A constructive discussion about stability, patches and bug fixes

[Dimitris]

Please don't take this the wrong way, but:

We cannot, and do not investigate and debug feelings.

Bring us examples. Bring us saves. Bring us reproducible regression cases. This, we can work with.

Thank you.

[BDukes]

Well you told him.

I agree with Figeac. Like him, I'm not really stomping my feet about it but things showing back up is a pattern. There are numerous bug reports to support it but as he mentioned with saying "feeling", there are things you just know have been broken again. There are bug reports to support this, you aren't an indie anymore-make millions, have staff, and your pro business benefits from the same or similar repository so your expectation of what is owed to you should be adjusted.
Anybody engaged in the game for a long period of time can see the pattern of demands up until a pro release and once released, civ is a very slow to be polished and bugs responded to. So what is their return? What do they owe you? This game is a really small part of civ users lives, anything they give you is gold.

The file request would be ideal and something you should require of your internal beta team but I think its best to have a realistic expectation about it after years of trying. Perhaps consider reports as leads your beta team or staff can follow up on it. Figeac or anybody else isn't responsible for this if you want your product to benefit from feedback. It bugs me when you do this to people we all know actually play the game (not the forums). The feedback isn't personal. Don't shovel digging up reports or creating files as pushback. Its been years of the same cycle, so why expect work from them instead of adapting to what is realistic? You likely have the staff to follow up and if they don't that isn't on the Figeacs of your world.

I'm pretty happy with the game overall and love most of the people, but when I see terrible responses I get that itch to build a team and my own game to get away from it. AGSI was terrible and Don dared us to build our own. Thank god we were young enough to follow up on it. Please, for the love of Pete, I'm too old to do that all again, have kids,and just want to play the total wargame we always talked about. Do you even remember TOAW and Harpoon game with Dale and I? Are you allowed to?

Have a great day. I'm not engaging in an essay contest with anybody else on all this or expect a pint of blood. Just do what's best and make things better.

Mike

[Figeac]

Please don't take this the wrong way, but:

We cannot, and do not investigate and debug feelings.

Bring us examples. Bring us saves. Bring us reproducible regression cases. This, we can work with.

Thank you.

I understand that reproducible cases, saves and specific examples are what you need when investigating an individual bug. I don't disagree with that.

But I don't think describing what I wrote as "feelings" really reflects the point I was trying to make.

I was not asking the team to investigate or debug a particular problem based on a vague impression. I was pointing to a broader pattern that I have noticed over time: core behaviours sometimes work correctly, later stop working after an update, are fixed, and then reappear as regressions after subsequent changes.

The examples I listed were meant to clarify what I consider "core behaviours": altitude and speed orders, strike profiles, formations, EMCON, weapon-employment logic, mission tasking, sensor behaviour, plotted courses, and so on. My point was that these systems are fundamental to how the player communicates intent to the simulation, and therefore their stability seems especially important when new features and patches are introduced.

Of course a specific bug report requires something reproducible before it can be investigated. But feedback about which areas of the game appear particularly vulnerable to regressions, or which systems players consider especially important to preserve, is a different kind of feedback. I think that can still be useful without every observation being accompanied by a save file.

That was the distinction I was trying to make in my original post.

[Figeac]

On a somewhat related note, I would also like to raise another possibility that I think could be beneficial to CMO in the long term: opening the game, at least to some degree, to community modding.

Many major strategy and simulation developers have embraced modding over the years and the result has often been the creation of very active communities that contribute far beyond simply adding new content.

Modders tend to explore systems in ways that ordinary players do not, quickly identify unusual behaviours, uncover regressions, experiment with possible solutions and, in some cases, keep games actively played and discussed for decades after their original release. They obviously do not replace the developers or proper QA, but they can become an additional layer of knowledge, experimentation and long-term support around a game.

I understand that CMO is a very different product from something like EU or Total War, and that there may be technical, commercial, licensing or even security-related reasons why exposing parts of the simulation is considerably more complicated. I am certainly not suggesting that everything should be made accessible.

But even a limited and officially supported modding framework, for example, allowing access to selected AI behaviours, mission logic, doctrine-related rules, event scripting or other appropriate systems, could potentially give the community much more room to experiment without interfering with the core executable.

It could also have another advantage: instead of the community being limited to reporting bugs or unwanted behaviours and then waiting for a hardcoded patch, modders could sometimes investigate those systems themselves, experiment with alternative solutions and demonstrate in practice what works and what does not.

CMO already has a remarkably knowledgeable and dedicated player base, and I think giving that community more tools to work with could strengthen the game rather than fragment it.

Dimitris, if you don't mind me asking directly, what is your view on this? Has broader community modding ever been considered for CMO, even in a limited form, and do you see it as something that could realistically be possible in the future?

[Figeac]

I agree with Figeac. Like him, I'm not really stomping my feet about it but things showing back up is a pattern. There are numerous bug reports to support it but as he mentioned with saying "feeling", there are things you just know have been broken again. There are bug reports to support this (...)

Thanks, Mike. I really appreciate your perspective and the time you took to write this. Given your long history with Command and everything you’ve contributed to the game over the years, I especially appreciate hearing your thoughts on this.