Disappointed with Quality Control for 2.2

[Sapare]

I think 2.2 was one of the "better" releases, but I am still upvoting OP for the principle that at this point Paradox has become so self assured and comfortable with their buggy releases that they rival Bethesda, only difference being that Paradox does fix their stuff down the line.(If Paradox is not actually overly proud and is not borderline intentionally releasing broken messes, they are making a bad effort at conveying that.)

And really, i think the perception/attitude is what is dragging 2.2 down.

When previous Stellaris releases were in worse states they made an effort to apologize and admit they screwed up, so far I have not heard any real admittance of their mistakes, and that helps paint a picture of a company that is confident its fans will eat anything. Add to it a number of rather half-arsed first few beta patches that seem to break more then they fix and I feel like the laugh-track is missing.

 

[magickware99]

I know right. An angry customer in my field means working day in/day out until the issue is fixed.

Having had to work 14-15hr days for about a month straight because of a big issue with a product and frequently dealing with customers demanding that things be changed to meet their spec and whim, I'd be utterly ecstatic if my company's customers were even half as understanding as many of Paradox's customers are with their products upon release.

 

[Jiav]

at this point, before working on a new DLC, paradox should really iron out past content and adjust the core game. Most important performance issues and the now terrible AI. They simply overestimate what their engine is capable of handling, and each patch the performance gets worse and worse.

Just go a few steps back and fix some core issues before moving on again. Building a house on crippled foundation is not going to help anyone at all.

 

[Kent_Lang]

Why do they release something so fking problematic and buggy right before their programmers leave for other projects and go away? on holidays?
I mean, who thinks of these timetables? who then says, 'hey yeah, thats a great idea' and who then after that, thinks its fine to take peoples money and release a completely broken and bugged experience?
If i did that at my work, id have been fired, and hauled before a Judge and prosecuted for fraud + knowingly endangering life amoungst other things.
There is something fundamentally wrong with the overall thinking of not only the team leads, but the overall management of this company, dev team and the product they are selling.

While I agree with your post, the thing is that Paradox did a brave thing by making 2.2 in the first place. This is actually a major update to Stellaris that changes the game from it's core and it's nice to see some ambition in the dev team. A lot of dev teams wouldn't have the balls to even try something like this or spread the changes out over several updates if even that. Imagine if they instead of adding the resources, stratas and planetary systems to the update instead just focused on adding trade and Megacorps in this update and simply reducing the scope.

I'm pretty sure that they regret that they put all the features into the update because people are more upset over the fact that the features aren't working than the fact that you got a whole lot of features and content in the update and that's a sad thing.

While I understand your and people who share your frustration, I think that it'll only end up in dissuading Paradox from being ambitious in the future. They know they messed up. Maybe we should stop making these threads to beat the dead horse and be more constructive and as intelligent as we claim.

Also it's not really fair to compare your job which I sounds like it's related to the construction business to a games developer. Your mistakes result in loss of lives but when Paradox releases a buggy release nobody is at risk of dying. Just not being able to play as it was intended.

I'm amazed that 1 modder has managed to IDENTIFY & BEGIN FIXING the AI issues (in his spare time!) within days of the 2.2 release!

That's truly amazing in of itself. It's doubly amazing is that he used event modding to fix some of the fleet problems to the AI as this type of modding is a lot of work.

 

[Arcvalons]

I think there could be more communication from the devs. Maybe this wasn't the right moment to change Wiz to another team.

 

[aZmoDen]

@Kent_Lang.
I respectfully disagree. You state '..people are more upset over the fact that features arn't working than the fact that you got a whole lot of features and content...'
let me respond by saying this, features that dont work, arnt features.
You also say '..Paradox did a brave thing... ... this is a major update.... ... changes the game from its core...... Alot of devs wouldnt have the balls to even try something like this...'
A lot of devs would actually make sure the product works when they release it. Major changes need to factor in not just the dev time, but QA and Marketing, as well as the dev time needed to rectify major problems BEFORE THEY LEAVE ON HOLIDAY. That last bit is about timing and it is every bit as important as QA, Marketing and initial dev time.
Want to see a solution to this? cause i have one. Split major changes from DLC and content updates. Major changes need to happen when there is time for the mistakes made to be fixed (eveyrone makes mistakes). See, the thing is, the customer shouldnt bare the costs of miss-management of the dev team and the companies time.

EDIT:
The team initiates a new concept.
Management says yes or no.
Marketing happens, vague release date advertised.
The dev team makes it.
QA happens, internally or externally or both.
Dev fixes problems.
Release date finalised.
Product shipped.
Devs eagerly await feedback and prepare for general fixes (but because of proper dev cycle problems are minimised)
Hotfixes are upped.
Customers are happy with their experience and flood positive reviews of the product, compare other games to this one asking 'why cant you be more like PDX?'
Team breaks to spend some hard earned cash and spend time with their families.
During said time off, ideas are formed, community-collective brain is milked for new ideas.
Team mets back, throws ideas on table and starts to analise community ideas.
New product enters above cycle.

Do you see the problem when i change around what happens?

The team initiates a new concept.
Management says yes or no.
Marketing happens, release date advertised.
The dev team makes it.
Product shipped.
Customers are very unhappy. <-------
Hotfixes are upped.
Customers are still unhappy. <-------
Dev fixes some problems.
Customers are still unhappy. <-------
Team breaks to spend some hard earned cash and spend time with their families.
Customers are still unhappy. <-------
Dev fixes most remaining problems.
Customers are mostly happpy / resigned to fate. <-------
New product enters above cycle.

 

[Invictus5966]

Seems to me they wanted this out in time for Christmas maybe to improve the bottom line but IMHO it was a major flop. I didn't even buy the DLC as I am not sure I like the idea of a corporation/race. My problem is with 2.2, they have been hyping this up for some time now and I thought they would at least QA it for balance and playability. None of my Robot races are even worth loading and I've seen on YouTube that Hive is OP

Perhaps Wiz moving on to a "secret project" was more important then getting this at least playable

 

[Kent_Lang]

@aZmoDen
What costs? Le Guin 2.2 is a free update. Did your computer also blow up from the update because that's what it sounds like when you say "bear the costs".
And yes I agree that the timing is terrible, but I think this is more of an issue of miscommunication between the different departments at Paradox than the fault of the dev team. Their financial department is probably trying to reign in revenue before the end of the fiscal year and games are frequently released during this time frame because of the commercial benefits of releasing things before Christmas so the incentives were very strong if they could pull it off.
Your solution isn't a bad one from the perspective of a consumer but I think that it'd be hard to convince the other departments as well to release content updates separately because content updates also draws a lot of hype toward the DLCs so putting them in the same development cycles and releasing them simultaneously as the DLCs makes a lot of sense financially.

 

[aZmoDen]

@ Kent_Lang I Respectfully Disagree.
My time is worth money. My money is worth money and the products i purchase are supposed to be worth the money paid.
My limited freetime is almost priceless. I coudnt enjoy the product i purchased, the time i spent trying to get things working and reporting bugs was ultimately worthless.
You seem to have a good grasp of physical environments, however more time needs to be spent contemplating the human environment and its benefits, costs and general worth.

 

[Kent_Lang]

@ Kent_Lang I Respectfully Disagree.
My time is worth money. My money is worth money and the products i purchase are supposed to be worth the money paid.
My limited freetime is almost priceless. I coudnt enjoy the product i purchased, the time i spent trying to get things working and reporting bugs was ultimately worthless.
You seem to have a good grasp of physical environments, however more time needs to be spent contemplating the human environment and its benefits, costs and general worth.

Paradox isn't responsible for how you decide to spend your time though. That's your own responsibility, and considering how much time you're willing to spend disagreeing with me, your time must not worth that much or you're not that responsible with your time.

Nobody's forcing you to spend your time reporting bugs, that's something you choose to do yourself. If you don't want to do it - don't and someone else will do it for you. You might even be reporting bugs that has already been reported or the devs already know about so that definitively doesn't sound like a responsible use of your priceless free time!

Also if your time is worth so much you'll probably make the money back on the DLC you purchased very quickly. I would recommend cutting your losses on this one if you feel this way.

 

[aZmoDen]

@Kent_Lang
The old saying is doubly important here: 'An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure'. I want this repeated cycle to stop. Incse you miised my edit (a few pots back) ill repost it here for you.

The team initiates a new concept.
Management says yes or no.
Marketing happens, vague release date advertised.
The dev team makes it.
QA happens, internally or externally or both.
Dev fixes problems.
Release date finalised.
Product shipped.
Devs eagerly await feedback and prepare for general fixes (but because of proper dev cycle problems are minimised)
Hotfixes are upped.
Customers are happy with their experience and flood positive reviews of the product, compare other games to this one asking 'why cant you be more like PDX?'
Team breaks to spend some hard earned cash and spend time with their families.
During said time off, ideas are formed, community-collective brain is milked for new ideas.
Team mets back, throws ideas on table and starts to analise community ideas.
New product enters above cycle.

Do you see the problem when i change around what happens?

The team initiates a new concept.
Management says yes or no.
Marketing happens, release date advertised.
The dev team makes it.
Product shipped.
Customers are very unhappy. <-------
Hotfixes are upped.
Customers are still unhappy. <-------
Dev fixes some problems.
Customers are still unhappy. <-------
Team breaks to spend some hard earned cash and spend time with their families.
Customers are still unhappy. <-------
Dev fixes most remaining problems.
Customers are mostly happpy / resigned to fate. <-------
New product enters above cycle.

My inability to convey my point to you (and the subsection of customers/players that agree with you) isnt a waste of time. It is part of the attempt to fix the problem. The point of PDX respecting their product and their customers, not to half ass the process, needs to be made AND accepted by both PDX AND the customers that dismiss, dilute and negate the point.

 

[Badesumofu]

I'm not sure customers, as a group, are 'very unhappy'. Posts praising 2.2 are getting mostly agrees, posts panning it are getting mostly disagrees. We all agree and accept that there are bugs and problems, but those things can actually be fixed at a far greater rate with a released product.

Bottom line - 2.1.2 is still accessible and playable if you prefer that. Seems the vast majority prefer to play around with 2.2 even in its current state. I certainly do.

I know the accepted wisdom is that products should be held back until they are totally good to go. But for this business model I'm not so sure it's the best thing. Regular customers generally know to expect issues with new releases and have the option to stay on the previous patch if they prefer. In Stellaris at least, the bugs do get fixed in post-release support. EU4 still has bugs that have been known issues for years - that I think is totally unacceptable.

Pros of current system:
You get the update to play with sooner if you are prepared to put up with bugs (which it seems most are)
The bugs get fixed more quickly due to massive influx of players
Paradox get money coming in more quickly to fund further work on the game
2.2/Megacorp reaches a largely bug-free state sooner than it would if held back

Cons:
Customers who don't realise they can roll back might get angry
Customers who have an expectation of a bug-free release will be disappointed

Now - look over that list. Notice that both cons can be addressed through improved communication to customers. The pros are all genuine benefits in my opinion. So perhaps the accepted wisdom is not applicable here, perhaps it actually is the better path to release stuff a touch early and focus on establishing customer expectations that reflect that model.

 

[Kent_Lang]

@aZmoDen
But I understand your point and agree with you though... but that doesn't mean that I think what you're proposing is realistic. It might be having this or no content updates at all. The fact that they do content updates on their games at all is a huge perk compared to other games companies who abandon their games to work on new products. I've been gaming for many years and very few companies are as generous as Paradox is with their updates. I disapprove of when they break the game that lack the DLCs with them like with Common Sense in EUIV but this update isn't like that. It's just an unsuccessful rollout of updates on a problematic time window which sucks now but will be awesome when they do iron out the bugs and since they've released it now they're almost forced to fix the bugs too. If they'd released it in your time frame, they could have abandoned the project altogether without us knowing too, meaning less and/or smaller updates! This cycle despite its flaws, forces Paradox to commit. Think about that!

 

[GC13]

My only grief is that PDX does not explicitely label the DLC releases as Open Beta, which causes threads like this as people don't realize the point of the early release by themselves. Should consider making that one opt-in instead of the other way around.

Paradox has said in the past that they don't use open betas because the feedback they get from fans about bugs isn't useful to them.

Now, I'm not saying that's accurate, but I also don't think we should be treating the buggy nature of the patches as all part of their master plan to get the patch to a good place faster.

 

[pmchem]

They don't use "open betas" because they treat the initial major version release as the open beta. Anyone actually playing 2.2 is just a guinea pig. You're their QA team.

 

[aZmoDen]

@Kent_Lang now there is a point i can respectfully agree with. I like PDX adding more content to their games (although the genre makes this an easy gimme, think AI Wars, Shogun2, Rome 2) and i like the the direction the game is heading. I like the 2.0 propulsion changes, i like the new pop system and the idea of trade. Its the end result i question. If there are too many things to be viable before release, cut all DLC unnecessary content, polish the crap out of the DLC and free supporting changes. Break for holidays and then get stuck back into the other changes you want to make.
One glaring example is the sectors (although i dont know how much time that ate up) that are 'being prepared' for a future patch/dlc. That can surely wait and the time spent doing that surely could have been spent parsing the code through a function checker (there where many files with simple spelling and/or function errors that led to many of the end result problems) or playing a game to see how it works.
If this general methodology that PDX is using needs to be the one used for the longevity of the game, then, ok fine, but within that methodology there needs to be some changes. There needs to be a change in the way the projects are managed, their time management and general priorities. This doesnt have to fundamentally change the financial structure of PDX.

EDIT: @Badesumofu
i dint see your reply and while what you say looks fundamentally right, its too late for me to comprehend, my brain needs sleep. I will look over what you have said tomorrow and hopefully have a worthy reply to your post.

 

[Kent_Lang]

Its the end result i question. If there are too many things to be viable before release, cut all DLC unnecessary content, polish the crap out of the DLC and free supporting changes. Break for holidays and then get stuck back into the other changes you want to make.
One glaring example is the sectors (although i dont know how much time that ate up) that are 'being prepared' for a future patch/dlc. That can surely wait and the time spent doing that surely could have been spent parsing the code through a function checker (there where many files with simple spelling and/or function errors that led to many of the end result problems) or playing a game to see how it works.

I think redoing the sectors had to do with the team discovering that the pop system required them to change admin cap to give the player more control which led into the sector changes as well. Like I said in my first post: This update was huge! Ultimately the new sectors system sadly turned out to be a fiasco and I think they could have ignored changing the sectors even if they changed the admin cap but I apparently the devs didn't think so.

Again I will stand by my conviction that I'm against them limiting their scope because of the arguments of my previous post. I think we benefit as consumers from them releasing even unsuccessful and rushed updates in the long run as long as they're sufficiently huge in scope. If it was a small update and it was unsuccessful then I would probably have been just as upset as you have been. In fact I was, over the update that changed the game to hyperlanes only which I initially thought was a completely unnecessary change but I came to realize that the benefits it brought in terms of performance was ultimately better for the game in the long run and the new starbase and claim system it brought did make the game much better in the end. The difference there and now is that those changes was handed to us piecemeal, but now we have a lot of good things to look forward to at least.

 

[Alblaka]

Could you point me to any info where the developers say that this was an early release of 2.2?

They don't, obviously. But if it was a well-timed, thoroughly tested 'late' release... you get my drift.
As well, check for Christmas timing. If they wanted to release it this year, they had to do it late November / early December at the latest.

And that's exactly the problem isn't it? It's not an open beta when it's not advertised as such. When people buy a finished product they expect sth that functions properly. Bugs aside, the performance issues in this version are unacceptable.

Yes and no.

Baseline, you're correct in that usually you don't sell a customer a potentially defective product in the promise of fixing the rough edges later.

In practice, that's EXACTLY what any software development does, however. Both in the entertainment AND business industry. Of course, there are a few sectors where security has priority over costs, but in the other sectors it's always the same story of "Testing? No, we don't want you to test that feature, if you could instead finish that second one, too!"
Additionally, PDX doesn't cater to 'random potential new customer' but explicitly relies on their established fan base. Whom they can hand out implicit Open Betas to and who will both gladly pay for that and support the development, entirely based upon brand loyalty.

That's why I keep saying they should just slap a big red 'Open Beta release' label onto their major DLC releases, or offer those as opt-in branches whilst leaving the 'public release for the unwary' to 1-2 months later. This would work both for the old and new playerbases.

PDX could save themselves a lot of headache by moving to an open prerelease beta model. I recognize that PDX doesn't have the resources to test every aspect of the game before release in-house, but letting people self-select to play the testing branch (even if it's locked behind a pre-order) would eliminate 95% of butthurt flounce threads.

That.

I mean, yes, they repeatedly said that they tried Open Betas and it didn't work, but that's exactly what they are doing right now anyways, so where's the loss?

 

[Nyrael]

I'm disappointed with the quality control for the 2.2 Stellaris update. It's a buggy mess: balance issues, difficulty issues (generally too easy), trading bugs, terraforming bugs, and more. If I can uncover dozens of problems on my own in just a few days, I wonder how robust the quality assurance process was for the update. Paradox could be an amazing company if you'd put more emphasis on quality and less on speed.

The Quality Control tends to discover many more before the release.
The problem is that both bug and balance fixes tend to create many new bugs and balance issues, and that QA'a time is limited. Games and DLCs are usually tested for months, but PDS products generally only get a few weeks, even though their complexity would require more time than other games get.
So when something gets a major overhaul, I just take it for granted that it'll take a while for it to get ironed out. Since I use dozens of mods that need updating, waiting is something I already do anyway.

 

[g4borg]

some bugs are really very obvious that is true, but there are lot of them to be honest, which are quite old.

i mean TW has been outlawed since who-knows-when in online games, exploits like rivalry to break non aggression pacts without war cooldown, station health reset in fights, spawning with illegal planets, etc. are known and forbidden, hot-joins are basicly broken since forever and the game still has no resync feature, so basicly the exploit of a broken market system is really just icing on a cake - and at least that got fixed fast.

unfortunately, going to the test branch is not just a flip of a switch, as you have to update the game every time; which means the majority of players will not use testing branch and many bugs remain undiscovered.

i do blame the community tho aswell, as many things have been stated but disappear in the forum, because people do not care to bring them forward as much as they like to generally complain. so sometimes i saw problems popping up and disappearing, it is an enormous work most likely to filter out information from this.

so cut them some slack.