CO Word of the Week #8

[Sc0rpy4]

Thanks for the update.

Yes, hateful comments are unnecessary.
But when people feel like their expectations are not met (pushed by your m4rketing) they'll feel emotional and one or the other leads to the current state of this community.
There's a really simple solution though:

• Taking full responsibility of the current state of the game
• Giving a public, official apologize and admitting that the game should not have been released yet
• Full transparency: when can we expect what improvements? What's the Roadmap? Will there be free content?

As long as you don't do the above, every m4rketing phrase in your words of the week is another drop of your customers' patience ("we won't realease xyz feature yet because we want to make sure it's polished", "we're excited to see the process", "we can't wait", "we take as much time as needed to implement xyz because we know this community deserves it" etc) . It really undermines your reputation.

Anyway, I will wait for such a post. Until then, i will look with scepticism not only on future release of CO but on any games published in the name of paradox.

PS1: we are well aware that most you peeps just follow orders. So maybe it's time that the board shows some signs of "hey we actually do care"

PS2: Bring animations back to this game. There's no motivation to build parks, schools, soccer fields etc if there's no single soul using it.

PS3: it's very not productive when people like me who are genuinely interested in trying to give an answer have to spend 10min to figure out why the spam filter (or that something is inappropriate) complains just to find out that i used the word "m4rketing"

 

[Collector78]

CO already confirmed they don't have any internal QA. This needs to be changed ASAP

They confirmed there is no internal QA? So there is no sprint planning with a scrum master? There are no test tools containing 'found issues'? There is not even a lead developer informing management about the progress? It would explain a lot but I find it hard to believe (and I've seen a lot after 25 years in IT)

 

[TheMax85]

As you may have noticed we had a couple of weeks off for the end of the year, but now everyone is back to working on Cities: Skylines II. Thanks for all the holiday wishes, it was lovely to receive them!

It will be a busy time of the year for us so I’ll quickly go over some highlights for the upcoming months. As we have stated earlier, there is no higher priority than releasing the modding support for the game. The Editor UI is expected to be ready enough for the closed beta in a few weeks. There is an issue with the asset import still that we are hard at work solving. If the issue is not resolved in a reasonable time we’ll consider releasing the editor without the ability to import custom assets and just have the maps and code modding present. Whichever the resolution for the modding support is, we can’t wait to see your creations!

The console versions of the game will also have the Editor (minus code modding) so therefore the Editor is the highest priority but in parallel, we’re also working on the stability and performance on console to make the game available for the console players as soon as possible.
The schedule for the upcoming months and the early access program for modders will be available later.

Before the Editor release, we’ll have a bug fixing patch that will include fixes for issues that have been resolved while the work above is ongoing. You can expect fixes for simulation and visual bugs, both based on internal findings and issues reported by you. The patch notes will be available when the patch is released. Thanks for all the reports!

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.

We have always treasured having the devs present on the different social platforms and having direct communication with the community, but our biggest responsibility will always be protecting the team and making sure they work in a safe environment so they are allowed to do their best staying motivated and productive. So we hope we can all work together for our devs to be able to stay and be continuously active.

As the mentions of this in previous entries do not seem to have moved the needle, perhaps you have a constructive way of telling us how we can improve the way we communicate with each other. Should we add more moderation or is the only option to pull back our engagement on our end? How can we make sure the community is a safe place for you to share your thoughts and hopes for the game?

Here are a few ideas to start with:

• Give feedback and disagree, but do it constructively! Be specific and detailed, and don't worry about what others think. We have a diverse community so opinions and experiences will always vary.
• Assume people mean well and remember that tone can be hard to convey in writing.
• Help us make the community a nice place for everyone by showing your fellow mayors how to give constructive feedback.
• Always be kind

And we wish everyone happiness and success in 2024!

Sincerely,
Mariina

First of all: happy new year!

I am replying pretty late because I wanted to take some time to think about your words @co_martsu

I get what you mean by toxic. Some of the posts I find are really written way to aggressive. I mean some people even disliked that I wrote your guys a merry christmas. Why?!

But I think this has more than one dimension to consider next to some people simply being impolite.

1. Written messages often tend to sound worse than if someone speaks face to face. Only writing text lacks body language and can cause communication issues.

2. Most of us here - including you - are not native English speakers. Tab can cause additional issues in expressing criticism by sounding way to strong.

3. You guys are Finnish and famous in our country to be sensitive against our very direct and sometimes very strong way of criticizing.

As you may have noticed we had a couple of weeks off for the end of the year, but now everyone is back to working on Cities: Skylines II. Thanks for all the holiday wishes, it was lovely to receive them!

It will be a busy time of the year for us so I’ll quickly go over some highlights for the upcoming months. As we have stated earlier, there is no higher priority than releasing the modding support for the game. The Editor UI is expected to be ready enough for the closed beta in a few weeks. There is an issue with the asset import still that we are hard at work solving. If the issue is not resolved in a reasonable time we’ll consider releasing the editor without the ability to import custom assets and just have the maps and code modding present. Whichever the resolution for the modding support is, we can’t wait to see your creations!

The console versions of the game will also have the Editor (minus code modding) so therefore the Editor is the highest priority but in parallel, we’re also working on the stability and performance on console to make the game available for the console players as soon as possible.
The schedule for the upcoming months and the early access program for modders will be available later.

Before the Editor release, we’ll have a bug fixing patch that will include fixes for issues that have been resolved while the work above is ongoing. You can expect fixes for simulation and visual bugs, both based on internal findings and issues reported by you. The patch notes will be available when the patch is released. Thanks for all the reports!

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.

We have always treasured having the devs present on the different social platforms and having direct communication with the community, but our biggest responsibility will always be protecting the team and making sure they work in a safe environment so they are allowed to do their best staying motivated and productive. So we hope we can all work together for our devs to be able to stay and be continuously active.

As the mentions of this in previous entries do not seem to have moved the needle, perhaps you have a constructive way of telling us how we can improve the way we communicate with each other. Should we add more moderation or is the only option to pull back our engagement on our end? How can we make sure the community is a safe place for you to share your thoughts and hopes for the game?

Here are a few ideas to start with:

• Give feedback and disagree, but do it constructively! Be specific and detailed, and don't worry about what others think. We have a diverse community so opinions and experiences will always vary.
• Assume people mean well and remember that tone can be hard to convey in writing.
• Help us make the community a nice place for everyone by showing your fellow mayors how to give constructive feedback.
• Always be kind

And we wish everyone happiness and success in 2024!

Sincerely,
Mariina

First of all: Happy new year and welcome back!

@co_martsu
I am replying late because I wanted to think about your words. I understand what you mean by toxic. Some messages here are. And on some other platforms I found even worse. I can still not understand why some people even disliked my merry christmas to your team. Why?!

While I agree that toxic behavior has to be stopped, we should also look at other dimensions because I can immagine that with all the complains you receive it's easy to get into a negative mood.

I believe next to the general issue of bad behavior on the internet you should consider some more dimensions for dealing with all this. I work in an international team and a face a lot of communication issues. And actually I've learned to keep most of my engineers as far as possible from our stakeholders for good reasons. It's all about communication.

1. Human communication usually needs body language. That is missing on the internet. So our messages can easily be interpreted much stronger than we intended them to be. Especially when people try to express emotions by text. So it's in general wise to keep calm, take a deep breath and try to get the real meaning behind. If it's still toxic, react accordingly.

2. Many of us here - including you - are not native english speakers. Therefore there is always a high risk of writing or understanding something in a tone that does not fit. It does not have to be about missing vocabulary, it is often just the way you express things. I guess you know that from your mother language, but most of the time you won't actively think about it there.

3. We come from very different cultures with different critism culture. You Finish for example are famous in our country for beeing sensitive against our (very direct) way of complaining. It gets even more complicated when I have to criticize a japanese person. We Germans always see the end of the world coming for literary everything and will always find something to complain. Now unfortunately most people are not aware of this when writing. We have a joke: A Finish and a German meet in a British pub, the Finish might say "what a lovely pub!", the German will also like the location but say something like "what a terrible weather outside and what a disgusting warm beer..."

4. We all live in a world situation that causes stress and fear. You should understand that very well considering your geographical location. Now you might think this has nothing to do with a computer game. But it has. Such a peacefull game as yours is for many people an opportunity to escape from all this stress. If this promised place of piece like this does not work, it makes people disappointed if they have to deal with issues like we all know.

5. I read a lot of demands for refund. 50 € for the game are not much for someone like you and me. But did you consider, that for many people this is a lot of money? And how they feel if it does not work as expected and they read a sentence like "might not be for you". You appologized for that sentence already. But what I talk about is not words. Its emotions connected with it.

 

[DerFremde]

Toxicity is a problem. But I think the bigger problem in the long run are the players, who already lost interest in your game. I am one of them, I played a lot of CS1, was looking forward to CS2 but I have moved on. I think there is no way to fix it to a point where it's actually fun and rewarding to play. The bugs are too massive, the graphics not good enough and it lacks the love for details like players in the soccer fields, firefighters, children playing in the parks, bicycles etc.

One day, another small developer will publish a game that will be to CS2 what CS1 was to SimCity. I am looking forward to that day.

 

[Abitus]

I never said anything that you wrote there. I don't think companies are right about doing that. I'm just saying that, sadly, that's how it works and that's what they're doing.

Yeah, you're right. It's not always easy for me to express nuanced things in english, so I'm sorry for that.

But :

- You said that, according to the philosophy of these evil corp companies, apologizing and admitting errors is "bad for business". I totally recognize that you didn't say this as it was your own opinion, but it's still an opinion I strongly disagree with, regardless of if it's yours or not. What you said made me want to react to it, not to argue with you but with the idea itself. I'm sorry if I made it sound like I was attacking you on this subject, that was not my intention.

- You also said that we as customers have to realize and accept that those evil corp companies think and work like this, and that we won't get anything better. This on the other hand seemed like it was your own opinion. And if my intention is still not to oppose to you personnally, that statement is also something I strongly disagree with. My opinion on this particular subject is that, on the contrary, the more companies are thinking and acting like this, the more we must fight them (my point being that if we don't, society as we know is in danger of collapsing - that may sound an exagerated statement but remember it's only a personal opinion, intended to be balanced with things like climate crisis or the rise of totalitarism all around the world).

In summary rest assured that I have nothing against you personnally. What you expressed seems to come from an analysis that I sadly share, so I think we're on the same page on that. But yeah, I felt the need to say that, precisely because of these observations, we desperately need to fight with more intensity. Like I said, it's not us customers who have things to realize. It's capitalists, shareholders and companies, all over the world.

 

[elektrizikekswerk]

Thanks so much for that insight! I do think we'd benefit from ensuring moderators, when posting as users, enable their posts to be reacted to.

As @Lucododosor said this has to be done manually for every post after we posted them - sometimes we forget. Please feel free to ping/@ us if you see such a post so we can change it accordingly.

 

[DanielR80]

They confirmed there is no internal QA? So there is no sprint planning with a scrum master? There are no test tools containing 'found issues'? There is not even a lead developer informing management about the progress? It would explain a lot but I find it hard to believe (and I've seen a lot after 25 years in IT)

@co_avanya said so

we do not have in-house QA

here:

The Journey to Launch - Mini Documentary about the Release and Future of Cities: Skylines II

Last week was the last written Word of the Week of the year, and we instead wanted to share a short film we're been working on from Colossal Order and Paradox Interactive. Listen in on our thoughts, hopes, and dreams about the development, the...

forum.paradoxplaza.com

 

[Soeverein]

Toxicity is a problem. But I think the bigger problem in the long run are the players, who already lost interest in your game. I am one of them, I played a lot of CS1, was looking forward to CS2 but I have moved on. I think there is no way to fix it to a point where it's actually fun and rewarding to play. The bugs are too massive, the graphics not good enough and it lacks the love for details like players in the soccer fields, firefighters, children playing in the parks, bicycles etc.

One day, another small developer will publish a game that will be to CS2 what CS1 was to SimCity. I am looking forward to that day.

Absolutely. At least the toxic players are still interacting with the game. I havent posted anything on social media about the game until this post because honestly I refunded it within an hour after purchase and havent even thought about the game until I saw a news article about the 'toxicity'. Im unsubscribed from any Cities social media so unless it reaches wider channels I wont hear about it.

But the nr 1 way for a developer want to build and keep a purely positive community, is by releasing games that deliver on their promises and dont overhype and dont feel like a downgrade compared to their predecessors. Dont give people anything to be toxic about in the first place.

 

[prismaticmarcus]

I can't provide my feedback, apparently it is spam? Why? No links, no abusive language, no profanity....

Is this being called spam so you don't have read my feedback? And you wonder why we are toxic.

What? Here your post is. If you wanted to include a link the automated system may have blocked it. Go ahead and provide your feedback.

 

[FX2K]

Happy new year!

So, based on the video at the end of the year and this post, here is what I understand:
- The fans had unrealistic expectations created by the marketing team, which is "too good". Obviously, the companies(both companies kept feeding the hype with streams, videos, friendly YouTubers that coincidentally always get sponsored videos by Paradox) share no responsibility for state the game was released and the current state almost three months after it was released.

- The toxicity is keeping the devs from interacting with the community. Maybe I'm missing something, who, other than the CM and the CEO has actively interacted with the community? This feels like another attempt to shift responsibility to the fans, especially when everyone knows that it's a minority that should be punished according to the rules that are already in place for the forums, as it always has been here. If the problem happens in other platforms it should be mentioned in the post.

Meanwhile, the first message of the year, provides no roadmap or a list of actual targets, no timeline or gameplan. The same vague statements keep being repeated, the line about modding is almost word for word from the previous WoWs. This should've, in my opinion, set the tone for the year, instead, it feels like a smokescreen to change the topic.

I thought exactly the same and just clicking the I agree did not feel substantial enough, so quoting the content to highlight that fact.

Sell a broken product, blame the customer expectations, then say there's toxicity because you sold a broken product, what is still broken and unfinished.
This isn't me being toxic, this is me being taken for a fool. Well, never again!

FWIW, the game runs like a pile of ... on an i9 14900k, RTX 4090 and 64gb ram, with low population counts and has a tonne of issues and bugs, unifnished functionality and its my fault apparantly.. I don't think I have much in the way of a PC upgrade path. Sorry, but Its ridiculous. Its now been months!

Get your act together and the community will pull together also.

 

[zdravkodubravec]

It is sad that for weeks maybe even months almost many people asked politely what can they expect, what will be in game and what not… how it will run… After we started to see deeper below the facade how things are bad and started rightfully complain and expect a lot from a 90 euro game you call that toxic! In my opinion it is more sad that in this case development had most probably no say in what big bets are or what priorities should be in there work! Rightfully so i can say that what is toxic is lack of planing and proper priorities that align with what your customers want and not your CEO and so on … and not to mention console centric approach where from what i see only important thing is your profit….. I really don’t want the game to flop and studio to go under but it is more likely that it will never be the same! Especially considering that to this day you still do not support any kind of custom content or mods for pc officially! Thx!

 

[Kanslee144]

Yeah, you're right. It's not always easy for me to express nuanced things in english, so I'm sorry for that.

But :

- You said that, according to the philosophy of these evil corp companies, apologizing and admitting errors is "bad for business". I totally recognize that you didn't say this as it was your own opinion, but it's still an opinion I strongly disagree with, regardless of if it's yours or not. What you said made me want to react to it, not to argue with you but with the idea itself. I'm sorry if I made it sound like I was attacking you on this subject, that was not my intention.

- You also said that we as customers have to realize and accept that those evil corp companies think and work like this, and that we won't get anything better. This on the other hand seemed like it was your own opinion. And if my intention is still not to oppose to you personnally, that statement is also something I strongly disagree with. My opinion on this particular subject is that, on the contrary, the more companies are thinking and acting like this, the more we must fight them (my point being that if we don't, society as we know is in danger of collapsing - that may sound an exagerated statement but remember it's only a personal opinion, intended to be balanced with things like climate crisis or the rise of totalitarism all around the world).

In summary rest assured that I have nothing against you personnally. What you expressed seems to come from an analysis that I sadly share, so I think we're on the same page on that. But yeah, I felt the need to say that, precisely because of these observations, we desperately need to fight with more intensity. Like I said, it's not us customers who have things to realize. It's capitalists, shareholders and companies, all over the world.

Oh, I never thought you had something personal against me. Don't worry.

What I meant to say in my posts is that people are (rightfully) complaining about the state of the game, but I know that things are probably never gonna change because the upper management doesn't care. All they see is money and Cities Skylines 2 is probably gonna be a financial success (it's estimated that by November they had already sold more than 700k copies), so why would they listen to people here? Why would they care? We're a minority of players.

They will just keep throwing paid DLCs at us. Some of us will stop playing the game, but the majority will just keep buying the DLCs because the games is fun or whatever.

And they will make a profit, and the cycle goes on. Companies will almost always listen to the stockholders instead of listening to the players (unless it means more money to them). That's sadly the truth.

 

[Brynjar]

As the mentions of this in previous entries do not seem to have moved the needle, perhaps you have a constructive way of telling us how we can improve the way we communicate with each other. Should we add more moderation or is the only option to pull back our engagement on our end? How can we make sure the community is a safe place for you to share your thoughts and hopes for the game?

By far the most effective way to prevent toxicity is to not sell a product people are unhappy with. That is obviously too late in this case, so now your focus should be on either improving the product as quickly and frequently as possible, or give people the opportunity to refund the prouct. What you should absolutely not do is to use every opportunity to mention how you are hard at work making sure the console edition can be released as planned. Most people who bought the gane for PC are not interested in buying the gane they are unhappy with for consoles. Threatening your customers to stop communicating with them probably isn't going to achieve what you want either. It will likely just make large portions of the community even more fed up with how the release are being handled.

And what about the posts on steam full of foul language and personal attacks against CO staff? Not what I think is acceptable. I'm not going to link to any because they are vile and agressive.

Steam has a profanity filter you can apply if the foul language bothers you.
If the language in Steam reviews really are a problem, this probably isn't the ideal place to address that.

In my book, toxicity is about being aggressive, insulting or even menacing and this is NEVER acceptable, whatever the reason.

The problem arises when what one person considers harsh but fair criticism is considered aggressive or insulting. Any criticism can be toxic if you want it to be toxic. Since there is no clear definition, or line to be drawn, there will always be someone stepping over that line unintentionally.

People chose to be toxic. That is their action and choice.

No. There are both cultural differences and large individual differences for what is "toxic". That is also why bringing up vague mentions like this word of the week is pretty pointless, and possibly counter productive.

It's against the rules to have more than one account.

Surely Paradox could have adjusted the rules for moderators specifically if they thought it would have made the forums a better place? That said, I don't see how having different accounts for moderation and private opinions would make the forums a better place. Having moderators visibly engaging outside of strictly moderation posts brings value in itself.

 

[ClemiMD]

What I meant to say in my posts is that people are (rightfully) complaining about the state of the game, but I know that things are probably never gonna change because the upper management doesn't care. All they see is money and Cities Skylines 2 is probably gonna be a financial success (it's estimated that by November they had already sold more than 700k copies), so why would they listen to people here? Why would they care? We're a minority of players.

As a company, you can certainly do this to make a quick buck. However, this makes no sense in the long term and would be an unwise strategy.
Paradox as a distributor would also not benefit from discontinuing the product.
Economically, it is much more advantageous to develop a sustainable and long-lasting product and build on sales in the future.

If you look at the first part of Cities:Skylines: 2 million copies were sold in the first year after release. By 2022, 12 million.

In my opinion, CO and PDX are also aiming for long-term success with C:S2. This is not possible with a product that is no longer supported and ends up in the junk drawer.

 

[Kanslee144]

As a company, you can certainly do this to make a quick buck. However, this makes no sense in the long term and would be an unwise strategy.
Paradox as a distributor would also not benefit from discontinuing the product.
Economically, it is much more advantageous to develop a sustainable and long-lasting product and build on sales in the future.

If you look at the first part of Cities:Skylines: 2 million copies were sold in the first year after release. By 2022, 12 million.

In my opinion, CO and PDX are also aiming for long-term success with C:S2. This is not possible with a product that is no longer supported and ends up in the junk drawer.

But you kind of proved my point. They don't care if we have bugs or if bicycles are added or not. They don't care if they're wrong or not. They only care about that because it might financially hurt them.

 

[BoraBora]

They will just keep throwing paid DLCs at us. Some of us will stop playing the game, but the majority will just keep buying the DLCs because the games is fun or whatever.

I'm not sure about the majority's future behavior. Less and less people play CS II each week. I agree we're a minority of vocal players on this official PDX forum but that's because we're the ones who still care about the game and most don't. The casual gamer disappointed by the terrible performance and the game-breaking bugs: will he keep reading patch notes for months to be updated about the game's progress? I don't think most will. They'll play another game or do something else.

As far as modern cities building go, CS I & II still have no competitors, so we city builders fanatics are stuck with our hopes and rehashing our dissatisfaction post after post. But not every buyer of CS I & II is a modern city builder fanatic. What we like to call a "community" is only a very small fraction of the game's buyers. A game is a product and we're first and foremost consumers. A disappointed consumer don't waste time to discuss for months about why he's disappointed. He moves on to another product. 14,532 games were released on Steam in 2023, plenty fish into the sea.

 

[Potoroo]

As you may have noticed we had a couple of weeks off for the end of the year, but now everyone is back to working on Cities: Skylines II. Thanks for all the holiday wishes, it was lovely to receive them!

It will be a busy time of the year for us so I’ll quickly go over some highlights for the upcoming months. As we have stated earlier, there is no higher priority than releasing the modding support for the game. The Editor UI is expected to be ready enough for the closed beta in a few weeks. There is an issue with the asset import still that we are hard at work solving. If the issue is not resolved in a reasonable time we’ll consider releasing the editor without the ability to import custom assets and just have the maps and code modding present. Whichever the resolution for the modding support is, we can’t wait to see your creations!

Please do not delay the ability to customise maps. If assets have to wait then so be it but map customisation is #1 on my editor priorities.

 

[Abitus]

They will just keep throwing paid DLCs at us. Some of us will stop playing the game, but the majority will just keep buying the DLCs because the games is fun or whatever.

And they will make a profit, and the cycle goes on. Companies will almost always listen to the stockholders instead of listening to the players (unless it means more money to them). That's sadly the truth.

I admit I'm not so sure about that. I think that if bad reviews and bad comments continue in the long term it could be enough for the company to see a significant loss. The terrible communication we're currently complaining about is after all made specifically to prevent that kind of situation to happen. If it wasn't the ultimate risk for them, I doubt that they'd invest so much in pr and damage control attempts.

And fwiw yesterday I talked about this WOTW to a friend who is a game dev, and his opinion was "they will collapse in a year or two". Now this is subjective, he could be wrong (and btw I personally do not wish that to happen), but I think the risk still exist.

 

[S.C. Watson]

Please do not delay the ability to customise maps. If assets have to wait then so be it but map customisation is #1 on my editor priorities.

Haha, nooo. I want to detaaaail. I don't care about the maps - I can change them in game or download new ones from Thunderstore. I need props for detailing!

 

[elGendo87]

I really have mixed feelings. In one hand, i think that the game is what it is, and its me who is wanting more of a thing that is not what i want. In the other hand, i think that this simulator have an inmense potential, but by desing reasons, it's tied to the "game" concept. Finally, the product, is neither a game nor a simulator. For a game, it's dull, has no strict goal. For a simulator, is incomplete. A lot of frustration flourish whit this two conceps colliding.

Even if it would have zero bugs from day one, there are a lot of thing missing or partially implemented (also compared with C:S+DLC). And i'm not mentioning the computational power needed to run the simulation. May be, the launch was a rush (i blame PDX for that)

So, yes, the community is toxic, but it have a lot of reasons to expres it's frustation, and is really easy to do in the actual times...