CO Word of the Week #1

[Larva]

too arcade

This is, quite frankly, a horrifying verdict
If what I understand about CO team is correct - they should really be scared of such remarks
And if what I understand is incorrect - then soon we will see Cities Skylines: Mobile version...

 

[Artax Nighteven]

And I repeat: This is a video game. It has mechanics in place to solve for contingencies behind the scenes. You have zero indication that these are NOT homeless cims, you didnt spend a single second on the fact that there's nobody walking around which implies they ARE cims from another city, and you don't seem to udnerstand that even in the most advanced simulation ever made in the history of the universe, there would still be things being "faked" in the background when the forground isn't working- such as in hte case where someone completely breaks the most basic function of the game, transportation of people from place to place.

You. Have not. Provided. A clear and complex and exhaustive enough look at what is happening or how it happens in other conditions to make ANY claims on what the results of the experiment are. This is not a fair look at anything.

Just because commercial buildings get employees when nothing is connected doesn't mean the city is being faked when things ARE connected, those are two WILDLY different scenarios.

You are talking in your main language, i'm not, so don't be too cool about it. And grow up.

Say what you want, if there are no connections to the outside of the city, and workers pop in the same way, the system is working bad. [snip]

/mod-edit: removed some nasty stuff...

 

[Schm1dt]

Again. I am not saying the video is faked. I don't have the time or energy to help you boost your reading comprehension.

And I repeat: This is a video game. It has mechanics in place to solve for contingencies behind the scenes. You have zero indication that these are NOT homeless cims, you didnt spend a single second on the fact that there's nobody walking around which implies they ARE cims from another city, and you don't seem to udnerstand that even in the most advanced simulation ever made in the history of the universe, there would still be things being "faked" in the background when the forground isn't working- such as in hte case where someone completely breaks the most basic function of the game, transportation of people from place to place.

You. Have not. Provided. A clear and complex and exhaustive enough look at what is happening or how it happens in other conditions to make ANY claims on what the results of the experiment are. This is not a fair look at anything.

Just because commercial buildings get employees when nothing is connected doesn't mean the city is being faked when things ARE connected, those are two WILDLY different scenarios.

Are these 'homeless' individuals moles or dolphins? When things are interconnected, it's impossible to distinguish between fake workers and real ones. You may not fully understand how tests work.

 

[Larva]

Again. I am not saying the video is faked. I don't have the time or energy to help you boost your reading comprehension.

And I repeat: This is a video game. It has mechanics in place to solve for contingencies behind the scenes. You have zero indication that these are NOT homeless cims, you didnt spend a single second on the fact that there's nobody walking around which implies they ARE cims from another city, and you don't seem to udnerstand that even in the most advanced simulation ever made in the history of the universe, there would still be things being "faked" in the background when the forground isn't working- such as in hte case where someone completely breaks the most basic function of the game, transportation of people from place to place.

You. Have not. Provided. A clear and complex and exhaustive enough look at what is happening or how it happens in other conditions to make ANY claims on what the results of the experiment are. This is not a fair look at anything.

Just because commercial buildings get employees when nothing is connected doesn't mean the city is being faked when things ARE connected, those are two WILDLY different scenarios.

This is some Jesuit level discussion on the very straightforward fact...
When a failsafe mechanism takes over the entire system - that's very very bad. If we allow this to happen, we will never know - do we actually play the game the INTENDED way, or is it just failsafe that narrows our path to railroaded virtual reality that is not even real ?

 

[Schm1dt]

This is some Jesuit level discussion on the very straightforward fact...
When a failsafe mechanism takes over the entire system - that's very very bad. If we allow this to happen, we will never know - do we actually play the game the INTENDED way, or is it just failsafe that narrows our path to railroaded virtual reality that is not even real ?

This. You literally can't lose in this game or have serious problems. Is it still a game if there is no challenge?

 

[yalex]

So they claim to be 'no longer afraid of the marketing department' and yet they clearly were forced to release an extremely unready version of their flagship game.

 

[RA1981]

Giving specific details on the patch schedules is not something we can reliably estimate due to the way we are working now: As soon as we have a reasonable amount of fixes tested and verified we make a build, smoke test it and push it live. We are aiming for a quick patch release schedule but please understand that we won't in any case be able to have a patch out more than once a week. I will be as open about this as I can without causing even more disappointment by creating false expectations. For example if we were to have a patch in smoke late in the week, say Thursday, and the patch is good to go it can go live on the same or next day. However if it has an issue that requires the devs attention it's easily Monday before the patch is in smoke test again. I hope you understand!

I agree that it's not good to release a patch at the end of the week if it's not 100% that it'll work as intended. Maybe something worth to think about: why don't you fix a patch release weekday, e.g. monday or tuesday. This avoids the problem with having a maybe incomplete patch released before the weekend. And if you make clear that this doesn't mean that a patch is released every monday/tuesday we know what we can expect. On the other side, this might also enable you to put out smaller (uncritical) patches regularly at the beginning of the week.

And you can call it PoW (Patch of the Week )

 

[Larva]

So they claim to be 'no longer afraid of the marketing department' and yet they clearly were forced to release an extremely unready version of their flagship game.

Not really. "Not having investors" <> "Not having marketing department". Moreover, any sane marketing deputy will do everything to PREVENT such a marketing disaster
I think, that sentence should be treated normally, no real need to jab - they need money to operate, they had financial plan and they had to adhere to that plan more, than to gain potential benefit from delaying project (as it goes in indie world - sometimes delaying to do some polish actually hurts as game gets overcooked and loses wider audience in favor of core fans). Most likely - they severely underestimated the blowback...

 

[Larva]

For those who want quick patches and fast solutions - please, don't. What we really need is an acknowledgment of the problem and a promise. Hasty solutions are not advisable

 

[shells0ck]

Anyone living in the US should find a "Saul Goodman" and sue Paradox for false advertisement. The industry have no shame anymore.

 

[Lys91]

Oh my gosh. That is just absurd. Thanks for sharing!

But I assume a Dev will tell us it is just another "bug" lol...

Or they don't have time to read/watch it, and we should do a bug report...

Honestly, CO this is not a good look. I do not believe you are not aware of what the people are aware of and are pointing to. If you are really unaware, this is problematic on its own as someone else said.

 

[Lys91]

eries is not afraid of teleporting when things can't be accessed- and it's a debug, crash-prevention, keep-things-moving feature. It's not INTENDED to be pushed to the limit by disconnecting everything- it's meant to solve minor problems in hte background nobody could ever notice are happening. Think of how cars in CS1 would give up after being stuck in traffic for too long- that is the exact same mechanic, and it has the exact same results. If there's no connection, eventually the game allows things to give up, and "just get on with it".

The city in that video has no citizens, yes. But as someone else said, people from neighboring towns can and do come work in your city. I would be interested to see the camera follow someone who enters/exits any of those buildings (if they do at all), and whether the city continues to work and haev zero people if the residential zoning is all removed and hte connection is put back together (and then, again, following anyone who shows up).

That video by itself is *not* a scientific diagnosis of a problem and *cannot* be used to form a blanket statement. You CANNOT use "a test environment where nothing is set up as it is during

And the devs could answer instead of saying they don't have time to read/watch stuff.

It would be as simple as saying: X, Y and Z are bugged. What you observe is A. We are looking into fixing it.

People would not continue to go on about it if it were being addressed explicitly and openly.

 

[lujerex]

No update yet, but we can share that the modding beta group, which consists of code modders, asset creators, and map makers, has early access to modding information to give them a head start on populating Paradox Mods.

Is there a way to apply for the closed modding beta group or is it exclusively invite only?

 

[Abitus]

Quick reminder to everyone saying the game is a city painter: it's not.

I'd actually be very happy to citypaint while CO is working on fixing perfs and simulation. But the fact is, even with unlock all & unlimited money, I'm still a slave to the "as designed" weird demand. The only things really "freely paintable" are roads, endless low-density suburbs, industries, and services. If I want to paint mid-density, high-density, commercials, or offices, I have to deal with the broken simulation and just hope to eventually see demand bars increasing without being able to understand how nor why.

I could totally understand that not everything is broken, and that I also have to accept a different gameplay than CS1 gameplay, and learn to play well. But the fact is, it's really difficult to be sure about anything when we're all lost between the broken aspects AND the lack of transparency on how the simulation works.
Online communities (here, discord, reddit, youtube...) are very polarized: on one side angry people trash talking about everything being fake, on the other side ultra-optimistic people becoming arrogant by telling to the angry crowd that they don't know how to play and the game is perfect.
Drama apart, what this situation is telling us is sadly obvious: noone really knows how to play this game. Clarifications about what is a bug, what is a feature, and how features work, will be needed.

In the meantime, as I was saying... this game currently does a very poor job as a city painter. So I burried the idea to enjoy painting my ideal city while the simulation is broken. Instead I simply accepted it's useless to play this game until at least a couple of months from now.

All my support to CO's team, you have a lot of work to do.

 

[Larva]

Quick reminder to everyone saying the game is a city painter: it's not.

I'd actually be very happy to citypaint while CO is working on fixing perfs and simulation. But the fact is, even with unlock all & unlimited money, I'm still a slave to the "as designed" weird demand. The only things really "freely paintable" are roads, endless low-density suburbs, industries, and services. If I want to paint mid-density, high-density, commercials, or offices, I have to deal with the broken simulation and just hope to eventually see demand bars increasing without being able to understand how nor why.

I could totally understand that not everything is broken, and that I also have to accept a different gameplay than CS1 gameplay, and learn to play well. But the fact is, it's really difficult to be sure about anything when we're all lost between the broken aspects AND the lack of transparency on how the simulation works.
Online communities (here, discord, reddit, youtube...) are very polarized: on one side angry people trash talking about everything being fake, on the other side ultra-optimistic people becoming arrogant by telling to the angry crowd that they don't know how to play and the game is perfect.
Drama apart, what this situation is telling us is sadly obvious: noone really knows how to play this game. Clarifications about what is a bug, what is a feature, and how features work, will be needed.

In the meantime, as I was saying... this game currently does a very poor job as a city painter. So I burried the idea to enjoy painting my ideal city while the simulation is broken. Instead I simply accepted it's useless to play this game until at least a couple of months from now.

All my support to CO's team, you have a lot of work to do.

Daym mate that hits the spot... Can't even properly city paint indeed

And BTW - totally agree on the last part! No refunds for me, I will support more DLCs, I really enjoy aesthetics of this new installment and wish all the best to CO team in getting this game ironed out. Hell, I am even keeping my positive review for it on Steam just to not let it sink into the pitfall of Overwhelmingly Negative rage whirlpool!

 

[yalex]

Not really. "Not having investors" <> "Not having marketing department". Moreover, any sane marketing deputy will do everything to PREVENT such a marketing disaster
I think, that sentence should be treated normally, no real need to jab - they need money to operate, they had financial plan and they had to adhere to that plan more, than to gain potential benefit from delaying project (as it goes in indie world - sometimes delaying to do some polish actually hurts as game gets overcooked and loses wider audience in favor of core fans). Most likely - they severely underestimated the blowback...

Where did they mention anything about investors?
While there would obviously be a revenue gap by delaying a release, a potential option could have been early access. There's a variety of options between the spectrum of 'release unpolished product' and 'developer hell'.

 

[co_martsu]

Hopefully today's patch will have a positive impact on your gaming experience, see the patch notes here
I'll get back you next week with more info on what we are working on (SPOILER: It's dirty work).

 

[ma2412]

wow, a patch - thank you!!!

 

[Mazisky]

@co_martsu

Despite some disappointment with the launch state, I am really glad you folks are working hard to patch and improve.

I really wish that in some time this would be the best city builder ever made.

I believe in you guys, do not disappoint!

(and fix the flickering shadows please, game is unplayable with day night cycle due to them!)

 

[Larva]

Where did they mention anything about investors?
While there would obviously be a revenue gap by delaying a release, a potential option could have been early access. There's a variety of options between the spectrum of 'release unpolished product' and 'developer hell'.

No offense here, I am not trying to devaluate your post and I do agree with an early access point and idea of 'most likely wrong decision from CO team' on how to approach release of quite ... non-perfect game.
I assumed you were taking a stance on this reply from CO staff:

To call the state of the game Alpha is a bit a reach don't you think? The decision to release the game on PC on the announced date was made based on careful consideration. The decision was influenced by us having confidence in the gameplay, having data that the game is running well enough on a variety of hardware and not wanting to disappoint the players waiting so eagerly to play the game. We can debate if this was the right call, but does it make any difference now after the game is out? I'd rather have us focus on solutions so that everyone who likes the game can play it and enjoy it.
Colossal Order is an independent game developer owned by key members of the team so there are no investors that we would need to please on our side. When it comes to the pricing we leave that to the capable hands of our publisher.

So that's where they mentioned about investors. Thus, my point - they never claimed (as you said) to 'no longer afraid of the marketing department' - if they did, please help me with this, but what I saw, they claimed they are

an independent game developer owned by key members of the team so there are no investors that we would need to please on our side

So, my point was:

They made a decision (not to go EA, not to delay) - and they are paying for it. But they made it NOT because their hands were held by shareholders - they (probably, most likely) take quite full responsibility for it. And, hopefully, will make up for it