I guess, september is more realistic.And when will it be ready?
What stage is the work at?
Will we have them by the end of Q2, June?
Thanks for any response
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Reality check...
Failed.
Anyway, your examples are rather poorly chosen.
If you are going to support others via Kickstarter, then you have made a decision to "invest" some money in some hopefully positive future outcome.
If you are buying a game which isn't marked as Early Access, then "you" (aka the typical customer) do expect a finished, correctly working product in return for your money.
That's the first point where CO and CS2 have massively failed.
And they continue failing with literally every action they are taking. One might start thinking it is intentional.
"Patches" which introduced new errors and flaws, a DLC which set a new low in steam reviews and now even messing up the refunding process for said DLC. And no indication they would be overly concerned about it. Where is the hotfix to correct that? There isn't one and even their "communication" only indicates that they aren't overly concerned about it.
Why might that be? Isn't that just unbelievable?
It is because of players like you who not only let them escape with that track record but even advocate that others should accept it as well.
It isn't a god given law of nature that especially gaming software is released in poor state, it is caused by people of your mindset. YOU and the ones like you are literally asking for the treatment you are receiving.
Now, you seem to be fine with that. Good for you.
But don't tell others that your way of thinking would be "the right one", "modern" or whatever. It isn't.
It is a standing invitation to gaming companies to put less and less effort in software development though.
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Lol @ comparing crowdfunded projects to products backed by a huge corporation. Regardless how much funding does it get (I'm guessing in the context of CS2 - not enough), your money isn't directly going to the developer.
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Cities Skylines sold 12,5 millions copies of the base game in 8 years and was profitable 2 months after the release in march 2015 (Mariina's words in an interview). This is not a niche game. CS II was in the 2023 Steam top10 by revenue with more than 5 millions $. This is not a niche game either. The comparison with Railroad Tycoon makes no sense. Games are cheaper because they sell 100 times what they sold in 1990.
What makes even less sense is relating the supposed "low" price today with some bug-ridden, unoptimized, half-finished games released by some unscrupulous big companies like Paradox (they grossed 2 billions in 2023). It's like saying: "hey, a computer in 2024 is 10 times cheaper than in 1990 so you have to accept they sell you a half-broken PC. But know that Intel, AMD and NVidia are working hard at fixing your useless PC so be patient, we'll keep you posted next year".
As for your pedantic journey towards patience and peace of mind since you've discovered kickstarter, it's so ridiculous I'm speechless. You should direct your patronizing life lessons to CO and PDX who were so impatient last year to take our money they couldn't wait for 2024 or 2025 to finish their product and get their return on investment. As for me, I never invest in games, I buy them, just like I buy food, books or clothes. The only people I lend money to without interests are friends and family, not companies.
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Did an e-mail about the game from your company get sent out to people from an official account? (CO vs PDX address is not my problem, it is related to your game, you figure out your internal problems) Was it done by a malicious third party or was it a blunder? I think this is a perfectly legitimate question that deserve a proper answer. If it was malicious this is very concerning, if it was a blunder do say so.
I also find extremely grinding the CO VS PDX in your recent answers. This is not how I expect a business to operate and behave. Your internal problems are yours, not the customers. This is extremely disrespectful. If people ask a question about YOUR product, it is not their job to hunt down who did what in the chain of your contractual relationships. If one of your partners hold the answer, you do go ask them, this is not the customers job. I don't know what people at CO expect from such behaviour, but it doesn't look good from a customer perspective.
This attitude also reflects very poorly on the future of the game. Are customers to understand that your relationship are so poor that you cannot talk to each others to ask when a pack will be released, what it contains, etc. ? Because that's how your last couple of answers sound like. That honestly doesn't look good for the long term viability of the game.
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co_avanya
Community Manager at Colossal Order
Moderator
QA
Community Ambassador
Colossal Order Dev
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- Jan 4, 2021
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There was no malicious activity, and as far as I know, the email that was sent out is the automated notification you can sign up for by clicking the "Follow" button at the top of the forum. Beyond that, I don't have the answers to what happened or why, sorry!
If you dont know what happened or why, then how can you conclude there was no malicous activity? That's contradictory.
The issue is days went past with the community asking if emails received from Paradox about a refund was indicative if someone had unauthorised access to your systems, which potentially means our user data could of been accessible as well.
Given these forums link to our Steam account, our personal details are potentially scrapped and stored by Paradox as part of the linking process. That exposes your customers to data theft.
All that was needed when this originally occured, was a immediate honest response to say, someone behind the scenes stuffed up and published a draft for an official announcement. We will have a finalised official announcement later this week and cant say anything further at this stage. The information that has been leaked is not because of a malicious actor who got administrative access.
This response has no honesty and transparency, it comes across as an excuse that its still unknown what happened, because nobody wants to take responsibility for making a mistake.
Indicative of the whole 6 months so far, to be honest.
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You're completely right!
But back in the late nineties, when this started and I, (personally me!) wrote sentences like yours, tried to stop the trend to software as a service, stop the riping in the hands of the customers and things like that, mostly all people laughed at me. NOW that battle is over. I didn't won those days, so I had to adapt, wether I liked it or not.
YOU are twenty years to late!
Sorry to say that, but all your anger and indignation won't change anything NOWADAYS.
There isn't another possibility as to accept, what is fact now.
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Voting the DLC the worst to be ever released on steam made them reimburse it. PDX also delayed several releases in the same period of time. I would say that expressing unhappiness in certain fashions (e.g., steam reviews) has an effect on business behaviour. I think people should express (politely) their unhappiness. Obviously it won't solve everything, but it has some positive effect.
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I think Oct->Dec 2023, most people did, but nothing happened during that window to get results. Dec 23, they dumped a patch that broke the game and then went on vacation, they came back and noticed a lot of anger in the community because of it and called the community toxic. 3 months later, here we are and weve barely moved the needle.
People's only voice that truely is heard, is when they choose not to buy future products.
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I agree with you regarding that DLC. The reaction was so massive, that they (CO) had to do something.
Now we have to hope that this won't broke their neck.
Expressing their (the customers) unhappiness is good, of course!
The thing I criticize is impatience and general mistrust.
I, for example, wrote directly to collossal order to make clear, what I expect to be done. I don't accept everything. But I know, it will take much time.
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Just adding that it's great that @co_avanya is back and replying on the Community again.
Given so many people were complaining that there was no CO voice on here for a pretty significant period of time, the way that some people are replying to them and asking them questions on here is pretty awful.
Yes, they're an official company rep. No, they're not the cause of all of the issues. Yep, they'll get whatever answers they can get. Yes, CO is a bin fire right now. But a little kindness and consideration in the way you type can go a long way when it comes to speaking to one individual.
Given so many people were complaining that there was no CO voice on here for a pretty significant period of time, the way that some people are replying to them and asking them questions on here is pretty awful.
Yes, they're an official company rep. No, they're not the cause of all of the issues. Yep, they'll get whatever answers they can get. Yes, CO is a bin fire right now. But a little kindness and consideration in the way you type can go a long way when it comes to speaking to one individual.
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Everybody called for a fast solution. People demanded a instant patch. They tried and failed, because it was made to fast.
They went on vacation? It's normal for all of us to do, specially around christmas. It is a law to regain health and power. And of course, that was maximum hard for all the people, who had hoped to play the game in their own vacation time.
Best would have been to delay those patch to january.
Wasting time with instant patches is a bad thing nowadays. More bugs and problems afterwards than before.
Yes. But if the choice for the company was to go bankrupt now or later, they would have choosen "later" I guess.
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Exactly. So why are you not showing the least bit of concern that this happened, let alone that PDX/CO's refusal to comment for several days caused some people to freak out with stress and anxiety? Not knowing what is going on is the worst situation.
To help you refresh your memory with what happened and how traumatic it became because of the official silence: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/email-from-co-paradox-regarding-beach-assets.1664477/ . Every concern could have easily been put to rest but no, you neither confirm nor deny.
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Because Avanya is not an employee of PDX but of CO? And this forum is run by PDX? So any information about an incident concerning the security of this forum must come from PDX. So you should in this case not ask for a statement of CO but of Paradox. Those two are separate companies.
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It should be obvious that I am not too late.
CO/PDX won't make any money this year from DLC. And sales - according to SteamDB - have drastically slowed down.
That means they are hit where they are the most vulnerable - in their profits.
And there is a message for you: that the "Beach Properties" pack was retracted was not due to your and likeminded ones' calls for "patience", but because a lot of people did the exact opposite: They didn't show any patience and they assured that they were heard.
Some postings above you claimed to be "trusting CO".
I wonder why that is?
Because they delivered good, mature software at release? Hardly.
Because they fixed the existing issues quickly? Hardly.
Because they delivered at least some meaningful DLC? Hardly.
Because they acted immediately after the refunding process went terribly wrong? Hardly.
We are six months past release now. Nothing has been really resolved and they continue acting without care, adding one misstep after the other.
Not only no reason to have "trust" in them, but much reason not to spend any more money on their products as long as those aren't of decent quality. If that means they will be going out of business, so be it.
We aren't charity, we are working hard for our good, flawlessly working and very functional money. If they cannot come up with an adequate piece of software in return, good riddance.
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Continuing
- NA medium row. Somehow worse than EU, with 10 different assets out of 41. In some cases, up to 8 were identical. For example 01_L3_3x6 and 02_L3_3x6 are the same pixel to pixel. Why bother then with 02?
- NA medium res - same deal with EU, 21/75
- NA mixed was a tough one. Game says 165. But the assets are separated into 3 forms - normal, left and right. Normal has 33, which is a norm here, two per level. Now left also has 33, and so does right - but those are pretty much mirrored. Can't count that as separate assets. Also, left & right are just remixed version of normals, with altered fronts, wall shapes etc. But they did require some work so they are different from normal, sure. So all in all we're standing at 66. Which is not bad in fact. Same business with EU, so another 66.
- EU/NA commercial low. 140 it says, once more they're separated into three categories, gas stations, motels and regular ones. There are 9 gas stations and motels, 22 regulars, making it 40 per region. Poor result for three types of assets.
- EU/NA commercial high. Separated into normal and hotels. There's only 9 different hotels so we've got 36/75.
- offices low, in most cases there's 4 per asset, in total of 21.
- office high - 33/70. Nearly a half, not bad.
Today's count - 369. Plus 386 from yesterday, and we land at 755 residential, mixed, commercial and office assets.
I'm not touching industrial because there's nearly 500 of them to check and compare. I'm guessing over a 100 uniques considering previous experiences. Maybe 200. So in fact we'd be landing at half of what the game actually says - nearly 1900.
So I say, if we're about to get 2500 if it's counted using Paradox method, we're doubling the amount currently in the game. If we're counting using logical method, we're quadrupling it.
I hope, that is.
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They are separate companies. But is it unreasonable to expect a greater show of concern, an understanding at least of why so many days of official silence only made matters worse? Would a less bureaucratic response, something more sympathetic, really be out of order? Perhaps I'm conflating issues. CO just seem to lack a sense of urgency about anything at the moment. Telling people who have lost their beach properties assets because of the DLC removal debacle they have to wait two or three weeks for a fix is appalling.
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I would expect all discussion between the two companies would be kept internal. I doubt that CO would throw their employers under the bus by openly complaining or criticizing them. I don't think we will ever get the full story behind the release of the game, and the issues the companies faced. We can speculate but it doesn't really do any good without actual facts to back it up.
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