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SpaceTroll

SpaceTroll

7 years ago May 31,2017, 13:01:00 PM

Lesson Learned

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Dear community,


Thank you all for being here, with us. Some of you have supported us for nearly 5 years now, since we came out of nowhere with Endless Space. It has been a great journey and a pleasure to have you guys beside us: we are constantly learning how to craft the best games, thanks to your feedback and all the interesting discussions we have on Games2Gether. One thing we were very proud of was to create not only deep and rich games, but also games that were very solid and stable even in Early Access.


That said, the way last patch release came out was a mistake on our part, and for that we wanted to apologize.


We were so excited and hyped by what Endless Space 2 was becoming, that we clearly overlooked quite a few issues lurking in the shadows… and not necessarily minor ones, unfortunately. As veteran game developers, we know how destructive it can be to a game to overlook bug polish.


When two weeks ago we shipped Endless Space 2, our intention was to blast right out the gates and keep adding improvements, fixing bugs and generally making the game better. The last sprint to release had been a bit of a rush to implement community feedback in the last days of the Early Access. This, however, came at the expense of proper testing. Taken aback by the amount of things that needed a quick fix, we rushed to address all issues and issued as quickly as possible a patch to fix most pressing problems and make everyone happy. As we all know, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and this patch turned a “not so good situation” into a “far worse situation”, with the AI entering a deadlock status for many players who had previously been unaffected.


That’s on us. We messed up. We are really sorry.


From now on, we will be more careful in the testing of our patches, in order to avoid reproducing the same mistakes in the future. We have since provided a hotfix (1.0.52) that seems to have fixed these pending turns issues, and allowed us to resume work on the game. 


We will of course continue to fix issues arising from thousands of hours of play, and we have already planned another hotfix that should remove a rare hang in ground battles as well as multiplayer fixes that were tested in update 1.0.6. preview. Balancing is also a priority: our factions are very asymmetrical, and we are constantly focusing on balancing them based on all your comments and feedback.


This is again just the beginning of a long adventure together, and we are so sorry for any inconvenience, for those of you who wanted to spend your week-end with Endless Space 2, alone or with friends in the Endless galaxy. We count on you to keep your faith in us, and for as long as you will be on our side, we promise you that we’ll keep making incredibly rich, fun, and beautiful games in the Endless universe… and beyond! 



Thank you,

Amplitude Studios

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7 years ago
May 31, 2017, 4:49:18 PM

Endless Space has been my favorite strategy game since StarCraft in 1998. I've spent more time in ES1 than any other & so far ES2 has not disappointed. Bug & maligned hotfixes are an annoyance, but Amplitude Games has been an amazing company. I can't speak for anyone besides myself: you still retain my trust & appreciation.

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7 years ago
May 31, 2017, 5:07:43 PM

Mistakes happen, the good thing is you learned a lesson and will do better in the future.


I have one small advice: start systematically releasing patches only on Mondays. That way if something unexpected and critical comes up you have the rest of the workweek to make an emergency hotfix, no need to worry about which member (or any) of your team can be called in to work overnight or during a holiday.


It was unforseeable that the patch you'd send out just before a 4 day holiday would make things much worse. But you could have expected that there would be no one at the office to fix anything, if something goes wrong.



By the way, you're doing a great job in working openly with the community and sharing info. This helps not only with reassuring players but also brainstorming solutions. I'm thinking of this thread in particular as an example. In it you mention

Also one of the cool features we added is the computation of four  suggested technologies at the beginning of the turn. This is actually a  complex algorithm which analyzes the player empire needs, and it was  computed all the same for the AI, which already has a research  computation. So we have removed this for the AI.

I remember people asking for suggested technologies during early access. And you made it happen, that's great. But if you had kept silent that it was made possible through a complex algorith that requires a lot of computation each turn then, I think, no one would have mentioned that there are players who do not need suggested technologies and would be quite happy to have an option to turn this off so that their computers can compute turns a bit faster. Moral of the story: open development leads to unexpected and spontaneous good ideas.


Keep up the good work and Make ES2 Stable Again :P

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7 years ago
May 31, 2017, 5:19:48 PM

No problem :) 

Beatifull ilustration by the way !

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