Disappointed with Quality Control for 2.2

[Mikhail_Mengsk]

I recognize that PDX doesn't have the resources to test every aspect of the game before release in-house

Some bugs were so glaring it's really not clear how even a single betatester couldn't spot them in like 8 hours of playthrough. I'm a strong defender of the CONCEPT behind 2.2 and MOST of its features. It's a great update, i'm really excited about it but that doesn't mean i appreciate that the game was barely playable at release. 2.2 as a free update, yes, i don't mind being buggy. I fully expected it, because it's a full rework of the economic system, to which all the game logic is tied to. The problem is that PDX released Megacorp DLC, for which people PAID FOR, and it's not playable until they fix 2.2 issues.

That's the problem.

PDX released Megacorp 6th December to maximize profits, because after December holidays people would have less money to spend. Even if that meant releasing a clearly, clearly not functional product. BEcause no, it's not functional if the AI stops working after early game, if the content of a previous DLC is borderline broken (machine empires and such), and early AND late lag make the game unplayable. IT's not the market exploits or the thousands little bug, it's entire parts of the game NOT WORKING.

But since people keep buying day one even when they should really know it wouldn't be functional for a while, PDX will keep doing it. Just wait for Diplomacy DLC. I've never done it and never will buy day one, even when (like in Megacorp case) i really wanted it. But unless PDX starts releasing functional DLCs/patches, i will never ever buy their products until they are on sale AND their bugs sorted out. Bethesda, EA and such are objectively WORSE guys in the game industry, but i feel PDX gets away with a lot of shit only because we love their final products and we fear that if we make them "pay" for this kind of behavior they will stop making the games we love. But i'm under the impression that they are goind downhill. Slowly, and giving us good products nonetheless, but i'm starting to get fed up with this kind of things. When was the last time the AI seemed to work without the help of Glavius or other peoples' mods? 1.8?

But hey, just look at the loads of people who apparently would buy a car with half its gears not functioning.

 

[Knotz]

Until such a time as Paradox embraces the 'simple solution' of labelling and human psychology and make sure they label their big updates openly as open betas it's entirely reasonable for people to be upset about poor performance and bugs because Paradox sell their products as, and people buy them as, finished products. I didn't even think it needed to be said but something is wack when a company has successfully indoctrinated their consumer base to be okay with, and even defend, unfinished products sold as finished products.

That being said I'm giving it a 65/35 chance of the game having the major issues ironed out before break but the rigorous balancing pass that'd make it really great is probably gonna wait until sometime next year.

 

[krios41]

and each patch the performance gets worse and worse.

I disagree. Sure the 2.2 made the performance unbearable.
And then we have 2.2 beta and all my performance issue's are gone. (or at least the vast majority of them, its running a ton smoother then even pre 2.2 at least)

 

[TehJumpingJawa]

Would you rather have an Open Beta released as a buggy mess, that is fixed in 1 month due to community testing massively speeding up the discovery of bugs, whilst still having the option to sticking with the previous version for as long as that takes.

or wait 1 (or more) months for the devs to work out all major flaws behind closed doors, being stuck with the previous version without any choice?


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.

When money is exchanged, the goods or services should be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose and as described. It's not just a good idea, it's the law (in most places that PI operate).

By all means have a public beta, but don't charge for it, nor advertise it as a finished product.

Tbh though in this instance it wasn't testing that was deficient (I'm sure PI were well aware it was a buggy mess), it was time allocated for fixing it.

Stellaris as a piece of software is overloaded with technical debt; bugs upon bugs dating back even before release. Unless PI acknowledge and address this, it's only going to get worse.

 

[Kougar]

I told all of my friends just how radical a change 2.2 Le Guin was for Stellaris. It got many of them interested again. In November I was telling them it would probably drop next year, my logic was such a radical redesign of the game and its mechanics would require considerable testing and time to fix issues... a week later Paradox revealed the Dec 6th launch date.

The simple truth is this update should have been released next year. The type, kind, and variety of bugs are mostly those that cannot be missed by anyone playing a single full game to completion. That tells me the update and DLC received only the barest minimal bugfixing time in order to launch before the holiday sales.

I have started six games. I have invested days worth of playtime. I lost one game outright when the grey tempest cleansed the galaxy (definitely was funny). Four games are unfinished because they are not playable, 3 minutes realtime for a single in-game "month" to pass means it will take weeks just to complete a single one of them. The sixth game I put gateways to .25%, reduced the map size and number of empires considerably. But I lose the game when an awakened empire with one fourth of my fleetpower attacks me and my ships will not engage. A crippled 40K fleet destroys a 170K fleetpower armada because all it does is fly around from system-to-system with the AI chasing them. They even ignore the attack command. This bug has ocurrred three separate times in a SINGLE game before I simply ran out of fleets and alloys to build them.

It is incredibly infuriating to spend so much time trying to play this game and its new DLC, yet not be able to even complete a single game due to bugs. I would gladly have waited two months for proper bugtesting to be done, because it's a hot unplayable mess at it is.

I own all the DLC. But after today I will no longer recommend to friends to buy DLC unless it is six months old and on sale, because by then maybe it will actually work. I am so incensed right now that I would send a refund request for the Megacorp DLC to steam, but because I have sunk so many hours into unfinished or lost games I doubt it would be approved.

I don't care about promises of changing how bugfixing Stellaris will be been made in future years. The damage is done, you already have my money, and I will think very long and hard before I buy anything newly released with the name Paradox attached to it. It may be a great game or DLC in six months after release, but I am done paying to be a beta tester.

 

[Alblaka]

When money is exchanged, the goods or services should be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose and as described. It's not just a good idea, it's the law (in most places that PI operate).

By all means have a public beta, but don't charge for it, nor advertise it as a finished product.

Tbh though in this instance it wasn't testing that was deficient (I'm sure PI were well aware it was a buggy mess), it was time allocated for fixing it.

Stellaris as a piece of software is overloaded with technical debt; bugs upon bugs dating back even before release. Unless PI acknowledge and address this, it's only going to get worse.

Have you by any chance worked as actual IT developer in a corporate environment? Because whilst I entirely agree with you that it should be like you described, it very rarely is.

And delivering bug-free software is NOT a law. You're free to try proving me wrong by citing one, but afaik it's a core issue that legislative has NOT been keeping up with digitalization and that there is no strictly defined quality definition for digital wares (and, honestly, that's a good thing, because if you apply the same rules physical manufacturers have, to software, most IT companies would have gone broke by people handing back products and demanding refunds whenever they found a bug).

As well, technical debt != bugs.
Bugs = bugs.
Technical debt = inefficient / obfuscated design/code that will increase the cost for further development somewhere along the line, and should be dealt with, but rarely is because Bugs and Features are prioritized.
(Albeit that's just nitpicking, let's agree that Stellaris, in any case, likely has both technical debt and bugs galore)

The issue is, PI can't 'address' this, past saying 'Yep, we're aware, what you want us to do about it?'.
Opposed to business level IT, where companies have millions of profit per day, and can afford spending 6+ digit sums on IT departments, PDX (or more specifically, the Stellaris project), is funded by selling copies of their game and DLCs. And there's no fix monthly payment from large-scale companies to use their software, either. If big companies, that do have the money and 'serious customer' can rarely afford foregoing features in favor of stability, why would you think Stellaris (specifically using the project, not company name, here) could do that?
Especially in the current mindset that permeates the gaming communities, they have to prioritize content/features over removing all bugs.


What I'm trying to say is that assuming PDX is unaware of the problems at hand, is implying they're braindead/middle management. They are aware of the issues, but need to be moving forward regardless. They will attribute the resources to QA that they can attribute. F.e. as they're doing right now by pumping out hotfix after hotfix, because right now they're in a position where there's enough content (and consequently sales) for the project to float by costs for a few months.
I'm not paying for the 2.2.0 version of the game. I paid for the version of the game that it will become in a month or two, or a year or two. Because I do fully trust Wiz's team (even without him present anymore) to deliver on their promise. Because they did so back in 1.0 and again in 2.0 (and, to a lesser extent, a couple times in between).


(And whilst I'm rambling and typing out essays, bonus round: Try searching my history on this forum 2-3 years back. I was exactly in the same mindset and of the same oppinion as you. Probably even a bit more demanding and aggressive in tone. Just that I was doing the same in regards to EUIV, not Stellaris. I even specifically took up the 'Partisan/Revel/Revolutionary' flag as my forum icon to express my discontent. Then I started working in IT myself and voila, now I cannot stop being amazed by how PDX manages to keep a healthy mindset, agile development practices and this degree of dedication, despite the industry 'standards'.)

 

[magickware99]

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.

I don't understand why you're willing to call this release an "implicit open beta" when Paradox stated it's an official release.

The current issue isn't that the game has a couple bugs here or there- it's that the game doesn't work. The AI is incapable of even giving the illusion of playing correctly for starters.

 

[Alblaka]

The simple truth is this update should have been released next year. The type, kind, and variety of bugs are mostly those that cannot be missed by anyone playing a single full game to completion. That tells me the update and DLC received only the barest minimal bugfixing time in order to launch before the holiday sales.

As above, they cannot afford to run through too long loops of QA, or Stellaris' sales might not cover the expenses anymore, which would lead to PDX being forced to can the project. Unless you want to imply the devs are more incompetent at their job than your average random forum user, or intentionally malicious and out to ruin your day.

PS: Holy shit I hate BBC and forum formating...

don't understand why you're willing to call this release an "implicit open beta" when Paradox stated it's an official release.

1+1=2
What else can it be?

Unless, as above, you want to imply that the guys working on this game for years, are all worse at recognizing bugs then you or me, random people with at best a slightly related technological background.
Simple conclusion is that they're entirely aware of the bugs. Now, what is it called when you release a bug-riddled piece of sotware with the intention of having the open community help locating these bugs to fix them after the initial release?

That's open beta. And since they don't call it as such, it's an 'implicit' Open Beta, not an explicit one.

 

[magickware99]

As above, they cannot afford to run through too long loops of QA, or Stellaris' sales might not cover the expenses anymore, which would lead to PDX being forced to can the project. Unless you want to imply the devs are more incompetent at their job than your average random forum user, or intentionally malicious and out to ruin your day.

Out of sheer curiosity I went through the Q3 financial report they released on their website. They appear to be doing fine financially.

How do you know that they can't afford longer QA time in their development cycle?

 

[Kougar]

As above, they cannot afford to run through too long loops of QA, or Stellaris' sales might not cover the expenses anymore, which would lead to PDX being forced to can the project. Unless you want to imply the devs are more incompetent at their job than your average random forum user, or intentionally malicious and out to ruin your day.

PS: Holy shit I hate BBC and forum formating...

I don't blame devs when management won't allocate time or resources for testing. Again these are bugs that anyone with an understanding of game mechanics will notice during a single game playthrough. They are impossible to avoid, especially when some bugs are 100% guaranteed to make long/late/large or many-AI games unplayable before the endgame is even reached.

This isn't some minor cosmetic DLC that adds a few structures. Megacorp and 2.2v as a whole completely changes the core mechanics of the game affecting almost every possible thing. Such a colossal change needs to be treated with an equally appropriate beta-testing period. I think the vast majority of Stellaris players would agree that 2.2v Le Guin is a completely different game now. So why was it treated as a minor DLC with minimal beta-testing time?

There are bugs that have existed since Utopia such as the non-engagement bug. That is an OLD bug that has apparently now gotten entirely out of hand.

 

[Alblaka]

Out of sheer curiosity I went through the Q3 financial report they released on their website. They appear to be doing fine financially.

How do you know that they can't afford longer QA time in their development cycle?

PDX finances != Stellaris project finances

Even if a company is doing well, there is no reason for them to run a project that doesn't provide profit. Even with their focus on customer satisfaction, PDX is not a welfare that will develope and maintain a game that only costs them, just to give us some joy. As nice as that would sound, it's not how economy and business operates.

See it the other way round: PDX is doing fine financially. Likely because every single of their projects is running a profit, which is achieved by sensible management and reasonable prioritization of manpower.


You can argue that these profits should be reinvested to make more profits... but that's already what's happening. CK EU Stellaris Cities are all running franchises. MechWarriors was one of the more recent additions. We're getting a completely new Planetfall to continue an older franchise, Imperator Rome is an entirely new one and there's the new secret project Wiz transfered to.
They ARE investing those green numbers to fund more projects, to satisfy more nuanced tastes, employ more people and, of course, make more profits. They're just not investing the money into projects that already run a profit. And I'm no BWL student, so I can't tell you whether that's the better choice, but I'll simply assume that PDX as a company knows what it's doing.

Megacorp and 2.2v as a whole completely changes the core mechanics of the game affecting almost every possible thing. Such a colossal change needs to be treated with an equally appropriate beta-testing period.

Yeah, which is what is going on right now. We're currently open beta testing 2.2. Just that, for some obscure reason PDX will not officially label it as such. Probably a PR thing. Or maybe a legislative one. Or something related to Steam.

 

[magickware99]

1+1=2
What else can it be?

Unless, as above, you want to imply that the guys working on this game for years, are all worse at recognizing bugs then you or me, random people with at best a slightly related technological background.
Simple conclusion is that they're entirely aware of the bugs. Now, what is it called when you release a bug-riddled piece of sotware with the intention of having the open community help locating these bugs to fix them after the initial release?

That's open beta. And since they don't call it as such, it's an 'implicit' Open Beta, not an explicit one.

No, it's the developer releasing a buggy game that doesn't work. If they release a game that they know doesn't work then I believe that's false advertising.

The distinction I am trying to make here is that you appear to be trying to find a justification for their actions. I am trying to hold them responsible for it in what little way I can.

Edit-

In hindsight I think it would be clearer to say that you, and others, appear to be trying to explain why Paradox might do this.

And I don't get why Paradox's actions need to be explained by the players.

 

[TehJumpingJawa]

@Alblaka

I used to.

I don't agree with your definition of technical debt.
Any development work that is postponed to allow an earlier release is technical debt.

Additionally, bugs will often have an underlying design flaw component to them, or will have come about because of lax development practises.(lacking proper unit test coverage for instance)

So in my mind, bugs constitute technical debt in two ways, directly(the work to fix it), and indirectly (the work to stop it happening again).

 

[Alblaka]

No, it's the developer releasing a buggy game that doesn't work. If they release a game that they know doesn't work then I believe that's false advertising.

The distinction I am trying to make here is that you appear to be trying to find a justification for their actions. I am trying to hold them responsible for it in what little way I can.

I can agree with the false advertisment bit, simply because 2.2 is an Open Beta in all but name. If they were just to slap a "Yeah, this is the Beta release for 2.2, join in early on the features, or wait until 2019 to get the bugfree version, sorry but the changes were to massive to deliver the latter by December" we wouldn't have half as much of these discussions...

And of course you can hold them responsible for misscommunicating that. I won't stop you from that.
But I'm the kind of person who will always try to remind people that there's two sides to every story. It's easy to just see the unfinished product you receive and then go on a forum rampage (not specifically referring to you, just the general state of the forum), without realizing what the alternative would look like.

And I don't get why Paradox's actions need to be explained by the players.

Me neither, to be honest.

Additionally, bugs will often have an underlying design flaw component to them, or will have come about because of lax development practices.(lacking proper unit test coverage for instance)

I would respectfully disagree with that.

In my current project we're living by TDD, but besides the issue of dealing with components that aren't our own, and some chunks of legacy code, even our newest additions to the code never remain bugfree. And that's not even counting the 'bugs' that come down the pipeline when the customer suddenly decides that the button should have a more fancy color.
Of course you can cut down the number of bugs by maintaining proper practices,
and I would freely doubt Stellaris has a great test coverage on the Integrative level (then again, I'm not sure you can actually write 'simple' tests for a game that complex).
but I would never go along the conclusion "There's bugs, the test coverage must be lacking."

So in my mind bugs both directly(the work to fix it), and indirectly (the work to stop it happening again) constitute technical debt.

Let's simply agree that bugs are bad, technical debt is bad, middle management is an abomination and 99.9% Unit Test coverage a dream The fuzzy details of what constitutes what are best left to people writing guidelines and manuals.

 

[artemis667]

The option is there to revert, if anyone feels that strongly about it (and I understand why people might want to do that. I'm almost tempted myself in truth, just until it gets a bit less raw). I don't think there is any justification to be angry at the devs for the situation. It is an extraordinarily complex evolution of the game, and sometimes it takes time to get these things right.

 

[tinculin]

The chances are that the QA team did identify a number of these bugs and issues prior to release, especially the glaringly obvious ones.

What’s far more likely to of happened is their product/commercial team weighed up releasing the product before Christmas with know issues vs a later release and made the call to go ahead.

Given the number of issues and frustrated people, I’m not sure it was the right decision, but we’re probably doing their QA team a bit of a disservice in suggesting some of the more glaringly obvious bugs weren’t picked up.

 

[Studoku]

Yeah, which is what is going on right now. We're currently open beta testing 2.2. Just that, for some obscure reason PDX will not officially label it as such. Probably a PR thing. Or maybe a legislative one. Or something related to Steam.

It's as if people don't want to pay to do QA for Paradox.

If anything the "this is a paid open-beta advertised and marketed as a full release" argument should count against Paradox. I can accept them releasing a rushed product to release for Christmas (and they have a reputation for fixing things) but intentionally releasing a beta and outright lying about it is something even the shills should be mad at.

 

[itsuart]

And I don't get why Paradox's actions need to be explained by the players.

Stockholm syndrome. And I'm not sure if I'm joking anymore.

The only way to change this behavior of our beloved PDX is to stop incentivizing the company by knowingly paying money for subpar product. Otherwise they have no reason to change anything. Why would they?

 

[Alblaka]

It's as if people don't want to pay to do QA for Paradox...

Speak for yourself.
I bought the DLC, and will keep buying the DLCs, in the full knowledge that the releases are very likely to be bug-laden and Open Beta-ish. Because I'm still having fun. Both as a player, and as a software-developer who get's to kind-of-help-out debugging a favorite game of his. That said, having fun debugging fun software is probably a trait unique to crazy codemonkey's like me, so you're correct, that this may be a concern for PDX.

Then again, I would assume any sales you 'lose' due to labelling a release as Open Beta will come back once the full release rolls around, so that's a moot point for me.

Why would they?

Why should they?

I'll take "play (/beta test) this release now, or use our freely avaible revert function to keep playing the previous stable version until we iron out the bugs" over "wait extra-long to play a more polished version' every day.

And, I'll take the former over "don't buy the DLC because you want PDX to admit it's an open beta release first, but therefore risk Stellaris getting less manpower because the sales go down", too. (Or, to clarify: I would love PDX to just mark those releases explicitely as Open Beta so that people less informed about the topic wouldn't run into (from their perspective) unexpected bugs, but I don't this one grievance as a cause critical enough to stop supporting the developement of the game financially. I will however be vocal about the issue, as I am right now.)

 

[Mergoth]

The problem with Stellaris (and all of PDX games in fact) is that even if they fix all the bugs and make 2.2 playable, they will soon add another DLC and the game will be a bugfest and unplayable again... So you only have a little margin to play the game between a stable version with few bugs and the next version with tons of bugs