How do you feel they've handled the BtS patching process so far?

[Loopy]

Having exchanged PMs with moderators, I'd hardly consider things bungled. If you have strong personal feelings with how things are being handled, please take it to PM instead of trolling the thread trying to get it locked.

Again, it's just a little poll to gauge user opinion. Vote. Make suggestions. Maybe Firaxis will hear some of them. Maybe they won't. But please don't troll (or feed the trolls).

 

[mrt144]

I think everyone would be a bit happier if they had said "here is the list of changes, but we wont give you a timeline of it's release". you cant please computer game nerds no matter what you do.

 

[Quagga]

I'm not concerned about the 3.13 release schedule. But the 3.03 thing was a real botch that should have been fixed immediately.

 

[rusty217]

I think they made mistakes with thier patching and they should improve.
But by far their biggest mistake was announcing the patch in the first place.
If no announcement had been made about a new patch then nobody would even know if it was delayed when it was actually released.

 

[whitulf]

I think they wanted to tell us, the (hopefully) CIVilized players, that they were working on the badly expected/awaited patch - including, that they took note of the bug reports posted in the forums.

The release-date was a risk, and it looks like something took more time to finally have an optimized patch without the risk of further unforeseen bugs etc. .

Still - better be patient and be glad they try to make sure it will be optimized this time than behave immature.

The patch will come and I prefer quality - even at the cost of an earlier "in-time" release-date.

 

[ainwood]

First closed then re-opened......it's not just the patch that seems to be getting bungled.....

It is kept open because it is (somewhat) constructive.

 

[MrFrodo]

I've had verious issues with the way firaxis does patching in this title and others. But overall they do a pretty good job of coming out with an initial product that is playable by normal people (this doesn't include most of the fanatics in this forum). Then they do a good job of eventually coming out with a maintenance release that address the majority of the issues in a good way.

With Civ4 BTS I've now played 10+ games without any of the known bugs ruining my enjoyment. The patch looks like it will be nice, but I'm in no hurry, so I hope they take the time to QA it properly and include fixes for as many of the issues as possible.

 

[iyyillius]

at first when the patch was announced i continued to play the game because for the most part i hadn't encountered any major bugs in the game.
(i thought the espionage system was perfect and still feel it doesn't need any change... and i play marathon !)but since alexman started saying "early next week for three weeks now I've been delaying playing a game until the patch comes out. Because of the backwards compatability issue. The only major problem that I've seen is the spy count as friendly units for nuke attacks bug.
since i know that will come into play late in the game it has made it hard for me to commit to a long term game for three weeks now. While i of course am a very patient person i don't like being lied to at all.
If it wasn't for the patience and understanding of most of us civ fans here at civ fanatics this could be contrued as almost diliberately misleading and an outright lie. For this alone I am disappionted in the way this patch is being handled as i am sure that the patch will be more than adequate, and had i not been led on about the time frame of it's release i would have waited patienly indeffinatly.

 

[Loopy]

While i of course am a very patient person i don't like being lied to at all.
If it wasn't for the patience and understanding of most of us civ fans here at civ fanatics this could be contrued as almost diliberately misleading and an outright lie.

I sincerely doubt anyone lied about when the patch was to be released. I suspect it's more of a case of someone making a promise they weren't in a position to keep. Well intentioned or not, it's hardly a smart thing to do, be it from a programmer who's involved in the patch, a game company with shareholders to think about, a politician to her constituents, or even a parent trying to stop his kid's whining.

The key might be to make sure qualifiers and disclaimers are used -- aka legalese to worm your way out if things don't go as planned.

Speaking of which, the above is solely my personal opinion and does not necessarily represent the opinion of my employer, ISP, or any other party. Any information within is intended as entertainment only and does not provide any express or implied warranties. Any trademarks belong to their respective owners.

See how easy that was?

[edit] After 102 votes, the results were 12/35/32/23. [/edit]

 

[ushram]

They've tried to do a good job with it, but stumbled some (minor changes might be needed).

 

[ButSam]

I voted "bumbled", but it has nothing to do with Alexman's gracious changelog, or his attempts to provide us information, which I appreciate greatly.

The reason why I think it has been "bumbled" is because v3.03 was an admitted mistake that actually was a step backward, and to date there is no fix for that mistake short of uninstalling and reinstalling, only patching up to 3.02, and never clicking the update button again until a new patch is released.

I don't know who is at fault, nor do I care; just please fix it. Even if it doesn't do everything the initial changelog stated, we do need some sort of patch to fix the biggest of the problems soon. It's been awhile...at least a month, I think we may be going on 1.5 months since v3.03.

Sam

 

[bob_x]

I think it was a mistake for them to try to make one huge patch that fixes everything, instead of smaller patches released more often.

For one thing, frequent patch releases would keep the customer happier.

Secondly, if the customers are willing to work as free beta testers, why does Firaxis management have a problem with that?

In a sense, they made everyone beta testers by releasing a buggy game in the first place. Why do they all of a sudden worry about this when it comes to releasing patches?

 

[Craterus22]

I think it was a mistake for them to try to make one huge patch that fixes everything, instead of smaller patches released more often.

For one thing, frequent patch releases would keep the customer happier.

Secondly, if the customers are willing to work as free beta testers, why does Firaxis management have a problem with that?

In a sense, they made everyone beta testers by releasing a buggy game in the first place. Why do they all of a sudden worry about this when it comes to releasing patches?

I have wondered this too... is the Firaxis/Take Two patch release strategy simply a result of minimizing cost? Does Firaxis have quality testing/patch distribution fees charged against its books (similar to recording fees in the music business?)?

It is really a shame that they can't go the beta patch release route... there is probably a large contingent of people that never play online (so there wouldnt be a compatibility issues)

 

[PieceOfMind]

I have wondered this too... is the Firaxis/Take Two patch release strategy simply a result of minimizing cost? Does Firaxis have quality testing/patch distribution fees charged against its books (similar to recording fees in the music business?)?

I don't think that's the case because that could not explain why the v303 patch was VERY dodgy. I would wonder what their strategy is, if they have one at all, because I can't make any sense of it.

IMO they did a better job with the patches for vanilla and warlords.

 

[ainwood]

I think it was a mistake for them to try to make one huge patch that fixes everything, instead of smaller patches released more often.

For one thing, frequent patch releases would keep the customer happier.

I guess it depends on your perspective. If you buy a new game, and then go to download the latest patch (which you invariably do), knowing no history, are you going to be more impressed with a game that has two patches released (ever) or five patches? The five patches would suggest to me a very real quality control problem - that it wasn't partial fixes, but mistakes having to be fixed again, or problems overlooked and not fixed etc.

Secondly, for a game like Civ where multiplayer games / events can take months, frequent patches are really, really annoying! They can stuff-up the games of many people - say you're involved in 3 succession games, where one is using one patch version, the second another version, and someone wants to start a new SG with yet a different version - a nightmare!

 

[RedRalph]

I'm a bit out of the loop here lads - last I heard it was more or less guaranteed Monday or Tuesday last, it clearly isnt out. Do we have a new ETA?

 

[PieceOfMind]

I guess it depends on your perspective. If you buy a new game, and then go to download the latest patch (which you invariably do), knowing no history, are you going to be more impressed with a game that has two patches released (ever) or five patches? The five patches would suggest to me a very real quality control problem - that it wasn't partial fixes, but mistakes having to be fixed again, or problems overlooked and not fixed etc.

Secondly, for a game like Civ where multiplayer games / events can take months, frequent patches are really, really annoying! They can stuff-up the games of many people - say you're involved in 3 succession games, where one is using one patch version, the second another version, and someone wants to start a new SG with yet a different version - a nightmare!

They're very good points ainwood. I hadn't really thought of those I admit. However I'm sure you'd have sympathy for those non-fanatics who've downloaded this latest patch 303 and discovered the links in the civilopedia crash the game. If I were not a fanatic my impressions would be ruined more by this than the sight of a number of patches.

Besides, more often than not non-fanatics would not see the number of patches because they would use the auto-update feature.

 

[I tech faster]

The 303 patch disappointed me because I was expecting some IA et bugs issues fixes. But seeing the next patch change log made me thing that Firaxis wasn't sleeping this whole time. They could use to communicate a little more on what they are working. The game seems to run pretty well without it though.

 

[ButSam]

The 303 patch disappointed me because I was expecting some IA et bugs issues fixes. But seeing the next patch change log made me thing that Firaxis wasn't sleeping this whole time. They could use to communicate a little more on what they are working. The game seems to run pretty well without it though.

I keep seeing this comment, and I agree with the following caveats (which are not minor IMHO):

* Turn off all movies (which have caused several people, myself included, to have CTD, even with the intro movie which is not at all obvious to be able to disable; movies worked fine pre-BtS for me at least)
* Play a game on Normal speed (since scaling espionage effects does not work properly -- or so others have claimed...I always play Normal so this is no problem for me.)
* Make the AI use espionage more wisely (I have not experienced a problem with AIs trashing their economies through spying, but others apparently have)
* Do not be unfortunate enough to get stuck in one of those infinite loop positions

Of course, using some other unofficial patches and mods may help compensate, but is that really how the game should be patched? Mods should not be required to fix bugs, they should be optional for a different gaming experience.

I can live with this solution temporarily, but how long does it take to patch the espionage scaling and use, revert to the original style of movies, fix the infinite loop bugs, and compile with the most recent stable version this time to fix the 3.03 bugs? The answer of course is we don't know. I've done debugging before and the simplest bug could take awhile to find, let alone fix. However, it sounded like with the update we got most recently Firaxis was not tracking down one of these game-breaking bugs anymore; they were focused on a multiplayer problem that affects games with Locked Assets. I think that could wait... not everyone plays multiplayer with locked assets. Then again, I don't want to sound like I'm blaming Firaxis; it is quite possible Take2 said they get one more patch for BtS and that's it, or some other constraint we are unaware of. I don't want to blame anyone; I just want to see the big issues fixed; besides the obvious game would work much better for all of our games, I was hopeful we could get a BotM this month...but that doesn't look likely now.

Sam

 

[Adam7Eight]

I'm a bit out of the loop here lads - last I heard it was more or less guaranteed Monday or Tuesday last, it clearly isnt out. Do we have a new ETA?

No.

(10 char.)