CO Word of the Week #8

[orbops]

Noone said scrum is foolproof, but simply checking if all post-its are in the ready column is certainly a quality check to be done before going live. Somehow I'm quite sure someone forgot to look at the board here
That someone is called a scrum master and it's his task to provide this kind of information to the decision makers.
Probably he did so, but was not listened to. What I see in daily life is that bonus constructions for project managers and board members make them ignore people who are giving a message they don't want to hear.

P.s. when scrum is a dev party, you implemented it wrong. According to the theory books post-its shall not go from 'test' to 'done' unless the tester appointed by the customer gave green light. Not even mentioning demo moments that should be reflected on post-its too. Iterations of two weeks are considere too short by many.

Those demo moments are yet another example of giving a GenZer a participation award and a chance for all the developers to step away from their desks to see what the other teams are doing. Demo moments are not designed to highlight fixing bugs, but simply showcasing new features or functionality.

The scrum master may be focused on QA within his/her own team, but usually the QA is dependent on the outputs of multiple other teams, who are focused on meeting their own goals. Most people don't realize that fixing a bug usually involves multiple teams, and if your team is simply fixing bugs that means your team will be lagging behind in new features/development. Put it this way, for a developer what is more exciting - fixing a gameplay bug or working on the code for the rollout of the console version.

 

[Collector78]

for a developer what is more exciting - fixing a gameplay bug or working on the code for the rollout of the console version.

Since the latter is a piece of cake (done before by many others) and solving the taxation / suitability bugs most likely not, you know the answer
Besides, this is not even a choice for the developers, since CO clearly stated that priority 1 is making this game stable and better....although this Word of the Week seems to contradict this earlier statement already a bit.

 

[Mazisky]

CO is doing the same error as creative assembly few months ago.

Meanwhile :

CS1 player peak : 12k
CS2 : player peak : 8k

But that must be toxic players launching CS1 just to bother CO

Yes, and Creative Assembly had to apologize and lowering prices\adding content because nobody was buying their products anymore because of that same error.

Hopefully this won't happen again here.

 

[KyoLo the major]

Yes, and Creative Assembly had to apologize and lowering prices\adding content because nobody was buying their products anymore because of that same error.

Hopefully this won't happen again here.

But we also have to consider the 2 separate situations. On one side you have CA and Sega which have years of very successful games with very wide player base. We have here yes, Paradox is holding quite a few games, but them and CO aren't so strong I believe to be able to sustain that kind of refunds..maybe they can give the first DLC as free for who got the game at day 1..
Let's just see what they can produce and relax the pressure on them!

 

[Mazisky]

But we also have to consider the 2 separate situations. On one side you have CA and Sega which have years of very successful games with very wide player base. We have here yes, Paradox is holding quite a few games, but them and CO aren't so strong I believe to be able to sustain that kind of refunds..maybe they can give the first DLC as free for who got the game at day 1..
Let's just see what they can produce and relax the pressure on them!

That's why I said "Hopefully this won't happen again", because I hope CO can fix things so that we won't reach that point which it would be a disaster for them.

One should learn from communication mistakes from other companies that costed lot of money.

 

[Blue Monkey]

Last but not least, we have seen a growing tendency of toxicity in our community, something we have not experienced to this extent before. Not only directed towards our devs but also our fellow community members - resulting in people hesitating to engage with the community. In the long run, this will really hurt not only the mood and the happiness of community members but also discourage creativity and modding, something we would be very sad to see.

What did you expect would happen if you basically release a broken product that was overhyped & overpromised? Flowers?
You seriously need a reality check. YOU brought this onto yourself and this constantly deflecting responsibility & blaming the community is just making it worse.
The game is objectively bad, while having massive potential. The 60% approval on Steam is enough proof.

As for your priorities. Modding should be 2nd, first fix the core issues (incl. the performance) for the game [realistically you do it at the same time]. At least you halted the DLCs, but tbh it would be wise for you to release a few DLCs for free for those that backed the game early, to compensate for this horrible launch (and you have nobody but yourself to blame, I mean it is obvious you could have delayed it, the console version is proof of that) and make the base game not so shallow.

Don't get me wrong, I see massive potential & and there are a few moments where I truly enjoyed it, but the performance issues, the simulation flaws & horrible simulation decisions (economy does not matter i.e.), the really shallow content & some of it is not even working (looking at i.e. ultimate police building) and then demand full price for it is a douchebag move to say the least. FULLY on CO management (you can always say no to Paradox, as you did with the console versions - edit: as some comments pointed out: Yes, most likely Sony/MS said no, but given how weak consoles are compared to PC, it would have been suicidal to release on console, so I gave them the benefit of doubt, as in 'they pulled the plug themselves').

People don't forget such things, you basically shot in your own foot. To this date many believe Cyberpunk 2077 is a buggy mess still, which is objectively not true anymore - all a result of a horrible launch. Basically Paradox (not only because of you) and now CO have gained a bad reputation as a result and it will take a long time to fix it.

 

[Lys91]

you can always say no to Paradox, as you did with the console versions

I thought it was Sony/Microsoft that said no? I am not sure how that process works.

 

[dan1979]

That's why I said "Hopefully this won't happen again", because I hope CO can fix things so that we won't reach that point which it would be a disaster for them.

As Mariina said herself "The pressure from the business side of things is quite a lot to handle"

Unfortunately I think disaster already hit. Right now there is no console release date and that is maybe 40/50% of the money CO and Paradox expected to have after years of funding development and marketing. With 4,000+ bug reports to review and performance issues, is it even close? It looks like it slipped from spring to asap now.

This is what they should be focusing on in WoW - objective, fact-based comments about what's wrong and how it will be fixed. Trying to be best friends with "the community" clearly isn't working out too well so forget it and deal with business. If I was considering buying the game today, I'm not seeing much positive here - just vague references to fixes and then more than half the post complaining about something that doesn't fix the game.

 

[Fred214]

There's so much negativity here right now that it makes me sad. Ok the game had broken parts at release we all know that through 1000 unique posts here, now please look forward. The game is playable and some parts are amazing, and a foundation that when it's adjusted is going to be awesome.

With that said, 80€ is a big or small investment depending on your income, and of course it's allowed to be disappointed.

Just wanted to say that I appreciate the work you're doing CO, with this heavy weight on your shoulders. I truly believe none of us would want a bug free game that people love to play more than the employees at CO.

My suggestion to CO and Paradox would be to release the region pack inside any of the next patches instead of as a mod asset when that part now is troubling.
That would benefit the community and the players right now.

For myself who plays through GFN that would also be the only way for me to see the region pack.

 

[ClemiMD]

I would very much appreciate it if Avanya would write the WoWs. She has the right instinct and is close to the community. I'm sure she'll approach communication with us, the mob of angry customers, at the right level. I personally also like her writing style and sense of humor.

 

[Licenturion]

I would very much appreciate it if Avanya would write the WoWs. She has the right instinct and is close to the community. I'm sure she'll approach communication with us, the mob of angry customers, at the right level. I personally also like her writing style and sense of humor.

I don't think it matters who writes the blog plots to be honest as long as everything keeps being 'soon', 'we are working on it', 'stay tuned', 'read more about it next time'.

On the official live stream I asked a few questions this week and on every question players I asked she had to say on every question 'I can't talk about this', 'I can't say', 'I am forbidden to speak about that'. When I said 'it has been 3 months of 'soon more info'' and she actually answered with 'I AGREE WITH THAT'.

Dear @co_martsu and @co_avanya what everyone is asking is this:

Priority	Status	Feature/Bug	Target release
High	Active development	XXX	2nd half of January
Medium	Rolling out	YYY	23rd January
Low	Planned	ZZZ	March
	In consideration	AAA	TBD

Such table can be updated regulary and sometimes an update can preceed with some other usefull information in blog format. There are a lot of games that have this and even regular software companies like Microsoft, Adobe etc have these things on their websites. We are all aware that roadmaps can change along the way when something goes sideways, but having information that is subject to change is still better than having no info at all.

This information will probably divide toxicty in half, help players, help modders and stop all the constant complaints that we are left in the dark and have nothing concrete to look forward too. Avanya made a 'dry excel' about mod compatability in the past when an update of CS1 was about to launch, and it really helped the community as well. So a roadmap table would work here too.

 

[DJQuad]

I thought it was Sony/Microsoft that said no? I am not sure how that process works.

It is. Consoles have requirements for performance, stability, etc that PCs don't. CS2 did not meet those requirements, hence the delay. I would not be shocked if it gets delayed again.

The good news is that some of the optimization games have to do to get on consoles can be patched for the PC version. That's probably will be what is in the "big patch" they mentioned around the time of the console launch.

 

[co_avanya]

Hi all! What a terrible week for me to be out sick, I missed so much of this discussion. A big thank you to everyone for being constructive in this thread, it’s really nice to see that we can have conversations about toxic behavior in the community without the thread devolving into toxicity. And it’s really wonderful to see that you appreciate us showing up and communicating (even if we don’t say what you hope to hear ). Being active in the community is really important to us, but of course, if the general consensus was it would be better to stay away/be more distant, then we would have to reevaluate our approach.

There are so many questions and points raised in this thread that I won’t be able to address all of them, but I’ll try to cover the ones I can that popped up a bunch.

Roadmap
This is something we’re currently looking into. While we update you through these posts, we also realize that they aren’t great when you’re looking for a quick overview. Realistically, we won’t be able to include any specific dates or dive into detailed lists of bugs that are being looked into, but we’ll be as specific as we can. Once we figure out a format that feels right for us, we’ll share one with you. So if you have any thoughts on a roadmap that haven’t come up yet, now would be a great time to share them.

Patches/bug fixes
We’re intentionally vague about what’s in a patch, like the upcoming one Mariina mentioned, as we don’t know exactly what they look like until they’ve been finalized. The last patch was specifically to include improvements to LODs, so we could talk about that as the patch wouldn’t happen without them. For this next patch, we’re looking at which fixes can be included, testing to confirm they work and that there aren’t unintended side effects. If we share that we’re looking to include a fix for bug A, and then discover that the fix introduces bug B, then the fix wouldn’t make the patch. While I know that a lot of you are completely able to understand that this can happen, I’m afraid that isn’t the case for all in our community, and due to the overall situation we’re gonna be a little more cautious with information to not disappoint.

Bug reports
We’re very grateful for all the reports and we’re working our way through them all as fast as we can. Sadly, that isn’t happening as fast as we’d like, and there are still a lot of reports without replies or tags. Last year we pulled extra staff from their regular tasks to help with the reports, but as they need to get back to those tasks, we’re looking at other options. I’m the meantime, it’s super helpful when you upvote issues that also affect you as it makes it easier for me to determine which ones are widespread and which ones are more rare/specific cases.

Feedback/wishes
We’re not really active in the subforum and that’s not likely to change because the purpose is for you to share your thoughts. We’ll pop in and ask questions if we need a little more info to understand what you’re after, but generally, this is a place where we will lurk more than anything. The fact that we don’t post doesn’t mean we aren’t reading your feedback.

We’re also looking into a solution for our community wishlist so it would be public and you could add directly to it, but it will probably be a little while before we find the right tool that does everything we need it to. But I wanted to mention it as I’ve seen some great feedback on this and we’ll hopefully have a list in the future that makes it a bit more clear that your wishes are noted and considered when we’re looking at new content.

The simulation
We hear the questions about how the simulation works (or should work) and we’re working on a dev diary to bring you more information and clarity. I don’t have an ETA for it yet, it’s the sort of thing we’ll coordinate with the community team on the Paradox side so it doesn’t overlap with other community events, but I wanted to mention it. Of course, you’re still very welcome to ask about specific functions or systems. I’ve already answered some questions before and I’d be happy to shed some light where I can.

 

[k3b0_kieran]

You guys released what was essentially an early access game at AAA prices and now seem to be glossing over that fact when your community is angry and frustrated.

Trust is a two-way street, and you destroyed what you had with the community by doing this.

What you view as toxicity is actually passion. Your fans are so passionate about Cities Skylines, to the point that people spend hundreds of hours improving your game with mods, assets, etc., that when you essentially lie and deliver something that doesn't remotely come close to their expectations, they are rightly pissed off. The beauty of IP like this is that once you release it, there's a shared ownership between you and its fans.

Instead of alienating your fan base, maybe meet them where they are. Unless you are actually proud of the state in which you released the game, I'm pretty sure you can have some empathy for how people are feeling. Don't try to fix the symptom; fix the root cause. You messed up in releasing this game and will now have to work tirelessly to regain the trust of your fan base.

Constructive feedback: Grow your team, take a hit on your margins, and accelerate bringing the game up to standard. Don't send tone-deaf messages that put everything on the fans. Continue to acknowledge your mistakes and efforts to fix them until they are fixed. Set clear SMART objectives around performance/features for what is the definition of 'done' and share them with the fans, e.g., "We think this game is running at standard when you can run it on X settings with Y minimum requirements by Z date", "The game is at launch standard when A, B, C features are available in the game by Z date". Progress towards those should be the first thing reported on in each update. If any of you are Brandon Sanderson fans, think about his progress meters on his website for each book he is writing and give us that kind of visibility on these objectives.

At the moment, it doesn't feel like you appreciate how much of an impact your Cities Skylines 2 has had. Literally, the only game I've played for hours on end since 2015 is Cities Skylines, and I'm now wishing someone else would take a crack at building a city simulator. I paid almost ~CA$100 for the deluxe version, and I feel robbed. You didn't even acknowledge your part in creating this problem at any point in the update above. You've turned a passionate promoter into a complete detractor, and this post really just cements my opinion. Right now, I won't be buying any of your products, add-ons etc. ever again.

Henry Cavill on toxic fans:
I understand what you’re saying, but when it comes to fans, it is a fan’s right to have whatever opinion they want to have. And people are going to be upset, especially when you’re talking about books or games, because you’re never going to be the exact person who they had in their head, or who they played on The Witcher 3, for example. I don’t necessarily consider that toxic, I just consider that passionate. And it’s something which I have obviously had to come to terms with over the years."

 

[ClemiMD]

Thanks for this update and nice to have you back!

 

[DanielR80]

We hear the questions about how the simulation works (or should work) and we’re working on a dev diary to bring you more information and clarity.

This needs to be included in the tutorial and relevant numbers/facts have to be shown in the game UI.

 

[TripleAgent]

Being active in the community is really important to us, but of course, if the general consensus was it would be better to stay away/be more distant, then we would have to reevaluate our approach.

I think one of the biggest issues here is lack of information. As we've discussed before, there has been a breakdown of trust between CO and the community surrounding release, and that hasn't really been fixed.

We don't want you guys to be more distant or give us fewer updates, we want updates with actual meat and information. We can't have dates, we can't have an idea of the types of bugs that are being worked on, we can't have the reason why asset importing is still unfixably broken after 3 months, all we're given each WoW is "soon" and "we're working on it" and "performance, mods, and the console release are our main priorities (on the latter point, every time you mention the console release that acts as a reminder to PC players that there is valuable labor going to a version of the game they have no interest in, which doesn't help).

As an example, WoW 6 was an apology for the "the game is not for you" debacle, announcing a bug fix on mail service, storage transfer, and pathfinding (good!), and a description of the next bugfixing patch. This one was good!

WoW 7 only contained some very general patchnotes about how money is calculated and two niche maps with strange traits, a statement that mod support is high priority, that console versions were nebulously delayed and will have modding tools, that the expansion pass is nebulously delayed, and that there has been some work on performance.

Looking at this WoW 8, we have that modding support is high priority with no concrete release estimate, console versions are still in the work but more info will be available later, we're working on a bug patch but can't tell you when we can tell you about it, and that the community is toxic. I don't see much here of substance

Comparing the three, can you blame us for wanting more information when it feels like our wheels are spinning and going nowhere and we're already dealing with information that we don't feel we can fully trust? This is why we need a roadmap. As we've discussed before, I think the Victoria 3 roadmap style would be very good for addressing this issue.

Respectfully, I also think Mariina has a responsibility to at least address the issue of remuneration/partial refunds straight up (or any other kind of concrete measure to make things right beyond "we'll eventually fix the game"). If there are zero plans and it's never going to happen, just tell us. That'll make a lot of people angry, but at least it'll rip the band-aid off and it won't be something debated anymore.

 

[jalapenojon]

I may be taking a long break from CS2 but I had to come back to say thanks for your efforts in CS2 and I’m looking forward to getting back into the thick of things next month.

I’m looming forward to the console release as well.

 

[Abitus]

Hi all! What a terrible week for me to be out sick, I missed so much of this discussion. A big thank you to everyone for being constructive in this thread, it’s really nice to see that we can have conversations about toxic behavior in the community without the thread devolving into toxicity. And it’s really wonderful to see that you appreciate us showing up and communicating (even if we don’t say what you hope to hear ). Being active in the community is really important to us, but of course, if the general consensus was it would be better to stay away/be more distant, then we would have to reevaluate our approach.

There are so many questions and points raised in this thread that I won’t be able to address all of them, but I’ll try to cover the ones I can that popped up a bunch.

Welcome back and thanks for this detailed message which is way much nicer to read than the original WOTW. Hope you're feeling better.

Realistically, we won’t be able to include any specific dates or dive into detailed lists of bugs that are being looked into, but we’ll be as specific as we can.

I hope that by "specific dates" and "detailed lists of bugs" you actually don't mean "dates" and "lists of bugs".

I perfectly understand that it can be complicated for you to announce exact dates when you don't now by advance what could break at the last moment. But I think it would be very welcomed to have time estimations (weekly-based if daily-based is too difficult) for each major bugfix/task at least.

Also, personal opinion on this but : I would prefer to see these time estimations even if they're sometimes pushed back because of something unexpected (as long as explainations are provided when it happens), rather than having to settle with vague statements like "soon" and "next" which are often too much confusing.

The simulation
We hear the questions about how the simulation works (or should work) and we’re working on a dev diary to bring you more information and clarity. I don’t have an ETA for it yet, it’s the sort of thing we’ll coordinate with the community team on the Paradox side so it doesn’t overlap with other community events, but I wanted to mention it. Of course, you’re still very welcome to ask about specific functions or systems. I’ve already answered some questions before and I’d be happy to shed some light where I can.

I think you already understand this but it costs nothing to underline it : the best would actually be to have more info on the simulation directly in the game rather than in a dev diary. I understand this is not a priority and fixes must come first, but I consider it important that this does not get forgotten. I hope that once the major bugs are fixed you'll be able to work on improving tutorials/metrics/ui and other things which can provide us more informations directly in game.

 

[CensoredLOL]

Thanks for the interaction, Avanya.
I wasn't infuriated reading it, so that's a definite improvement.

I’m the meantime, it’s super helpful when you upvote issues that also affect you as it makes it easier for me to determine which ones are widespread and which ones are more rare/specific cases.

That's really you guys' job. You need tracking on which bugs are most prevalent and which mechanics need changed the most. The bug forum is a mess - there aren't 4000 unique bugs and issues, and there is currently no way to track which ones are duplicates except by a)reading them all and b) classifying them. That can likely be resolved with more stringent forum support tools - perhaps a multi poll when submitting a report (similar to the questionnaire, except in multiple choice format) that tracks classes of bug automatically and auto-populates a spreadsheet. Web guys can likely figure that out.

You can't rely on the community in it's current (POed) state to do your job for you.

So if you have any thoughts on a roadmap that haven’t come up yet, now would be a great time to share them.

I put this after the above for a reason. Prioritizing the things people want the most is going to be key. None of us want to sit through another 3 months of bug-fixes before any new content is released. Content can be pedestrian stairs or elevators, the mythical asset pack, longer railroad bridges, bikes and bike lanes, firefighter animations, or any one of the things that people want most for the game. Bug fixes aren't a bribe to get people to return; content rules all. Give us a doggie biscuit.

We’re not really active in the subforum and that’s not likely to change because the purpose is for you to share your thoughts.

The original intent of this forum may have been that, but there is no better place for us to voice concerns. We're ALL here, interacting with each other, and now, finally, after 13 pages, with a dev. Subdividing all of the concerns into individual bug reports or posts will never get the amount of exposure that an official announcement thread will get; this is your best window to interact with people, have your posts seen and understood by the community, and, again, inspire confidence and assuage fears.

I understand that you risk "amplifying negativity" by responding to all of the concerns. I understand that it's a lot of work.

I think one of the best things you can do is to hold a series of (or even weekly) AMA or town hall style meetings, at set times, and quickly answer and interact with the community. Have 3 or 4 of your guys posting pretty blue messages while we all spam questions at you. Not everyone will be answered, and you guys would pick and choose which questions you want. It would take some coordination on your part - but putting a crew of you in a conference room with laptops would be an event that shows your knowledge, your ability, and your care for the community. Consider it.