CO Word of the Week #8

[SpielSpielson]

I just want to say a massive thank you to you and your team for all of your hardwork. The launch of this title was not perfect but that is life and I think the way you have handled everything since then has been fantastic. I also wanted to recognise your comments about the toxicity in the community. I have found the levels of entitlement and vitriol abhorrent and it stops me from engaging in the community. The level of disrespect that some people have for fellow human beings is so disappointing.

I believe this is a minority (albeit a vocal one) and for all the haters out there, there are a significant number of lovers who hide in the background afraid to put their opinions out there in case they receive the attention of the trolls.

I personally think your level of communication has been great and have felt well informed on the progress to date.

 

[Worldr]

Thank you for the update and welcome back
Regarding the Editor, it would be very sad to see the Asset editor not be included, although I understand the reasoning behind it. I hope it all works out or that the Asset editor will otherwise be released in a later update.

 

[Licenturion]

Happy new year.

Looking forward to new patches that fix gameplay issues and clean up all graphical issues (snow layers, missing grass, missing animations...) the coming weeks and months.

As for toxicity. That is sadly a product of the state the game released in and shall probably continue whatever you do until the game has its "redemption arc". Same happened before with games like Cyberpunk, No Man Sky etc. But if you keep improving things with the thousands of suggestions and feedback reports in the feedback forum you will hopefull get your redemption story for CS2 too and toxity will probably will turn into praise after some time, Steam player numbers will rise above Skylines 1 and review scores will increase.

 

[A lowborn Emperor]

Welcome back.

I have to say that just having mapping and coding in the editor will bring huge benefits for the players, and go a very long way to increasing the lost faith in the community to your studio. As such I think releasing the editor with just maps and coding, should the asset import not be ready in a reasonable time, should be a paramount consideration on your part.

What should be construed as a reasonable time frame to release without the asset import?
ASAP I cannot stress this enough ASAP!

A.S.A.P!
Having the editor out in the wild will provide valuable early feedback on your modding platform, so that alone would be a benefit to yourselves, and having more mods being released on a stable platform easily accessible to all players, instead of just the more confident ones manually installing mods, will see an influx of positive posts on social media such as in the reddit forums.

Because I am a greedy, needy, demanding player I cannot stress enough that a simulation performance enhancement patch is way over due, so I look forward to the next patches.

FREE THE EDITOR!

 

[KoolAidDev]

Happy New Years, I hopedf your vacations were well!

The main suggestions I want to discuss / features I want to be released soon are more variations / looks of service buildings like schools, fire departments, hospitals, and police stations. I believe this is a big suggestion because the looks of some of these are a bit unrealistic, like the police station and hospital. Those look more cartoony and I would like some variations that can fit for a downtown city and just some more styles for small and midsize towns. For the schools, the style doesnt have any downtown versions, and it just can sometimes look odd for multiple of the same school, maybe you guys can release these as assets in the paradox mods or maybe as a free/paid DLC. I hope you take this into account and have a wonderful day/night.

 

[ClemiMD]

Thank you for this update and I wish you every success and patience for the coming months!

 

[Degginger]

Here's to a successful new year,

I personally would like to see bugs and new features dealt with more transparently, for example here https://trello.com/b/wHz5JHqH/voxel-tycoon-roadmap

Many people always open new tickets even if the case already exists, so you can possibly get an overview and you could also show which cases might be solved in the next patch.

 

[gameblogger]

Happy new year team and thank you so much for the update.

As for toxicity, if that is a concern then I think 24/7 moderation across all social media platforms (forums included, particularly the Steam Forums) should be the aim. Perhaps requiring posts and messages to be pre-approved (where this is possible) should be considered.

Nevertheless, you all are doing a fantastic job getting the patches out and I'm sure, in time, all your nhard work will be rewarded.

 

[eVo_squirrel]

Hi, Mariina and all CO team.

Hope you guys had a great holiday season.

Even though this is my first forum message, I've been playing Cities for basically forever now. Cities 2 is my "therapy game" (as Cities 1 was) and I honestly love what you're doing with the game, all the way from how you built the release, up to how you're communicating with us in the community since the first days.

For controlling toxicity, my option would be increasing moderation, as having CO interacting directly with us is one of the greatest things we can have as a community.

Keep on doing what you do best. I'm sure you will be successful with it, as you were with Cities 1.

 

[co_martsu]

I believe this is a minority (albeit a vocal one) and for all the haters out there, there are a significant number of lovers who hide in the background afraid to put their opinions out there in case they receive the attention of the trolls.

Thank you for bringing this up. We want the community to be welcoming to all and so that no-one has to be afraid to voice their opinion. Everyone can be polite and kind to others, even if there's a disagreement. It's a choice we all make.

Thank you for the update and welcome back
Regarding the Editor, it would be very sad to see the Asset editor not be included, although I understand the reasoning behind it. I hope it all works out or that the Asset editor will otherwise be released in a later update.

We will have an asset editor with the import feature eventually. We want to see your buildings in the game!

As for toxicity. That is sadly a product of the state the game released in and shall probably continue whatever you do until the game has its "redemption arc". Same happened before with games like Cyberpunk, No Man Sky etc. But if you keep improving things with the thousands of suggestions and feedback reports in the feedback forum you will hopefull get your redemption story for CS2 too and toxity will probably will turn into praise after some time, Steam player numbers will rise above Skylines 1 and review scores will increase.

Toxicity and criticism are different things, I'm sure you understand that. Toxicity is threats, attacking people and being outright mean. It has nothing to do with explaining what the issues with the game you might be facing and what you wish for the devs to fix or improve on first. We don't want praise, we want a community where we can discuss with the players about the game, what is working and what is not without facing abuse.

 

[SuTu7]

Happy new year and all the best for 2024!

As my understanding there will be a few weeks (probably 2-3 weeks) until you release the beta for the editor and a couple more weeks after that for the testing then there will be a patch? So we're expecting the next patch to be in one month?
Sadly that's a lot as I lost my interest in the game getting to a bigger city and knowing I cant fix a lot of the stuff.

 

[Boonatix]

Regarding toxicity, I think you should update the community guidelines and rules and then also act upon them without mercy against toxicity and hate... and ban users from participating. Because there is just no room for toxicity and hate anywhere, and thus no public platform should be given for them! There is never every a reasonable excuse for toxicity and / or hate (like some try to find with "oh the state of the game blabla...) - no matter what happened, civil discussion must always be a priority between human individuals.

 

[Mrt19]

Regarding toxicity, I think you should update the community guidelines and rules and then also act upon them without mercy against toxicity and hate... and ban users from participating. Because there is just no room for toxicity and hate anywhere, and thus no public platform should be given for them!

Ah yes, only approve the 'positive' ones; delete the criticism.

 

[Bloody Regina]

As we have stated earlier, there is no higher priority than releasing the modding support for the game.

I am very disappointed that your priority has shifted to MOD. I still encounter many bugs, and I cannot play game correctlly.
I hope that resources from MOD development can be allocated to bug fixes, and resolving bugs becomes the top priority among you.

 

[Otis85402]

I understand that posts like these are essentially PR, but I can't help but still feel un-listened to by this response. Rather than addressing the substance of any of the issues reported here - the bug reports, the massive gameplay issues - they instead chose to not answer those questions and instead ask the fanbase to be nicer.

Please fix this broken game. Please give us a real answer as to when we can expect a patch addressing any of the issues being reported. You say you want to engage with the community, well you can start by going through every thread where a bug is reported and start responding to them with what you are going to do about them.

 

[pbilk]

Sorry to hear about the toxicity that you have seen. I have seen some but not a lot. Either way, those people seemed to be entitled, they are looking for an outlook for their anger and hate, they don't understand the gaming industry and don't care to change their mindset. I get that the launch wasn't perfect, we are humans. Yes, maybe the launch should have been an early access release instead, but what is done has been done.
However, I imagine some toxicity might be just hard to discern in the tone.

I think your communication has been good and I appreciate it. To me, it shows me that the whole team cares to make CS:2 a wonderful game and I see that potential for future DLCs, unofficial mods, future modding, and how the game operates in comparison to CS:1.

 

[MayorWanze]

Ah yes, only approve the 'positive' ones; delete the criticism.

no one is complaining about criticism, just toxicity.

 

[SuspectPizza]

Hi, thanks for the update! I'm not sure how to feel about the post. Personally I think that you've provided as much information as possible without making promises you're not sure you'll be able able to keep 100% (like patch release dates). But I can also see what emotions this post might stir in some people (probably the same ones labeled as "toxic").

In my honest opinion that part of the community is - on a certain level - just frustrated with some aspects of the game. Sure, taking it out on other people isn't going to solve it, but that's the internet for you and no amount of moderation and banning is going to completely shield the dev team from people like that. I completely understand that being on the receiving end of unreasonably angry people is definitely not something anyone would want for their forum, so I hope it works itself out.

What little advice I could give is probably this: The last patch was about a month ago and given the state of the game a lot of people might have already expected a new one, especially when the last one introduced a very widespread economy bug. But since the patch isn't ready, I believe it might have been better to outline in more detail what is going to get fixed. Yes, I know - no one wants to make a promise and then back out, but I don't think that uncertainty is going to calm people as much as certainty (for example, the last couple of WoWs provided more insight into what was being worked on). Plus some people might feel like time discussing toxicity (which is not really an issue directly related to the game itself) might be better spent discussing the game/patches/modding/plans/...

The other piece of advice might be a bit more controversial: I read through the discussion about the behind-the-scenes video and lot of people felt like they haven't received an apology for the state of game. Whether or not that is something the studio wishes to do is not up to me of course, but at least tackling some of the emotional comments head on could be a sign of the studio listening to unpleasant discussions as well. (Instead of vaguely posting about toxicity in a WoW - but that's just my guess, not sure what/who the post was aimed at).

So overall, while this might be contrary to the question in the post "Should we add more moderation or is the only option to pull back our engagement on our end?" I feel that engaging more with the community is the way forward.

Best of luck with the game and the community!

 

[davidmrc]

Happy new year!

So, based on the video at the end of the year and this post, here is what I understand:
- The fans had unrealistic expectations created by the marketing team, which is "too good". Obviously, the companies(both companies kept feeding the hype with streams, videos, friendly YouTubers that coincidentally always get sponsored videos by Paradox) share no responsibility for state the game was released and the current state almost three months after it was released.

- The toxicity is keeping the devs from interacting with the community. Maybe I'm missing something, who, other than the CM and the CEO has actively interacted with the community? This feels like another attempt to shift responsibility to the fans, especially when everyone knows that it's a minority that should be punished according to the rules that are already in place for the forums, as it always has been here. If the problem happens in other platforms it should be mentioned in the post.

Meanwhile, the first message of the year, provides no roadmap or a list of actual targets, no timeline or gameplan. The same vague statements keep being repeated, the line about modding is almost word for word from the previous WoWs. This should've, in my opinion, set the tone for the year, instead, it feels like a smokescreen to change the topic.