Endless daytime patches...

I personally don't mind the sheer number of patches, because I like seeing how things are evolving and am probably more interested in game design than game play. (Wish I could have been around from the beginning.) But I'm unhappy with the number of forced-update patches recently, especially given that most of the changes in the patch notes don't affect me in any obvious fashion -- so why should the patch be forced in order to play?

I do agree, though, that this many patches, for so many in-your-face things, is likely to sabotage their attempts to get both new players and returning players. Just review the patch notes and notice how many of the changes mentioned are in starter areas or for things like the glowing nodes that will affect everybody. I'm glad they're making those fixes as quickly as possible -- but most of those problems shouldn't have made it into a live release in the first place.

Just last night, I was changing a house on a row lot and saw the option for "Empty Lot." I was thrilled to see it, because that's one of the changes I want -- but it doesn't actually work yet. It's there, visible to players, but it doesn't work. Now, I understood what was going on because I listened to the stream where Atos explained it, but to most players, that's just going to look like shoddy work. And as I say re: contractors in my real life -- if there are this many obvious front-facing problems, how can we trust that what's behind the scenes isn't riddled with even bigger problems? My personal enjoyment of seeing the work-in-progress doesn't weigh much against a loss of consumer confidence.

 

Just wondering... @GivenUp do you play daily or just "commenting" here to draw attention to the amount of patches?
The Dev Team in Shroud, truly does respond to Player feedback & patch accordingly, which IMHO is an awesome thing for the the Shroud Team to do.
They respond to Player Feedback & patch to address our feedback.
For those of Us who log-in daily (via the Shroud launcher... not via Steam) really..... the patches are not an issue (or much of a time/bandwith issue at all)
Patches are really an acknowledgement that current issues/"fires", expressed by the Players, have been dealt with & have changed accordingly, to make game-play more enjoyable.
Patches are NOT a bad thing.....

 

Just a thought.

Even if they don't try to coincide patches with people's time out of game, which might be impossible since its a global game, they could still have a timetable with designated times patches might go out each time they go out, so players can be more prepared. Like 6am,12pm,6pm,12am. I don't know if this would help at all, or be more trouble than its worth. But I thought it was worth suggesting.

 

Yes, I have played daily and dealt with huge numbers of patches each month.

I highlight them as an opportunity for future growth. Clearly those of us here are used to them, and I pointed out above they aren’t the end of the world...to me. Why I comment is certain new players may not see it the way we might, because it looks like releases aren’t tested much before going out. I will disagree about the main reason there are so many patches - it isn’t pivoting based on player feedback; it is fixing bugs only caught once live. Nice to do that, but shouldn’t that be caught beforehand? “Player feedback” that xyz feature is broken and it gets hot fixed a few days later is in different than how I think you are framing it.

Again, we here are fine with this methodology, and if that is all we want, carry on.

 

There’s a simple answer to this - play through Steam and leave your computer switched on. Patches download and install automatically as they are released; when you sit down to play all you see is the little message at the bottom of the Steam window - 1 of 1 item downloaded.