Alarming silence of Firaxis

[gunter]

I played a lot the first original masterpiece called Railroad Tycoon,it was 1990....then I skipped intermediate versions due to several reasons and I finally bought Sid Meier Railroads! more or less an year ago.....

Sid has been a real Genius and for the youngsters here his masterpieces list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier can witness his first games were deeply full of geniality ..... later on maybe he became rich and famous and maybe losse some adrenaline....maybe it's a common human behaviour....but you are not human,believe me !

All this speeches.....to say that he always stated that he made games that himself would have loved to play....excellent concept and excellent mind but now Sid we wanna talk with you directly,you surelly will be the most wellcome guy ever seen in a forum. By myside I would only to thank you for what you have done in these last 20-25 years. I do not want to complain about Civ IV.

If you wanna appear with a camuflated nick ....maybe..... are you already here ?

 

[gps]

I played a lot the first original masterpiece called Railroad Tycoon,it was 1990....

Sid has been a real Genius.

True, 50% of all the games I played in the late eighties/early nineties were Sid's: Silent Service, Gunship, F15, F19, Red Storm Rising. Don't forget, he had a whole career in military sims - BEFORE he ever started working in the strategy genre.

later on maybe he became rich and famous and maybe losse some adrenaline....

I don't think that's the problem. I just think in those days, games were a much less complex matter, some of these games were coded by Sid alone - and having the whole code and the whole logic in the hand of one man sure makes bugs less likely than today with hundreds of people working on one game. And if you have a look at the making of Civ IV video provided with the Civ Cronicles, one starts to wonder, how much input - except for the name - Sid actually had.

... now Sid we wanna talk with you directly,you surelly will be the most wellcome guy ever seen in a forum.

Tha would be something...

I do not want to complain about Civ IV.

Me either, it surely is one of the greatest games I've ever played. If I did not care, there'd be no need for me to be a little bit worried, the game may stay unfinished.

 

[classical_hero]

My suggestion: Wait before buying a new game, expansion or patch. Review the complaints and issues. For BTS, I didn't even buy it until 3.02 and Solver's patch were available. I never installed 3.03. I didn't install 3.13 until Bruic's patch was out for almost a week.

For those of you who can't wait, resign yourself to being out there on the bleeding edge. It sucks, but that's the reality of software products these days.

There are some of us who use BTS for Mutliplayer and generally you have to go with what you host is doing and every single one of them that I am playing in went to 3.13, so there was no option for but to patch.

 

[r_rolo1]

^^ And there are those people that purchased their BtS on Steam ( or some other e-commerce thing ) and that had their BtS auto pached and unable to go back to 3.0X....

And BtS 3.13 has some serious SP issues ( unlike some suggested ) : the colony issue ( you can't have more than one colony... if you make a second the first auto declare war ( WTH ? ) ) , the way that they handled the max 18 civs problem when creating colonies ( if there is a dead civ, the colony takes his place... the problem is that the colony inherits the culture from the dead civ and you suddently have cities with 95% of your colony culture and with the " we yearn to .... " ( why they didn't installed a 34 civ dll ? ) ) , the fact that privateers can have safe harbor in the victim's cities.... just to name a few. Not so bad as the MP issues, but clearly broken issues that unbalance the game seriously.

The big problem is that a lot of people ( me included ) is with fear ( based on other games of the same house fate, like CivIII ) that Firaxis had simply abandoned BTS as a ghost ship and that no more patches will come. That would not be the end of the world if Firaxis officially said that the shop was closed ( almost all of the people would adopt some kind of unofficial patch and life would go on ), a thing that most likely will not happen for marketing issues ( who would buy a game that the manufacturer said that was on the shelf?... ).

@gunter

Most of us ( if not all ) feel the same about Sid... if it still was Sid that was making the games....

P.S alexman is again in here... good news

 

[Dagta]

Well, I've been a professional programmer since 1984, and it's obvious to me that hundreds of hours of testing went into the patch.

Throwing about the number of years you've been a programmer (which in my case is actually true), carries little weight in an argument. It's about as meaningful as saying that since I ate lunch at the same restaurant as Sid (true fact) or that I am in the credits for Civ (true fact) or that the fact that I have a high post count (yet another true fact) makes me an authority on how much testing Firaxis did. It is meaningless.

Perhaps total hundreds of hours went into testing but how much of that was on the final release candidate of patch 3.13? No caught something as obvious as the cultural icon bug? I saw that within five minutes of loading my first game after the patch.

23 years of programming and you think hundreds of hours of testing went into this patch.... was there a beta test with 100 people?

 

[Perfxion]

Are people still forgetting that PC software is hard to test for everything since there are about 1.75 trillion different hardware configurations out there. So the bugs might not be present on the machines they work with. And the beta testers that uses can only change so much with testing. It would take like 10 million dollars and 6 years to test a game on every possible hardware configuration out there.

 

[Dagta]

Are people still forgetting that PC software is hard to test for everything since there are about 1.75 trillion different hardware configurations out there. So the bugs might not be present on the machines they work with. And the beta testers that uses can only change so much with testing. It would take like 10 million dollars and 6 years to test a game on every possible hardware configuration out there.

To test if a program core and graphics are compatible you need several configurations. Bugs like the culture icon bug, the colony founding bug, and resource trading bug are machine independent. They are logical bugs in the game's programming and will show up regardless of machine configuration.

 

[Perfxion]

I played the game many times with the latest patch and have not seen any of these problems. So it has to be hardware dependent.

 

[King Flevance]

No it isn't. Its coding. Those two statements are fact. You are either:

1) not playing 3.13
2) using Bhruic's patch
3) never noticed.

 

[Smidlee]

Perhaps total hundreds of hours went into testing but how much of that was on the final release candidate of patch 3.13? No caught something as obvious as the cultural icon bug? I saw that within five minutes of loading my first game after the patch.

How many bugs were spotted before you got the patch? I can see someone play the game for hours and miss this bug. (The more people play the game increases the changes of spotting bugs.) I bet you didn't catch ever bug on Bhruic's patch in five minute yet ever one of those were there at the time.
Personally I didn't notice this bug until it was reported here.

 

[toft]

How many bugs were spotted before you got the patch? I can see someone play the game for hours and miss this bug. (The more people play the game increases the changes of spotting bugs.) I bet you didn't catch ever bug on Bhruic's patch in five minute yet ever one of those were there at the time.

This is why frequent small patches would be nice. Firaxis would get a fast feedback to the changes they made, and we would get a better feeling of satisfaction with our product. Its a win-win situation.

Anyway... that "Check for updates" button in Civ4 is pretty useless when theres only ~2 patches per game/expansion.

 

[Vanadium]

i only play MP with some freinds we usually play a game at least once a week.

the MP sync issues have just bricked the game for us since it happens on every turn for us...

can they not release a small patch to fix that? cause seriously that IS a large problem.


ive never complained before about any patches for xpacs or fixes ...but that last patch just made the game literally unplayable for me and my freinds.

please fix soon.

 

[ori]

i only play MP with some freinds we usually play a game at least once a week.

the MP sync issues have just bricked the game for us since it happens on every turn for us...

can they not release a small patch to fix that? cause seriously that IS a large problem.


ive never complained before about any patches for xpacs or fixes ...but that last patch just made the game literally unplayable for me and my freinds.

please fix soon.

Have you tried the fix proposed here?

 

[Vanadium]

Have you tried the fix proposed here?

no i didnt, thanks. tomorrow night i guess the 3 of us will have to do that and hope for the best

 

[jpinard]

There is one issue to think about... and that's how the Civ development team feels about modders.

For those that mod the game, every time a patch comes out it could be a major undertaking to update their mod to fit the new code. As anxious as I was for the last patch, I was also painfully aware of all the editing and re-testing I'd have to do of my own work.

That being said, if they chose the "bigger patch - longer time" vs.
"smaller patch shorter time" because of a the extra work it causes modders... they should communicate that to players.
It's really really hard to find balance, and I've been on all sides of the gaming world.

I'm just really thankful Soren and the team took the route they initially did so we don't always have to wait for the dev's (mod-wise) and we have talented people who can help us enjoy our gaming while Firaxis tries to catch up.

 

[warpstorm]

Perhaps total hundreds of hours went into testing but how much of that was on the final release candidate of patch 3.13?

I have no way of knowing; I turned down the offer to beta-test BTS and its patches.

23 years of programming and you think hundreds of hours of testing went into this patch.... was there a beta test with 100 people?

There were on all of the previous patches to Civ3 and Civ4. By extrapolation, I would assume that they kept a large core set of beta testers as well as some T2K professional QA. (Firaxis recruits its testers from posters here and at Apolyton.)

The other thing to consider is that maybe the testers are not at fault and they dutifully wrote up bug reports on these problems. They might have been deemed "known shippable" by Firaxis (or more likely the upper management at T2K) so as to not delay the patch any more (or spend any more money it).

 

[Dagta]

I have no way of knowing; I turned down the offer to beta-test BTS and its patches.



There were on all of the previous patches to Civ3 and Civ4. By extrapolation, I would assume that they kept a large core set of beta testers as well as some T2K professional QA. (Firaxis recruits its testers from posters here and at Apolyton.)

The other thing to consider is that maybe the testers are not at fault and they dutifully wrote up bug reports on these problems. They might have been deemed "known shippable" by Firaxis (or more likely the upper management at T2K) so as to not delay the patch any more (or spend any more money it).

Thanks for the explanation. I didn't know about the beta testers.

Whatever happened, I do feel this patch wasn't ready for release.

 

[Snazzye]

Consoles require much more exhaustive testing precisely because you can't patch it.

The reason to go to consoles is that the programming and testing is all easier and standard because you have one fixed, stable platform, instead of a different hardware setup on every single customer (which is what the PC version has to deal with).

Wodan

You can patch consoles. Thats what Xbox live is for. Look at EA with Madden 07. That game was buggy until they released a patch over live months later kinda like, erm..........

 

[TheWilltoAct]

I don't know how you can not notice the culture icon bug......

 

[Loopy]

I'm not sure why the OP labeled their silence as "alarming". When was the last time Firaxis/Take2/2KGames ever been forthcoming and responsive about when a patch was going to be released? All it would take would be a three words on their webpage saying "patch in progress" and that would be tons better than their total lack of communication. I'd say that the silence is just a continuation of the status quo, and not particularly alarming.

Some may point at the response Alexman got as a reason for the silence. That might be valid if, 1) Firaxis/Take2 had been communicating with us beforehand, 2) he were acting in a official capacity in keeping us informed, and 3) he actually received some serious flaming for his words.

To address those points:
1) AFAIK, their communications have been only of an extremely informal nature, done once in a blue moon, of random Firaxians posting on random topics or asking for our help in providing save games. A loss for sure, but how big of a loss?

2) All indications were that he was acting of his own initiative. While he personally might not want to repeat his actions, one could easily argue that the lesson learned by Firaxis/Take2 shouldn't be that they ought to keep quiet about everything, but rather that they ought to have a designated liason. Some of the best CS comes with a mantra of "it's not my fault, but it is my problem." That kind of thinking actually gets things fixed. When the philosophy is "it's not my fault, so someone else can deal with it", too often that "someone else" is "no one else".

3) I'd hardly call what he received a serious flaming. There was clearly tons of support for Firaxis early on. As implied "deadlines" came and went and the weeks passed, while there was criticism for his lack of communication there was still just as much support. And I don't remember a ton of actual moderator action coming up in response to what anyone said about Alexman. On a per page basis, it wouldn't surprise me if there were more in this thread. And the more cynical might even wonder if he never came back to read it, if he could even be affected by the "flames". Sort of a "tree falls in the woods" question, no?

Thoughts?