Feedback: Catnip Games - Tear Down the Sacred Cows

There are a few things about Shroud that have been annoying over the years that have always seemed deeply rooted to me. Now that there is an official change in leadership/ownership, I'd love to propose a list of ideas to @Chris and the team to consider.

Please add yours, but please don't turn this into a debate on a particular idea (famous last words right?)

1) Monthly Releases - When the team was larger we had significant features added every month. Now they come into the game mid-release sometimes, or in a state where they're really not done yet, but are pushed in to make the date. I had always understood that the monthly release helped with telethons when those were monthly, but that's done too now. How about a quarterly or bi-monthly release where we actually can get a reveal on significant (tested) content.

1b) Build features till they're fully baked - We have had a lot of features where we've gotten the first version of something and then the next step never really materialized. While technically you met the objective, it can make the new feature feel half-assed. Just one example is brewing - yes, technically we can brew stuff. But man, after waiting a year for whiskey to be done, and then it does the same as beer that takes a couple days is disappointing.

2) Telethons - When these were quarterly, they drummed up good excitement. I would schedule time in my calendar to watch and hear from you guys. That became more difficult and less interesting when it went to monthly (a lot of the same 'news'), and now with streams quasi0-daily, I only really get to watch when someone tells me 'hey, you gotta see what Chris just said'. I'm NOT saying stop regular streams, but a quarterly stream where you do some big reveals or announcements (maybe drink some), and do meaningful stretch goals would be sweet.

3) QA - Many people don't use QA. It's too buggy to really get a feel for the changes, and changes are often not in yet anyway till right before release. How about a near-real-time QA server with some access to a changelog so that those who really want to help test or give feedback on features can do so with a real change to affect a change prior to the release. Also - please tell us what to test and how to do it, eg: New dungeon is in, enter via X or give us a scroll to get there (in QA), mobs spawn in waves - please test with large party, etc.

4) QA rewards - like above, this has been a downward spiral. A lottery is not a good incentive for playing for many hours hunting bugs. How about a COTO for every 30 minutes spent on QA in which XP was earned and spent (to avoid abuse) plus a bug/feedback was submitted in the month. I don't have all the answer here but make QA meaningful for testers.

5) Store Credit/Gifting - I've heard that Portalarium didn't want to be considered a 'bank', but so so may companies do stuff like this. Now that it's Catnip Games, maybe you should consider that again. When you took it away, players complained. I cannot imagine anyone complaining that they'd be able to send a gift or save up store credit. If having a dollar amount was the problem, show us our COTO balance in our account page and let us spend or send COTO's for anything that costs real $ instead.

That's it for now - Chris - these points are all listed with the genuine wellbeing for the game and the community at heart.

A

 

Many many bugs on QA are found when not earning XP.

 

Hmm.

Could the devs track xp gain on QA and then transfer that to the live server?

@Chris

 

So, my issue with QA:
1. Its never clear what we're meant to test, what's actually in and what is meant to be in but not functioning is never clear.
2. Early on, I devoted hours to testing every month, reported bugs, etc. Never got a thing for it. Which would be fine? Except - Saw people spamming the forums with same bugs over and over, and they have fancy bug titles and bug furniture and I have crap-all because it was all random lotto. This fails, hard.
3. Usually I'm not the first one to catch things, I often post confirmations/additional info on bug threads but don't open many. This apparently does nothing from a reward perspective.

I get that there's some sort of concern that people will just "log on QA for the rewards" and go afk without actually doing anything. Its a legit concern. I'm sure there are some sort of logs to show if player is doing anything though - a lot of it is in the API even - crafted an item, changed scenes, killed something, bought something, sold something, etc. It should be easy enough to tell the difference between someone doing stuff vs. not doing stuff and award as appropriate.

I'm not saying we should all get Corpion Chairs for logging on and doing stuff for a few hours. But there should be a progression of QA time spent to eventually unlock everything based on how much time you invest. First, fix the incentive.

Next, make good use of your free labor!

• Give clear test cases.
• You're going to have to give spoilers. We can't test if stuff works if we can't find it or don't know its in. This would save a lot of embarrassment (remember the Obsidian Destroyer bear fiasco....and other fiascos...)
• If you want to test things like loot drops, crank them up x100 on QA so people can test if its actually dropping. (remember the first dungeon room fiascos that were in the quest only instance of hilt? and so forth).
• Want to test things like combining artifacts? Crafting recipes? Add a vendor on QA that sells any item in the game for 1g. Seriously. Its QA, who cares.
• TELL us what bits of the game you've fooled with. Couple releases ago, marker placement in POTs was totally broken with no clear indication why or what changed or even that that system was being touched. We need to know what parts of the game have been changed so we can see if they are working as intended. We've had the 'sticky skills' bug for a few releases now and haven't a clue what/when/why/how that came into existence.

I'd consider reformatting the /bug questionaire too. The copypaste with your location and specs and all is fine, but I'd recommend saying:

What were you trying to do?
What was meant to happen?
What actually did happen?
Critical? Y/N Blocker? Y/N Reproduceable? Y/N

This might help identify causality instead of someone just posting something that says "This NPC doesn't do X". It would eliminate a lot of the working as intended stuff because if NPC isn't SUPPOSED to do X then well, it wont. If you change the behavior of something, disclose that, so you wont waste tester's time or dev time reading irrelevant reports.

 

I wish they would create test scripts as quests on QA that everyone gets reset each build.

 

I should have a Corpion chair by now, 100%.

Instead it's been nothing for like a year.

They should really rethink their method.

 

Rewards could be melded with the incentives.

Is there a new item dropping? first 5 people to get this many of that item win Scientist Goggles!

Is there a new crafting recipie? First however many peopel to craft what when how and howmany get such and such

It might not make people who arent the first dozen to race to the test server happy but the people who do race there will test the stuff for the rewards

 

That's why i stopped spending time on QA. early release notes would say "feature X". i'd go test it. it wouldn't work. i'd post a bug. i'd get a response "that's not in yet" ... eventually i just gave up stopped trying to help out.

 

Its an interesting idea, but I think it only makes the problem worse.
QA testing should not be a COMPETITION to see "who can find/report the broken thing first" and then everyone else's efforts are meaningless - this is a big part of the reason a lot of us don't bother anymore.

 

Maybe I fell into a ploy, but I thought the way they switched gears on monthly releases was actually a positive. It's one of those things that I looked at to gauge how well the game was doing, i.e., if it changed in a negative way (less releases) I'd think maintenance mode or worse was not too far behind. That they pushed out patches before the actual monthly release showed me they were working on things regularly. You could argue, successfully, that this led to bugs, etc., and I would not disagree; however, they appear to be constantly fixing things. To me, this is a bellweather as to the health of the game. People point out all types of things to push a "The sky is falling!" narrative, but truly if these monthly releases go then that narrative would become more likely in my eyes. I also agree that they should fix/adjust things with these intermittent patches, but only ADD things after testing with the monthly patches.

I was a bit put off by the switch to monthly telethons. They really should consider bringing them back in a QUARTERLY fashion - that is what originally hooked me on the game, the fact that they would have fun while trying to benefit the game. So, it was right to get rid of the monthly's, but please consider bringing back the telethons in a quarterly or seasonal fashion. Two big events happen at the end of the year - Halloween and then the whole Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year's push. Those are times that people are willing to contribute, not to mention other times throughout the year, making the quarterly telethons appropriate.

 

I’ll sell ya mine for $5, oh right RMT is not allowed.

 

I should have 10.

 

I think Chris mentioned in his streams that they will try to change the release setup. One release new content, next release bug fixing, next release new content, next release bug fixing,…

I personally would suggest keeping the current streams as this seems to be more fitting for new avatars to get a feeling for the devs work. But at a few special days a year I think a telethon would be nice and maybe 2 events a year would be already sufficient. These telethons would be designed less for new avatars and more for the long-established ones. E.g. meet and greet with all devs , describing the long time plans for coming features, explanations why something planed cannot be implemented, …

Even if that sounds interesting I do not think they should let us get that close to development. In worst case one customer could define this way a mechanic to work as he likes it.

Of course the rewards lottery is...probably not the best solution. Maybe they should instead create a bounty-system for found bug and depending on the danger of bug the "payed" bounty is lower or higher...at best we cannot see the defined danger-category as this might just lead to discussions about the bounty. At the end of QA the summarized bounty is transferred to your account and you might find some cotos or rare items in your treasure chest.

Well…aside of LotI-Bundles and the game service vouchers everything else is already just available for cotos. This way simply purchase coto-bundles until you have collected enough cotos for a big buy...not that different to the old store credits. Also sending cotos is this way the same as sending store credits in the past. As you already mentioned the only difference might be that you have to play SotA to see your savings...but is that really a problem?

 

Yes yes and yes on QA.

Give us the power to set stats, generate items, etc. And keep it up 24/7.

Would you seriously hire a QA team and expect them to work in these conditions? What makes it okay because we are free?

Edit: I don't mean to agree to benefits on live server for actions on QA. Cosmetics for valuable bug reports sure, but making it defacto /part/ of prod would interfere with its purpose of being a bug tool.