[Lukas Berger]

Originally Posted by NeuroticTruth

Lukas,

Thank you for your response. I wanted to take some time to properly digest your comments here and throughout the thread before I properly responded. Before doing so, I greatly appreciate the time you spent in discussion in this thread. I didn't expect a dev to respond to my post, let alone engage in conversation, so that was encouraging to see. Also, thank you for offering to take a look at the league file. Any input / assistance would be greatly appreciated. As far as your initial post goes, here are my thoughts (grab a coffee, this might be a long one boys):



-- Your changes to the base game affect not only solo / league play but PT as well. While there are changes that affect online leagues, there are bugs that have plagued online league for numerous versions that (despite being reported) have never been corrected. My point here was that the focus clearly has shifted from being focused on potentially improving these issues, to tuning the base game for PT use.

Just some quick replies here that are not meant to be the final word. But as far as this goes, it's not really the case we're doing much to tune the base game for PT. There's really not a lot of crossover between the two modes and the dev time for each is pretty well defined, as well as the teams that work on each pretty much each have their own areas. There's not too much crossover among the folks that work on each team and we're not really worrying about PT when making changes/improvements in the base mode of the game.

Originally Posted by NeuroticTruth

-- Safe to assume here that I do not have verifiable proof. I got this information directly from current and former beta testers. All of which echoed the same sentiment.

I mean, I have no idea how they would know this. Especially not the former team members. There's no viewable list of how many members of the team there are

We do review the team each year to see what people have been able to contribute and if over a period of time (always more than just one dev cycle) they have not been able to contribute much, then sometimes we'll talk things over with them to see if they're in a position to continue or not but if anyone does leave the team, it's always with the plan of replacing them with someone who is in a position to contribute more, not just to have less folks on the team.

So basically each year, the beta team is expanding, not contracting. Each mix of folks has its own personality though and personal circumstances vary, so some years there may be more activity than other years, but that's really not something we can directly control.

Originally Posted by NeuroticTruth

-- This topic seemed to hijack the thread a bit. I'm not going to rehash this much as this has already been spoken to immensely. I will say, however, that this issue doesn't just happen with our "large league file". I've seen this issue happen in numerous files of varying size, birth date (version it was created on initially etc), and depth.

This is a super complicated subject, because there are just so many things that can go into this beyond just the pure league size.

A few are:

The overall specs of your system, amount of memory etc of course.

Beyond that, the amount and type of programs you run in the background, and whether you have exceptions properly set up for OOTP in those like anti-virus and disk cleaners that might interfere with OOTP, overall health of the system itself, age and health of your system's memory and hard drive, how often you restart your system. How often you update your Operating System, and how often you update individual drivers for components like video and sound cards.

Even things like whether you leave a specific league open for long periods of time when you're not actually playing (which can increase the chances of corruption happening to a file, depending on the other programs and processes running) can make a difference in the health of save files.

Originally Posted by NeuroticTruth

-- This is a direct quote from a current beta tester "tbh, despite being around OOTP a long time, i don't know what the "right way" to report a bug is. i've filed bugs in their bug tracker i get access to in the beta. i've posted in the bugs forum. in basically every case, there is never a peep of a response - like no ack, no nothing." This is a feeling I think many of us have experienced. That's why some of this is so frustrating. We DO report these issues. Sometimes they get fixed but it feels like overwhelmingly our reports go ignored.

Nothing is ignored if it's posted in the bug reports forum/or the beta team's project tracker. We read everything posted there. But that also doesn't mean we reply to or fix every single thing there.

Again, there are different reasons. One, just to reply to everything would take more time than we have, and we prefer to give priority to working on the game itself rather than replying to literally everything.

I don't think you'll find any game company that replies to all or even most bug reports users make and in fact, I think/hope we'd be pretty high on the list of the companies that communicate the most if you were to compare. I mean, sure in the bug reports forums there are tons of bug reports that we didn't reply to, but there are also tons we did and overall hundreds of posts from us replying to bugs and working through issues with folks.

Beyond that, a specific report may be a duplicate of other reports we've received. It may be something we've determined not to be a bug. It may be something relatively minor that we've determined would be better served going on a list of similar minor issues to be fixed at a latter time. We have have more pressing priorities at the moment and a specific issue just falls a ways down our priority list.

It may be we just don't currently have the time or manpower to fix a specific issue or that the fix would take more time and effort than the befit would be worth and so decide to leave it for a future version. We may not be able to recreate a certain issue. Sometimes we have plans for a larger overhaul of a certain area in the future, so it makes sense just to leave the issue for them. Plus sometimes we do fix a bug but ma just forget to reply to the reporter and tell them.

And other times, maybe we just missed something. Like I mentioned in my first post, if you have reported something you're sure is an issue, and not received a reply, feel free to be persistent and to point it out to one or more of the team.

Anyway, there are lots of reasons we might not reply to or fix a specific problem immediately, but it doesn't mean it's useless to report it. We do see and note all issues that are properly reported, even if they aren't immediately fixed or immediately(or ever) replied to.

Originally Posted by NeuroticTruth

It truly feels like we're not even considered when you make an implement changes. Again, I understand we're an extreme small minority, but we've devoted years to this game and our communities. It is difficult to me to continue to feel so under represented. I would love the opportunity to put a list together of some concerns we have and get your thoughts on them.

What can I say here? This is a fair complaint. I know a lot of folks, including many we respect highly and have contributed to the game greatly, who are active in online leagues have made this same complaint repeatedly in the past, that we don't give enough time or attention to the needs and priorities of online leagues. And I can't truthfully say that's wrong.

For sure in the past, online leagues have gotten the short end of the stick developmentally more than is probably fair. It always seems like the changes that online leagues are clamoring for just fall on the part of our to do list we don't have the time to get to each year. And that's ultimately on us, in that we should probably be moving those things further up the list a bit more often. We do want to improve though.

For instance, just within the last few months, I know Matt's been compiling some specific input regarding online leagues to work though a list of their most pressing issues and complaints/needed improvements etc for OOT22. Some of those changes already made it into OOTP21 patches, especially build 71 if you check that list out. Anyway, if you and your league wants to put together a list of priories yourself, we'll certainly look it over and add it to the list we already have.

Now how much of the rest of the list will ultimately make it into OOTP22 remains to be seen (it's a big list and we're still a small team!) but we are aware of the need to do more for the online folks.

I cannot promise we'll be perfect at this or always include just what you want, but we do want to do better and certainly not to take a group of our most loyal and passionate customers for granted.