My thoughts on the Future of Shroud & the NEXT STRETCH GOALS....

Might want to add some priorities to these bugs as well.

There is a memory leak that has been around for a year.


I hear all this talk about improvements to performance, the game is running worse this release than it ever has lol.

At this moment we have

Memory leak - game crashes after a couple hours or shortly after a visit to a town like central brit
Frequent disconnects of internet connection or packet loss for many players
Mass desyncs - you get hit by attacks from mobs after they are dead or while you are los behind a wall
Massive lag on overworld map

Who cares about saving 2 seconds on the scene load when I'm going to waste 5 minutes chopping thin air with my harvesting axe while I watch the connection icon blink on and off in the top right corner.

 

Full ack!
I became a SotA supporter to help RG create a new spiritual Ultima sucesor, rather than Chris making his next attempt to create a successful game.

 

Well you had a good run on the forums.

 

I'm responding in-line.

The devs:

1.) Write long posts every quarter about the direction of the game.

That is not communication directly to players about things THEY are talking about. Specifically bugs and actual feedback. I find that they do listen to big-picture feedback, however, the feedback on bugs is needing a lot more attention.

2.) Write long posts every release about the direction of the game.

Just look at the bug forums from past releases. See above.

3.) Hold livestreams every release and every 2 weeks answering questions and talking about the direction of the game.

Again, if they were listening... REALLY listening, they would hear the call to fix the existing, not create a larger pile of future un-fixed bugs. This is easy to change. Just start fixing the game. The roadmap to do so is there.

While I understand that some things are not as transparent as some would like.... I don't think players understand how much work goes into releasing a game like this each month and to have them actively helping players with their wishlish, their issues, their individual desires - many of which we can see compete with each other or are in disagreement with each other.... It seems like a tall order.

Other game companies don't do this. Does Bethesda listen to the wishlists and desires of their players ? Not even close ! Do you have the kind of access that we have here to influence the game ? No !

Ok, that's great that they listen to us and fulfill wishes, however, and again, this doesn't fix the already existing.

We have a lot of influence but the fact of the matter is we can't make every single person on here happy.

I think almost all of us have submitted bugs or at the least been frustrated by them. I'd put money on the idea that most people would be happy if they started fixing the things we know are broken. The maps ALONE would be a major improvement. If I was a new player and saw maps barely functioning, I'd question the health of the game immediately.

The thing I would agree with is that some major decisions sometimes are not made with the kind of explanations that might help offset trouble.

Oh you mean when they tried to tell us Coto denominations were going away because of a load-balancing issue but really was because they were changing the Coto system? Yeah that was handled terribly.

Again, I don't know why Port decided to put themselves into this corner to create new items every month to fund the game. There are so many games out there that run smoothly but do not release new content every month. It can be done.

I love SoTA. All I want to see is it's longevity secured and the MMO community to find it as amazing as I do.

 

Your entitled to your thoughts and feelings. I just do NOT agree with them. Said my piece no other reason to comment.

 

It's not true that they never fix bugs, because I've seen bugs fixed after many months.

I do empathize however with how annoying it is when bugs affect you personally, like when I couldn't use some of the furniture I really love.

Also did you watch the livestream ? The impression I got is they made a serious of changes based on uh "feedback" here. The spirited Dukes throne room discussion got results for the Dukes.

Getting the Daemon fixed is a perfect example. We asked for natural caves recently on here. Now we have them. We complained that the taxes were too high, they are halfing taxes on bigger lots, which is a big deal, because it was A LOT before.

 

To be fair, most of my not remembering comes from explosive overpressure while wearing a helmet that focuses blast damage onto the wearers brain. Military intelligence at it's finest. I've now started a spreadsheet so I can see what I've already posted.

And also to be fair, in the current list of fixed bugs there are six fixed on there that I know I submitted and a half a dozen others that seem pretty familiar, I probably submitted those as well.

(Edit: And others may have as well. Duplicates are one of the big problems, see below)

The real issue for me isn't the fixing, that keeps happening. It's the method we have for figuring out if a bug has been submitted before. Have a look at the top one on that list, patterns for masks. That was submitted in April of last year by someone. I know I submitted a similar bug last month or the month before. Was I going to find the prior submission from 8 months earlier? No. Did it take up dev time looking at my submission? Yes. Do I want them having to look at repeat bugs? No.

The forum search is really not up to the task. @Alley Oop may have a brain that can hold all known bugs in his head but unfortunately those days are gone for me. So my worry is more along the lines of

• Am I duplicating a bug? (I know it happens)
• If not, is my bug making it into JIRA? (a large number go unanswered, so do I resubmit next month?)

 

Oh, and if I submit something on the QA forums and they don't get acknowledged or fixed, do I resubmit them on the live for that release?

 

So do we resubmit our bugs in the new release, then? I only ask because two I've submitted are from last April and still not fixed.

 

I don't know, that's what I've been wondering for ages. If it wasn't acknowledged one way or the other, what do we do?

Edit: Alleine if your bug was accepted, it's in the JIRA and I would say don't resubmit.

 

Whether we like it or not, I'm sure there is some order, depending on the urgency or severity of any bug. I'd report once acknowledged, I wouldn't worry about it. But that's me.

 

I would say, at least make a decent effort to see if a particular bug does have a JIRA number. If you don’t find one, submit a /bug report. Make sure you are using that command.

If you do happen to find a JIRA number for an issue you still see bugged, still submit a /bug report and also provide that JIRA number. They can at least check, and it’s possible that JIRA was marked as closed but isn’t anymore.