[Dev Team] 3.0.3 Patch Released (Checksum d281)

[sillyrobot]

For high crime planets and Crime Lord Deal exploits, why are players allowed to deprioritize Criminal Jobs? The effect is that even maximum crime planets maintain 0 criminals even if 6+ slots are available. As a routine Syndicate player, I find it vexing.

Is this a bug, exploit, or intended? Can someone please explain why this is intended or what the difficulties are in fixing it?

LOL you can fire the criminals!?!? Awesome! "Hey you! Yeah you! I'm the owner of these here docks, and we don't want youse kind around here! You're fired! Get out and don't come back! There are some waiter jobs a couple of blocks over! Get a real job!"

 

[johnty5]

Anyone can make a single mistake. When the behaviour becomes chronic -- the same behaviour occurs again and again, it is time to find and correct the source.

I agree. But that's still not the same as imagining some cackling villain in the system.

Last month people were attacking devs for the problems of Leviathan - and, to a lesser extent, Stellaris pop mechanics. Then, when it was made clear that wasn't acceptable, people started couching their posts in terms of "I'm talking about the bean counters/management". But whether the forum's cackling villain has been "Devs", "Johann" or "Bean counters", the constant has been a view that problems result from malicious/lazy/incompetent actors, when actually cockup is usually more responsible than conspiracy.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

For high crime planets and Crime Lord Deal exploits, why are players allowed to deprioritize Criminal Jobs? The effect is that even maximum crime planets maintain 0 criminals even if 6+ slots are available. As a routine Syndicate player, I find it vexing.

Is this a bug, exploit, or intended? Can someone please explain why this is intended or what the difficulties are in fixing it?

Yeah, that’s absolutely a bug IMO.

 

[sillyrobot]

I agree. But that's still not the same as imagining some cackling villain in the system.

Last month people were attacking devs for the problems of Leviathan - and, to a lesser extent, Stellaris pop mechanics. Then, when it was made clear that wasn't acceptable, people started couching their posts in terms of "I'm talking about the bean counters/management". Both attacks imagine that problems result from malicious/lazy/incompetent actors, when cockup is usually more responsible than conspiracy.

There are two possible sources both of which would have a responsible entity (a villain if you will): crappy processes or crappy resource constraints. Ultimately someone or several someones are responsible and should be accountable.

 

[Nutellaeis]

So Rogue Servitor Industrial Districts on Habitats will stay bugged until 3.x ? It is a shame. I liked shoving all my lovely organic humans into small space paradises.

 

[mhdalyn]

Will merchant, portal research, and other similar jobs that scale based off planet population be rescaled as well?

 

[Tharundil]

Don't feed the trolls

 

[DarkSafire]

oh ye of little faith.

I do have faith in you, otherwise i wouldn't bother to play the game or read forum.

We had a set amount of time set aside in our schedule, buffing up operations and the like did not fit within the time window when competing with all the other things in the patch that needed dev time. That's just how it is, our priorities are in the right place, as you will find out soon enough

Nemesis has been out for barely a month and you are already puting support for it on ice. Maybe put more time in your schedule for post-launch support? What can have more priority than fixing bugs or addresing players concerns? More content? We already have it in droves.

 

[Unicum1l]

So only me asking now: why so rude with terravore. They already had limitation on growth, but now in addition they lose one spawning job cause they have not hive worlds.

It is bad. If classical Hive minds was buffed, it would be good to do same for Terravore...

 

[orc4hire]

Nothing on ship-related intel? Sigh. Well, 2.8.1 still works.

 

[Platoondas]

Since there has been quite a bit of "disappointed" feedback in this thread.
I just wanted to reiterate for the devs that I'm very happy with the progress of these patchs. Its not perfect there will always be things to improve, but if you look at my post history you'll see I've given some pretty unhappy feedback.

This was a big step forward, and I have more hope for the future of Stellaris.

 

[johnty5]

There are two possible sources both of which would have a responsible entity (a villain if you will): crappy processes or crappy resource constraints. Ultimately someone or several someones are responsible and should be accountable.

Or maybe they could just fix the processes and the people who designed the processes can learn from their mistakes.

 

[sillyrobot]

Or maybe they could just fix the processes and the people who designed the processes can learn from their mistakes.

That's certainly a form of accountability, yes. Though I'd prefer if the institution learned from the mistake rather than individual people as the institution endures. People get reassigned or leave. Their memories and learnings go with them.

 

[sillyrobot]

So let me see if I understand.

The community makes a bunch on noise about glaring, terrible, deficiencies of the AI making a single-player game almost meaningless because of the guarantee that no AI can pose a threat.

PDX acknowledge the community and opens a BETA AI feedback thread where many good examples of AI problems are shown.

The BETA is released with NO meaningful AI changes.

You tell us that this is the last patch for 3.0 without even mentioning anything about all the AI feedback.



The community can be quite toxic sometimes, and it is often uncalled for. But this, this is PDX just opening the door and inviting toxicity.

Please make a meaningful statement about the AI and your plan to address it and far in the future it will take.

The AI is broken! 3.0 made it worse.


I have Federations, Necroid and now Nemesis in my Steam wishlist cart. I will not buy any of them until the AI is fixed.

I figure there's a decent chance it'll get mentioned tomorrow during PDXCon even if only in passing. If I had a betting circuit, I'd bet they plan to replace the AI whole-cloth. After all, why fix what you have when making something new invites entirely different failure points?

 

[johnty5]

That's certainly a form of accountability, yes. Though I'd prefer if the institution learned from the mistake rather than individual people as the institution endures. People get reassigned or leave. Their memories and learnings go with them.

We agree on that. Is it clear that Paradox needs better/different processes to avoid releases like Leviathan happening again and to allow for long-term issues like tech debt to be addresses on an ongoing basis rather than building up? Yes. Does the fact that those processes aren't already in place mean that malicious/incompetent actors must be responsible for that? No.

 

[DC E1G]

I understand, and a year ago I would have agreed with you. There is a proper balance. There was a time in Stellaris history where it felt like deadlines were so hard that things got released in whatever state they were in, regardless of how severe the bugs were. That's not the case now though, 3.0.1 came out the most polished and major bug free as any release for the game so far. So the fact the major issues now boil down to balance issues and AI tweaks (that are easily moddable and therefore fixable by the player for their playstyle in the meantime) means those deadlines are back in the reasonable category.

Like I said in Stellaris history there are times when you would have been 100% right that hiding behind "sorry we had a deadline to ship" would have been absolutely unacceptable, and I said as much on these forums during those times, but I just think this situation is much different. And the improvements we've seen in terms of development, QA and communication for this update cycle leave me very optimistic moving forward. But certainly the threshold from acceptable to unacceptable is a personal opinion, so neither of us is truly wrong in that regard.

I do think the relative stability of 3.0.X has been very much overshadowed by the issues with pop growth, economic balance, and the AI, which while understandable, is too bad, because, technically speaking, Nemesis has been one of the smoothest releases since the 1.X days and a number of legacy bugs were fixed. This does give me some hope that these design and AI issues will get sorted, because the scoping for the last two expansions has been pretty good in terms of realistic targets for what can be delivered in a good state.

I understand the skepticism others have, but personally, I think the game has been headed in the right direction under its current leadership, even if it isn't getting there as quickly as I would like.

 

[sillyrobot]

We agree on that. Is it clear that Paradox needs better/different processes to avoid releases like Leviathan happening again and to allow for long-term issues like tech debt to be addresses on an ongoing basis rather than building up? Yes. Does the fact that those processes aren't already in place mean that malicious/incompetent actors must be responsible for that? No.

Malicious? Almost certainly not. Hanlon's razor already takes care of that.

 

[Alfray Stryke]

For high crime planets and Crime Lord Deal exploits, why are players allowed to deprioritize Criminal Jobs? The effect is that even maximum crime planets maintain 0 criminals even if 6+ slots are available. As a routine Syndicate player, I find it vexing.

Is this a bug, exploit, or intended? Can someone please explain why this is intended or what the difficulties are in fixing it?

Cheers for this - got it logged internally to be looked at. Looks like an old issue that re-emerged.

 

[Tim_Ward]

as you will find out soon enough

Alright.

But if we get a DD hiatus for six months, and then the first DD back is "Announcing our Next DLC: Space Golf" or something, then I'm going to tell everyone that I told them so.

 

[sillyrobot]

Alright.

But if we get a DD hiatus for six months, and then the first DD back is "Announcing our Next DLC: Space Golf" or something, then I'm going to tell everyone that I told them so.

It's like you expect past behaviour to inform future results!