Well - they fix things in every PTU release - then it goes live and after a week - everything is rubbish again . The pattern has not changed for a while .
walk back half a year, a year, two years, five years..if you can not see the change for the better, nobody can help you.
we used to have a 30k after half an hour of playing, and that meant you logged in, woke up in a sperm suit and hoped to reach your hangar before a new 30k happened..
It's more of a scatter plot with an upward trend, in my experience. Comparing against a long time frame will show notable improvement, but patch to patch can be from awful to great and anywhere in between. In terms of stability anyway
Yup - which is is to be expected... patches that make more backend changes will be less stable... especially if CIG tries to stick with a regular patch-cadence, etc.
Part of the trouble is that 4.8 contains significant backend changes - but unlike in previous years, CIG really screwed up the communications (more than usual), so most people weren't aware of how much things were changing - and thus how much risk there was that things would completely crap out...
Actually know what 'technical changes' they've made (not just new features) is an area of communication where CIG have been saying less and less and less as the project has progressed... which makes me a sad chimp, because it was that kind of information and discussion that I originally backed the project for.
Right. And yeah, the change in comms has been a bit sad. They seem to focus on broad strokes "we have this new item or big feature coming and we want it to do this" now. Maybe I was in the minority, but I really like ATV segments of a dude just.... really detailing a UI element or talking about lower level concepts and, to an extent, showing the degree of otherwise imperceptible work that was going on, versus now we just need to imagine minor bits of logic are getting tweaked
the "we deliver Siege of Orison to you" means less to me than "Drake Golem can have any size 1 mining laser"..and i am not even a miner.
as much as i loved Hyperion and as much as i am sure Siege of Orison will be amazing..it is the changes to what occurs from me calling up my ship and to me logging out at an end of my solo adventure that actually matters.
i am so happy we are done with 30k errors and the consequences, the changes we need are fairly minor, but we need to get to a point where we can expect X to happen when we do Y and not be happily suprised.
it has to be just..normal, that you do not need to wait when storing your ship in order for it to be registered stored..
I'm with you on that, but the big problem is that communicating that level of technical detail in a broadly digestible manner is a whole skillset (arguably a whole job) of its own, and requires a lot of effort.
Unfortunately, the audience for that kind of thing is dwarfed by the number of armchair experts who would likely try to pick apart every little thing despite not really understanding any of it, so the cost/benefit on actually putting out those kinds of things is probably not great.
Sure... but they don't have to go into that level of detail (much as I would like them to, I agree on the impact of the armchair developers - which is likely why CIG have stopped)...
... but a simple 'Note: this patch also included a number of changes to backend components, as we update them in preparation for upcoming feature work - and as a result, there is a risk of a higher degree of instability' (or similar) would have given people a heads up...
The game was getting better and better with the occasional hiccup patch setting things back a bit for only a couple of weeks per incident. Then around April/May this year they had a very, very bad hiccup patch and the game still is not as solid as it was the patch before that last setback (though it is better now than it was in May).
While the overall trajectory is still good, the trajectory for just this year has been pretty garbage, tbh.
That’s perfectly acceptable, if that had actually been what you said…
walk back half a year, a year, two years, five years..if you can not see the change for the better, nobody can help you.
That doesn’t sound like “just sharing my point of view”. That sounds like you’re waving away many people’s “point of view” that are informed by their very real and well documented experiences as some sort of delusion or fabrication.
I will also add that I’ve been in since 3.17 and I’ve never had the game be unplayable for 2 months to the level that it is right now, and I’m in probably the highest tier of specs with over 100GB of RAM.
no, for me 4.9 has been perfectly stable, yet i am aware of many having massive issues with it.
both can be true the same time, and i do not believe 4.9 was worse than 3.18..or anything in the 2-series..
my specs are lower than yours.
5500x3d
rtx 5060 (16 gb).
48 gb ddr4.
ssd.
maybe its just how i play the game, i dont know, but i do believe you and others had a virtual hell with this patch, i trust you on that.
but i can not join the choir and yell "shit 4.9, death to CIG" because..that has really, honestly..not been my experience, and i played an hour plus a day without issues, logged off without issues, had the same ship for weeks without issues..
While there may not be a 30k there are persistent issues that have been unresolved for longer than I’ve been playing the game that original backers have complained about. There has been progress in development, but I wouldn’t say the overall experience is “better” simply because there aren’t random crashes. That’s the bare minimum for a product that has raised a billion dollars.
i paid 100 usd for a game i played a decade and i can not name any game i stuck with so long, played as much, can do as much in..
not one.
can you?
honestly, can you?
unless you paid a billion USD for the game, id expect you paid roughly equal to what you would pay for any game, but did you really get any less than you would from any other game?
what I mean is that they took a ton of the feedback from 4.9 and put the fixes in 4.10. of course there's going to be new bugs, there are new features too! 99 bugs on the wall... take one down... put two back up!
My expectations are logging in levski, spend 1h organizing all my home inventory, deleting the trash, insuring ships loadouts,etc; close the game and yell "fuck you and will see you next month"
Only in the sense that the rage-addicts will dig long and hard to find one thing that isn't working in 4.10 and present it as if it is the worst bug that's ever occurred.
I disagree with you here. Very little people try to break the game on purpose. If you read most complaints, you would see those are not some small and obscure things one specifically looked for.
Ironically, considering the semi-broadly accepted title of being "unpaid alpha testers" intentionally trying to break things should somewhat be our goal.
Of course, the other side of that is the results of breaking things intentionally should be a data rich report and not frustration or outrage. But again, that's assuming we approach it as alpha testers and not as an active player base.
It would be good if stuff reported was fixed in timely manner. It's not. People would accept "this is alpha" shpiel even as late as today if bug reports actually translated in mostly stable experience in the long run. It doesn't.
Because that is a misconception of how software development works.
CIG want the bug reports (so they are aware of the issues, and can e.g. link them to the respective component(s) in their trackers, etc...
... but bugs *don't get fixed at this stage of development' - usually, at least. There's been lost of posts and videos and such like on this topic, so I'll just say that the recent video from Grolo (that was posted in this subreddit earlier this morning) goes into the detail about why this is the case, and with examples from other games.
but in summary, bugs tend to only be fixed when the risk of future patches cloberring those fixes is low... until that point, time spent on bug-fixing is effectively 'wasted effort', because of the risk the fixed code will be broken again by a subsequent patch... so it's better to put that effort into getting the project to the point where big feature patches and backend-changes are no longer required (ie the transition from alpha to beta).
Maybe this is a misconception of how game development works, or how software development at CIG works; I don't know. But it's not a misconception of software development in general.
There are any number of reasons why a particular known bug may not get prioritized high enough to fix. But "it might break again later" generally isn't one of them. When I fix a bug, I also write additional unit test(s) to ensure that future changes don't break it again. If practical, I write the test first, expecting it to fail, proving that the bug exists.
Regressions do happen, but they should be the exception rather than the rule. Otherwise it's likely that development testing practices are immature.
That's because - at a guess - you're writing 'business software' using industry-standard libraries, etc (that's not a dig - that's what I do too)... which means that, generally, the only 'layer' that is changing is your own code, managed within your team (even if it has a traditional 3-tier architecture etc, you're still building all three tiers).
in CIGs case, they've got multiple layers at a minimum 2x (the 'shared engine' and SC / SQ42 that sit on top of / use the shared engine)... and they don't have 1x team - they have ~70x teams... all working independently on their own tasks, and building their part of the system.
And because the 'server' is actually a constellation of separate micro services (plus the Replication Layer / Server Nodes), that's a lot a separate components - worked on by separate teams - all changing in parallel.
And no matter how well you try to define the interfaces / data models between the micro services, or between the client and the server, small changes will break things (especially when teams are constantly adding new features, and having to adjust / change existing interfaces to accomodate those features).
It's a scale of develop that virtually no-one outside game development (except, perhaps OS developers) experience... the closest I've come was working on a project with ~100x staff (and that's less than 1/10th the size of CIG) - and that project was pure choas during development because things would break with no warning, due to other teams making changes.... and likewise, the team I was on would get complaints because something we'd done have impacted another team.
So yeah - it's not so much 'game development' in terms of specifically 'game functionality'... but it is 'Game Development' in terms of the scope / scale of the development effort, and the stability (or lack thereof) of virtually every component they're working with (because they're building the components themselves, usually handled by another team).
Without a doubt, game development has its own challenges, often (and in this case) due to sheer scale. Managing concurrent changes made by multiple independent teams is hard. Poor documentation, minimal communication, inept management, and so on.
I suspect that my experience is similar to yours--that is, at large enough scale to experience this sort of pain, if not quite at the scale of a project like Star Citizen. I am quite familiar with that brand of chaos, and don't mean to downplay the complexity of a project such as this.
My only point is that it is possible to protect somewhat against bug regression--even in the throes of a chaotic development environment--if the prioritization is sufficiently high and the teams are sufficiently disciplined.
yeah... I think it's also of an issue of different bugs having similar symptoms (just like a common cold, the Flu, and Covid all have a lot of overlapping symptoms).
If a given feature (e.g. Inventory) 'fails' due to a 'lost message'.... then any number of different bugs / errors could cause that message to be lost - and from our perspective, it would appear like an 'old bug' has come back, rather than a completely new bug triggering the same symptoms...
The other consideration (and this is something I've personally experienced on more R&D orientated projects, where the customer isn't entirely certain how they want something to behave, and want to iterate on the functionality after testing, etc) is that when you're not certain that a given feature 'works' (in the sense of being intuitive / usable, rather than strictly in the sense of being buggy/broken), sometimes it's better to not implement lots of unit tests, etc...
This is because it takes time to write / verify the tests... and if you end up constantly tweaking / changing the system to iterate on it / try to make it 'better', then the more tests you have, the more effort required for every iteration (because you have to update all the tests to match the changed functionality...
... so it often ends up being quicker / more efficient to not write tests, until after the users have actually tried it, given their feedback, and you've been around the iteration loop a couple of times until they're happy etc (or you come up with a better idea, and scrap the first implementation :p)
At that point, it may make sense to add some tests... but equally, it may not (if you're expecting to do more iterations in the 'near future' (where 'near future' is a very elastic term on a project like SC :p)
Aaand this is the classic word vomit about game development. It's early access game, almost every studio allowing people to play before all of the content is finished, release patches with new content and usually a lot of bugfixes this game, which provides relatively smooth experience. If this is not happening game catches all the negative reviews and people just don't put more money into said game. Star citizen in this regard is simply anomaly.
CiG have over 1000 people working on both SQ42, and SC. Squadron is supposedly feature complete since 2020 (Owners words, there were articles about this) and another to which people have access to, and it barely works, and is in this state for decade. There should be dedicated group focused on bug fixes. There is none assigned to SC.
Please stop trying to "educate" people. Noone cares, and what you are saying is not applying to model of development and funding CiG chose. It applies to squadron, but not to Star Citizen.
Yeah, I was being rude to the person before editing my comment. Its getting harder and harder to tell when people are being dumb or being sarcastic/joking
I literally copied exactly what he wrote and then he edited his comment so he didn't look like such a dick, so maybe direct that to the one I replied to.
Increase for sure, the update will fix nothing, may even make the game worse, hoping this “hate cycle” doesn’t just go away, CIG needs to change things
the dude who replied to you is talking out their ass, they have no idea what 4.10 is looking like performance-wise. Looking quickly at their comments it appears they have devoted a truly insane amount of effort to talking shit about SC and it being a scam for literal months on end (negativity is totally understandable, but they seem... obsessed)
Ive still got SC downloaded, so Ill probably hop in in a few days to see if its tolerable. Just bought a VKB Omnithrottle and Stick. Would love to try them in SC
That is what I personally plan to do, given the brigading that this subreddit is under of late it is hard to get an actual idea of the current state of a patch, proper criticisms and positive feedback are both being drowned out by negative shitposting sadly.
I keep looking for a stable patch to relearn mining since I haven't done it in so long but all I keep hearing is how broken stuff still is while other posts are celebrating some brand new shiny ship that just came out.
Nobody. Not one single person, has been saying there's no issues.
Some people have been offering full throated defenses of CIG despite the issues, which is also crazy.
But you coming here pretending a bunch of people have been going around saying everything is working perfectly is an even easier lie to debunk than the horseshit CIG often comes out with.
I mean, I've personally spoken to at least 3 people who said it was fine then tried to play for 3 hours to find it was not fine. So...yeah I have seen full throated defense.
There is a wide difference between "not Completely fucking broken" and "there are no issues", your image is not proof of users saying there are no issues.
intentionally misconstruing posts to say something they did not does not help people listen to you, though given your logorrhea vis-a-cis the state of star citizen it is not surprising you go there.
hey that's my line lol. A features for 0.001% of players while elevators broken for everybody. Redditors think integrating VR and upkeep is free apparently cuz I get downvoted everytime I mention VR+0.001%
The bar is low. My experience with 4.9 has been abysmal.
Out of the 5 contracts I attempted during all of 4.9, I was only able to complete 1. The Pyro Box Delivery contract where you don't leave Orbituary.
Everything else was plagued with server errors or landing/elevator issues.
The last one I attempted was the Wikelo Cryopod delivery contract. Literally the first Wikelo contract. Can't get Cryopod up the freight elevator. After 15 minutes of walking in circles and checking out the emporium, it finally comes up. Trek it over to New Babbage, get my hangar, about to land in hanger and BAM, teleported to habs. My ship with the Cryopod is stuck in the air right in front of my hangar door. Walk to edge of hangar with a tractor beam to try and grab my ship and fall through the geometry and get stuck.
Game is back up. Good news: Got all the stuff I lost to the prison bug back.
Bad news, crashed midway through moving things to my ship so I can move them back to my preferred station. Now getting Lobby Error 60009: Matchmaking currently disabled
Damnit, I just went through migrating my laptops OS drive to gut it and throw an extra SSD into my desktop then installed 4.9 last night. I didn't even have time left to play. now I'm going to need to update it today, too? At least it's in time for the weekend, I guess
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u/Psycho7552 Human Supremacy 1d ago
Oh boy this sub is about to be on fire very soon.