CO Word of the Week #9

[tamsi99]

@thetawaves24.7 :
It is all fine if you have a different perception of "broken" and "bugged" and of other things. Please just accept, especially hinting to the topic of modding, that different people have different priorities with what they want to do with their time. Please don't make the common mistake to derive from your own priorities to what everyone else should or should want to do or use their time for.

Just want to quickly address one statement:

I don't know why the max amount is $2 billion but I do know that a 32 bit int maxes out at 4,294,967,296 so this was a bit silly and kind of betrayed your tech background bonafides.

Well, then you might want to google what a "32bit signed int" is and what range it covers, considering that the game might need to handle negative numbers as well. Then you'll see that my statement is not so unfounded. Anyway, that statement was rather a humorous remark than a technical analysis. If you have written code yourself in the past then you probably understand why.

In any case, may I also suggest that there are more important things in life than trying to focus on every word in my few postings here, so please don't feel the need to waste your time trying to analyze every word I write

 

[Kanslee144]

Unfortunately it's like I said on the last WoW. They're a company and they mostly care about money, otherwise why would they push the game release, console release and DLCs while the game is vastly broken?

The devs might love working in the game and want it to be better (which I think it's the case), but the companies themselves (especially Paradox) don't care about your bugs and all that.

"Oh, but what do you mean? The game is broken, they need to fix it or people won't buy the console versions and DLCs" Not exactly. The game made between 30 and 40 million dollars already, even in the current state and without all the next steps I mentioned above. Most people buy games without reading reviews or going into forums to discuss it's problems. If they don't like the game they just move on, and sometimes they do come back to buy a DLC or two.

They've purposely launched the game earlier, riddled with bugs and performance issues, because they wanted/needed the money. You can be sure they calculated the financial risks of doing that, but never really thought about gameplay issues. They admitted that already (not with these exact words, of course). There was false advertising and everything. So why do you think they care about your gameplay issues. They're gonna make bank anyway.

So, what I mean by this post is that don't waste your time writing 16 pages of posts here thinking they will read it and admit guilt, open refunds or something like that just because we said so. Every one here at this forum is just a minority of the people who will play this game and, financially speaking, we are nothing to them.

I wish CO and Paradox would prove me wrong, but I don't think that's the case.

 

[thetawaves24.7]

@thetawaves24.7 :
It is all fine if you have a different perception of "broken" and "bugged" and of other things. Please just accept, especially hinting to the topic of modding, that different people have different priorities with what they want to do with their time. Please don't make the common mistake to derive from your own priorities to what everyone else should or should want to do or use their time for.

Just want to quickly address one statement:


Well, then you might want to google what a "32bit signed int" is and what range it covers, considering that the game might need to handle negative numbers as well. Then you'll see that my statement is not so unfounded. Anyway, that statement was rather a humorous remark than a technical analysis. If you have written code yourself in the past then you probably understand why.

In any case, may I also suggest that there are more important things in life than trying to focus on every word in my few postings here, so please don't feel the need to waste your time trying to analyze every word I write

You're right I did and I edited it to correct it but you have to understand I'm not a IT expert, my programming knowledge from 14 years told my intuition that 2 billion exactly is not the max for a 32 bit integer but my apologies good sir. Speaking of mistaking your own priorities with what other should do, why should CO hire a number new employees that they have to train and work to integrate into their team just to lay them off months later so that you can get the content you want on the timeline you want?

The reason I focus on choices of words is because certain words or terms may be loaded and don't often help create good discussion or good feedback. You described the financial sim as broken because you hit the max funds. In reality you hit the max funds because of a bug with industrial taxation when certain buildings bug out. You can deal with it by trying to pinpoint the exact building and deleting it, managing your industrial zoning to try to avoid run away land values and if it does happen you can load back to the most recent auto save before it triggered.

We had the same experience but I would argue because I didn't write it off as broken I put some effort into investigating the issues and found ways to play while avoiding the issue for the time being.

 

[tamsi99]

No worries about the cash limits, it's certainly also not the most important important issue of CS2.

Regarding the hiring, this is called consulting / contracting and this is what I've been doing in certain situations for decades, like many others as well. It is a whole industry offering these services. Again, whether this makes sense or not is always very specific to the individual situation. While others declared in absolute terms that such a thing would not make sense at all, I wanted to give a more differentiated perspective that, at least from where I stand, I would see opportunities for CO to benefit from temporarily hiring additional resources. Of course, for a final decision / recommendation, you also need to understand whether it would make sense from their team structure and team dynamics point of view, etc., which I cannot judge. Given the work structure as such, however, I would indeed see opportunities to do so. Again, just weighting in a differentiated view vs. the absolute opinions we've seen before.

 

[thetawaves24.7]

Of course, for a final decision / recommendation, you also need to understand whether it would make sense from their team structure and team dynamics point of view, etc., which I cannot judge.

This was the my immediate thought to what you initially said and I think probably an important perspective to keep in mind. This isn't Activision absorbing 19 studios to keep the CoD machine pumping out a new game every year along with micro-transactions and battle passes in a live service model that still doesn't care about the bugginess of their game.

 

[co_avanya]

Hi everyone!

Firstly I'm so sorry I didn't get a chance to respond here yesterday. I'm afraid I won't get to address all the points raised in these comments, but I've made some notes reading through all your comments, so I hopefully won't forget too many things.

Let's start with modding. I want to apologize for the miscommunication around release time that modding support was imminent. We had a disconnect in information between the community team at Paradox who handle the streams, and our development team. I completely understand that the communications at the time set expectations that we have not lived up to, and I want to apologize for not communicating the situation sooner. It took us longer than it should to realize this information was out there and to update you on the modding situation. We can't undo that, but we have discussed how we can avoid situations like that in the future and make sure that everyone on the community side, whether on our side or Paradox's side, is up-to-date on the situation so we can set expectations you can count on.

I also completely understand the frustration you feel learning that modding, and particularly asset import, are coming later than hoped. Our initial goals were for mod support to be added right after release, but these plans changed as we received your feedback and it became clear that there were other areas of the game that needed attention first. On top of that, we have encountered issues with the asset import, which has delayed the Editor. We are also frustrated by these issues as modding is important to us and we know that a lot of you are looking forward to playing with custom content. All I can say is that we're working on resolving these issues as fast as possible and that we will continue to update you on the progress. This week it means the news that it could take months to resolve, hopefully we'll have some good news to share on the situation in the future. Bad news always sucks, but being open with you about our progress means also sharing the bad news. You deserve to know what's up, and it is of course completely understandable that the news is followed by frustration. I'd like to take the chance to thank you all for remaining constructive. It means a lot to me, personally, and to us as a company, that we can continue to have constructive conversations.

Performance
We haven't reached our goals yet, so work on performance continues. As the patch before the holidays contained a bunch of performance improvements, we don't have much to share at this point, but I wanted to mention that we continue to look at what we can improve, also on the CPU side of things. And even when we reach the targets we have set for ourselves, we will continue to look at what can be improved. The work on performance never really stops, and we continue to keep an eye on feedback and bug reports to determine where improvements can be made and are mostly needed.

Bug fixes
This leads me to bug fixes, something that will never end. A bug-free game is of course the dream, but realistically, we'll probably never get rid of all bugs. That doesn't mean we'll stop trying to squash them all though! Your reports are incredibly helpful to us in determining how widespread issues are and how we can reproduce them. We have already fixed a long list of bugs thanks to your reports and saves, and we'll continue to do so. We'll have a full list of bug fixes when the patch is ready for release and the patch notes are finalized - the WoW only mentions a few - and we'll continue working on fixes for the reports we haven't been able to address yet. We prioritize bugs that have the most severe impacts on your experiences, but occasionally, we also have smaller bugs that are quick and easy to fix or relate to another severe issue that's being investigated.

The team
I just want to address the worries that our team has gotten a lot smaller or that we let people go following the release. We're still a team of 30 people. While some companies scale up and down in relation to different projects, that's now how Colossal Order works. When we hire a new employee, it isn't just for a specific short-term project, but because we see them as a valuable employee in the long run. Of course, people move on from time to time to find new challenges in their professional lives, and new people join the team. The company turns 15 years old this summer, so naturally, not everyone who has ever worked here is still with the company. But we always aim for sustainable growth because we believe people do better work when they know we aim to keep them in the long run and not just for whatever current project they're working on.

All that said, I completely understand wanting us to add people or speed up the process in other ways. We're always on the lookout for how we can improve our processes and get better at what we do, but unfortunately, some things just take the time they take, and adding more resources doesn't always speed things up. It's really great to see all the passion and thoughts on how we can improve, so thank you everyone for sharing. <3

 

[Infixo]

Unfortunately it's like I said on the last WoW. They're a company and they mostly care about money, otherwise why would they push the game release, console release and DLCs while the game is vastly broken?

The devs might love working in the game and want it to be better (which I think it's the case), but the companies themselves (especially Paradox) don't care about your bugs and all that.

"Oh, but what do you mean? The game is broken, they need to fix it or people won't buy the console versions and DLCs" Not exactly. The game made between 30 and 40 million dollars already, even in the current state and without all the next steps I mentioned above. Most people buy games without reading reviews or going into forums to discuss it's problems. If they don't like the game they just move on, and sometimes they do come back to buy a DLC or two.

They've purposely launched the game earlier, riddled with bugs and performance issues, because they wanted/needed the money. You can be sure they calculated the financial risks of doing that, but never really thought about gameplay issues. They admitted that already (not with these exact words, of course). There was false advertising and everything. So why do you think they care about your gameplay issues. They're gonna make bank anyway.

So, what I mean by this post is that don't waste your time writing 16 pages of posts here thinking they will read it and admit guilt, open refunds or something like that just because we said so. Every one here at this forum is just a minority of the people who will play this game and, financially speaking, we are nothing to them.

I wish CO and Paradox would prove me wrong, but I don't think that's the case.

Finally! After almost 20 pages of posts, someone actually pointed out the bare truth. MONEY. Money is the main driver here. The decisions they make are prioritized based on "how much money will that bring us". This is why (the obvious "revelation") whoever already bought the game, and gave them their money - is not so important any more. What matters are 2 main sources of future revenues which are consoles and DLCs.
That is why consoles release is the top priority for them and this is THE ONLY REASON why performance is worked on. Not complains from PC players. PC players are just rat labs to provide feedback and actually test the performance (because they didn't know after years of development that their own game didn't meet their performance goals until a week before release, remember? xD /s)
And as for the future DLCs - this is a bit tricky and the reason behind all those seemingly random moves that they are doing. Because now CO has to please people who already bought the game. And they are doing so by a) investing a bare minimum into error fixing (hence lots of random fixes, or whatever is currently mostly hated, with not actual priorities) b) attempts at damage control via communication and PR (well... it is clear that they don't know how to do that) and c) releasing modding tools. Because CO is a small company that ofc doing all of that is impossible, so they jump from topic to topic. Limited number of people can only do so much...
Please also notice how CO has changed priorities recently, after talks with PDX. Well... money talks.

 

[Askorti]

Our initial goals were for mod support to be added right after release, but these plans changed as we received your feedback and it became clear that there were other areas of the game that needed attention first.

I dont want to nitpick your message Avanya, but this line is... concerning. Very concerning.

It sounds almost as if CO was not aware of the extent of the issues with the game until it was released, and only when people complained about the multitude of bugs, issues and performance problems did you guys realize that you got a bit of a stinker on your hands. But surely... That can't be the case, can it?

 

[∆tlαntic4]

Hi everyone!

Firstly I'm so sorry I didn't get a chance to respond here yesterday. I'm afraid I won't get to address all the points raised in these comments, but I've made some notes reading through all your comments, so I hopefully won't forget too many things.

Let's start with modding. I want to apologize for the miscommunication around release time that modding support was imminent. We had a disconnect in information between the community team at Paradox who handle the streams, and our development team. I completely understand that the communications at the time set expectations that we have not lived up to, and I want to apologize for not communicating the situation sooner. It took us longer than it should to realize this information was out there and to update you on the modding situation. We can't undo that, but we have discussed how we can avoid situations like that in the future and make sure that everyone on the community side, whether on our side or Paradox's side, is up-to-date on the situation so we can set expectations you can count on.

I also completely understand the frustration you feel learning that modding, and particularly asset import, are coming later than hoped. Our initial goals were for mod support to be added right after release, but these plans changed as we received your feedback and it became clear that there were other areas of the game that needed attention first. On top of that, we have encountered issues with the asset import, which has delayed the Editor. We are also frustrated by these issues as modding is important to us and we know that a lot of you are looking forward to playing with custom content. All I can say is that we're working on resolving these issues as fast as possible and that we will continue to update you on the progress. This week it means the news that it could take months to resolve, hopefully we'll have some good news to share on the situation in the future. Bad news always sucks, but being open with you about our progress means also sharing the bad news. You deserve to know what's up, and it is of course completely understandable that the news is followed by frustration. I'd like to take the chance to thank you all for remaining constructive. It means a lot to me, personally, and to us as a company, that we can continue to have constructive conversations.

Performance
We haven't reached our goals yet, so work on performance continues. As the patch before the holidays contained a bunch of performance improvements, we don't have much to share at this point, but I wanted to mention that we continue to look at what we can improve, also on the CPU side of things. And even when we reach the targets we have set for ourselves, we will continue to look at what can be improved. The work on performance never really stops, and we continue to keep an eye on feedback and bug reports to determine where improvements can be made and are mostly needed.

Bug fixes
This leads me to bug fixes, something that will never end. A bug-free game is of course the dream, but realistically, we'll probably never get rid of all bugs. That doesn't mean we'll stop trying to squash them all though! Your reports are incredibly helpful to us in determining how widespread issues are and how we can reproduce them. We have already fixed a long list of bugs thanks to your reports and saves, and we'll continue to do so. We'll have a full list of bug fixes when the patch is ready for release and the patch notes are finalized - the WoW only mentions a few - and we'll continue working on fixes for the reports we haven't been able to address yet. We prioritize bugs that have the most severe impacts on your experiences, but occasionally, we also have smaller bugs that are quick and easy to fix or relate to another severe issue that's being investigated.

The team
I just want to address the worries that our team has gotten a lot smaller or that we let people go following the release. We're still a team of 30 people. While some companies scale up and down in relation to different projects, that's now how Colossal Order works. When we hire a new employee, it isn't just for a specific short-term project, but because we see them as a valuable employee in the long run. Of course, people move on from time to time to find new challenges in their professional lives, and new people join the team. The company turns 15 years old this summer, so naturally, not everyone who has ever worked here is still with the company. But we always aim for sustainable growth because we believe people do better work when they know we aim to keep them in the long run and not just for whatever current project they're working on.

All that said, I completely understand wanting us to add people or speed up the process in other ways. We're always on the lookout for how we can improve our processes and get better at what we do, but unfortunately, some things just take the time they take, and adding more resources doesn't always speed things up. It's really great to see all the passion and thoughts on how we can improve, so thank you everyone for sharing. <3

Why doesn't Colossal Order explore the option of providing refunds to players who are dissatisfied with the game's current state? Are there specific reasons for not offering refunds, and if so, what are those reasons?

Is Colossal Order considering the possibility of labeling the game as an "Early Access" release, particularly in light of the current state of the game?

 

[thetawaves24.7]

I dont want to nitpick your message Avanya, but this line is... concerning. Very concerning.

It sounds almost as if CO was not aware of the extent of the issues with the game until it was released, and only when people complained about the multitude of bugs, issues and performance problems did you guys realize that you got a bit of a stinker on your hands. But surely... That can't be the case, can it?

I think they've acknowledged as much from slightly before release to now. Even prior to release they had warned players that there may be issues. They admitted to not realizing the extent of issues people had with various configurations. With a decent setup and the right graphical settings you're not GPU bound even if the game isn't as pretty as possible, in larger cities you're CPU bound which will improve through fixing bugs, improving performance and resolving issues with the simulation and optimizing it.

You mention the bugs, issues and performance problems but I noticed you didn't say anything about the gameplay. What did you think that?

 

[MohawkWolfo98]

Hi everyone!

Firstly I'm so sorry I didn't get a chance to respond here yesterday. I'm afraid I won't get to address all the points raised in these comments, but I've made some notes reading through all your comments, so I hopefully won't forget too many things.

Let's start with modding. I want to apologize for the miscommunication around release time that modding support was imminent. We had a disconnect in information between the community team at Paradox who handle the streams, and our development team. I completely understand that the communications at the time set expectations that we have not lived up to, and I want to apologize for not communicating the situation sooner. It took us longer than it should to realize this information was out there and to update you on the modding situation. We can't undo that, but we have discussed how we can avoid situations like that in the future and make sure that everyone on the community side, whether on our side or Paradox's side, is up-to-date on the situation so we can set expectations you can count on.

I also completely understand the frustration you feel learning that modding, and particularly asset import, are coming later than hoped. Our initial goals were for mod support to be added right after release, but these plans changed as we received your feedback and it became clear that there were other areas of the game that needed attention first. On top of that, we have encountered issues with the asset import, which has delayed the Editor. We are also frustrated by these issues as modding is important to us and we know that a lot of you are looking forward to playing with custom content. All I can say is that we're working on resolving these issues as fast as possible and that we will continue to update you on the progress. This week it means the news that it could take months to resolve, hopefully we'll have some good news to share on the situation in the future. Bad news always sucks, but being open with you about our progress means also sharing the bad news. You deserve to know what's up, and it is of course completely understandable that the news is followed by frustration. I'd like to take the chance to thank you all for remaining constructive. It means a lot to me, personally, and to us as a company, that we can continue to have constructive conversations.

Performance
We haven't reached our goals yet, so work on performance continues. As the patch before the holidays contained a bunch of performance improvements, we don't have much to share at this point, but I wanted to mention that we continue to look at what we can improve, also on the CPU side of things. And even when we reach the targets we have set for ourselves, we will continue to look at what can be improved. The work on performance never really stops, and we continue to keep an eye on feedback and bug reports to determine where improvements can be made and are mostly needed.

Bug fixes
This leads me to bug fixes, something that will never end. A bug-free game is of course the dream, but realistically, we'll probably never get rid of all bugs. That doesn't mean we'll stop trying to squash them all though! Your reports are incredibly helpful to us in determining how widespread issues are and how we can reproduce them. We have already fixed a long list of bugs thanks to your reports and saves, and we'll continue to do so. We'll have a full list of bug fixes when the patch is ready for release and the patch notes are finalized - the WoW only mentions a few - and we'll continue working on fixes for the reports we haven't been able to address yet. We prioritize bugs that have the most severe impacts on your experiences, but occasionally, we also have smaller bugs that are quick and easy to fix or relate to another severe issue that's being investigated.

The team
I just want to address the worries that our team has gotten a lot smaller or that we let people go following the release. We're still a team of 30 people. While some companies scale up and down in relation to different projects, that's now how Colossal Order works. When we hire a new employee, it isn't just for a specific short-term project, but because we see them as a valuable employee in the long run. Of course, people move on from time to time to find new challenges in their professional lives, and new people join the team. The company turns 15 years old this summer, so naturally, not everyone who has ever worked here is still with the company. But we always aim for sustainable growth because we believe people do better work when they know we aim to keep them in the long run and not just for whatever current project they're working on.

All that said, I completely understand wanting us to add people or speed up the process in other ways. We're always on the lookout for how we can improve our processes and get better at what we do, but unfortunately, some things just take the time they take, and adding more resources doesn't always speed things up. It's really great to see all the passion and thoughts on how we can improve, so thank you everyone for sharing. <3

Thank you very much sincerely for sticking your head out of the parapet. It really means a lot when someone for the development team apologises for their faults and expresses a willingness to make up for the mistakes. Thank you as well for not blaming the community for the problems as well, it’s greatly appreciated after the last few weeks.

I’m sorry if I keep whipping a dead horse, but for that measure, would CO comment if they would begin to allow partial or total refunds to consumers who feel misled by the original statements, and haven’t had such a huge playtime? What is done is done, but we can make a first step in healing trust in the community.

I do feel people are deeply misled by the original comments and the fact it took so long to clear up such comments when it’s plainly evident that modding support was nowhere near the few days.

 

[Gonzoez]

Hi everyone!

Firstly I'm so sorry I didn't get a chance to respond here yesterday. I'm afraid I won't get to address all the points raised in these comments, but I've made some notes reading through all your comments, so I hopefully won't forget too many things.

Let's start with modding. I want to apologize for the miscommunication around release time that modding support was imminent. We had a disconnect in information between the community team at Paradox who handle the streams, and our development team. I completely understand that the communications at the time set expectations that we have not lived up to, and I want to apologize for not communicating the situation sooner. It took us longer than it should to realize this information was out there and to update you on the modding situation. We can't undo that, but we have discussed how we can avoid situations like that in the future and make sure that everyone on the community side, whether on our side or Paradox's side, is up-to-date on the situation so we can set expectations you can count on.

I also completely understand the frustration you feel learning that modding, and particularly asset import, are coming later than hoped. Our initial goals were for mod support to be added right after release, but these plans changed as we received your feedback and it became clear that there were other areas of the game that needed attention first. On top of that, we have encountered issues with the asset import, which has delayed the Editor. We are also frustrated by these issues as modding is important to us and we know that a lot of you are looking forward to playing with custom content. All I can say is that we're working on resolving these issues as fast as possible and that we will continue to update you on the progress. This week it means the news that it could take months to resolve, hopefully we'll have some good news to share on the situation in the future. Bad news always sucks, but being open with you about our progress means also sharing the bad news. You deserve to know what's up, and it is of course completely understandable that the news is followed by frustration. I'd like to take the chance to thank you all for remaining constructive. It means a lot to me, personally, and to us as a company, that we can continue to have constructive conversations.

Performance
We haven't reached our goals yet, so work on performance continues. As the patch before the holidays contained a bunch of performance improvements, we don't have much to share at this point, but I wanted to mention that we continue to look at what we can improve, also on the CPU side of things. And even when we reach the targets we have set for ourselves, we will continue to look at what can be improved. The work on performance never really stops, and we continue to keep an eye on feedback and bug reports to determine where improvements can be made and are mostly needed.

Bug fixes
This leads me to bug fixes, something that will never end. A bug-free game is of course the dream, but realistically, we'll probably never get rid of all bugs. That doesn't mean we'll stop trying to squash them all though! Your reports are incredibly helpful to us in determining how widespread issues are and how we can reproduce them. We have already fixed a long list of bugs thanks to your reports and saves, and we'll continue to do so. We'll have a full list of bug fixes when the patch is ready for release and the patch notes are finalized - the WoW only mentions a few - and we'll continue working on fixes for the reports we haven't been able to address yet. We prioritize bugs that have the most severe impacts on your experiences, but occasionally, we also have smaller bugs that are quick and easy to fix or relate to another severe issue that's being investigated.

The team
I just want to address the worries that our team has gotten a lot smaller or that we let people go following the release. We're still a team of 30 people. While some companies scale up and down in relation to different projects, that's now how Colossal Order works. When we hire a new employee, it isn't just for a specific short-term project, but because we see them as a valuable employee in the long run. Of course, people move on from time to time to find new challenges in their professional lives, and new people join the team. The company turns 15 years old this summer, so naturally, not everyone who has ever worked here is still with the company. But we always aim for sustainable growth because we believe people do better work when they know we aim to keep them in the long run and not just for whatever current project they're working on.

All that said, I completely understand wanting us to add people or speed up the process in other ways. We're always on the lookout for how we can improve our processes and get better at what we do, but unfortunately, some things just take the time they take, and adding more resources doesn't always speed things up. It's really great to see all the passion and thoughts on how we can improve, so thank you everyone for sharing. <3

Your message sounds like:

"1) Oopsy...
2) Ooopsy...
3) We are fixing bugs, but we arenot going to tell you what bugs we are fixing
4) We will continue our way even though the community we care so much about is unhappy"

And you, again, ignore the question of refunds. I don't want to wait until you fix the issue you created. I paid for the game to play it back in November-December (of 2023 to be clear) and now it's move to unspecified time in the future. I have better use for the money in the meantime...

 

[Gonzoez]

This game is also still available on GFN while many of us HAVE to use the GFN because your game perforamnce is abismall and melting our PCs.... Either remove it from GFN or make sure that we can enjoy the same features as Console players. Why do they matter more for you than us?

 

[Rommyca]

Your message sounds like:

"1) Oopsy...
2) Ooopsy...
3) We are fixing bugs, but we arenot going to tell you what bugs we are fixing
4) We will continue our way even though the community we care so much about is unhappy"

And you, again, ignore the question of refunds. I don't want to wait until you fix the issue you created. I paid for the game to play it back in November-December (of 2023 to be clear) and now it's move to unspecified time in the future. I have better use for the money in the meantime...

I ll send You the refund If IT s all about money. How can You throw away such a long period of funtime for a few momente of bad communication? Where is the great community it used to be? A rule of the mariage says : at good and bad times together.

 

[thetawaves24.7]

Finally! After almost 20 pages of posts, someone actually pointed out the bare truth. MONEY. Money is the main driver here. The decisions they make are prioritized based on "how much money will that bring us". This is why (the obvious "revelation") whoever already bought the game, and gave them their money - is not so important any more. What matters are 2 main sources of future revenues which are consoles and DLCs.
That is why consoles release is the top priority for them and this is THE ONLY REASON why performance is worked on. Not complains from PC players. PC players are just rat labs to provide feedback and actually test the performance (because they didn't know after years of development that their own game didn't meet their performance goals until a week before release, remember? xD /s)
And as for the future DLCs - this is a bit tricky and the reason behind all those seemingly random moves that they are doing. Because now CO has to please people who already bought the game. And they are doing so by a) investing a bare minimum into error fixing (hence lots of random fixes, or whatever is currently mostly hated, with not actual priorities) b) attempts at damage control via communication and PR (well... it is clear that they don't know how to do that) and c) releasing modding tools. Because CO is a small company that ofc doing all of that is impossible, so they jump from topic to topic. Limited number of people can only do so much...
Please also notice how CO has changed priorities recently, after talks with PDX. Well... money talks.

Nobody needs to point out that money is an important or even the main driver because its obvious to the point of boredom. Most large game projects spend years in development before they're even announced. The game has been in development for an unknown period of time, it may have already been delayed repeatedly without the public knowing.

Money has been invested into it and eventually anyone that invests will want to see a return. Most likely from my understanding that would be Paradox who is in charge of testing, distributing and owns the IP. The developers had and continue to have a grand vision that they're executing but financial pressures forced a messy release. Now the incentive for Paradox is to keep pressure CO to pump out as much monetizable content as possible. For CO producing DLC is an incentive but its also to recover and protect the reputation of their product/brand/creation which is why the priority is to get things fixed and polished. PR is PR and many corporations do it much worse. I applaud CO for coming out here and keeping the player base updated, admitting their failings and keeping pride in their product. They should take pride because the core gameplay of CS2 is better than CS1.

You can be upset that you fell for the marketing campaign but ultimately it was up to the consumer to have refunded the game as soon as they heard or experienced the initial performance issues. Companies want to sell consumers things, consumers want to obtain those things for a good value, that's the tension between them. Next time follow your incentives instead of thinking a fairly successful company in their own right won't be following theirs.


Modding tool release is taking them longer than they expected but I imagine a big part of why they're putting in the resources to implement paradox mods is so that the entire community regardless of platform will have access once everything is in place.

 

[CensoredLOL]

I want to apologize

That's a GREAT START (but would have been better if you added "on behalf of CO"... we don't blame you specifically, Avanya. You at least take the time to talk with us.

We had a disconnect in information between the community team at Paradox who handle the streams, and our development team.

That seems like a pretty major disconnect... unless something catastrophic happened in t-minus 1 week before launch, that's really odd to promise it, and not have that information be accurate to within a (checks notes) year.

I want to apologize for not communicating the situation sooner. It took us longer than it should to realize this information was out there

We have been gently asking/forcefully asking/demanding it since a week after launch, in these very threads, based on information your team put out there. It's not like you didn't/couldn't know we wanted it - I've seen multiple instances of that exact moment quoted/linked on these boards, and likely hundreds of mentions of it.

Our initial goals were for mod support to be added right after release, but these plans changed as we received your feedback and it became clear that there were other areas of the game that needed attention first.

This part smells like victim blaming to me... "we were going to work on assets, but then you complained more about performance and we switched the team dedicated on making an asset editor to bug fixes... you got what you wanted"

"It became clear"... how was it NOT clear?

 

[CapnBludd]

OMG so much to address.

They're hosted on one mod page, with a launcher that automatically installs them into place for you and gives you the ability to toggle them on and off. Its not the best mod manager I've ever used but its a mod manager like basically any other. I'm not even a skilled IT expert but just a few google searches to get the info and get it set up took me all of 15 minutes. Mods are always going to introduce some level of instability so I'm not sure when the "reasonably stable" standard would be met. Anyways just to summarize your view on mods you believe its the lifeline of city skylines but you can't be bothered to put in the effort to install mods manually. You also don't want to install mods that are not available on an 'official mod store' even though thunderstore seems to have mods available for 69 (nice) games, and the fact that most people were modding CS1 through steam which is not Paradox or CO. Finally even when the mods do arrive on a mod delivery platform that is suitable to your well refined tastes you will not partake in this so called lifeline until a certain threshold of stability is met.

Honestly in the time it took you to respond to me you could have already had a number of mods that are relatively stable that give the QoL we were used to with CS1 mods.

Yes, all that!

The argument that because it's not from the official store is silly. These are the mods and the modders that would be in the store now. Some of these folks are behind the biggest CS1 mods, and they've been getting early versions out there so folks can try and get beyond some of the frustrating and sometimes game breaking things in CS2 as it is.

In the first weeks, there were lots of shady sites, name squatting and the like, but now practically all of the modders are putting the stuff on Thunderstore, and of course GitHub. I'm an old retired guy, and I can use Thunderstore and yeah I could do it manually on GitHub if I had to.

Get your mods folks, the mod makers are out there discussing and working on stuff constantly on discord https://discord.com/invite/HqnEAS6S take a look and see, go and get your mods where most of them are all making them available.

Oh no! What if a mod breaks this perfectly running game that has no minor flaws or major problems with any of the things that it's supposed to do? LoL.


Do people think the mods just magically appear when PDX Mods opens?

 

[Gonzoez]

I ll send You the refund If IT s all about money. How can You throw away such a long period of funtime for a few momente of bad communication? Where is the great community it used to be? A rule of the mariage says : at good and bad times together.

What? Marriage? If it is a marriage - I want the divorce and half of the wealth

Yes, please send me the check for the price of Ultimated Edition that I own and I can send you the steam key if that's an option (or just promise to never lay a finger on this game again). But be ready - I am not the only one who wants the refund

 

[ClemiMD]

Thank you @co_avanya for the insights and for giving us an update on the ongoing progress. I really appreciate you saying the right things to the community about the many critical comments, however justified they may be. Keep up the good work!

Finally! After almost 20 pages of posts, someone actually pointed out the bare truth. MONEY. Money is the main driver here.

What, people work to earn money? What a disgrace.

1) Oopsy...
2) Ooopsy...
3) We are fixing bugs, but we arenot going to tell you what bugs we are fixing
4) We will continue our way even though the community we care so much about is unhappy"

And you, again, ignore the question of refunds.

Yes, Oopsy. Why not? People wanted an apology. There's another one. Again.
Fixing bugs is not just "let's fix a bug and release the fix", it is a bit more complicated. This has been explained many times, both by CO itself and by people here in the forum who work as software developers.
And what the hell shall CO refund? They can't. You demand a refund where you bought it. At the retailer, nowhere else. If your iPhone is broken, do you ring Steve Jobs?

 

[tamsi99]

@co_avanya :
Thank you very much for your response.

• Could you please clearly confirm that end of March 2024 is the time we will see the next relevant performance improvements, as implied by the WotW?
• Could you please inform us if you are already working on a DLSS 2/3 integration? If yes, I'm sure you have a rough target date at hand, feel free to not hold back on communicating it
• Regarding all the simulation issues, it would be helpful to get a kind of roadmap from you to understand what can be expected next. If you are not comfortable with communicating dates (or at least months or quarters) then at a very minimum a priority list on what you are working on. Fairly managing customer's expectation is always a good way to control their emotions and frustrations. Vague statements on the other hand just accelerate the rumor mill and by that again frustration