[2019] Competing governments and different tiers of governments

That's the focus of the current updates in work.

Bugs do have a priority you can look up on GitHub, we nearly cleared all high priority bugs recently.

Rubble is some portal magic, we've tried fixing that a hundred times now, but some issue keeps getting back, this likely will require more in-depth changes we cannot do with a single patch.

Performance and bugs are number one priority at the moment, which is why there have been nearly no new features from 8.0 to 8.2.

Governments are not a decoration though, but one of the major game pillars and they work quite well with less than hundred players - i'm doing all that stuff with my server since at least a year already, just with manual work and imagination. And yes, the server has a 30 days reset cycle and the same bugs than anyone else.

In regards to bugs you might want to report them on Github or at least go into detail which already existing bugs are most annoying to you - we have a lot of minor bugs with different priorities and often some players extremely dislike one bug, while others don't care at all. I've been making sure all the bugs that were reported to me as extremely annoying by several players in the past were treated with priority.

Regarding crashes - i never had a single crash in a release version of Eco since im playing it, aside from server crashes which were fixed immediately. There are also no known crashes or crash issues reported on GitHub despite two or three that are very specific to the players setup. If you experience that many crashes, please file a bug with logs and descriptions.

Broken Professions, XP Imbalance and Goods Productions are all other milestones for 9.0 - but it is a major update, so we'll have several new things, government being one of it. New ore concept being another.

Then you have to give some publicity on that regard. Yes, talking about bugfixing and game stabilizing is not as fun as about new features, but it's important to make players sure you pay attention to them as well.

I don't have the feeling we don't do that. We've acknlowedged the issues in the changelogs since then, it's written on the roadmap, i'm answering people accordingly on all our channels and doing anything i can to make sure people know. The only thing we do not do is making a whole blog post or newsletter about the issue (but they did include information to that, too!). And that should be understandable, given those are mainly marketing, not information.

It doesn't mean it will be like this on the majority of the servers. It just proves you are capable to do that.

Eco is not about the majority of the servers, but about the capabilities the game offers. It's totally intended that every single server works (up to extremely) different. It's up to the players to make things out of the options we offer. If they don't want to make use of them, it's one of the ways Eco can be played. If someone wants to play it exactly one way, it's not unlikely he'll find a server that does. Sure, when you just join some random server that just some random person opened you won't find much of a concept behind and just play somehow. But that is not how Eco is supposed to be played - and a lot of communities exist out there that know that and alter the gameplay on their servers or just use different features to achieve different goals. All this can also be done on every "random" server, too - it just needs people communicating. We're working on more tools to make the communication easier, but in the end this is a type of game where players either have creativity and an idea of what they want to do or not. And if they don't want to use the government stuff, they don't need to. That doesn't mean the majority of players is not affected by it, because the majority of people in multiplayer actually plays on the big servers of communities that use these features. They are less servers, but they have the most players. (Just like my server, having reached 60+ online players over the whole first week of the cycle on several cycles - there may not be much of those servers, but they have 6 - 10 times the playercount of a "random" server. And that playercount is the direction we want to ultimately go towards.)

My experience with that was, let's say unsatisfying to continue. For example, some of our players found bugs that were marked as resolved a long time ago, like the bug with otters not giving carcass, but it's still occurring.

It's sad that this happens, but i don't get why this is unsatisfying? If a bug still occurs despite being supposed to be fixed, please reopen it. We cannot know if it wasn't reopened. QA team was extended, but it's totally normal they cannot find every single bug in the game. You also need to be aware that closed issues do not mean they are fixed in the current version available. The carcass bug for example is fixed in 8.2. That means it's not fixed for you, but in the next version. We cannot keep issues that are fixed internally open, though, as this would greatly hinder our workflow.

And according to the Discord moderators, some major bugs like the ecosystem instability when species die without players' intervention are not even considered as bugs at all, after that, I'm not sure it worth to spend time to make a GH report.

Not everything that can be annoying is a bug - some of these things are features. If you are referring to foxes and turkeys dying out - those die as they aren't placed correctly because the wetlands biome was removed. We didn't go the additional route to remove everything that is related to that biome, because it's meant to be reintroduced. Both are not needed to progress and therefore that is more of an aesthetic bug, but we still love to see some players try and succeed in rescuing those.

If you are referring to something else, there is no bug report open for it. A world should be generated with enough - but not necessarily much - of each species and they should be able to survive on their own for at least 24 hours. Some issues for this were there and fixed in 8.2. In nearly all cases this works - for a way longer to unlimited timeframe. Very rarely things get out of order and the ecosystem shifts, making a species endangered. This might be annoying but is not necessarily unwanted behaviour, as this game is called "Eco".

Some information given by moderators is simply untrue, like when they said with 100% confidence that wild version of a plant doesn't spread from a hand planted ones and all the cases are just a coincidence because of the good climate/soil conditions at that place. We just made an experiment with extinct rice and another one with near extinct trillium not presented on the continent where the experiment took place that they successfully reproduce from hand planted ones... That's just awkward... And this casts the shadow on the trust to the team.

Moderators are not part of SLG. They are volunteers - normal community people - tasked with keeping the discord clean. They cannot be correct every single time. If they aren't give them a headsup via DM. Even I, being part of SLG, make mistakes. It's impossible for me to know everything perfectly.

As for crashes, I don't remember all the cases but the most common occurs when two people try to simultaneously shift-drag same stuff from one container to another which happens often while teamworking.

One of the perfect examples of how different views are. We know this issue and it's fixed in 8.2. Why wasn't it fixed via hotfix? Because the occurance of this crash is so extremely rare over the whole population, it was not worth the potential cause of way more issues (given the change to fix it was a more in-depth one) introduced by the hotfix. So yes, your playstyle probably makes this crash happen very often - but in regards to the total population playing the game, it's a extremely rare occuring crash and therefore high-priority, but no priority for a hotfix.

Great! Then shout out about it!

We do, it's mentioned in our newsletters and everywhere we are. But smaller features and changes will be announced in their own newsletter after the bigger ones - typical marketing. We also don't want to announce everything that is new or changed at once - which is a typical business standard. I can already say that not nearly all professions will be fixed and 9.0 will likely not make a perfect game out of it. It'll be a first step to flesh out professions and make early-game professions valuable in the late game. Some things cannot be done yet, cause the features for it are missing. Paper Milling is totally useless at the moment, but when we implement upkeep, books and paper need for all sorts of government stuff, it'll be a valuable profession. But that is not part of 9.0. Same applies to a lot of other professions that will get more use later on, when additional features that are not yet present are implemented with whole new systems around them. While a good part of the current imbalance is causes by us just not balancing it - and i've no problem to admit problems, a part equally big is caused by things not yet implemented and coming over more and more major patches in months to come - that is what Early Access means.

That's what our focus was on for all patches since 8.0 to 8.2. We cannot only do that stuff, either, though, as we need to cater to the people requesting new features, too.

The chunkloading in 8.2 is way better than it is now, but Eco is and forever will remain a extremely CPU heavy game (by design - it is a big simulation with underlying databases that accumulate gigabytes of data in no time) that requires a lot of resources. Optimizing stuff at this stage of development is hard and a lot of the work lost on every new feature. We know it's running too bad for now, but you shouldn't expect it to run "good" before the main features are finished and working. Of course you can expect it to run "okay". That is what we're trying to do.

You don't need to excuse anything. It's not like we are doing most things as of business standards and i'm neither the person that decides what will be announced in a newsletter or blog post - that's decided by different people. My job is to communicate with you and give you the answers for question you ask for and cooperate with people, admins, modders and projects from the community, giving your feedback back to the developers. Your feedback was given to them.

And even though i'm not a professional community manager - which some people do like way more than a professional person, btw, given a lot of our former community players didn't even regularily play the game - i feel i'm doing a good job in that. I'm sorry if you don't feel the same and i'm happy about any suggestions you have for me to improve.

But i'm not the guy that decides where the game heads, how the game is developed, when bugs get fixed or how big our Quality Assurance team is, despite i'm having some influence on that which i regularily use. We now have a QA team (we didn't earlier), we now have regular newsletters and i've been part of a lot of other improvements in the last time.

You surely also do not need to excuse for you not knowing how bug reports are treated. But i'm not sure why you think you should be. I just told you how you could help us. Most games i know of don't even have a public bugtracker. Here you can at least see what bugs are open and due to be fixed. I'll gladly put up a description of what the bug stages mean on the GitHub explanation page. But i doubt people would actually read it.

It's impossible to make every single person happy. The danger of fixing the issue you have via hotfix was just too high for a hotfix. This was not my decision, so the only thing i can do is communicate it to you. I can also communicate to the people responsible that you would liked to have seen a hotfix for it. But that is where my possibilities end. I've lately made sure a lot of high priority bugs from the perspective of the community were fixed with higher priority, too.

You are mentioning a devlog - that's actually what the newsletters are supposed to be and what they are based on. What kind of devlog would you like to see? I know devlogs from other games and they work quite similar to our newsletter system. Devs tell what they are working on at the moment, what their vision is, share ideas and get feedback. That is what the newsletters (which are also on the website, on steam and anywhere else) are. The issues with performance were actually part of several developer livestreams (they are also on YouTube) after 8.0 and mentioned several times in the newsletters up until now.

The wiki is something i'm working on finding better approaches for at the moment. It's a player-run wiki, it's not information from the developers on there, so if you see wrong information you could - if you want - help out in fixing it.