How can so many major game aspects be broken?

[BlackholePD]

You're right; what I wanted to argue is that both are essentially done by the higher-ups who want to see financial profit.

And I do blame the developers for creating a planetary system that their AI cannot handle at even the most basic level (managing the numbers on your planet like amenities and unemployment). Seriously, look at any of the AI planet after the mid 2300. It doesn't know how to deal with these basic game mechanics.

I am still fairly bemused by the empire that kept constantly building habitats. I still have dozens of uninhabited habitats within my borders, and a few sectors with like 15 inhabited words in them that are nearly all habitats. The habitats were all cripplingly underdeveloped, too. Took me a while to stop them from being a drain on my economy.

And no, that strength in alloys didn't seem to transfer to a particularly strong fleet, because I steamrolled them easily. They just really liked building habitats I guess.

 

[Ramiren]

I think microtransactions are a little more predatory than broken game mechanics, because they actively seek to further exploit the player. Plus they're an intentional "feature", as opposed to merely the product of lacking development time.

But regardless, I still wouldn't be running up to some hapless programmer at EA and yelling at them about this. They don't make these decisions, it's the corporate leadership that does.

I mostly just don't want this to turn into "let's shit on the Paradox development staff, and then get the thread locked".

I'd argue that in order for microtransactions to work, the base game needs to be of good enough quality that you want to invest additional money into gambling on it.

I mean imagine if EA launched a game with the kind of issues we're seeing with stellaris right now. People wouldn't be complaining about the microtransactions because you can't even experience their negative effects when the game doesn't work. If you buy a game and it has microtransactions you've paid for and received a working product that's using scummy tactics to try and sell you more. If you pay for a working product and recieve a broken one you just haven't gotten what you paid for period.

 

[Beardy-Bard]

I'd argue that in order for microtransactions to work, the base game needs to be of good enough quality that you want to invest additional money into gambling on it.

I mean imagine if EA launched a game with the kind of issues we're seeing with stellaris right now. People wouldn't be complaining about the microtransactions because you can't even experience their negative effects when the game doesn't work. If you buy a game and it has microtransactions you've paid for and received a working product that's using scummy tactics to try and sell you more. If you pay for a working product and recieve a broken one you just haven't gotten what you paid for period.

I think you are right, look at Fallout 76 you have the possibility for Ingame transactions but what you read on nearly every review are the bug reports and not about the transactions

 

[Asuzu]

As someone working in QA in large software company, i must say "nine women won't give birth to a single baby in a month" saying is over-used and wrong for most part. It's a fairy tale for people who doesn't know how it works. Most of the the things Stellaris (or any other game) lacks, including tech debt can very well be fixed by random people with basic knowledge in the field. Sure, some product require unique approach and unique skills but i don't think it apply to areas Stellaris lack, that mostly are about lack of play-testing (as bugs, balance issues, and feature not working as intended) and following fixes. If like two weeks before release they show us hot code with placeholder art it is an issue.

Also about team size. Sure increasing it may result in issue, but current situation cause issues already. Major ones.

Yeah, working in software development myself, leading project management and delivery, I completely agree.
The game shows pure case of simple play-testing absence.
Most of the issues and bugs we encounter can be seen with naked eye just by.... running and actually playing the game.
Which means not even simpliest QA has been done.

And with the amount of cash milked from the players, the size of 15 should have been just the playtesting team, not even developers.
At least 3-5 people should be just on bug fixing duty, considering how bloated bug forum is.
Some reported bugs stay there for years now, that is simply not acceptable.

Having an AI mod being mandatory must be insulting to developerts, at the very least they should hire Glavius or freelance him to help and fix current AI scripting.
And that is not just for AI logic, but simplier things, like default station/ship loadouts.

But who am I kidding, this has been working well for Paradox for years now, so why even bother changing stuff, hiring more people and losing cash.

 

[Spyhawk]

Yeah, working in software development myself, leading project management and delivery, I completely agree.
The game shows pure case of simple play-testing absence.
Most of the issues and bugs we encounter can be seen with naked eye just by.... running and actually playing the game.
Which means not even simpliest QA has been done.

I'm sorry to ask, but I have to: are you guys still in touch with reality?

What is the most believable, between:
* Paradox devs not even launching their game to test their own new code during their development, or
* Paradox devs being aware of the broken status of their code but releasing it anyway to meet that cashy Christmas deadline?

 

[Korruna]

Which means not even simpliest QA has been done.

I think QA takes too much heat for bugs that players find. Most of the time, the bottleneck for fixing bugs is not finding them but rather fixing them. I really hope that their next DLC is content-based (Events, races, etc.) rather than systems based so their programmers can be tasked with going through this enormous backlog of bugs instead.

 

[Madzai]

I'm sorry to ask, but I have to: are you guys still in touch with reality?

You're mixing terminology a bit. "Lack of QA" isn't the same as "lack of testing" or "bad testing" only. Software Quality assurance include both testing and fixing the issues (because you assure quality, not just point out issues) what was found during testing. So we don't bash PDX testing team, they probably found and reported a lot of issues. Not all was found probably lack of resources of Testing team and very limited time frame, which is, btw, is also "lack of QA" if you don't have enough time\resources.
And also, it can be totally possible that some areas wasn't tested at all aside from basic tests (like that application don't actually crash after certain actions) if they were added at last minute.

 

[Mikhail_Mengsk]

I think QA takes too much heat for bugs that players find. Most of the time, the bottleneck for fixing bugs is not finding them but rather fixing them. I really hope that their next DLC is content-based (Events, races, etc.) rather than systems based so their programmers can be tasked with going through this enormous backlog of bugs instead.

Well, to be honest, a lot of bugs are literally missing lines in the code, and others are fixed by editing .txt. Deeper issues of course would require waaaaaaay more work.

 

[~Robbie]

I really hope that their next DLC is content-based (Events, races, etc.) rather than systems based so their programmers can be tasked with going through this enormous backlog of bugs instead.

This is what Stellaris has needed for a long time IMO. New systems are fine if they don't come at the expense of leaving the game broken for a long period of time. Not to mention that we've had the same events going for so long that adding new would be a good way to spice things up on the narrative/RP side of things with Stellaris. Then the team can use that opportunity to fix mission critical bugs, because they know that the new content they're adding is something that won't break.

 

[Spyhawk]

You're mixing terminology a bit. "Lack of QA" isn't the same as "lack of testing" or "bad testing" only.

Agree, but I was answering on the following point:

The game shows pure case of simple play-testing absence.

I don't buy the idea they were clueless about the state of the game, when blatant issues could be seen by the "naked eyes". They knew.

 

[MrMess85]

Agree, but I was answering on the following point:



I don't buy the idea they were clueless about the state of the game, when blatant issues could be seen by the "naked eyes". They knew.

There are a few bugs you can understand how they slipped through but...

• The performance stutter! What are they testing the game on? Super computers?
• End game crisis simply broken. No one realised that the end game crisis wasn't purging?
• AI empires not building anything? Did they just think they were really good players? Did no one look to see what was happening beneath the surface?

 

[Madzai]

I don't buy the idea they were clueless about the state of the game, when blatant issues could be seen by the "naked eyes". They knew.

But i did answer that on too. Depending on how Stellaris is build(how modular it is) it's totally in a realm of possibility that some elements were added last minute and not\almost not play-tested at all. Or just different build was tested. I know a recipe for disaster called : "man, we did not include any changes to those ares so no need to test them again", too well.

 

[Spyhawk]

But i did answer that on too. Depending on how Stellaris is build(how modular it is) it's totally in a realm of possibility that some elements were added last minute and not\almost not play-tested at all. Or just different build was tested. I know a recipe for disaster called : "man, we did not include any changes to those ares so no need to test them again", too well.

Oh I agree on that one. I'm the first to have first-hand experience on that "last minute commit" that breaks everything. I however doubt that a last minute change would still not be reverted one month after release.

...
Well, I'm writing that, but we know from the Stellaris post-mortem they didn't even prototyped stuff correctly. They might still practice some "shortcuts" or widly use bad practices, but then this is pure incompetence that doesn't deserve customer money.

 

[Greenslade]

There should probably be a catch-all "Moaning about 2.2" thread that all the new complaints posts can get merged into, IMO. There's like 2 or 3 new ones a day and it's clogging up the forums.

 

[Soranya]

This is in my opinion the main issue behind such a buggy update - the project management turned into chaos mode at Paradox. I am a software developer myself and I have worked for a few companies with different project management pipelines and when I look at 2.2 it just smells like whomever is handling project management can't handle it. Or is doing too much coding herself/himself because project management is not very fun for coders (you have to talk to people, yuck). That can happen when you make a lead dev into a project manager and she/he is not very much into new duties. This can be made worse if the main decision makers cannot make up their minds and change plans after they commit to a release date and the project manager does not have the power (which requires experience) to say 'no'. Paradox needs a dedicated project manager who knows how to get this job done well and all our problems will go away. In my opinion.

A good project manager for a large project does not do any coding or does it only a small percentage of time. Main duties lay in having a general oversight of the project and making sure that everything fits together. This cannot work if you have to do the dirty work yourself.



Even more reason to get a proper project manager + assistant if need be. Stellaris team did not scale up well is seems.

Thy so much for this statement. I 100% Agree that lack of proper (Software) Project Management can very likely be the cause for all the problems.

 

[Asuzu]

I think QA takes too much heat for bugs that players find. Most of the time, the bottleneck for fixing bugs is not finding them but rather fixing them. I really hope that their next DLC is content-based (Events, races, etc.) rather than systems based so their programmers can be tasked with going through this enormous backlog of bugs instead.

In both cases, I hold project manager responsible.
It is his prerogative to make sure there are no bottlenecks between QA and coders.
In my experience, putting a lead developer (such as Wiz) into project manager role is terrible mistake, as numerous examples have proven, developers make terrible project managers/delivery managers.
Stellaris IS a huge game with lots of species, ethics, whatever included. It must be hell to test, no doubt. Which makes QA division even more responsible to hold the torch and not get burnt.
I have no doubt of course, that the current broken release is solely to blame on management rushing the DLC out for Christmas sales as well.
Well-known Paradox logic of "let's milk the sales, and patch it with 11-12 patches later".

And the pipeline between QA and coders responsible to fix issues is more than clogged.
Not to mention, many issues are just left unanswered until later.
E.g. "why bother with fixing sector AI, when we plan to redo planet management sometime soon..ish?"
E.g. "why bother with fixing border protrusion, when we plan to move to outpost model sometime soon..ish?"
And so on and on.

I agree, from business point of view it's perfect, you save craptons of money by not coding behind, but coding ahead, but hey, this train has to arrive somewhere.
Stellaris 2.2.3 is a perfect example of this gone too far, the game is beyond unstable atm, literally impossible to play, AI has no idea what it is doing at all, game crashes every time when exiting to menu, and so on and on. How much longer can this go on?
At some point you have to take account, settle down, stop jamming new features and stabilize.
Or at the very least, branch your coding properly, so the main product is being stabilized while small science team is working on experimental features.

But in current development model, Stellaris is just a trainwreck about to happen, if not happening already.
This is not Agile, this is not Scrum, this is "Omfg Christmas is coming" type of development.

 

[SeekTruthFromFx]

This is in my opinion the main issue behind such a buggy update - the project management turned into chaos mode at Paradox. I am a software developer myself and I have worked for a few companies with different project management pipelines and when I look at 2.2 it just smells like whomever is handling project management can't handle it. Or is doing too much coding herself/himself because project management is not very fun for coders (you have to talk to people, yuck). That can happen when you make a lead dev into a project manager and she/he is not very much into new duties. This can be made worse if the main decision makers cannot make up their minds and change plans after they commit to a release date and the project manager does not have the power (which requires experience) to say 'no'. Paradox needs a dedicated project manager who knows how to get this job done well and all our problems will go away. In my opinion.

A good project manager for a large project does not do any coding or does it only a small percentage of time. Main duties lay in having a general oversight of the project and making sure that everything fits together. This cannot work if you have to do the dirty work yourself.

Even more reason to get a proper project manager + assistant if need be. Stellaris team did not scale up well is seems.

I don't know anything about Stellaris specifically, but PDX policy is normally to separate Game Designers (with dev experience) from Project Leads (with project management experience). The HoI 4 Project Lead, @KimchiViking, explained some of this in a dev diary about the development process a couple of years ago.

 

[PainlessDK]

There are a few bugs you can understand how they slipped through but...

• The performance stutter! What are they testing the game on? Super computers?
• End game crisis simply broken. No one realised that the end game crisis wasn't purging?
• AI empires not building anything? Did they just think they were really good players? Did no one look to see what was happening beneath the surface?

There was a playthrough sometime last year where the devs also had a lot of stuttering (while streaming on Twitch), but as far as I remember didn't make any notice of it. Strangely enough.

 

[Fampat]

didn't make any notice of it

If youre in presentation mode, as a responsible, surely you cover such things up by trying not to notice it.
Iam pretty sure they know and knew, and they are working on in since then, but must be a pretty hart one to find.

 

[TheAtreides84]

Then they release the stuff, see how people pay them money for the crap, make a big laugh at the loosers and go on holidays to spend the money they got for making crap.

Stellaris is dead.

Nah, they'll fix it. They'll just take till kingdom come. I have accepted it like a fact of life by now. Taxes and PDX games needing up to three years to be in a reasonably complete, playable state. On the plus side, you'll enjoy discounts if you wait that long.