If you and the other devs are unhappy with negative feedback, maybe you should consider your situation. You work for a company which relies on the "sunk cost fallacy" (aka spending good money after bad) to get it's customers to spend up to 1/3 of the game itself for DLC which heavily hints that it will fix issues that have been around since the game's release but never does. You work for a company which uses "sponsored" YouTubers to create heavily edited videos purporting to be live playthroughs (seriously, look at any YouTuber's vid and watch the dates closely) to sell the game. A company that leans hard on unpaid fans to provide tech support and additional content and tries to pass off unintuitive, arbitrary rules and needless complexity as depth and challenge.
There's no problem with the negative feedback, as long as it can be used to improve our work. Another different thing is the
unfair feedback. For instance, you say that '
[we] will fix issues that have been around since the game's release but never does', which is not true, as some other people in this thread have already pointed out. Right now we have internal 'debt' backlogs that we're reducing with each released update since last year, along with the new content.
Whoa. Then I'm sorry, my bad for not giving them a proper credit. (I actually suspect that most of those 3k bugs were found in pre-release iterations where it's mostly known where to look for bugs, but it's still a solid number). Perhaps they enjoy the game too much and don't pay attention when some things are off if they don't ruin gameplay completely
Son, you ARE the QA (spoken like the gears of war line) lol.
But no, even historically QA testing/ID of bugs wasn't the issue in EU 4. There were times where the line "we are the QA" could have been considered a lot more true than it is now. There was never a dearth of bugs identified. The issue in EU 4's patch history was always that long-confirmed bugs simply weren't fixed. You can't fix already ID'd bugs with more testers or more gameplay knowledge. You need someone who can actually program the game to go in and fix the enormous quantity of problems already identified, and to allocate resources so that someone is able to do it.
Prior to 2020, that was happening a lot less than it is now, and the backlog was pretty immense. Tinto more or less had to not only try to keep up with issues introduced by new stuff, but also fix remaining issue from new stuff from the past 6+ years. I know this, because bugs I'd known about for longer that which always annoyed me went away. Which means they reached that far back, but also addressed other known issues introduced in that 2016-2020 window too.
It's a massive improvement and while I have my criticisms of some design choices (nobody will get a game 100% to preference that still sells) and UI elements (somewhat more low-hanging fruit), IMO Tinto should be commended for both overall direction choice and making up for lost time wrt cleaning up the game. Previous devs have talked about catching up on tech debt, but in the past two years we've actually *observed* it happening.
To me, a meme Gotland tree is a small tradeoff for that, assuming we don't go into HOI territory.
Thanks for the kind comments giving credit to our bug-fixing work, it's really appreciated. As said by my colleague, we already fix hundreds of issues before each release, but those aren't commented out of the team, for obvious reasons. And even if we do our best for catching all the issues before a release, there will always be issues slipping into them, as it's nearly impossible to deliver a bug-free version.
And yet you're (team, not necessarily you individually) still releasing patches with blatant, easily corrected, bugs in newly added content such as the +100% instead of 1% in the horde ideas so something is clearly broken. Either QA is not being organized properly to ensure all new content is properly reviewed along with more general gameplay testing or said reviews are incompetent or the issues they raise aren't being addressed in a timely manner. Whichever area is the problem is irrelevant to the consumers, all we see is one broken release after another...
And, again, it's not fair saying things like '
one broken release after another'; 1.32 and 1.33 updates have been much more stable than the disaster 1.31 was, and we're aiming for an even smoother 1.34 release, and we're making preparations with that objective in mind.
It would get really interesting if AI was smart enough to actually follow these mission trees without external help. If results for the world's picture were horrible enough, developers would consider making missions more balanced
There will be some words about this in tomorrow's DD.
Having a Ph.D. in history, are you aware that the text for the new Danzig Confederation was lifted entirely from Wikipedia? Doesn't seem like good historical research to me.
en.m.wikipedia.org
First and foremost, I consider Wikipedia as a really interesting source, as depending on the article, it will have references and links to other sources, so it can be checked the actual accuracy of what is told on it.
That said, this may be an overlook on our behalf, as paraphrasing is something that can be taken into consideration, but copy-pasting not; sometimes we are a bit pressed by time constraints to finish some of the content to be tested, etc., and we forget to double-check properly what we've written.
