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Beach properties assets are all gone and my city is screwed. Thanks a lot.

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LordTridus said:
and people should IMO have a bit of a sense of humour about it rather than whipping up the outrage machine.
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This would have worked with CS1, I guess. With CS2, this is a different story because players get screwed up many times. Most fanboys, myself included, purchased the Ultimate Edition and are not affected.
Removing a DLC just to get rid of the negative review on steam is an option, but it does not come for free.
What is more damaging?
Is it to not remove the worst-rated DLC on Steam for 2 or 3 weeks, or are you making it unplayable for the few people who bought it?

CO/PDX decided to go for the second option.
 
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tweety80 said:
This would have worked with CS1, I guess. With CS2, this is a different story because players get screwed up many times. Most fanboys, myself included, purchased the Ultimate Edition and are not affected.
Removing a DLC just to get rid of the negative review on steam is an option, but it does not come for free.
What is more damaging?
Is it to not remove the worst-rated DLC on Steam for 2 or 3 weeks, or are you making it unplayable for the few people who bought it?

CO/PDX decided to go for the second option.
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It definitely doesn't come for free: the revenue from the sales is now entirely gone. If the goal was just to get rid of bad reviews it's not a great plan, since the bad reviews on the base game are still there.

Sometimes the simplest answer is not "they're trying to screw me to save their own reputation". Maybe it's actually "they got the message we'd been trying to give them for the past several months, and in trying to do something about that someone made a mistake."
 
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LordTridus said:
It definitely doesn't come for free: the revenue from the sales is now entirely gone.
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I assume CO couldn't sell many DLCs, so it seemed for CO/PDX to be the best choice to ignore those few players.

Anyway, bringing the DLC into the base game was a good idea. This is a huge step in the right direction.
 
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maarten_714 said:
The content still exists on Steam, anyone with Ultimate can continue playing or re-install fresh, or buy Ultimate now and install. The content is there, it only exists one time.... it is just flagged as enabled for download. But yeah... CO set a flag somewhere saying this content should no longer be available because it is now refunded to everyone, and in the process it was removed for a bunch of people. I realize part of the problem may be on the Steam side, but also on the CO side for not understanding how it works when you refund a DLC.

How, what, why, when, how? I don't know, I am not a steam back-end tech expert, and likely, neither are you. But I do know that Steam has big refund system built in the client. You can buy any game or DLC, and if the play time is less than 2 hours and you own it less than 14 days, you too can get a refund. But in the process of doing so, the game is removed from your computer by the client when it can. This refund system, even though this refund is well past the 14 days/2hours thing from Steam, has kicked in and removed the items refunded from the client that received a refund.

At the same time, they indeed did not make it available for purchase any longer, so a refund is indeed removal. I can see that people don't anticipate this, so I certainly and completely understand. It is the kind of mistake I would make in such a scenario, I too am only human. But because we are human, we also develop failsafe measures to prevent us from making such mistakes.... and in almost all tech related issues where a big decision needs to be made: Test it, before you put it in production.

All I am saying is that there is a rather easy test before you start issuing refunds to everyone, and that is to issue a refund to just one or two accounts...... just to make sure nothing funky happens when you do that. That way they don't have to understand the steam behind the scene refund tech mambo jambo, because you just tested as a user just to see what happens if you click this here button that says refund.

This could have, and should have been tested.
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Ok :)
 
maarten_714 said:
Let's be clear here:

What you should have done:

Patch the game first so it has the new content included first, then start issuing refunds. This way success is pretty much guaranteed.

As mistakes are human, this is what you should have done to fix the mistake:

Stop all work, get the devs together, come up with a plan (this should have really happened over the weekend, but I respect the weekend, so on Monday morning....), and release an immediate emergency hotfix that just enables the new content. Doesn't have to include ANY of the new patch content you are working on, just an interim hotfix that included the Beach Properties content into the base game, and that's it. Mods shouldn't break because nothing else is patched, and everyone would be happy, and respect that mistakes are simply human.

What you are actually doing:

Oh, sorry we messed up again. Meh, we're just going to pretend nothing happened, we don't know if we will fix it before the next patch, and since it will be fixed with the next patch so.....just stop loading your games for now.

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I still believe in Colossal Order and I will continue to play CS2. (I have Ultimate, so ultimately I am unaffected) But this is starting to become a bit of a comedy now..... Another reason why you should have fixed it REALLY quick with an emergency hotfix to be released not any later than say Wednesday (I take it you would need at least one day to compile the hotfix) is that the first YouTube videos basically laughing at CO/Paradox for just outright removing the content from thousands of players without offering an immediate fix.....have already been posted, and the LAST thing this game needs is for game sites to pick up on this again and release articles with more bad press.

This is one of those things you shouldn't just shrug at, this should have been a "stop all work, everyone work on the hotfix, release it, and then go back to developing the next patch" kind of thing.

It may delay work on the next patch for a few days or a week, it may mean the staff has to put in some extra overtime this week, but as someone who has worked in IT for nearly 30 years..... that is the price you pay for making mistakes. Because God knows I have made my own share of mistakes in my career, and I have paid for them by fixing it in long long night hours, in one or two cases literally working till 7am in the morning and seeing the first people walk back into the office for the next work day.....just to make sure THEIR work day started off with no issues whatsoever..... and I could go home for some sleep! :D

That is the price we pay for making mistakes. And while I realize you are all likely already putting in long, long overtime hours to fix the game, this is what should have happened to ensure the Beach Properties content is patched in.

If that is too much of an ask, you should just re-release the content on Steam as a purchasable DLC for the price: "free", so users can get it themselves.
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Given what has happened over the past 6-8 months with this game, not sure that rushing out a hotfix is a good idea... It would probably just break something else.

Maybe this speaks to how few copies of the DLC actually sold, that its not a priority to get it hotfixed
 
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Patch 1.1.2f1 is rolling out now with a fix for this issue. Again, we're sorry for the issues this caused.
 
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