No, srsly. Guys I think You need to work on this because this became a funny and comic thing. Just make sure of the state of build or game and give exact release date. What is wrong with You??? Why Paradox and many other RTS and 4X games developers do not suffer from such delays on delays? Just be sure on the state of patch, then give a release date. It is not hard, but You will avoid such ridiculous always on delays things.

I said it elsewhere before that I thought this project is a huge ambition. Things got in the way, like covid. But frankly with me sometimes liking the game, the community interaction and sometimes not really feeling it - because a good play through is so dependent on random settings I couldn't figure out consistently - I have to say product development was rather badly done. If that were to happen on this scale in a firm where I work, heads would be rolling. Let's just be clear game development is not easy, can be wrong, but can be improved if you sometimes change the lead developer(s). Probably about time here now. 

I disagree about grumbling in silence.  I definitely prefer a more communicative v. less.  They probably shouldn't have given an exact date (if they thought it would be ready on the 28th they probably should have said "end of October/beginning of November".... but maybe they expected to be/were finished last week and were just QAing it when they found the big bug, sometimes the unexpected delay is bigger than the cushion you have given yourself.)

That said, some people will like communication less and prefer to think they aren't doing anything than to hear about their setbacks.

You are game studio.

You spend a month making a patch.

Testing looks good. No problems for quite a while.

We are ready to release! Give them a date.

Internally people play patched version. 

Find horrific bug that outright breaks the game that somehow got missed (this happens so often if you have deluded yourself that its unusual then stop being deluded).

Make hard decision. Release with game breaking bug that the players will drag you for eternally or delay patch and anger the short sighted fools. Ok this isn't really a hard decision.

Promethian wrote:

You are game studio.

You spend a month making a patch.

Testing looks good. No problems for quite a while.

We are ready to release! Give them a date.

Internally people play patched version. 

Find horrific bug that outright breaks the game that somehow got missed (this happens so often if you have deluded yourself that its unusual then stop being deluded).

Make hard decision. Release with game breaking bug that the players will drag you for eternally or delay patch and anger the short sighted fools. Ok this isn't really a hard decision.

Why are You calling some gamers "short sighted fools"? Isn't this toxic?  The point is, to be sure of the state of build or game. To put exact date when U sure that U have stable and good build without major bugs. Why are u defending the, knowing that they delays everything for years now? It wasn't   a first time that this happened, its a broken system in management with systematically delays and failed deadlines. Prob. not enough testers to polish product well. It is hilarious now that they even delay the patch after so many delays of a game and beta's. That's the point. Do Ur communication on what  U are fixing and what is in the plans, but do also tell the exact release date when U sure that build is ready.

Chosen_One wrote:

Promethian wrote:

You are game studio.

You spend a month making a patch.

Testing looks good. No problems for quite a while.

We are ready to release! Give them a date.

Internally people play patched version. 

Find horrific bug that outright breaks the game that somehow got missed (this happens so often if you have deluded yourself that its unusual then stop being deluded).

Make hard decision. Release with game breaking bug that the players will drag you for eternally or delay patch and anger the short sighted fools. Ok this isn't really a hard decision.

Why are You calling some gamers "short sighted fools"? Isn't this toxic?  The point is, to be sure of the state of build or game. To put exact date when U sure that U have stable and good build without major bugs. Why are u defending the, knowing that they delays everything for years now? It wasn't   a first time that this happened, its a broken system in management with systematically delays and failed deadlines. Prob. not enough testers to polish product well. It is hilarious now that they even delay the patch after so many delays of a game and beta's. That's the point. Do Ur communication on what  U are fixing and what is in the plans, but do also tell the exact release date when U sure that build is ready.

Oh, gamers are 100% "shortsighted fools" XD
You have no idea what really goes into game dev, huh? Bugs, glitches and faults in code can come up anywhere, at any time and it is 99% impossible to predict it.
Anything from "If we have a player have 67 units in this particular pattern, and then move one straight to the south, it causes a gamebreaking bug" to "By the 86th game will the loading button suddenly disappear due to information cache being overloaded."
The point I am making is, that you are never able to see beforehand exactly when a product will be finished and problem free.
And delays are inevitable because, well you can't predict certain circumstances and if it is discovered in time before release they might require some time to be fixed.

the ONLY way to be 100% sure when release will come, (and keep high quality) is to have the game ready WAY ahead of time, and then wait until release.
That is the only way to do it, and that is unrealistic for most game devs. ESPECIALLY in the 4X genre.

Tnecniw wrote:

Chosen_One wrote:

Promethian wrote:

You are game studio.

You spend a month making a patch.

Testing looks good. No problems for quite a while.

We are ready to release! Give them a date.

Internally people play patched version. 

Find horrific bug that outright breaks the game that somehow got missed (this happens so often if you have deluded yourself that its unusual then stop being deluded).

Make hard decision. Release with game breaking bug that the players will drag you for eternally or delay patch and anger the short sighted fools. Ok this isn't really a hard decision.

Why are You calling some gamers "short sighted fools"? Isn't this toxic?  The point is, to be sure of the state of build or game. To put exact date when U sure that U have stable and good build without major bugs. Why are u defending the, knowing that they delays everything for years now? It wasn't   a first time that this happened, its a broken system in management with systematically delays and failed deadlines. Prob. not enough testers to polish product well. It is hilarious now that they even delay the patch after so many delays of a game and beta's. That's the point. Do Ur communication on what  U are fixing and what is in the plans, but do also tell the exact release date when U sure that build is ready.

Oh, gamers are 100% "shortsighted fools" XD
You have no idea what really goes into game dev, huh? Bugs, glitches and faults in code can come up anywhere, at any time and it is 99% impossible to predict it.
Anything from "If we have a player have 67 units in this particular pattern, and then move one straight to the south, it causes a gamebreaking bug" to "By the 86th game will the loading button suddenly disappear due to information cache being overloaded."
The point I am making is, that you are never able to see beforehand exactly when a product will be finished and problem free.
And delays are inevitable because, well you can't predict certain circumstances and if it is discovered in time before release they might require some time to be fixed.

the ONLY way to be 100% sure when release will come, (and keep high quality) is to have the game ready WAY ahead of time, and then wait until release.
That is the only way to do it, and that is unrealistic for most game devs. ESPECIALLY in the 4X genre.

Yeah, when it happens once in a while it is okay. But when it happens all the time with even DLC for ES2 which came out years ago and for last year with Humankind, every Beta delays and release date delays and now patch release day delay I say, that there is something wrong and they need to work on it. No less no more. Gamedev is hard. But business overall is a harsh place. Company's need to fight for their audience. And keep a good coms with its audience. But all time delays is damaging for reputation. They say that they need a week to fix that patch, what was the issue just to tell about that patch in first place with safe date? Why U even defend them for ongoing for more than year delays of everything? I say that their decision to delays beta's, date of release and even patch in matter of 1-2 days before that date is unprofessional and very frustrating.

Why are you capitalizing "You"? Is Amplitude God?

Anyway, I agree with others that using Paradox as your first example completely undermines your argument. Srsly!

What's the point of this thread? They have made an announcement. All the information is there. They are communicating in the forums.

Melliores wrote:

Please let us not mention Paradox as an étalon/benchmark of  releasing good quality DLC and patches on time. The latest DLCs for Europa Universalis and Surviving Mars were littered with game-breaking bugs and could not be squashed for weeks on end even after multiple patches.

A lot of other studios are experiencing issues with delays due to working remotely. I agree that the communication can be handled better but a delay was to expected seeing on how many things they are working, including the Stadia and Mac versions.If anything, it is better for the Stadia users as they will be able to catch up with the rest of the platforms this way. :)

How about Valve Software? They patch their products rather quickly. Even several times a day if necessary, even if it's just one fix.

DrunkenChoko wrote:

Ok so I think we all need to cool down a bit around here.

Yeah there is a delay, yeah that's on us, sorry.

We can't just remove the offending code and push a build because sadly we're not selling humankind on Itch.io, there is validation, on all of the platforms, that the game work. Those validation take time, and we don't want to have different patch online between our platform (the exception being stadia, which is another system entirely, so in this case we allow ourselves to have some difference because there is much more development involved porting the game).

Also while we have automated testing we also have internal and external QA (our internal QA are the one responding on your bug report on the forum).

I know a delay is shitty, I know that we announced a date, trust us, you play humankind some hour in your week maybe, we work on it full time, we are the first people that want the update to go live.

Again, keep your cool, it's just a game in the end.

We understand this. But the main point here is just to announce a date when You guys sure. So You could entirely skip this damaging delays. We would love to see news regarding the work You have done even without exact date, just make some blogs bout them and when You are ready to release set a date.

Regarding PDX example, I only play Stellaris. And maybe they have major issues on other projects. But with Stellaris, as a 4X realtime huge game I see they made a correct approach. They never delayed anything IIRC. And most patches was good. It is IMHO. And it can be wrong for many of You.

DrunkenChoko wrote:

Ok so I think we all need to cool down a bit around here.

Yeah there is a delay, yeah that's on us, sorry.

We can't just remove the offending code and push a build because sadly we're not selling humankind on Itch.io, there is validation, on all of the platforms, that the game work. Those validation take time, and we don't want to have different patch online between our platform (the exception being stadia, which is another system entirely, so in this case we allow ourselves to have some difference because there is much more development involved porting the game).

Also while we have automated testing we also have internal and external QA (our internal QA are the one responding on your bug report on the forum).

I know a delay is shitty, I know that we announced a date, trust us, you play humankind some hour in your week maybe, we work on it full time, we are the first people that want the update to go live.

Again, keep your cool, it's just a game in the end.

You are talking about certification process, but to my knowledge pushing updates to SteamPipe are near "instantaneous". What prevents you from making public beta branch builds there weekly?

Sublustris wrote:
You are talking about certification process, but to my knowledge pushing updates to SteamPipe are near "instantaneous". What prevents you from making public beta branch builds there weekly?

I think we are preparing a beta branch build for the patch.

Provinding you with a beta branch weekly ? I don't think that would be a great idea, the game while in dev break quite frequently, I don't know exactly why we don't do it (I'm not the one taking those decisions) but I think providing you with a beta that is 1 out of 3 times completly broken might be the reason...
Plus we don't want to spoil you the little addition we make with the bugfixing too soon !

Well it's not like you have only one branch where all untested and unreleased changes pile up before you push them out. Like, when I look at each individual patch in release notes for your games, they do not strike me as being so indivisible to be broken into several independent chunks, that could be deployed to your players sooner. 

Phew, well this conversation here went onto a path..... for whatever it is worth (probably not a lot), I would say delaying a patch is really not the end of the world. You can mod around with things and the community yourself until a week later when the patch is released, and then see how it goes and change / adapt things yourself again for the next built. I mean to me CIV in any form since 2 was totally unbalanced, and until today still is, which always requires multiple gamer tweaks (where you just have to make sure multiplayer is compatible). Yet at the same time, speaking purely for myself and maybe some other folks - HK could do (really well) with a bit more flavour / character to some game mechanics. I think everyone here is here because they know Amplitude can do just that given the past few games. Endless Legends was so unique and innovative. I think to me repeating this is more important than a week delay of some bugs and stuff.  

Promethian wrote:

You are game studio.

You spend a month making a patch.

Testing looks good. No problems for quite a while.

We are ready to release! Give them a date.

Internally people play patched version. 

Find horrific bug that outright breaks the game that somehow got missed (this happens so often if you have deluded yourself that its unusual then stop being deluded).

Make hard decision. Release with game breaking bug that the players will drag you for eternally or delay patch and anger the short sighted fools. Ok this isn't really a hard decision.

Long live stability and reparability and the resulting improvements to replay. 

DrunkenChoko wrote:

Sublustris wrote:
You are talking about certification process, but to my knowledge pushing updates to SteamPipe are near "instantaneous". What prevents you from making public beta branch builds there weekly?

I think we are preparing a beta branch build for the patch.

Provinding you with a beta branch weekly ? I don't think that would be a great idea, the game while in dev break quite frequently, I don't know exactly why we don't do it (I'm not the one taking those decisions) but I think providing you with a beta that is 1 out of 3 times completly broken might be the reason...
Plus we don't want to spoil you the little addition we make with the bugfixing too soon !

Yeah that doesn't sound fun. I suppose maybe (a miracle will happen) a player could discover a fix? I don't know the appropriate modern meme here because I'm just flashing back to the Far Side cartoon with the mathematicians and the chalk board showing their work where it's literally written out that - a miracle happens here - and a third professor suggests it's a bit too vague to publish. 

If you're cooking dinner and accidentally set fire to the meal, reducing it to a blackened and charred husk, do you eat it anyways because it's dinner time and you are going to eat when you planned to eat no matter what?

DrunkenChoko wrote:

I really don't want to explain how our workflow work, to summarize, it's gitflow (sorry, not gonna explain it precisly, but if you don't know it, it's really a classic flow in IT).

Let me try to break it down to you, if you don't know about git at all I'm sorry it probably won't make a lot of sense to you.

Git is absolutely great for code, or any other files that only contain simple, human readable text. Now imagine how it is for file like unity asset ? It's really not that great (I mean it does exactly what it's supposed to be, it's just not really great).

Now let's imagine that we add a new branch to our flow, some kind of debug-beta branch where we add only the big bugs while another branch, the balancing branch, only take the balancing work. We want a beta build that only fix bug and doesn't add the balancing.

Now imagine that we modify the District database, to fix a bug (a lot of bugs are data related and can be fixed this way) on the debug-beta branch while another dev try to fix some pesky OP emblematic quarters, what happen when you try to bring those two change in the same asset file ? Git have a big old conflict, one that is messy to repair because .asset file are yaml file, not something very easy to fix.

I know it will happen because it already happen sometime, and it's a pain to fix, except it only happen between one fix and one balancing modification (or two fix, or two balancing, whatever). A patch contain a hundred of those little modification, needless to say those asset files will be broken beyond repair if we start trying to merge them with all of those changes.

Again, I'm not saying we can't do better, some studios are able to do weekly beta branch with no visible issue, so it must be feasible. Right now I don't know how to do it, and if someone know at amplitude there might be other reason why we don't do it.

Anyway, again, sorry for the delay, I hope we will do better, and I hope I made some sense here.

Are you guys looking for release engineers? :D

PeaceWeaver wrote:

If you're cooking dinner and accidentally set fire to the meal, reducing it to a blackened and charred husk, do you eat it anyways because it's dinner time and you are going to eat when you planned to eat no matter what?

That's not at all what this is. I'm 10+ hours into the beta patch. It's a vast improvement for me. If it's not for you, you can easily pass on it, right?

curtc wrote:

PeaceWeaver wrote:

If you're cooking dinner and accidentally set fire to the meal, reducing it to a blackened and charred husk, do you eat it anyways because it's dinner time and you are going to eat when you planned to eat no matter what?

That's not at all what this is. I'm 10+ hours into the beta patch. It's a vast improvement for me. If it's not for you, you can easily pass on it, right?

20 here, yes, a huge improvement.

Just something fun to think about.

During its golden years, studio Blizzard was producing so good games, near perfect on alpha, without bug.

And so, their communication strategy was : "We will release it when it's ready".

Also, those companies hire community manager for everything related to communication. Asking a dev to do the communication work results in huge technical explanation that no-one understand. Seriously, a gitflow problem? 

I really hope the devs have enough time to focus on fixing the game rather than replying to customers.

Being a huge Civ fan, Humankind was so refreshing to play! So many good ideas, so many new great concepts. Just please, fix the middle game to end era game concepts, to deliver an amazing user experience. 

Letting all team members interact with our players here on G2G rather than channeling all interactions through the community team is a core part of Amplitude's identity and our philosophy for involving our players in the development of our games.

Does reading some threads on the forum and replying here and there take a little bit of their time? Sure. But we do not believe that time is lost, and will instead lead to a better product in the long run as everyone gets a better first-hand impression of the community's concerns and wishes.

Can their replies sometimes be a bit detailed and technical? Certainly. But we also think that this is not necessarily a bad thing. We are not always addressing everybody at once, and there are definitely players in our community who are skilled, knowledgeable, and invested enough to both understand and want a detailed answer.

Of course, the bulk of the community management and communication falls to the community team, as for us it is our main task. Yet if a designer or a programmer or an artist or any other person spends a few minutes now and then to read or reply, that hardly has a big impact on their daily productivity, but it can offer valuable insights both to them and to our players.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

Letting all team members interact with our players here on G2G rather than channeling all interactions through the community team is a core part of Amplitude's identity and our philosophy for involving our players in the development of our games.

Does reading some threads on the forum and replying here and there take a little bit of their time? Sure. But we do not believe that time is lost, and will instead lead to a better product in the long run as everyone gets a better first-hand impression of the community's concerns and wishes.

Can their replies sometimes be a bit detailed and technical? Certainly. But we also think that this is not necessarily a bad thing. We are not always addressing everybody at once, and there are definitely players in our community who are skilled, knowledgeable, and invested enough to both understand and want a detailed answer.

Of course, the bulk of the community management and communication falls to the community team, as for us it is our main task. Yet if a designer or a programmer or an artist or any other person spends a few minutes now and then to read or reply, that hardly has a big impact on their daily productivity, but it can offer valuable insights both to them and to our players.

Cheers to that. Don't go the traditional way (looking at you, Firaxis), because it ends in a complete disregard for the fanbase. A community manager is what we Southamericans call chanta. Look it iup. The industry, and the genre in particular, is full of chantas already. Don't be one more.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

Letting all team members interact with our players here on G2G rather than channeling all interactions through the community team is a core part of Amplitude's identity and our philosophy for involving our players in the development of our games.

Does reading some threads on the forum and replying here and there take a little bit of their time? Sure. But we do not believe that time is lost, and will instead lead to a better product in the long run as everyone gets a better first-hand impression of the community's concerns and wishes.

Can their replies sometimes be a bit detailed and technical? Certainly. But we also think that this is not necessarily a bad thing. We are not always addressing everybody at once, and there are definitely players in our community who are skilled, knowledgeable, and invested enough to both understand and want a detailed answer.

Of course, the bulk of the community management and communication falls to the community team, as for us it is our main task. Yet if a designer or a programmer or an artist or any other person spends a few minutes now and then to read or reply, that hardly has a big impact on their daily productivity, but it can offer valuable insights both to them and to our players.

So many times, you or one of your teamate helped me, when I even didn't ask for! Keep it. I know you work hard and make a good job.

And it's nice to interact with you or one of your teamate from time to time.

About something else: you maybe know your last change about district cost don't work so well ?

Well, I don't know if it's really work about balance of the game. Only thing I know, it's it gave me far less fun to play the game.

So, as you give us mod tools, I made a mod about that. And... ahah! It's the most popular mod actualy!

It's a bit sad because when you will patch again and remove (I guess) this exponential district cost, my mod will fall in the oblivion...

If you have time and wan't to have fun or have a new game experiment, try my mod "BuyThis", it work better than what I could expect.

Main mechanics are:

- you have money, so you can buy with money. No need Industry.

- you have food, so you can buy with pop. No need Industry. 

Some nice things that are already in the game, but not really used.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:

Letting all team members interact with our players here on G2G rather than channeling all interactions through the community team is a core part of Amplitude's identity and our philosophy for involving our players in the development of our games.

Does reading some threads on the forum and replying here and there take a little bit of their time? Sure. But we do not believe that time is lost, and will instead lead to a better product in the long run as everyone gets a better first-hand impression of the community's concerns and wishes.

Can their replies sometimes be a bit detailed and technical? Certainly. But we also think that this is not necessarily a bad thing. We are not always addressing everybody at once, and there are definitely players in our community who are skilled, knowledgeable, and invested enough to both understand and want a detailed answer.

Of course, the bulk of the community management and communication falls to the community team, as for us it is our main task. Yet if a designer or a programmer or an artist or any other person spends a few minutes now and then to read or reply, that hardly has a big impact on their daily productivity, but it can offer valuable insights both to them and to our players.

I appreciate your time here.

I also agree it is kind of cool to interact with you devs. I also believe it is kind of cool for you to have the opportunity to interact directly with us.

It's cool, but I don't think it is effective. You may face some unhappy customers who are difficult to manage. Replying to customers requires other skills that most devs don't have. Right now I don't know if I have to feel guilty for taking your time. I rather have you working on fixing the game now rather than replying to this thread. That's why I am not sure this is the most effective way, but well, you organize yourself as you want as long as the final product is good and delivered in due time. Right now, from my point view, you are giving the impression that your team is made of broken arms trying desperately to put some bandages on git flow, on database and finding anwers to a simple question "any communication on next patch?". We learned your struggle with git and we learned a little bit about your values. Fine, now we want a date for the next patch that will correct the previous patch.

Senai wrote:

Also, those companies hire community manager for everything related to communication. Asking a dev to do the communication work results in huge technical explanation that no-one understand. Seriously, a gitflow problem? 

I really hope the devs have enough time to focus on fixing the game rather than replying to customers.

Being a huge Civ fan, Humankind was so refreshing to play! So many good ideas, so many new great concepts. Just please, fix the middle game to end era game concepts, to deliver an amazing user experience. 

Hey, he replied to me, and I appreciate it greatly. This is exactly what I asked. Don't you dare to shoo him off for being gracious.