[LP] Leader Pass Pack 1: Great Negotiators (Nov. 2022) - Patch Notes Discussion

[Takfloyd]

Civ6 is just a bloated mess at this point. I would trade in all of the new leaders for one final, comprehensive gameplay polish patch.

Everyone with a brain agrees, but unfortunately, there are a lot of people who will see "ooh shiny new leader" and give Firaxis their money no matter how janky the actual game is. There's no clear economic incentive for Firaxis to bother with free polish, gameplay improvements and bugfixes.

However, if they take a look at their close competitor Paradox Studios, they might learn that the developers of Stellaris are seeing great success and immense goodwill and loyalty from their players after they created a dedicated bugfix/polish/AI/general improvement team that pushes out free updates despite the game being like 7 years old now. That game used to be even more janky than Civ VI and they managed to fix it and win all the fans back.

 

[Haig]

"There's no clear economic incentive for Firaxis to bother with free polish, gameplay improvements and bugfixes.""

Firaxis has to work with the resources their publisher gives them. Its not like it is some sort of greed or lazyness that they dont have a 100 man team squishing bugs.

 

[AntSou]

Everyone with a brain agrees, but unfortunately, there are a lot of people who will see "ooh shiny new leader" and give Firaxis their money no matter how janky the actual game is. There's no clear economic incentive for Firaxis to bother with free polish, gameplay improvements and bugfixes.

However, if they take a look at their close competitor Paradox Studios, they might learn that the developers of Stellaris are seeing great success and immense goodwill and loyalty from their players after they created a dedicated bugfix/polish/AI/general improvement team that pushes out free updates despite the game being like 7 years old now. That game used to be even more janky than Civ VI and they managed to fix it and win all the fans back.

Paradox are the Strategy game champions of releasing broken messes. The idea that Firaxis should mimic that is laughable.

Of course they need to focus on fixing their games, because they've on more than one occasion broken their games to the point of unplayability.

I say this as someone who loves Paradox titles. But your position of being charitable to Paradox while not extending the same to Firaxis (Stellaris came out a few months before Civ VI) is unreasonable imo.

I do hope that Firaxis fixes their bugs and will be disappointed if they don't. That goes along with being in the "ooh shiny new leader" crowd. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

 

[Duke William of Normandy]

Everyone with a brain agrees, but unfortunately, there are a lot of people who will see "ooh shiny new leader" and give Firaxis their money no matter how janky the actual game is. There's no clear economic incentive for Firaxis to bother with free polish, gameplay improvements and bugfixes.

However, if they take a look at their close competitor Paradox Studios, they might learn that the developers of Stellaris are seeing great success and immense goodwill and loyalty from their players after they created a dedicated bugfix/polish/AI/general improvement team that pushes out free updates despite the game being like 7 years old now. That game used to be even more janky than Civ VI and they managed to fix it and win all the fans back.

As someone who's also a fan of Paradox, the idea of Firaxis copying Paradox's practices gives me utter shivers... I don't have EU IV, but for those who do, remember Leviathan?

 

[InsidiousMage]

I don't have EU IV, but for those who do, remember Leviathan?

I mean, Victoria3 released with a ton of issues. I do genuinely appreciate that Firaxis releases complete games instead of Paradox's wait five years and a dozen DLC approach. Even if Firaxis isn't perfect I by far prefer their approach over Paradox's.

 

[bene_legionary]

As someone who's also a fan of Paradox, the idea of Firaxis copying Paradox's practices gives me utter shivers... I don't have EU IV, but for those who do, remember Leviathan?

Hahahahaha, Leviathan, at least EU4 had the decency to download the correct patch and load correctly before the (massively game breaking, deserving of overwhelmingly negative ratings, game corrupting, incredibly unbalanced) bugs occurred. Apparently, the guys at Tinto recieved death threats over it - a game, even just a really botched release?! Death threats are too far.

The last EU4 DLC, however, was supposed to be decent... but I don't play EU4 anymore, and you should be able to see why.

EU4 DLC has a long history of being broken and untested on release: look at the EU4 subreddit, they'll probably have some posts on Emperor and Leviathan there.

 

[Pfeffersack]

Not saying that Paradox' dealing with bugs is a gold standard (I personally know and play - there are surely others - exact three games/series where I consider bug fixing/polish to be really top notch: Old World, Workers&Ressources, Aggressors: Ancient Rome/Imperium: GreekWars), but I would rate them over 2k here. Reason: games are overall longer supported (and yes, as frustrated Imperator Rome fan I know the big hurting exception...), the DLC's are accompanied by more and bigger patches and my impression is that the bug tracking in their forum works better. Again - not ideal, still a lot gets reported with no visible reaction or fixing - but you get a tad more the impression that they leave the devs room to fix stuff. The result (my experience taken from CK3, HoI4 and Vic3): Those games are never bug free and new DLC add new ones, but at least the serious ones (which many people report, confirm and/or complain about) get fixed sooner...or sometimes later. But they get (IR being the forementioned exception). Thats at least my personal impression.

 

[bene_legionary]

Well, even Leviathan got patched after a while, but Paradox also tries to talk with its players and fix their bugs, instead of leaving them in the dark for a year and a half.

 

[Kwami]

Not saying that Paradox' dealing with bugs is a gold standard (I personally know and play - there are surely others - exact three games/series where I consider bug fixing/polish to be really top notch: Old World, Workers&Ressources, Aggressors: Ancient Rome/Imperium: GreekWars), but I would rate them over 2k here. Reason: games are overall longer supported (and yes, as frustrated Imperator Rome fan I know the big hurting exception...), the DLC's are accompanied by more and bigger patches and my impression is that the bug tracking in their forum works better. Again - not ideal, still a lot gets reported with no visible reaction or fixing - but you get a tad more the impression that they leave the devs room to fix stuff. The result (my experience taken from CK3, HoI4 and Vic3): Those games are never bug free and new DLC add new ones, but at least the serious ones (which many people report, confirm and/or complain about) get fixed sooner...or sometimes later. But they get (IR being the forementioned exception). Thats at least my personal impression.

Sure, Paradox supports their games longer, but they also charge an absurd amount of money to get all of the content. A new player buying into EUIV or Stellaris would spend hundreds of dollars to get all of the content. And because Paradox releases many small "expansions" and "story packs" and whatnot, none of them really play nicely together and the games end up even more bloated and messy than Civ VI is.

I guess Firaxis could emulate that, but I'm glad that they aren't.

 

[bene_legionary]

EU4 is the gold standard of bloatedness. We complain about needing Civ 7 but EU4 is a bit over 10 years old, and people still pay for its broken DLC. Maybe that is more about their players than Paradox, though.

 

[InsidiousMage]

EU4 is the gold standard of bloatedness. We complain about needing Civ 7 but EU4 is a bit over 10 years old, and people still pay for its broken DLC. Maybe that is more about their players than Paradox, though.

 

[bene_legionary]

At this point I don't want either Civ VII or EU V to be announced. It likely wouldn't live up to my expectations. But hopefully, the team that's working on those are better organised for their releases.

This 'update' to Civ VI, though, might be the best yet for Linux players. I don't have to play most of the broken mess of NFP now that it wiped it off my computer and replaced it with an update from 2019.

 

[blackbutterfly]

Firaxis has to work with the resources their publisher gives them. Its not like it is some sort of greed or lazyness that they dont have a 100 man team squishing bugs.

I must say I am really impressed with Amplitude, their tools (for modding - Unity) and the speed and quality of development.
They released an expansion on a pared down team as well but are fairing considerably better than Firaxis RN (though HUMANKIND is not without its own set of bugs and exploits).

I really hope for Civ VII Firaxis bring in people for DevOps and Tools. They need the reqs badly for a new foundation. This is truly appalling.
This Leader Pass fiasco. We are getting more bugs and exploits, not fewer.

TBH being (mistakenly) reset to Civ VI vanilla wasn't a bad idea. It was a simpler, better game back then (without Vampires and Zombies)

 

[AntSou]

Well, even Leviathan got patched after a while, but Paradox also tries to talk with its players and fix their bugs, instead of leaving them in the dark for a year and a half.

This was a common complaint after Gathering Storm. They surely heard our complaints because with New Frontier Pass they started giving us monthly updates... which was better than silence but not ideal imo as there wasn't enough time to adequately adjust to the changes. But at least they were talking.

In the end they left quite a few things basically broken, and they reverted back to long silences, and we've been hoping this whole time for fixes. I don't even care much about the mess with the Leader Pass, it's bad publicity sure, but it'll be fixed. What really disappointed me were the patch notes (or rather, complete lack of notes).
---

@blackbutterfly I played Humankind for one month at release through gamepass and have been keeping an eye on it since then, but to be fair I'm not too impressed. Was mildly excited about there being a new expansion. Watched the trailer, the idea of a unit collecting "prestige" (I think it's called something else) on the map looks remarkably dull, like reusing the mechanic from the nomadic era in a way that doesn't even make sense... it just comes across to me as being out of good ideas already on the first expansion.

I like Amplitude, so I'll keep waiting.

 

[Takfloyd]

Yep, even when Paradox releases a buggy mess of a DLC, the developers talk directly with the players on the forums constantly and acknowledge any issues right away. Then they inform players whether or not they are working on fixes, and they also always dedicate a few weeks to post-launch support (read: putting out fires and salvaging broken messes) after each new release.

Firaxis has this very corporate, manufactured relationship with players. You can see on their livestreams how rehearsed it all is, how tailored by the marketing department. The people there tend to look uncomfortable and stiff. They never acknowledge any problems - it took like 30 minutes of constant spamming about consoles in the chat in the recent stream for them to comment on it, before that they just cherrypicked other questions and pretended not to see what everyone was actually asking about. And of course, radio silence outside of the livestreams. It doesn't exactly inspire any respect for the company. They don't give me the impression that they respect the consumer, after all.

 

[AntSou]

Firaxis has this very corporate, manufactured relationship with players. You can see on their livestreams how rehearsed it all is, how tailored by the marketing department. The people there tend to look uncomfortable and stiff. They never acknowledge any problems

I disagree with this, but I agree Paradox are much more engaged with the community and I spent months asking Firaxis during their long silences to be more like Paradox in regards to community engagement (though not more like Paradox in other respects).

Those long HOI4 and Stellaris forum posts are always fun to read.

 

[Tolvo]

Firaxis has this very corporate, manufactured relationship with players. You can see on their livestreams how rehearsed it all is, how tailored by the marketing department. The people there tend to look uncomfortable and stiff. They never acknowledge any problems - it took like 30 minutes of constant spamming about consoles in the chat in the recent stream for them to comment on it, before that they just cherrypicked other questions and pretended not to see what everyone was actually asking about. And of course, radio silence outside of the livestreams. It doesn't exactly inspire any respect for the company. They don't give me the impression that they respect the consumer, after all.

I mean... you just described PR. That's kind of what you do as a company.

 

[acluewithout]

And not just resourceless melee units, +5 resourceless melee units.

2016 Victoria and her Red Coats leave the chat.

Civ6 is just a bloated mess at this point.

I really don’t think it’s bloated. Yes, there’s a lot going on, but I think it all mostly gels. There’s maybe a few Game Modes from NFP that are a bit out there (eg Zombies) but they’re optional. If anything, I think a few mechanics are just a bit undercooked (eg why didn’t Firaxis bring across Reformation Beliefs from Civ V’s religion or letting you turn Spies into Ambassadors). Civ VI is still very much not that crunchy compared to eg grand strategy games like Paradox and I still think it’s miles ahead of eg HumanKind and Old World (although, don’t get me wrong, those games have good stuff too).

I’m loving the new leader. And I do like really like the expanded roster.

But yeah. The game could do with some tightening up, particularly bugs and other frictions (like AI science obsession).

… Paradox are much more engaged with the community and I spent months asking Firaxis during their long silences to be more like Paradox in regards to community engagement (though not more like Paradox in other respects).

Firaxis definitely have a different style of communicating.

I don’t mind how Firaxis manages communications. I don’t really want over communication verging on parasocial relationships. They could maybe update people and or talk about their design thinking a little bit more? But really I don’t want the constant chatter.

 

[Benevolent Dictator]

I read on Reddit that the Amani Governor "Discover-all-heroes-in-1-turn" exploit also seems to be patched out.

Can't confirm personally because I'm a second-rate console pleb.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Just realized that there is no mention of Ana Nzinga being replaced as a GG, now that she is leader in the game. Maybe it was an oversight because the leader uses her native name instead of the one she used when she converted to Catholicism?