0 Economy exploits are getting more and more out of hand. LEM 3.1 made it WORSE

[Enfield_PDX]

My "description" says it all and I've been saying it for years. PDOX do not QA their games.
I love playing machines. They're my favorites to play. The moment LEM update dropped, I did just that. Literally took me 10m to discover this bullshit and then I said to myself "this can't be the only one". ESC -> Quit Stellaris and didn't open it until a new "hotfix" or "patch" drops which will probably be next week or the week after.

Literally it would take 1 person 10m to figure our this exploit.

Big props to all my fellow Stelly players who still have the energy to file bug report after bug report after every release.

I think I can say with some confidence that we do, in fact, test our games.

I appreciate the frustation, I really do. But this is not a game breaking bug. It doesn't corrupt your save, destroy your economy or crash the game. You have to "opt in" as it were to using it and are totally free to ignore and play as normal.

That is not to say the issue shouldn't be fixed. It should. But the larger "0 income empire" problem is something that requires a systemic fix. Maybe a serious rework of defecits etc. Which is a much larger project to consider.

When it comes to issues like this, please keep in mind the broader context of the game. Thanks

 

[Enfield_PDX]

Unfortunately nobody at Paradox wants to play Stellaris for 10 minutes- it's too buggy.

I think Swedish labour laws mean you can't force them.

I'm sorry but this is very funny to read while we're in the midst of our weekly 2 hour dev MP

I also keep in mind the fact that there hasn't been a single time in the past... say 2 years when I could, on the day of the update, play the game without encountering some serious bug, exploit, performance issue or anything else in a single playthrough. It's always been the following scenario: Update happens -> find issues -> wait 2-4weeks for the game to reach a playable state -> wait 1-2 weeks until the mods I generally use update -> finally be able to play. Every few months, same cycle repeats.

When will the cycle break? The answer can only come in future actions, not current words.

In my position as lead QA I've shipped now 4 major releases. Necroids, Nemesis, the MP update patch (3.0.4) and now LEM.

With each of these releases, I can comfortably say the bar of quality has been raised. The game is enjoying a fresh air of stability both in singleplayer and MP. What issues are being encountered are either very niche or broad results of the way the game has been that can be put on the radar of the custodian team if not addressed as part of a larger expansion patch.

We now have a mod early access program, so everyones favourite mods can be good to go on release day and in general have a much greater commitment to communication.

Things are getting better. There's plenty of work to be done (looking at you AI) but while your personal experience may be full of frustration the overall state of the game is good. I think that's a perspective worth keeping in mind.

 

[Enfield_PDX]

I agree it is not, per your normal definition, a game breaking bug. At least not in single player.

In multiplayer, with potentially unknown players, it is indeed a very game breaking issue, not a bug. Players can ofc choose not to use it, but there are plenty of cheaters and exploiters out there. Preventing this stops those people from ruining a multiplayer game by dominating it so freaking utterly, that everybody quits.

Multiplayer, while not discounted. Is not the vast majority of playthroughs, and even of those MP games. The majority are two or three friends playing together in a coop style. or so the telemetry tells us. As I understand for larger MP Games there are already rules in place for 0 income empires as well. But again, we're looking at solutions and you can bet the issue is on the patch shortlist.

And yes i agree a broader approach might help but look at my simple little mod. It does the job for now. How hard can it be to just implement something like that for now and think about the bigger picture over the next few months?

Because putting out a fix is actually quite a involved process. Lemme put it into context.

Lets say we fix a spelling error in the game. We have to take that change, put it into a build. Test that it's there and make sure it all works correctly. If this change also changes text/wording in the various translations of the game we then have to ship it off to be translated in as many languages as we support.

Once the fix is verified and in our testing build. We then have to pool the resources needed to make a full release build. That means ensuring we have the testers available. The technical assistance available to actually create the builds and push them out on various platforms. Because remember, we have no dead time. Everyone is always busy working on *something*

Once we have everything planned out. We have to create and verify the builds on each of out platforms. So Steam Windows, Steam Mac, Steam Linux. GoG Linux etc etc etc. all have to create succesffully and then go through a stability test. If any issues are encountered here that we have to fix, we have to rebuild and start again.

Once the builds are good to go, if they need to be sent for certification by a partner off they go. Then once they are certified. We have to pick a time and place to release the patch. Ensuring that we have the resources set aside to immediately roll back or fix an emergent issue.



Because of this, it's much better for us to take our time. Collect a lot of fixes to release at once. Because it stops us going through the above over and over with each change.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

(Like I said in my previous post, it took me 10 mins to find that it is now possible to have at least 100 defenses platforms on one citadel in vanilla...)

This is something we discussed internally when we were looking at the changes the Unyielding tree yields and decided if you wanted to stack defensive platforms to an absurd number that it's fine.