Disappointed with Quality Control for 2.2

[anamiac]

@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.

I would change it to this:

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)
Customers thrive on new content. A few minor bugs come out.
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?'
Customers go back and buy all the DLCs they're missing because the base game is fun and works well, so they figure the new content will be interesting, functional and worth their money.
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 meets back, throws ideas on table and starts to analyse 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 thrive on new content, but quickly become unhappy when they encounter bugs that taint their experience. <-------
Hotfixes are upped.
Customers are still unhappy. <-------
Dev fixes some problems.
Customers despair. <-------
Team breaks to spend some hard earned cash and spend time with their families.
Customers aren't playing anymore. They're back to playing Endless Space 2 now. <-------
Dev fixes most remaining problems. The game gets functional AI and late game performance problems are improved. The game becomes polished.
Customers don't experience the polished product. They only remember that Stellaris is buggy as heck. But they comfort themselves that at least they didn't waste any money on the DLCs... <-------
New product enters above cycle.

 

[Pellaken]

I have to be honest, this particular release seems particularly more buggy than most other DLCs that I can remember. I've not lost the faith; and I still consider the DLC a worthwhile purchase as they are fixing the bug, but the title of this thread is 100% correct; this many basic bugs should not have slipped through the cracks, even if it did mean a delay of a month before release. I'd rather have paradox tell us "unfortunately despite our best hopes to have this out on the date we laid out for us, there are still a lot of bugs to fix, and we feel it would not be fair to release the product as is" and give us the option of opting into a beta for it instead, while polishing it up for a month.

 

[Mohreb]

It is less buggy than 2.1
There 2 out of 3 ftl methods were left out and none cared to put them back since ...
At least performance is better with hyper-only ...

 

[FoolishOwl]

Frustrating as the bugs and balance issues are with LeGuin, at least I keep seeing the Stellaris developers pushing out new content.

 

[Delthor]

My only grief is that PDX does not explicitely label the DLC releases as Open Beta

I agree 100% that you just need to view launch month as an open beta. However, I'm no so sure about wanting them to label it as such. Betas and demos and the like have a tendency to either not help sales or hurt sales; there's very few situations where it helps. So I can understand why they might choose to do that, even if it does mean expectations from the player base are a little inconsistent.

I'd much, much rather play buggy 2.2 than polished 2.1, which is pretty impressive. So I'll forgive them for taking the approach that gets them some heat over quality, but gets the game to those who want it a bit faster. This is only acceptable because they are very generous with post launch support.

 

[Foupoudav]

Are they really on holliday right now ?

 

[hellatze]

Use glavius AI mod. It fixes the AI's terribad logic without cheats, so the AI empires actually do stuff in the game.

Game original purposes are not meant to be played with mods. Otherwise, bethesda all over again.

 

[FoolishOwl]

I have a love-hate relationship with a game that's nominally in beta, is in Early Access on Steam, is one of the top 100 best-sellers on Steam, and has had only minor changes since 2015, despite it being painfully obvious that it's incomplete. When the devs push out a bug fix or a minor graphics tweak, they make it sound like it was the software engineering equivalent of building Hoover Dam.

I much prefer it when the developers are energetically trying to add new features and improve things, regardless of whether they call it a beta or not, and I can put up with some instability when I see they're really working on things. It's a game, not the firmware for a pacemaker, so I can accept the tradeoff.

 

[Studoku]

Ye, that's exactly the point I made. Which of course you didn't read, given this is a forum thread.

My point was that if you're a shill, you should make a better argument. If not, why are you ok with this?

I still don't believe the claim that this was meant to be an open beta that Paradox lied about. I'm happy to believe this was a combination of Paradox's piss-poor QA and rushing a Christmas release. That's understandable.

But either you believe this, in which case even the most loyal shill should be outraged, or you don't, in which case come up with a better Niantic defence.

 

[Avil]

I'd much, much rather play buggy 2.2 than polished 2.1, which is pretty impressive. So I'll forgive them for taking the approach that gets them some heat over quality, but gets the game to those who want it a bit faster. This is only acceptable because they are very generous with post launch support.

2.2 as it's now or 2.1 with good AI and sectors? I'm actually not sure devs said "we don't work on AI because 2.2 gonna change everything! It'll be good in 2.2!" Ok, I'll wait for 2.2. Sooo, there it is! Oh. Well, new mechanics are more interesting than old ones. I guess.

 

[praftd]

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!

They didn't. AI mods just use sloppy work arounds and events to pidgeonhole the AI into certain behavior when it messes up. Or just dumps resources on them.

Aside from very tiny fixes, they change nothing about the AI in a signifigant way. They can help, but they don't fix anything.

 

[Arnovitz]

Stellaris needs to take a page from the EU4 team at this point. Spend the better part of 2019 catching up on the "tech debt" and fixing quality of life issues for your game that has now undergone two major redesigns in the same calendar year. Look, we all enjoy Stellaris and look forward to its future, but the pace of development has clearly outstripped QA, game balance, and modability.

Take the time to get your game right. Make the new, amazing pop system function properly. Once this is resolved, consider moving forward with a DLC focused around diplomacy, war, primitives, and AI improvements that we all know needs to happen next. This is a chance to polish the game up to a higher standard. As it is, there are simply too many two-dimensional features (e.g., click here for more resources; gamble to get this event) being heaped on the game that aren't adding much strategical depth. I worry that if all of these moving parts don't eventually start working together in unison that Stellaris will end up fulfilling the lackluster prophecy of early reviewers as "bone-dry sci-fi."

 

[Invictus5966]

Tell that to those who paid 20 dollars for a DLC that doesn't work, and could be probably made truly playable in 2019, when maybe people who have waited (probably me) would be able to buy it for less.

The problem, to me, isn't Le Guin. It's Megacorp DLC.

My problem is Le Guin and not megacorp. I didn't buy this DLC and all my balance and performance issues is there.

 

[Mikhail_Mengsk]

My problem is Le Guin and not megacorp. I didn't buy this DLC and all my balance and performance issues is there.

I meant that those (me included) that didn't buy the DLC can complain, but after all we paid nothing. If PDX had waited a month to properly squash the bugs, we wouldn't be playing it right now, despite it being in a bad shape. Until the "day one stuttering" hit me with 2.2.2, i could play 2.2 and start acclimatizing to the new system.

But people PAID for something that don't work, and that's objectively something that shouldn't be excused.

 

[Pyoro]

Paradox made some promises I think at the end of the EU3 development cycle and again after some complaints about beginning of CK2 and EUIV and their first few DLCs. I felt that temporarily they got a bit better, but since I can't say that's been kept up.

The bugs in 2.2 here are too numerous to even easily list.
Holy Fury in CK2 needed a dev diary on bugs, basically.
EUIV currently doesn't have too many, but I doubt anyone can even remember all the potentially game breaking ones it had over the years.
Don't know about HoI since I don't own that.

Overall it'd be disappointing if I were still expecting anything else. It's just not going to happen.

 

[STABBY5]

I suggested that they do open betas but I was told "They create large quantities of low quality reports" which upsets me because they do that after they make a buggy release filled with game breaking bugs they somehow missed which they then fix after customers report it. Somehow all those other studios(who have much higher QA standards) are wrong even when paradox does it but won't admit to it.

 

[Flint.1b]

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.

Mate you're in the wrong business, you should be a _tester_ not a _developer_. Look for some job offers as a tester, you can earn good money doing this professionally, no need to spend your own money on doing other peoples work..

 

[Alblaka]

Mate you're in the wrong business, you should be a _tester_ not a _developer_. Look for some job offers as a tester, you can earn good money doing this professionally, no need to spend your own money on doing other peoples work..

Nah, never make your hobby your job, it takes the fun out of it.
As job, I write code. As hobby, I break other people's code.

 

[Peter Ebbesen]

Nah, never make your hobby your job, it takes the fun out of it.
As job, I write code. As hobby, I break other people's code.

Preach it!

 

[Badesumofu]

Holy Fury in CK2 needed a dev diary on bugs, basically.

Holy Fury was as close to a big free release as I’ve seen from PDS. The biggest issue was arguably the black CoAs which was only cosmetic.