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.