted:Man it’s nuts that they’re going to try to push “actually the community is bad.” How do game company communicators of arguably objectively, currently poo poo products not look at what Hello Games did with No Man’s Sky and go “if we want this to eventually succeed, we should shut up and fix it.” Even Creative Assembly issued an apology and discounted Pharoah with everyone getting the difference between launch and new price. Jonny Shiloh posted:LOL, cue PC gamers going ballistic, although honestly I'm not convinced CO are going to be able to pull off a console release at all given the huge problems with the PC version of the game. Yup, and they have to go through certification processes and not just poo poo out whatever. Didn't Cyberpunk cause CDPR to have to issue refunds or something?
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Jan 17, 2024 00:18
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Antigravitas posted:I don't get this style of development at all. Put a few people on bug fix duty, lowest hanging fruit first, focus on bugs that don't involve the asset pipeline. Release a new build every few days to show that things are moving. It's TYOOL 2024, build automation is an old hat. It cannot possibly be that hard to throw in a few QOL things that modders have already figured out, too. I know something that gets pushed to release has to be of a higher standard than something a modder does but come on, they had like no dev tools or anything and figured out stuff like a line tool, surely to God CO could have put together something up to official levels in the nearly three months since release? Like I'm not a game dev and I might be totally wrong, but if I am, they need to be communicating why on stuff like this because an awful lot of us are now making similar points, and if it's unfair to the devs they need to explain the reasons they can't do with all their tools what modders could with none.
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Jan 17, 2024 00:43
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imo the backlog's probably on QA rather than dev
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Jan 17, 2024 00:48
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Ms Adequate posted:It cannot possibly be that hard to throw in a few QOL things that modders have already figured out, too. I know something that gets pushed to release has to be of a higher standard than something a modder does but come on, they had like no dev tools or anything and figured out stuff like a line tool, surely to God CO could have put together something up to official levels in the nearly three months since release? Like I'm not a game dev and I might be totally wrong, but if I am, they need to be communicating why on stuff like this because an awful lot of us are now making similar points, and if it's unfair to the devs they need to explain the reasons they can't do with all their tools what modders could with none. There was a mod for C:S1 that just chose random colours for your public transit lines. That didn't make it in to C:S2. There's so many random UI things that a sane development company would put in to the game, and CO doesn't for whatever reason. Why do I have to turn to a third party mod (that was made in like a day without any official mod tools) to have keyboard shortcuts for building roads? The only thing to do in this game is to build roads, why is that still a frustrating experience after 10 years of making citybuilders? Why is there a way to build specialized industry areas with custom sized polygons, and they didn't just build on top of that to make custom park zones? That thing they had in a DLC for the first game like 6 years ago. It's all a mystery, I don't get it. Every time I play this game it just raises more questions about weird design decisions and lack of polish and wondering what they're doing over there. There were a whole bunch of C:S1 mods that never made it in to the first game officially, even though all they did was fix bugs and improve performance and mod compatibility. Kyte posted:imo the backlog's probably on QA rather than dev Oh by the way they don't have in-house QA: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...7/post-29354555 I have no idea what kind of QA they have (if any), but whatever it is, they haven't done a good job so far! piratepilates fucked around with this message at 00:52 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 00:48
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Kyte posted:imo the backlog's probably on QA rather than dev We're the QA lol piratepilates posted:There was a mod for C:S1 that just chose random colours for your public transit lines. That didn't make it in to C:S2. Their entire oeuvre is transit games specifically, setting up transit lines used to be the entire game in the ones they made before CS.
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Jan 17, 2024 00:55
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skooma512 posted:We're the QA lol And it's crazy since they somehow made that more of a pain in the rear end in this one. Want to build a tram line? Gotta reconvert all those roads, build bus stops individually, zoom in and connect each bus stop via the transit line tool. Missed a patch of road while converting trams? Start all over. Accidentally make another line while working on your first one? Great, it'll use the same colour as the first one and drive you crazy trying to figure out what happened. Forgot to build a loop for your tram? Great, now your route is going to be all hosed up from the tram trying to make its own loop. I don't even bother with busses because I don't want to build all the stupid bus stops and connect them to each other.
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Jan 17, 2024 01:02
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Yeah, the huge amount of tedious busywork involved in making a new neighbourhood made me not want to expand my city further and at that point I asked myself why I was still playing. I couldn't answer that question so I uninstalled
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Jan 17, 2024 01:21
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Yeah, the separation of placing bus stops and placing lines into two actions to give you more freedom or whatever is one of the stupidest decisions they made. Also very much agree on the park thing, not being able to zone them and -worse imo- being unable to connect them to walking paths (which was in loving vanilla CS1) was the thing that made me stop playing.
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Jan 17, 2024 08:25
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piratepilates posted:Oh by the way they don't have in-house QA: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...7/post-29354555 
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Jan 17, 2024 09:41
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It's ludicrous to me that you can't even do basic stuff CS1 h ad, like making your own pre-assembled interchanges or other asset combinations you can plop down later.
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Jan 17, 2024 10:09
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Fishstick posted:It's ludicrous to me that you can't even do basic stuff CS1 h ad, like making your own pre-assembled interchanges or other asset combinations you can plop down later. There is definitely something odd going on with the asset editor problems they're having - it seems to be a massive technical hurdle for them at the moment but as I'm not a Unity dev (or even a dev at all LOL), I just don't get what could be causing them so many problems. My first instinct was that perhaps the community asset pack they were bigging up (the first expansion due back in December and hey it's FREE!) was made up of assets which were way too highly detailed to run on consoles given the performance constraints of those platforms, and that perhaps they all needed to be redone from the ground up to fit the console requirements. Now I'm not so sure - it looks like something more than just a time-will-heal-all thing, it feels like there's a technical issue they're really struggling to overcome. But as I say, I'm not a dev so I might be talking out of my arse, it wouldn't be the first time.
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Jan 17, 2024 11:10
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Martian posted:Yeah, the separation of placing bus stops and placing lines into two actions to give you more freedom or whatever is one of the stupidest decisions they made. Also very much agree on the park thing, not being able to zone them and -worse imo- being unable to connect them to walking paths (which was in loving vanilla CS1) was the thing that made me stop playing. Why include things that were clearly going to be paid dlcs further down the line? Like I didnt expect there to be everything from CS1 put into CS2 but it really does feel like a step back from the first game in pretty much every way apart from putting down roads.
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Jan 17, 2024 13:30
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While I get that a lot is deliberately absent for DLC, I think the hand-built park “zones” is one that really is a crusher not to have. You can still make a parks DLC, just let me identify a weirdly shaped lot that I intended to save as plaza or greenspace as a park so it counts for land value and recreation! Add about 4-10 props I can plop down in the zone. That’s all I, and I think most folks, want right now out of that.
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Jan 17, 2024 16:24
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