No more communication from devs?

[Mazisky]

Hello

I noticed that the last dev diary hasn't been posted here in the forum as usual, while it appeared on the CO website.

Also the bug report section seems to have no more communication from devs or testers.

Just wanted to know if it is all fine since it looks a bit worrying.


Thank you

Have a great day everyone, both devs and players

 

[unmerged(524934)]

You're quite right

Beach Properties Dev Diary #2: Sunshine & Swimming Pools – Colossal Order Ltd

colossalorder.fi

I doubt there's anything sinister about this not appearing on the official forums two days after appearing on CO's site, it's probably just a miscommunication, a quick phone call from Sweden will sort it out I'm sure

 

[ourg]

They've disapeared from all forums and social media and are probaly applying the ostrich policy, pretendting nothing is happening.
But my experience has teached me, the longer you let something wrong growing, the harder it will be to deal with it.
But it's not very surpising, the only stable thing while all this journey is the regular mismanagement and miscommunication they've made at each step

 

[Archivek]

I am afraid they don't care about us now

 

[Mazisky]

I am afraid they don't care about us now

I think they are very busy with fixing bugs, plus console development.

Still it would be nice to have some sign of life from them

 

[Archivek]

I think they are very busy with fixing bugs, plus console development.

Still it would be nice to have some sign of life from them

I also believe they are working r8 now of fixing the mess they've made but they could at least apologise and tell us what are they up to. IMO the lack of communication is the worst problem now.

 

[Daedalos_MS]

Hello

I noticed that the last dev diary hasn't been posted here in the forum as usual, while it appeared on the CO website.

Also the bug report section seems to have no more communication from devs or testers.

Just wanted to know if it is all fine since it looks a bit worrying.


Thank you

Have a great day everyone, both devs and players

You have to understand that this forum is not created so we can communicate with publisher and/or developer. The purpose of this forum is that we can help each other.

This particual developer believes that communicating with a community is not mandatory, but optional and done above the required standard.

From very old developer's post, it also looks like that there is certain procedure in place, where every change in the game has to be discussed and agreed with publisher. So eventhough certain employee of the developer likes our idea, they have to discuss it internally, if it is doable and desirable, which takes time. Once the developer makes decision, they have to go to publisher and ask for approval. As you can imagine this is very tedious process, where a lot of people are involved, where maybe the person who saw our comment is no longer involved in the process, or forget where they saw it, so we will never see the reply from them.

I am not sure if even work on bugs does not have a long approval chain, but it seems that publisher is ordering work on the patches, i.e. if they do not order and approve next patch, developer cannot release it. In summary, this game is owned by publisher, not developer. This is why probably no one is talking to us. Plus IMHO, the PDX/CO does not care to much about what the community things.

EDIT:
Adding the developer's post I am mentioning above...

Hi, I just have to come an defend us a little bit here even if it might end up hitting me in the face

We DO listen, or read more literally, your feedback. It's just that we don't always agree with it and even if we agree with it there's a process we must follow. We can't just take an idea, implement it and release a patch. So working on the game takes time and hiring more coders doesn't change that. We take an idea, discuss it with our publisher, design it, discuss again, implement it and have it go through the publisher's QA before it's ready to go live. If this is only semi-listening, I'm fine with that.

The system for the bug reporting is exactly so that you can find similar issues and hopefully solutions by searching the forum. So that there are the most common issues and solutions visible to the players. The QA goes through the forum and picks up issues to verify them. Only verified issues are assigned for fixing.

Unfortunately against the common belief we don't have a direct wire transfer between your purchase and our bank account so things happen slower than you might expect in terms of hiring new people. Instead of hiring more coders we at Colossal will improve our internal QA and community management in the upcoming months to avoid this:

 

[ma2412]

not wondering that communication goes near to zero:
every post (no matter what) will be rewarded with the same ****

 

[safe-keeper]

To give them the benefit of the doubt, it's Easter. It's very possible the whole crew is off on break. If Finland is as generous with offering days off as Scandinavia, they've all probably got the week off.

 

[Evil Ed]

If I was in COs shoes, and every post gets a mob reaction to it, I'd pull the engagement too. I wouldn't even care how it looked to the outside viewer. Why would I continue to put my employees in front of that?

The distaste might very well be valid, but there's a right way to approach things and a wrong way. Many posters can't seem to figure out what the right way is.

I am not, in any way, defending the situation. The game state is poor, the latest patch hasn't wowed me and the DLC is, I agree, lacklustre. I don't plan to pick it up again until a few more patches.

At the same time,. I wouldn't continually roast CO devs (or the CEO for that matter) in the way that many on here think is acceptable, no more so than I would pick up the phone to a company I'm unhappy with and scream at the poor person who takes my call.

We also have no idea what internal pressures there are/were to release things as they are. Paradox going public certainly doesn't feel like it's helped matters either...

 

[AngryHitsuji]

If the executives are so concerned with poor reactions from the customers, why release the game at all, when they know it is broken and that the reaction will be exceptionally negative.

Paradox has gone through this probably 30 times during it's life as a company, when you include bad DLC in addition to bad game launches.

The response will never change because the response is driven from customers who are angry at Paradox raising their expectations and then failing to meet them, while charging significant quantities of money for the product. And to answer the question, why release the game, or "what internal pressures are there". The answer is "Paradox wants money".

Customers have a right to express their displeasure and Paradox's response to failure should not be shutting into their shell, it should be proper apologies, rectification, ongoing dialogue and a commitment to not repeating the same problems on future games. But that would cost Paradox money so they won't do it. So the cycle will repeat.

 

[MohawkWolfo98]

To give them the benefit of the doubt, it's Easter. It's very possible the whole crew is off on break. If Finland is as generous with offering days off as Scandinavia, they've all probably got the week off.

Colossal Order seems to have far more holidays than any other gaming company or even the people working for Paradox.

 

[Civ5rako]

If I was in COs shoes, and every post gets a mob reaction to it, I'd pull the engagement too. I wouldn't even care how it looked to the outside viewer. Why would I continue to put my employees in front of that?

Because you and your employees would have created the mess the customers are complaining about?

And hiding certainly doesn't help in such a scenario.

 

[Askorti]

To give them the benefit of the doubt, it's Easter. It's very possible the whole crew is off on break. If Finland is as generous with offering days off as Scandinavia, they've all probably got the week off.

Meanwhile under the new dev diary for Vic 3 you have full 4 pages of nothing but dev responses... Including from yesterday at 10PM CET...

 

[safe-keeper]

If I was in COs shoes, and every post gets a mob reaction to it, I'd pull the engagement too. I wouldn't even care how it looked to the outside viewer. Why would I continue to put my employees in front of that?

The distaste might very well be valid, but there's a right way to approach things and a wrong way. Many posters can't seem to figure out what the right way is.

I am not, in any way, defending the situation. The game state is poor, the latest patch hasn't wowed me and the DLC is, I agree, lacklustre. I don't plan to pick it up again until a few more patches.

At the same time,. I wouldn't continually roast CO devs (or the CEO for that matter) in the way that many on here think is acceptable, no more so than I would pick up the phone to a company I'm unhappy with and scream at the poor person who takes my call.

We also have no idea what internal pressures there are/were to release things as they are. Paradox going public certainly doesn't feel like it's helped matters either...

The Hearts of Iron IV devs also just released a DLC that was spectacularly badly received. Here is their response. No empty and generic "we're so proud of our release and are working on bugs while reading your suggestions, but hey, can you stop being so angry with us, please?", but a thorough dissection of what exactly people didn't like, why they made the decisions they did, and how they would handle it going forward.

Greetings all!

Today marks the first dev diary since the release of Trial of Allegiance, so we’ll be looking back over how things went, and community reactions in a little more detail than usual. While I would have loved to have some data on player choices and interactions for today’s diary, our analytics engine is busy chugging away. So, we’ll have to hold off on that until the machine spirit has assessed the incoming preponderance of data.

The Elephant in the Room

It would be hard to talk about Trial of Allegiance without first mentioning that we’re acutely aware of its critical reception from fans.

We’ve had releases with less than satisfactory reviews before, so why talk about them this time? Well, this mostly boils down to the reasons. Usually when something doesn’t do well we’ll create a timeline and buckle down to address the issues that matter. As you’ll see below, things are a little different this time.

Above all, I see no reason not to be transparent about this, and I’m going to use today as an opportunity to talk about what it means to us and how we analyze reactions, so let’s dive into some of the facts:

Basically, they read every review and then wrote a DD covering the major complaints. They also added a note in the end telling people that toxic feedback didn't help anyone, but that's ok when they had already actually addressed the criticism.

Both the HoI4 and CS2 devs messed up, but only the HoI devs seem to want to want to own the situation they're in. The CS2 devs, for reasons I truly can't understand, are doing everything they can to pretend everything is fine.

 

[Rarzie]

The people writing the communication pieces and the official posts on this forum are not the people that do the bug fixing. CO could post stuff here all day long and it wouldn't slow down the production. At all. You're talking about the community manager and CEO. They quite literally have nothing better to do than communicate.

So the fact that there is a pretty much complete radio silence with the occasional piece of pointless fluff-article should be saying a lot for anyone able to read between the lines.

 

[safe-keeper]

The people writing the communication pieces and the official posts on this forum are not the people that do the bug fixing. CO could post stuff here all day long and it wouldn't slow down the production. At all. You're talking about the community manager and CEO. They quite literally have nothing better to do than communicate.

I'm pretty sure CEOs have quite a few other tasks to fill their days with besides just posting on forums. Just saying.
Also, since posting on forums isn't a 7,5 hour job unless you're posting more than an automated spambot, the community manager probably has other tasks as well.

Edit: also I'm amazed someone could actually disagree with this.

 

[jvg]

no one puts duplicated toppics together too

i wonder if i may put a joke here:
maybe they where banned for trolling.

please dont take me serious.

 

[City_Builder_81]

They are back to work fixing bugs. They are wasting a lot of time if they would respond to every comment.
Just keep calm and everything will be fine.

 

[MostBlunted]

To give them the benefit of the doubt, it's Easter. It's very possible the whole crew is off on break. If Finland is as generous with offering days off as Scandinavia, they've all probably got the week off.