CO Word of the Week #9

[Collector78]

Bug fixes are ranked in terms of priority and difficulty. Seems like the people complaining do not understand how software development works in regards to bug fixes.

* Every bug needs to be quantified in terms of how many other routines rely on this algorithm, and the impact to other teams if the input/output interface is impacted. So with the abandoned dog bug (I'm just guessing here - there could a routine focused on the dog, another on the dog tied to a person, another tied to keeping the dog on the sidewalk, another tied to how often to draw/display the dog, another tied to dog pathing, another to keep track of how many dogs there are in the city, another calculating the happiness of a person with a dog. So now there 7 different routines that need to be reviewed, so possibly 7 different dev teams now need to work on it).
* Each dev team now needs to determine how many resources need to be reassigned to work on this bug, and how this resource change impacts all the deliverables the dev team has already committed to.
* The dev team needs to now estimate how long it will take to fix the bug based on each person's availability (vacations, sick leave, PTO, etc)
*Once the bug has been recoded, now it needs to go through QA - which means all other fixes need to be frozen at this stage, including possibly retesting every other algorithm that interacts with this bit of code to make sure the bug hasn't broken something else.

If you want more small patches, then this entire cycle has to be repeated for every little patch - that's why program management wants to deliver larger patches less frequently.

Seriously? You and your company never heard of continuous delivery? The software I'm used to work with is rather "reproduce the problem", "start debugging", "find where it goes wrong", "see what has been changed or what is not working according to expectations", "adjust that piece of code", "test", "deliver the fix containing that piece of code". Every dev team reserves capacity for bug fixing. Only companies still using Cobol or something similar work like you described. Big patch files is simply begging for regression, exactly what caused the taxation bug in the first place.

 

[AngryHitsuji]

What happened to the "matter of days" that CO said the mod tools would be available after launch? And please don't gaslight me by saying "we never said that". (see note).

Apparently a "matter of days" has turned into 6+ months.

How could you get it so badly wrong a week before the release date?

I wonder how many millions of dollars would have been lost when pre-orders were cancelled if a week before launch you had told us that instead of it being a "matter of days" before mod support, that it was actually more like a year, and that instead of "not achieving performance benchmarks", you actually told us the game barely runs at 60fps at 1080p at medium on even top end gaming PCs.

Note:

Question: "When is Paradox Mods released?"
Answer: "Expect days after release."

One week before launch.

 

[anydaytv]

What happened to the "matter of days" that CO said the mod tools would be available after launch?

Apparently a "matter of days" turned into 6 months.

At that kind of range? Pretty sure you can safely throw another 3-6 months on top of that.

 

[Johnnysims]

Truth? I didn't preorder because I wasn't aware by not preordering I'd be missing things like The London Eye, Notre Dame, etc.
Knowing that's what I'd be missing, I'd have preordered, and still jumped over the fence where I'm at for two reasons:

1. Preordering should be a tool for developers to gauge excitement about their product, and not FOMO. So, now what? If I ever want to do a London based city, I'm just -- out? It couldn't be "The Colossal Headquarters", or a couple special bridges or something? I wouldn't have minded it at all if it was a preorder bonus and an add-on for me. It's the exclusivity of pretty major Landmarks on a preorder at some random point in time or it's gone.

2. Back to the addon argument: the "Ultimate Edition" --- kind of implies something in the name. It's not the "Mega Edition", the "Super Edition", or even "Deluxe Edition". No, it's the "Ultimate Edition".

Anyway, I'm not that choked up about it, it'll probably be an addon in the future, or something. You get my point.

I do get your point. Maybe that wasn't marketed enough, but regardless, like you said I'm sure at a later point there could be an addon for those landmarks. Or someone mods them in.

 

[Skeksis25]

What happened to the "matter of days" that CO said the mod tools would be available after launch? And please don't gaslight me by saying "we never said that". (see note).

Apparently a "matter of days" has turned into 6+ months.

6+ months is optimistic too. I mean, its going to be 6+ months just for code mods. Map editor and asset editor have been punted even beyond that. And on top of that, they keep talking about them going into beta first. Which means, just like a big chunk of this game, they will have a ton of issues that will barely be acknowledged or fixed.

Or do we really think with everything else this game has done, the mod tools are magically going to be released in perfect working condition?

Also, are we sure they are going to stick to this timeline? On Nov 13, 2023 during the 3rd word of the week, they said, "Our goal is to release the Editor as soon as possible, and we will keep you updated on the progress. We expect it will take a couple of months to get the Editor in a shape where we can release it, but we don’t have a concrete timeline yet as we don’t want to make promises we can’t keep. " Well its been a couple months and a few days now and now we are told only a portion of it will be in "beta" by the end of March. Who is going to be surprised when in the beginning of March, even that is delayed again?

 

[CensoredLOL]

@co_avanya @co_martsu
1. How many devs are currently working for CO?
2. How many are directly working on fixing game/bug reports?
3. How many are directly working on DLC/asset and map editor/content release?
4. How many are directly working on the console port?
5. Why is the development timeline so long on all aspects listed above?
6. Why wasn't said timeline mentioned prior to launch?
7. Can we expect changes to be made in your time management system to expedite quicker patches and content?
8. Will you ever admit that the way you are handling this is infuriating the community and make changes to how you interact with your customers?
9. Are there any talks with Paradox regarding refunds/partial refunds/loss leader DLC releases as content?
10. Is CO still committed to a 10 year life cycle for this game, or will you pull the plug after contractual obligations (preorder DLC/console release) are met?
11. Will you ever post more than twice in one of these threads?
12. Is increasing the communication with your customer base a priority?
13. Was there a massive, all-hands-on-deck review of last weeks and this weeks WOTW by your staff to gain a better understanding of why we are all p*ssed off?
14. If there was... why is this week's post more of the same?

If you answer all of these questions, it would go a long way to helping generate trust here, especially if we know that changes ARE being made. That simple commitment, and following through on it with full transparency, would help inspire confidence in the continued longevity and worthiness of this game for many here.

The current "CO way", from customer interaction, to bug fixing, to project implementation, to... well just about everything that we can see, is NOT working and the community has spoken through these threads, and by a cratered player count on Steam. It's not a good game - you need to a) admit it, b) apologize for it, and c) try to make it right for the first wave of people to play it. If you don't, there won't be a second wave on consoles, or people returning once DLCs are released. If there is no income from those due to the chronic mishandling of all aspects of game development - how do you expect to stay open to release more content? This is an existential threat to your company's survival. What you are doing currently is not enough.

If you are having manpower issues - ADMIT IT, and then post job openings. Do work to make this game better. Hire people who know how to resurrect a dead IP, and have them organize a way to fix all the issues. Find a way to save the game... because if we're waiting a YEAR for assets, your modding community will be non-existent, your vaunted Paradox Mods will be a ghost town, and your playerbase non-existent.

 

[Derangedteddy]

@co_avanya @co_martsu
1. How many devs are currently working for CO?
2. How many are directly working on fixing game/bug reports?
3. How many are directly working on DLC/asset and map editor/content release?
4. How many are directly working on the console port?
5. Why is the development timeline so long on all aspects listed above?
6. Why wasn't said timeline mentioned prior to launch?
7. Can we expect changes to be made in your time management system to expedite quicker patches and content?
8. Will you ever admit that the way you are handling this is infuriating the community and make changes to how you interact with your customers?
9. Are there any talks with Paradox regarding refunds/partial refunds/loss leader DLC releases as content?
10. Is CO still committed to a 10 year life cycle for this game, or will you pull the plug after contractual obligations (preorder DLC/console release) are met?
11. Will you ever post more than twice in one of these threads?
12. Is increasing the communication with your customer base a priority?
13. Was there a massive, all-hands-on-deck review of last weeks and this weeks WOTW by your staff to gain a better understanding of why we are all p*ssed off?
14. If there was... why is this week's post more of the same?

If you answer all of these questions, it would go a long way to helping generate trust here, especially if we know that changes ARE being made. That simple commitment, and following through on it with full transparency, would help inspire confidence in the continued longevity and worthiness of this game for many here.

The current CO way, from customer interaction, to bug fixing, to project implementation, to... well just about everything that we can see, is NOT working and the community has spoken through these threads, and by a cratered player count on Steam. It's not a good game - you need to a) admit it, b) apologize for it, and c) try to make it right for the first wave of people to play it. If you don't, there won't be a second wave on consoles, or people returning once DLCs are released. If there is no income from those due to the chronic mishandling of all aspects of game development - how do you expect to stay open to release more content? This is an existential threat to your company's survival. What you are doing currently is not enough.

If you are having manpower issues - ADMIT IT, and then post job openings. Do work to make this game better. Hire people who know how to resurrect a dead IP, and have them organize a way to fix all the issues. Find a way to save the game... because if we're waiting a YEAR for assets, your modding community will be non-existent, your vaunted Paradox Mods will be a ghost town, and your playerbase non-existent.

I'm a professional developer with 15 y.o.e. Adding developers to a team does not speed up development. It's a common misconception. Adding staff should be done only when it makes sense to do so, and when one team is working on multiple parts of the application at once, and a separation of duties makes sense. Adding more devs to an existing development team adds more overhead and complexity required to coordinate code changes, train the newbies, etc.

Generally speaking, I believe that "two pizza teams" are the best approach in software development. If you can't feed the team with two pizzas, it's too big.

"What one developer can accomplish in a week, two developers can accomplish in a month."

The community really needs to understand that more devs won't fix this. It'll just make it worse.

 

[meanderingmalcontent]

There’s really nothing new when it comes to the previous statements

I don't know what the corporate structure is at CO, but the fact that this sentence came out of the CEO's mouth for a broken game... no, a game the company broke...

I cannot fathom the amount of job security one feels to let this through the PR filters. Holy moly.

If I released a product this badly, I would bare minimum be put on notice. If I then doubled down that the product wasn't that bad and its the customers who are toxic, I would be in HR immediately. If a week went by and my report on the product was: "Nothing new! See you guys next year after a minor bug fix!"

Well, I would not only be fired, but blackballed from my industry.

Now, I understand that this isn't literally what is being said, but that is the perception based on the words chosen (see: PR filter comment).

 

[CensoredLOL]

I'm a professional developer with 15 y.o.e. Adding developers to a team does not speed up development. It's a common misconception. Adding staff should be done only when it makes sense to do so, and when one team is working on multiple parts of the application at once, and a separation of duties makes sense. Adding more devs to an existing development team adds more overhead and complexity required to coordinate code changes, train the newbies, etc.

I appreciate your experience. I'm not in software, but I still gotta disagree. We don't know how many they have working on the game currently, if they are divided into teams, or if they throw darts at a wall and say "Ope, guess we're working on fixing Dogs today" instead of having a priority timeline. Your statement might be true to there are already established teams working on solving issues that they are familiar with (in a normal dev environment, with established workflow), but the implied and speculated problems with CO's workflow is immense. Adding another entire team to handle bug-fixes, or any of the 4 or more major areas that need improved can't be a bad thing, especially if they don't have teams already assigned to them.

Generally speaking, I believe that "two pizza teams" are the best approach in software development. If you can't feed the team with two pizzas, it's too big.

"What one developer can accomplish in a week, two developers can accomplish in a month."

The community really needs to understand that more devs won't fix this. It'll just make it worse.

Scale is important here - you're thinking in linear thought based on your experience on how things are ran - likely better than at CO. CS2 has so many issues in so many categories of broken, that the only way it get's solved quickly is by working in parallel.

 

[anydaytv]

I'm a professional developer with 15 y.o.e. Adding developers to a team does not speed up development. It's a common misconception. Adding staff should be done only when it makes sense to do so, and when one team is working on multiple parts of the application at once, and a separation of duties makes sense. Adding more devs to an existing development team adds more overhead and complexity required to coordinate code changes, train the newbies, etc.

Generally speaking, I believe that "two pizza teams" are the best approach in software development. If you can't feed the team with two pizzas, it's too big.

"What one developer can accomplish in a week, two developers can accomplish in a month."

The community really needs to understand that more devs won't fix this. It'll just make it worse.

Yeah, maybe. Obviously what you're saying isn't wrong, generally. I agree with you, I'd say it's the training and coordination that really bogs things down in the end.
There's a pretty big caveat to what you're saying though, and that's when CO said something to the effect of "We had to pull devs off to sort through bug reports"
I mean, that's when it "starts to make sense" that you probably need more bodies.
4000+? Yeah, someone should probably be dedicated to sorting that.

... but I mean, I feel like I'm playing armchair project manager at this point. It's hard to speculate on what they need because it has a lot to do with how they've organized the project.

 

[anydaytv]

CS2 has so many issues in so many categories of broken, that the only way it get's solved quickly is by working in parallel.

Hahaha. God I wish it worked like that!

Sounds great on paper, but getting developers all on the same page takes work. It's like herding cats. At some point, your tech lead doesn't even get the chance to touch a keyboard because that literally becomes his whole job.

If the project has come this far without those sorts of organizational delineations, it would take time just to get it to the point where you could get more work done that way.

 

[AngryHitsuji]

Adding developers to a team does not speed up development.

How about actually having an in-house QA team? Do you think adding a few new staff to do that might improve the pace on sorting through the 3000+ bug reports that need to be looked at?

 

[Abitus]

If I may, I'm also a dev and teacher (I do both, I like to switch regularly so I don't get bored) since nearly 20 years now.

The most important lesson I learned from this industry, and the one that I try to also teach as the most important, is :

"IT DEPENDS"


I'm since a long time convinced that our industry really suffers from a lot of pre-made statements that developers all around the world like to repeat without thinking.

"Adding more developers doesn't help" is definitely one of them. I've seen some situations where adding one or a few extra-devs helped a lot. And I've seen other situations where that was the worst decision that could have been taken. So, yeah, it depends.


As quick examples of more of these harmful pre-made statements :

"You have to be passionated in order to become a good dev" : Generally speaking this is mostly wrong. First you work, then you become good at what you're doing, then and only then you start to like it. People who like an activity where they suck at are very rare birds. As a teacher I can certify that this sentence does a lot of harm to junior devs. It's like a massively propagated form of gatekeeping against them. But I also know a few profiles who were passionated about their own domain (like the web or gaming) way before they even started to learn software development, and that passion helped them. So there too : it depends.

"The common worker these days has to learn to adapt, like we developers are used to adapt" : I was debating this yesterday with another dev on twitter. Over the years I've seen hundreds of devs saying this to workers from other industries when they complain about it collapsing or similar situations (recently it was about graphic designers vs AI, a few years ago it was uber vs taxis, etc). Generally speaking this is an absurd misconception, favoured by the "big dev ego" syndrom : a lot of developers are convinced that THEY know how to adapt and other people don't, essentially because 1/ they frequently have to learn new tools and 2/ they already heard this idea so they repeat it without thinking. However it's pretty obvious that learning a new tool and resisting to the collapse of your entire indutry are two very veeeeeerrrry different things. The balls of those devs saying this to other workers losing their jobs are unbelievable... And yet, in 2024 it's also true that a lot of young devs come from different profession, and that they have learned to adapt (often the hard way). So there too : it depends.


I could go on, including with more tech-oriented considerations like SSR vs CSR, clean code vs simplicity, framework X vs framework Y, etc. But on these questions the average dev is more likely to already know that "it depends on the project". I sincerely wish that more devs could adapt this exact mindset to non-tech questions, like the three I quoted above.

It depends of the project. It depends on the team. It depends of the company. It depends on the context.



PS : I'm not saying these things to express any specific opinion about CO. This was just me expressing things I like to talk about. Specifically about CO well, I'm not in their team, I don't know what are their actual difficulties, so I don't know if recruiting would help them or not. What I know is just that it potentially could. It depends on their own context.

 

[Fawcetti]

Welcome back to the weekly update on what’s happening at Colossal Order and what to expect for Cities: Skylines II. Last week we had in-depth conversations with our publisher Paradox Interactive on the priorities and goals for Cities: Skylines II for 2024. There’s really nothing new when it comes to the previous statements: Modding support, console versions, and the Expansion Pass content are to be worked on and released during the year. From the great discussions emerged an important decision however: the modding support will roll out gradually as the features enter beta and we won’t wait for all of them to be fully completed before setting them live.

What this means in practice is that we’ll start giving the mod creators early access to the modding tools as soon as the code modding and Paradox Mods are ready for testing. If everything goes as planned a Public Beta version of the code modding and Paradox Mods will be available a couple of weeks after that. We’ll continue to work on the Map and Asset editing as they require a bit more attention still. Map editing is expected to be available sooner than the Asset editing, but at this time it comes down to iteration time and the feedback we’re getting on the usability of the tool. Asset editing is unfortunately suffering from technical issues and as long as players are unable to save and share the assets there’s no point publicly releasing the tools. We do have a plan for the fixes, but it might take months in the worst case I’m afraid.

To summarize on the priorities of the modding support:

1. Public Beta version of code modding and Paradox Mods will be available in the live build by the end of March
2. Public Beta version of Map editing available in the live build together with code modding or soon after
3. Public Beta version of Asset editing to be announced, only after the technical issues are sorted can we roll out the tool
4. Continue to work on the modding support and get out of the Beta stage during the Finnish fall.

We’ll keep resources on the modding support throughout the entire lifecycle of Cities: Skylines II as we know there are many improvements and feature requests we can work on to help the modders achieve their goals even after the initial Beta release.

The work on the console versions is ongoing and while gated by the modding support we’re making progress. We’re not committing to any timelines as there are too many unknowns at this time, but we’ll keep you updated and will communicate the moment we have something to share. For the Expansion Pass, the artists have the Beach Properties content almost ready and we’re on track for its release.

Before those bigger releases, we’ll have one more patch coming out. After this, we’ll include the bug fixes and performance improvements in the releases to reduce the amount of individual patches. Patch 1.0.19 is going through its first round in QA at the moment and will be released after it passes the checks. Full patch notes will be released on the day the patch goes live, but you can expect fixes for stuck maintenance vehicles and an additional fix for abandoned dogs, who will now be returned to their homes. While the work still continues on the land value, we have an improvement so pollution properly affects the value. And last, but definitely not least, we’re currently testing a fix for the tax bug with crazy high or negative numbers.

Keep following our social channels for news about the patch release and hope you enjoy the game in the meantime. Have a lovely week!

Sincerely,
Mariina

Thank you for your willingness to share and be as frank and open about the pathway being followed. The impacts and progress, both positive and the negative are important so the the difficulties are understood. We, as the community; the players; have to be patient and trust that we'll jointly come out of this with a game that is at good as the 1st version of CS. As a consul player I am having to wait and be patient. I look forward to a successful 2024 and am hoping....

 

[Swordsman1219]

More silence from CO -- this is just such a bloody waste of time for everyone involved at this point.

 

[DanielR80]

I'm a professional developer with 15 y.o.e. Adding developers to a team does not speed up development. It's a common misconception. Adding staff should be done only when it makes sense to do so, and when one team is working on multiple parts of the application at once, and a separation of duties makes sense. Adding more devs to an existing development team adds more overhead and complexity required to coordinate code changes, train the newbies, etc.

Generally speaking, I believe that "two pizza teams" are the best approach in software development. If you can't feed the team with two pizzas, it's too big.

"What one developer can accomplish in a week, two developers can accomplish in a month."

The community really needs to understand that more devs won't fix this. It'll just make it worse.

You are right that you just can't hire new developers to speed up development. I've read "The Mythical Man-Month":

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

But CO was planning for a 2020 release, they had 3 years to hire more people. Therefore I tend to agree with speculations in this thread, that some key developer left the company for some reason or another. If not, something else must have gone terribly wrong...

A blogger analyzed the source code, and found that CS2 uses the DOTS/ECS features of the Unity engine (to support multi-core agent processing), but the graphics engine didn't really support those, so CO had to bridge the gap themselves. We can assume those were the "technical difficulties" mentioned in the "Journey to Launch" video. Also, the Unity website mentions that ECS is for seasoned developers only:

Unity powers a large majority of games on the market, many of which do not need ECS to be built. ECS for Unity brings value to seasoned Unity creators who need additional control and determinism to achieve more ambitious games.

From my (admittedly limited) understanding, it sounds like someone bet on the wrong horse and chose a technology stack that, while fixing one problem from CS1 (multi-core performance), was not ready for use and introduced even bigger problems. Problems so big CO couldn't fix them alone:

The CS2 credits mention three times that Unity consultants were brought in to help: from "engine and console support", "Unity solutions games" and the "Success Services Account Team", with the total number of Unity engineers and consultants matching (or slightly exceeding) the number of CO engineers. I'm no game developer, but these numbers seem off, considering other games can be done by 1 or 2 person teams without help from Unity: Banished, Ostriv, Highrise City, just to mention a few city builders...


These are just my assumptions, made from piecing together what I can find online.

 

[TrevorHall]

At that kind of range? Pretty sure you can safely throw another 3-6 months on top of that.

But they didn't offer any range. "A matter of days" could be 5 days, 50 days, 500 days, 5000 days, who knows? Maybe it's a translation error. "This game will be ready. It's just a matter of time". A quote from Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.". We don't know if these are earth days, martian days or galactic standard days either.

 

[anydaytv]

But they didn't offer any range. "A matter of days" could be 5 days, 50 days, 500 days, 5000 days, who knows? Maybe it's a translation error. "This game will be ready. It's just a matter of time". A quote from Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.". We don't know if these are earth days, martian days or galactic standard days either.

Great Scott, you're right!

When they said "by the end of March", for code mods -- they never said what year!!

In all seriousness, I think "a matter of days" for the average person is "within a month" and I am thankful they actually gave us a timetable... assuming we are talking about this year...

 

[timfrombriz]

I admire the work the core programmers have done. The road system tools are a piece of art. Working with cubic bezier curves, and all the conplex maths to allow building overlapping roads, generating beautiful intersections with well aligned cross walks, a lot of hard work and love has gone into this. If the coder is reading this, pat yourself on the back and thank you. I admire your work, you've done a bloody good job and one thats never been done to this extent ever in the world.

A lot of the games designed systems, the supply and demand, traffic and lane systems, they were well thought out and are brilliant concepts. Henrik, if your reading, your ideas are brilliant for thr sequel.

Whats lacking is the QA, the Polish, the balancing, making sure it all fits together and plays as an engaging unbroken experience. Its like no one was allowed to actually play the game at Colossal Order, only work on their individual part making sure it worked standalone.

Managers who know everything about their product, nuts and bolts, are managers who speak the language of their product to the customer. They know their product, its strengths and weaknesses. A great manager should be a lead engineer, who works with the other engineers in the technical issues. When a manager is detached from a product and is just steering everyone, it always leads to disaster, eventually.

You can tell a good manager by how they publicly talk about their product. This week dog fixes are coming. Seems like a issue worth mentioning to you?

 

[ClaudiusWhite]

@co_avanya @co_martsu
1. How many devs are currently working for CO?
2. How many are directly working on fixing game/bug reports?
3. How many are directly working on DLC/asset and map editor/content release?
4. How many are directly working on the console port?
5. Why is the development timeline so long on all aspects listed above?
6. Why wasn't said timeline mentioned prior to launch?
7. Can we expect changes to be made in your time management system to expedite quicker patches and content?
8. Will you ever admit that the way you are handling this is infuriating the community and make changes to how you interact with your customers?
9. Are there any talks with Paradox regarding refunds/partial refunds/loss leader DLC releases as content?
10. Is CO still committed to a 10 year life cycle for this game, or will you pull the plug after contractual obligations (preorder DLC/console release) are met?
11. Will you ever post more than twice in one of these threads?
12. Is increasing the communication with your customer base a priority?
13. Was there a massive, all-hands-on-deck review of last weeks and this weeks WOTW by your staff to gain a better understanding of why we are all p*ssed off?
14. If there was... why is this week's post more of the same?

If you answer all of these questions, it would go a long way to helping generate trust here, especially if we know that changes ARE being made. That simple commitment, and following through on it with full transparency, would help inspire confidence in the continued longevity and worthiness of this game for many here.

The current "CO way", from customer interaction, to bug fixing, to project implementation, to... well just about everything that we can see, is NOT working and the community has spoken through these threads, and by a cratered player count on Steam. It's not a good game - you need to a) admit it, b) apologize for it, and c) try to make it right for the first wave of people to play it. If you don't, there won't be a second wave on consoles, or people returning once DLCs are released. If there is no income from those due to the chronic mishandling of all aspects of game development - how do you expect to stay open to release more content? This is an existential threat to your company's survival. What you are doing currently is not enough.

If you are having manpower issues - ADMIT IT, and then post job openings. Do work to make this game better. Hire people who know how to resurrect a dead IP, and have them organize a way to fix all the issues. Find a way to save the game... because if we're waiting a YEAR for assets, your modding community will be non-existent, your vaunted Paradox Mods will be a ghost town, and your playerbase non-existent.

What is the purpose of getting answers to these questions, other than to serve as ammunition to dictate how they should run their company? I get you might be passionate about the longevity of CO, but I'm pretty sure answering these questions would do them more harm than good. I assume like most companies, they are not going to want to be micromanaged by anyone here, so any expectation of that happening would just lead to disappointment.