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5 months
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SLG-Dennis
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There is a multitude of factors, we're assessing the reviews and address feedback where we can over the next weeks:
1. We had a overload on our backend servers at release (though people were understanding for that mostly) and multiple malicious DDoS attacks on our services afterwards (which they were not as much) during holiday time, while at the same time not used to deal with such issues. Fixing hence took a few hours at the first outage.
The reason the game doesn't work without active backend servers in singleplayer is simply that the game has no dedicated singleplayer. When you create or load a local world you start the same dedicated server any server hoster does and that one does check your authorization when joining. With the system we currently have in place it is not possible to allow offline play, even if we wanted to do so. Of course the license check could be removed, but that would mean anyone could play without buying the game by just downloading the publicly available game files on AWS for the buyers on our website, means anyone that can google can immediately play for free after adding a single start parameter to pretend they are a steam user, making them no longer need to enter their account credentials. Given we had the option to disable authentication in the past on server side for experienced users as a developer debug option, we also know that that was indeed used a lot. There is no other DRM than that and removing this would basically mean we can "go home and stop developing the game", as we'd not be able to earn any money from our work anymore, which with all passion for the game, is unfortunately necessary for us to continue working on it.
That does also mean the client actually has no effective DRM, there is nothing to crack. All authentication happens on the server side. We have no hard stance nor intention on fighting piracy to the end and even less would we ever want to provide "poisoned files" to anyone. But this very simple system is effective, as there is very few and only very outdated versions of Eco around - given the simple fact that what you actually would need to crack is the server and we can easily block these from public access even when that would be done. It just ensures one needs to buy the game at all, we don't enforce any DRM beyond that like other companies do to bring the piracy levels down as much as possible. It doesn't help that we currently have no error message shown when contact to backend servers is not possible, which makes the main menu fail, but that actually isn't any sort of DRM, but simply a timeout that causes a bug, which in turn makes people believe the game itself is broken. We can fix that and plan to do so, but you still couldn't start a world afterwards.
Our focus here is to get solid devops and be better prepared for any issues.
2. We had, as announced, for the first time a marketing campaign for the game - as many existing players had requested for a long while. That did require to release around christmas for the biggest effect and also drags in countless existing and new players that haven't played Eco for ages or get into it for the first time. We all know that getting into Eco takes effort, which not everyone is willing to provide. It is on us to make that entry easier and it's being worked on.
3. As with any major release, there is a lot of technical issues that have to be addressed. While we did public playtesting for six months, due to the sheer size of Eco and the time it takes to test every feature, by very nature only a very limited amount of players actually participate in that and QA testing in a small team can only go so far, as we're never able to anticipate all possible hardware constellations or what players come up with especially in the civics system during a 30 day playthrough. Those issues will be ironed out in the next weeks. There also is a Unity issue with old hardware we're investigating that stops some players with older hardware from playing. That hardware is not technically supported, but playing on it worked before and users do expect that to continue to be the case.
4. Update 10 also was a major update towards our vision we laid out on Kickstarter. It changes a massive amount of core game systems, making old worlds incompatible with many of the new features. We thought it would be a good idea to keep them loadable as players in the past gave us the feedback that they'd like to just look at their old worlds and what they have achieved, but should probably not have done that as other players got the expectation from it that they will fully function. It's unfortunately not possible to migrate existing worlds to a state that would be fully compatible.
5. For the same reason there is an obvious change in game systems that some of our playerbase loves and other parts don't. The new systems in many areas require adjustment in gameplay which will take a while to have become effective. Players trying to play the game strictly like in Update 9 will have problems that can easily be avoided when adjusting gameplay. It will also take a while for servers to figure out the best configuration settings for their specific playerbase for their intended concept to work out best. This is the part we anticipated before, e.g. were fully aware it would happen. This should become less of a problem once players got a grasp on new systems and realized which changes in their typical gameplay are necessary for it to work best with the new systems. Additionally we of course need to make some changes for acommodation. For example the next Patch (not Hotfix) will include an option to autoscale influence sizes to the selected world size, to prevent the problem of too small influence sizes on worlds beyond supported sizes, which is something servers commonly do, but should not. There also will be a new system of homestead support papers to make live for non-town citizens a bit easier by giving towns claim papers to sell that only lone homesteads can use to expand. We will also move the setting for allowing to claim within influence to the foundation and make it default on, so towns need to decide on purpose that they want to lock their borders down. A bit later we will also make influence on towns show during the founding process, so players know where they need to be to join - currently that is indeed horrible UX.
6. Talking about UX, our UI is obviously dated and needs a revamp which is planned to be one of the focuses of the next major update. There is too much at once and little options to configure what you want, with poor widescreen support. We're definitely going to address this, but this is a major change.
7. Eco is a very special game and that is not obvious to people getting it that had no prior experience with it. The whole intention of the game being to build a society with the tools we have and work out the challenges that come with it is something not everyone understands from our descriptions (we're looking into how to improve that) and also something not everyone simply likes. It is the core principle of the game, though. The problems some players see due to behaviour of other players is things that are supposed to get solved by the servers' community. That can sometimes be hard and failing is an absolute option - but we know that and its an intended option. The game is supposed to show that you have to come together, communicate, find common grounds and work together to get rid of what players might call "trolls" - or you may fail the objective. That is most easily achieved on administrated community servers, but not impossible elsewhere. We provide a framework and part of the gameplay is also to deal with people that some do rather not want to interact with at all. I can fully understand anyone saying that they don't want to deal with that in their free time or that a game for them simply cannot have that, but it is the purpose of this specific game and part of what makes it unique. And we would not want to adjust all our systems to fully remove what the core of Eco is - you figuring out how to solve problems, not us preventing problems to ever occur. It is unfortunately simply impossible - at least with the resources we have - to cater to everyone that would like Eco to be a specific way. We hence follow our original design intentions we have communicated since Kickstarter and try to incorporate as much feedback as is compatible with that.
8. Singleplayer default settings can hardly be balanced as people have vastly different expectations on how the game should feel for them. There is many people that can work with our default settings, others that got themselves fitting configuration values to have fun, but also a lot of players that don't yet have found such or don't want to invest the time to do. Unfortunately there is little we can do for this, as its already highly problematic to give defaults for servers when the gameplay can simply differ a lot depending on how many players you have. It's intended administrators think about their local community as they will have the much better grasp on what exactly their community needs. I also understand that many people wish for a more fleshed out singleplayer experience or alternatively removing the singleplayer tag - which we are actually considering -, but that wouldn't be true either. We have in alpha provided the local servers on request of players, simply because it was easily possible to do so. We also make sure that they can adjust basically anything for their play experience, but at the same time our focus is and always has been on the multiplayer on public servers. Nonetheless, singleplayer does exist and is a great way to jump into an experience and learn, then invite a few friends to your local server and ultimately get the urge to switch to a public server, which we would like to keep. It's a common story we hear how people got into the game from the more dedicated user base.
There is even more things that could be said, so if your specific thing wasn't in this post, that doesn't mean we don't have it on our list, that were just the biggest things that came to my mind. We always read all feedback and all reviews. It's just a lot of different factors coming together, some of which could certainly have been avoided. Our goal now is to address them and then look into how we can avoid them in the future.
1. We had a overload on our backend servers at release (though people were understanding for that mostly) and multiple malicious DDoS attacks on our services afterwards (which they were not as much) during holiday time, while at the same time not used to deal with such issues. Fixing hence took a few hours at the first outage.
The reason the game doesn't work without active backend servers in singleplayer is simply that the game has no dedicated singleplayer. When you create or load a local world you start the same dedicated server any server hoster does and that one does check your authorization when joining. With the system we currently have in place it is not possible to allow offline play, even if we wanted to do so. Of course the license check could be removed, but that would mean anyone could play without buying the game by just downloading the publicly available game files on AWS for the buyers on our website, means anyone that can google can immediately play for free after adding a single start parameter to pretend they are a steam user, making them no longer need to enter their account credentials. Given we had the option to disable authentication in the past on server side for experienced users as a developer debug option, we also know that that was indeed used a lot. There is no other DRM than that and removing this would basically mean we can "go home and stop developing the game", as we'd not be able to earn any money from our work anymore, which with all passion for the game, is unfortunately necessary for us to continue working on it.
That does also mean the client actually has no effective DRM, there is nothing to crack. All authentication happens on the server side. We have no hard stance nor intention on fighting piracy to the end and even less would we ever want to provide "poisoned files" to anyone. But this very simple system is effective, as there is very few and only very outdated versions of Eco around - given the simple fact that what you actually would need to crack is the server and we can easily block these from public access even when that would be done. It just ensures one needs to buy the game at all, we don't enforce any DRM beyond that like other companies do to bring the piracy levels down as much as possible. It doesn't help that we currently have no error message shown when contact to backend servers is not possible, which makes the main menu fail, but that actually isn't any sort of DRM, but simply a timeout that causes a bug, which in turn makes people believe the game itself is broken. We can fix that and plan to do so, but you still couldn't start a world afterwards.
Our focus here is to get solid devops and be better prepared for any issues.
2. We had, as announced, for the first time a marketing campaign for the game - as many existing players had requested for a long while. That did require to release around christmas for the biggest effect and also drags in countless existing and new players that haven't played Eco for ages or get into it for the first time. We all know that getting into Eco takes effort, which not everyone is willing to provide. It is on us to make that entry easier and it's being worked on.
3. As with any major release, there is a lot of technical issues that have to be addressed. While we did public playtesting for six months, due to the sheer size of Eco and the time it takes to test every feature, by very nature only a very limited amount of players actually participate in that and QA testing in a small team can only go so far, as we're never able to anticipate all possible hardware constellations or what players come up with especially in the civics system during a 30 day playthrough. Those issues will be ironed out in the next weeks. There also is a Unity issue with old hardware we're investigating that stops some players with older hardware from playing. That hardware is not technically supported, but playing on it worked before and users do expect that to continue to be the case.
4. Update 10 also was a major update towards our vision we laid out on Kickstarter. It changes a massive amount of core game systems, making old worlds incompatible with many of the new features. We thought it would be a good idea to keep them loadable as players in the past gave us the feedback that they'd like to just look at their old worlds and what they have achieved, but should probably not have done that as other players got the expectation from it that they will fully function. It's unfortunately not possible to migrate existing worlds to a state that would be fully compatible.
5. For the same reason there is an obvious change in game systems that some of our playerbase loves and other parts don't. The new systems in many areas require adjustment in gameplay which will take a while to have become effective. Players trying to play the game strictly like in Update 9 will have problems that can easily be avoided when adjusting gameplay. It will also take a while for servers to figure out the best configuration settings for their specific playerbase for their intended concept to work out best. This is the part we anticipated before, e.g. were fully aware it would happen. This should become less of a problem once players got a grasp on new systems and realized which changes in their typical gameplay are necessary for it to work best with the new systems. Additionally we of course need to make some changes for acommodation. For example the next Patch (not Hotfix) will include an option to autoscale influence sizes to the selected world size, to prevent the problem of too small influence sizes on worlds beyond supported sizes, which is something servers commonly do, but should not. There also will be a new system of homestead support papers to make live for non-town citizens a bit easier by giving towns claim papers to sell that only lone homesteads can use to expand. We will also move the setting for allowing to claim within influence to the foundation and make it default on, so towns need to decide on purpose that they want to lock their borders down. A bit later we will also make influence on towns show during the founding process, so players know where they need to be to join - currently that is indeed horrible UX.
6. Talking about UX, our UI is obviously dated and needs a revamp which is planned to be one of the focuses of the next major update. There is too much at once and little options to configure what you want, with poor widescreen support. We're definitely going to address this, but this is a major change.
7. Eco is a very special game and that is not obvious to people getting it that had no prior experience with it. The whole intention of the game being to build a society with the tools we have and work out the challenges that come with it is something not everyone understands from our descriptions (we're looking into how to improve that) and also something not everyone simply likes. It is the core principle of the game, though. The problems some players see due to behaviour of other players is things that are supposed to get solved by the servers' community. That can sometimes be hard and failing is an absolute option - but we know that and its an intended option. The game is supposed to show that you have to come together, communicate, find common grounds and work together to get rid of what players might call "trolls" - or you may fail the objective. That is most easily achieved on administrated community servers, but not impossible elsewhere. We provide a framework and part of the gameplay is also to deal with people that some do rather not want to interact with at all. I can fully understand anyone saying that they don't want to deal with that in their free time or that a game for them simply cannot have that, but it is the purpose of this specific game and part of what makes it unique. And we would not want to adjust all our systems to fully remove what the core of Eco is - you figuring out how to solve problems, not us preventing problems to ever occur. It is unfortunately simply impossible - at least with the resources we have - to cater to everyone that would like Eco to be a specific way. We hence follow our original design intentions we have communicated since Kickstarter and try to incorporate as much feedback as is compatible with that.
8. Singleplayer default settings can hardly be balanced as people have vastly different expectations on how the game should feel for them. There is many people that can work with our default settings, others that got themselves fitting configuration values to have fun, but also a lot of players that don't yet have found such or don't want to invest the time to do. Unfortunately there is little we can do for this, as its already highly problematic to give defaults for servers when the gameplay can simply differ a lot depending on how many players you have. It's intended administrators think about their local community as they will have the much better grasp on what exactly their community needs. I also understand that many people wish for a more fleshed out singleplayer experience or alternatively removing the singleplayer tag - which we are actually considering -, but that wouldn't be true either. We have in alpha provided the local servers on request of players, simply because it was easily possible to do so. We also make sure that they can adjust basically anything for their play experience, but at the same time our focus is and always has been on the multiplayer on public servers. Nonetheless, singleplayer does exist and is a great way to jump into an experience and learn, then invite a few friends to your local server and ultimately get the urge to switch to a public server, which we would like to keep. It's a common story we hear how people got into the game from the more dedicated user base.
There is even more things that could be said, so if your specific thing wasn't in this post, that doesn't mean we don't have it on our list, that were just the biggest things that came to my mind. We always read all feedback and all reviews. It's just a lot of different factors coming together, some of which could certainly have been avoided. Our goal now is to address them and then look into how we can avoid them in the future.