Checking in from the dev team: next update coming later this month!

[Pfeffersack]

It's much easier to record a bug than to write an accurate description, especially if English isn't your first language.

Hmm, ok. I get your point. So maybe this is generally meant in helpful way. However...for me presonally having to record a video is more hassle than taking screenhsots, creating a save and writing a proper description. It might have to do with the kind of bug reported, though. For some issues, shwoing a process over several turns in a vid might be helpful...but I'm not sure if it the best medium for every item. And @99-percent-sure wrote that the request for a video came despite a description been given.

 

[99-percent-sure]

Hmm, ok. I get your point. So maybe this is generally meant in helpful way. However...for me presonally having to record a video is more hassle than taking screenhsots, creating a save and writing a proper description. It might have to do with the kind of bug reported, though. For some issues, shwoing a process over several turns in a vid might be helpful...but I'm not sure if it the best medium for every item. And @99-percent-sure wrote that the request for a video came despite a description been given.

The situation was that I was playing Exploration, and my missionary (on his last charge) converted distant lands Carthage to my religion while standing on a hex that wasn't adjacent to the city center, which was not yet visible on the screen. I knew I was in Carthage because I was using the Improved Plot Tooltip mod. I didn't get my two relics for converting the capital. When a follow-up missionary visually revealed the city center five or six turns later, I confirmed that it had been converted to my religion, so the failure to award relics was a bug. I wound up setting that game aside and starting a new one.

Later on, I reported what had happened, figuring Firaxis would want to hear about it. A few days later, I got an automated email asking why I hadn't submitted follow-up information on my issue report. It turned out the system wanted me to send in a video recording of the bug. I didn't have any save files from shortly before I discovered the bug, and didn't want to replay 25-30 turns of that game just to recreate the bug, so I told Sarah (the agent who was communicating with me) that I'd just close the ticket, and try to document it if the situation came up again (though I'll just avoid converting an unseen AI capital in practice). The system sent me a couple of additional requests for a video after that, even though I'd told Sarah I didn't want to pursue it because I didn't want to invest my time replicating that situation.

Based on my description, that's the type of bug anyone, including a Firaxis bug checker, could test for. I don't see how me reporting the bug somehow made it my job to extensively document the bug. I'm honestly not interested in doing unpaid work for Firaxis. I've sent along screenshots of a couple of earlier bugs I've reported (independent settlements continuing to "own" hexes after they spontaneously vanish, for example), but now they wanted a video, and this doesn't seem to me to be the type of bug that you need a video to understand.

Anyway, now I'm reluctant to report any more glitches, which are popping up pretty regularly (especially around not getting credit for completing quests), because I don't want to have to replay games in order to document the glitch with a video recording. That's not my job.

 

[Niallism]

I think a lot of people are developing pretty uncharitable interpretations of the devs' attitude.

You're right. It is not the devs. I should not have said that it is the devs. It would be their executives and marketing team.

The game was released far too early, and they have not been honest about that. I'm not naive, I understand how often marketing and PR lies, but (a) I don't accept it despite its prevalence, and (b) I think it's a poor strategy.

For example, one of the PR/Marketing miracles of recent gaming has been the team at Hello Games, making No Man's Sky. They accepted that there were significant issues with its launch, and worked to address these without minimizing them. They accepted negative feedback and showed this. That was incredibly effective, and along with their hard work since launch, has turned their game and company's image around.

We can also point easily to many disasters, were a game has dropped radically in sales and popularity due to issues that the PR team do not address.

The people speaking to us from the Civ 7 makers are unlikely to be the people responsible for the buggy launch, the unfinished UI etc, and unlikely to be allowed to speak as they'd like, but the company failing to speak honestly on these issues annoys me and of course makes me trust them less.

How do you feel about the launch and the press releases about it? Are you happy with the narrative they have presented? Do you even care if it is honest?

 

[Gorbles]

Anyway, now I'm reluctant to report any more glitches, which are popping up pretty regularly (especially around not getting credit for completing quests), because I don't want to have to replay games in order to document the glitch with a video recording. That's not my job.

It isn't your job, nor are you obliged in any way to report anything you find.

However, a video recording of an issue is standard in publisher-run support forums, which are often completely separate to the developers themselves (this is also the case in regular software, to greater or lesser extents). I had to record videos of glitches in BL3, back in 2019 - 2020. Games are more complicated than ever, and run on more machines than ever. It's not a given that the support team could reproduce it on whatever hardware they have available to them, and to even gets to the devs, support need to be able to reproduce the behaviour (because they will add additional information that you have no reasonable way of knowing, that'll aid development in repro-ing and fixing the issue in-house).

So sure. You don't have to do anything. But at the same time, your expectation that somebody should be able to repro it from a description alone is flawed. Even if this is the case for simpler issues, or issues that reliably reproduce, the support team will have a standard expectation for supporting materials for any submitted issue. They can't handwave that because it looks straightforward. They have to follow procedure.

If support at my work handed development a ticket with a text-based description and zero supporting evidence, we would close the ticket. Because support haven't followed procedure, and it's a waste of development's time to do support's job (in addition to dev not interfacing directly with customers, which puts up an additional barrier in obtaining said supporting evidence).

Hopefully this insight helps a bit. Again, I completely agree you're under no obligation to do anything. But these procedures, these requests for data, exist for very valid reasons.

And back to lurking I go.

 

[evonannoredars]

You're right. It is not the devs. I should not have said that it is the devs. It would be their executives and marketing team.

The game was released far too early, and they have not been honest about that. I'm not naive, I understand how often marketing and PR lies, but (a) I don't accept it despite its prevalence, and (b) I think it's a poor strategy.

For example, one of the PR/Marketing miracles of recent gaming has been the team at Hello Games, making No Man's Sky. They accepted that there were significant issues with its launch, and worked to address these without minimizing them. They accepted negative feedback and showed this. That was incredibly effective, and along with their hard work since launch, has turned their game and company's image around.

We can also point easily to many disasters, were a game has dropped radically in sales and popularity due to issues that the PR team do not address.

The people speaking to us from the Civ 7 makers are unlikely to be the people responsible for the buggy launch, the unfinished UI etc, and unlikely to be allowed to speak as they'd like, but the company failing to speak honestly on these issues annoys me and of course makes me trust them less.

How do you feel about the launch and the press releases about it? Are you happy with the narrative they have presented? Do you even care if it is honest?

The difference between Hello Games and Firaxis is that one as an independent developer and the other is owned by Take-Two Interactive/2K. I don't think it's the PR team being restricted in how open they can be by their higher-ups within the Civ VII development team - they have less independence going higher up than that.

I do think the Civ VII team as a whole has been receptive of feedback and have made some good decisions - such as delaying the events that were scheduled to come with each update to prioritise working on other stuff and seemingly(?) delaying RtR content after the upset around Britain lacking a unique unit model - and being very clear about what features we can expect when in the roadmaps.

So while they likely can't address the past reasons why the game ended up with the issues it had at launch, they are very much addressing what they intend to do about it in the future - which I think is more important. I wish they were doing more in each update, but I'm happy with the level of communication.

 

[99-percent-sure]

It isn't your job, nor are you obliged in any way to report anything you find.

However, a video recording of an issue is standard in publisher-run support forums, which are often completely separate to the developers themselves (this is also the case in regular software, to greater or lesser extents). I had to record videos of glitches in BL3, back in 2019 - 2020. Games are more complicated than ever, and run on more machines than ever. It's not a given that the support team could reproduce it on whatever hardware they have available to them, and to even gets to the devs, support need to be able to reproduce the behaviour (because they will add additional information that you have no reasonable way of knowing, that'll aid development in repro-ing and fixing the issue in-house).

So sure. You don't have to do anything. But at the same time, your expectation that somebody should be able to repro it from a description alone is flawed. Even if this is the case for simpler issues, or issues that reliably reproduce, the support team will have a standard expectation for supporting materials for any submitted issue. They can't handwave that because it looks straightforward. They have to follow procedure.

If support at my work handed development a ticket with a text-based description and zero supporting evidence, we would close the ticket. Because support haven't followed procedure, and it's a waste of development's time to do support's job (in addition to dev not interfacing directly with customers, which puts up an additional barrier in obtaining said supporting evidence).

Hopefully this insight helps a bit. Again, I completely agree you're under no obligation to do anything. But these procedures, these requests for data, exist for very valid reasons.

And back to lurking I go.

Thanks for explaining the way it's set up. Who actually does the game testing and checking for bugs? Is that in-house with the devs, or is it connected to support?

Also, I'm starting to feel like we should be getting some sort of compensation or credit toward future DLC for reporting bugs with the detail the support unit expects. We've already spent a lot of money on the game because we bought it early at full price, and now we're also having to put in work to document glitches in a way that they can work with, rather than just letting them know what's going on.

 

[bbbt]

If support at my work handed development a ticket with a text-based description and zero supporting evidence, we would close the ticket. Because support haven't followed procedure, and it's a waste of development's time to do support's job (in addition to dev not interfacing directly with customers, which puts up an additional barrier in obtaining said supporting evidence).

As someone who has been on both sides of this, 100%. I don't know that most development teams would accept a text-based description with zero supporting evidence from their own QA department, never mind someone outside of the company. I would think either a video or a saved game file with steps to reproduce would be acceptable, though I understand even the latter most people might not be having enough detail in said steps.

Even if the bug is described accurately, some bugs are very obvious and reproducible, and some very much are not. It could be that X always happens. Or it only happens when you are playing as Rome and Greece is also in the game, or that if you click on Y first then X the bug happens but not if you click X without clicking Y first. And all of that context is not going be captured without a save file/video.

The difference between Hello Games and Firaxis is that one as an independent developer and the other is owned by Take-Two Interactive/2K. I don't think it's the PR team being restricted in how open they can be by their higher-ups within the Civ VII development team - they have less independence going higher up than that.

I don't follow Amplitude too closely, but now that they've gone from independent to studio owned back to independent, I wonder if people will be able to see in major differences with them.

 

[bbbt]

Thanks for explaining the way it's set up. Who actually does the game testing and checking for bugs? Is that in-house with the devs, or is it connected to support?

I can't speak for Gorbles (or the game industry for that matter, which I've not worked in), but where I've worked, it's worked like this: you have both QA and support. QA generally tests against requirements (is the original game design/how the game is supposed to work) and will write detailed test cases and unit tests for that, and report bugs they find for the dev team to fix. Support will field bugs reported by clients/customers, and reproduce them, and then report bugs for the dev team to fix (usually a 2nd/3rd tier support, not necessarily the initial CSR). After the dev team has fixed it, usually the person who reported the bug (ie QA or support) verifies that it is working as intended in the patch before it is released.

But the entire software/tech/web industry basically has enormous backlogs of hundreds of bugs, feature requests, roadmap plans that usually get added to faster than devs can handle them, and most will never be gotten to (and there's endless hours spend on meetings to prioritize what gets done over what). It's been true everywhere I've worked (though, I should note, I've never worked on embedded systems or anything like that).

 

[Kwami]

The difference between Hello Games and Firaxis is that one as an independent developer and the other is owned by Take-Two Interactive/2K. I don't think it's the PR team being restricted in how open they can be by their higher-ups within the Civ VII development team - they have less independence going higher up than that.

The other big difference is that No Man's Sky was so bad and so lacking in promised features that it generated a class action lawsuit against the development studio for false advertising. That suit was ultimately dismissed for insufficient evidence, but that's only because the bar for such a case is set very high. NMS was an absoluter disaster at launch. Despite it's problems, Civ VII is still a great game that many of us have already put hundreds of hours into. It's nowhere near as bad as NMS was.

I don't follow Amplitude too closely, but now that they've gone from independent to studio owned back to independent, I wonder if people will be able to see in major differences with them.

Their biggest game under Sega, Humankind, was certainly not as good as their prior games. I never got around to playing Endless Dungeon.

One of the founders left and formed his own studio, though, so they might never be the same as they were before. We'll see!

 

[Morgawr]

Based on my description, that's the type of bug anyone, including a Firaxis bug checker, could test for. I don't see how me reporting the bug somehow made it my job to extensively document the bug. I'm honestly not interested in doing unpaid work for Firaxis. I've sent along screenshots of a couple of earlier bugs I've reported (independent settlements continuing to "own" hexes after they spontaneously vanish, for example), but now they wanted a video, and this doesn't seem to me to be the type of bug that you need a video to understand.

Anyway, now I'm reluctant to report any more glitches, which are popping up pretty regularly (especially around not getting credit for completing quests), because I don't want to have to replay games in order to document the glitch with a video recording. That's not my job.

Exactly how I feel. I’ve reported bugs for games for decades but the way it’s handled at 2K seems to put a monumental unrealistic effort / time expectation from the customer. Sending videos, multiple back and forths showing you installed the game correctly etc - even tho Civ is my fave game of all time, it’s still way too much to ask.

It’s as if they assume we are full time gamers and THEY are doing us a favor by taking in bug requests! This gives a VERY BAD FEELING. (luckily can keep my love for the game and dislike for bug handling separate)

You can ask the customer to put in say 10 mins of effort, they expect triple quadruple that basically. Then you think “I might as well spend that time playing the game and work around the bug” which is what I’m doing. (And upvote reported bugs on 2K)

Before I start a new age I now “brief” myself with a check list of bugs on what NOT to do lol (eg don’t pick Han because Great Wall pop bug in next age; ignore incense because doesn’t boost missionaries, etc)

 

[Melkus]

You can ask the customer to put in say 10 mins of effort

Exactly, I understand that a dev needs a precise description in a professional context (I am one), but there's a balance to it.
If I report a bug and FXS asks me if I can provide a save game because they can't reproduce the error, I'd be happy to help out if possible. But this is more like "plz provide all possible evidence (including some weird player number - I had to google where to find it), just in case we need it".
In VI, FXS still used to comb through the bug forum here and engage with people. That felt much more like a company taking players seriously and valuing their time. (I'm pretty sure they still read it and this is more about company policy, btw.)

 

[bumpyglint]

I just want to jump into this thread to say that I honestly believe most people defending Civ VII's bug reporting process have probably never actually tried using it—because if they had, I don't think it would be possible to defend. The entire system seems almost deliberately designed to discourage players from reporting bugs.

To begin with—and I know this sounds absurd—the bug reporting system itself is bugged. No joke. If you try to report at the same time two completely unrelated bugs in two separate tickets, you'll get an automated response saying something like “This issue has already been reported in your first ticket” and the second ticket gets automatically closed. It’s like their system just can’t comprehend that two simultaneous reports by the same person might be for two different bugs. This isn’t just me either—it’s been mentioned multiple times online and at least one week ago it still wasn't fixed.

On top of that, as others have noted, they seem to intentionally ask for completely irrelevant information. I’ve submitted tickets with very specific descriptions, even including the exact section of code with an obvious typo from the devs—literally handing them the fix. And yet, the response is always the same robotic checklist: “Which game mode?”, “Did you clear your cache?”, etc. It’s like they don’t even read the report.

Here’s another great example: I once attached a save file as requested. They told me the file was wrong. So I re-attached it. They said it was still wrong. I attached it a third time. Again—wrong. Eventually, I realized the issue: the save file was from the correct in-game era, but the name looked different in my language (I don’t use English in-game). They never even tried opening the file—they just assumed it was wrong based on a "similar" name (obviously the name was not the same of the wrong age in english). That’s four back-and-forth emails wasted over nothing, because they could not open a file and preferred instead writing 4 emails, asking me to check again the file each time.

Then there’s the infamous Han and Ming Great Wall bug. These improvements permanently reduce the city’s population by one each time they're built. This is game-breaking—effectively giving you a massive growth boost (like +200% food when you build just 3) for just building a couple of walls. I again pinpointed the exact typo in their code, explained it in plain terms, and even provided the corrected code that I tested extensively. What did I get in response? More generic questions and requests for screenshots, videos, game mode details, etc.—completely unnecessary given that I already explained the root cause and provided a working fix. After jumping through all their hoops (despite beeing absolutely useless, I've done everything they asked me), I was finally told: “This is a known issue related to population decreasing during improvement construction, so we can close this ticket”. But that’s not the bug I reported! That one is related, but it’s a different issue. Yes, as all the other impromenets in the game the population decreasing during the costruction (another clear bug), but for these 2 "great wall improvements" the real bug is that, unlike every other improvement in the game, the population reduction doesn’t get restored after construction. One tiny digit in their code needs to change from 0 to 1. That’s it. Despite all this, I tried to explain this to them but I couldn’t get through to them. I even begged them to forward my code fix to a developer, even their intern would be able to understand the problem if they check that specific line in the code. Nothing.

So yeah—if you’re defending their bug report process, I can almost guarantee you haven’t actually used it. It’s like talking to a wall at the moment.

 

[Noble Zarkon]

So yeah—if you’re defending their bug report process, I can almost guarantee you haven’t actually used it. It’s like talking to a wall at the moment.

The bug reporting system is run by Take 2 and supports all their games. The first line folks won't necessarily have access to or even have played the game. They will likely be minimum wage employees expected to follow a script by rote.

I'm not defending it just pointing out the reason for some of the things you have encountered.

 

[99-percent-sure]

Update is queued! Let's see what we've got.

 

[bumpyglint]

The bug reporting system is run by Take 2 and supports all their games. The first line folks won't necessarily have access to or even have played the game. They will likely be minimum wage employees expected to follow a script by rote.

I'm not defending it just pointing out the reason for some of the things you have encountered.

Yeah I'm sure that's the reason, still all the facts and opinion of my post remain the same hope they'll take the situation more seriously

 

[99-percent-sure]

The bug reporting system is run by Take 2 and supports all their games. The first line folks won't necessarily have access to or even have played the game. They will likely be minimum wage employees expected to follow a script by rote.

I'm not defending it just pointing out the reason for some of the things you have encountered.

I've definitely lowered my expectations around bug reporting after hearing how things are set up. The structure is neither efficient in terms of getting things fixed quickly, nor streamlining the bug reporting process to incentivize players to report problems. It's probably financially expedient for Take Two to do it this way, of course. I did set up my Steam video recording option in case I decide to take the plunge again at some point, but I'll probably just avoid reporting anything that isn't egregious.

 

[The_J]

Moderator Action: Please continue the discussion here https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/civilization-vii-update-1-2-0-april-22-2025.697718/ . Thread closed.