Patches like this cannot continue.#578

This patch has been truly horrible, nearly every person I’ve talked to in the community has been having major issues with their controllers, somehow the buffer system got screwed up (????????), and everyone’s control schemes have been reset with no warning whatsoever for those who might not remember their configurations.

I love this game to death and have been a huge defender of this game ever since launch, explaining to people who might not understand floorhug or don’t realize that many of their connection issues have nothing to do with Aether Studios, but this is completely indefensible. Patches like this NEED to be tested more thoroughly, no matter what. Pushing a patch this broken erodes trust in the community and is INFINITELY worse than a dry spell of sparse patches. If the team can’t keep updating the game this quickly, just tell us. The vast majority of players understand that resources are finite and time is limited, and would much rather wait a little longer for quality patches.

Agreed this was just completely uncalled for.

Does no one play test before pushing updates to live versions?

If any of you forgot your settings and wants to look them up,
you can start the game in a previous_version mode under Steam > Library > right click ROA2 > Properties > Betas > Beta Participation > previous_version

Collect your settings and change it back after.

so this is why we dont give ranno skins

Agreed. I really wonder how this update was deemed to be ready enough to ship in the state it launched in.

“It runs on my machine” QA

They don’t have a dedicated QA team, it’s just them. They are just an Indie studio. The fastest way for them to get bugs is to release updates and see if players encounter any because there are significantly more of us than there are of devs, even triple A game companies know this.

By all means it’s unfortunate that controls got reset, but that’s just a slight inconvenience at worst isn’t it?
I have asked around about input buffer issues as well and couldn’t find anybody who knew anything about that either…

Yeah there are bugs, but you are acting like the fact that the Ui for inputs on specific controllers on Linux or Clown Ranno’s preview button bringing you to the purchase page is game breaking, all of these things are just just sort of unfortunate at worst.
If you wanna help with QA, then post bugs on this Nolt and they will patch them.

@tundra they have a beta test team that has tested previous patches before launch, which is exactly what this kind of patch is perfect for

@Tundra I do agree with you about QA being a lot harder as an indie team which is why I’ve always been very forgiving of bugs in the past, but this update has been game breaking on an unprecedented level. Several people I’ve talked to havent been able to play the game because of how much it screwed with their controllers, the entire Sinput ecosystem seems to be broken. This update should have been pushed as a public testing branch or something. I understand that my post may come off as a bit rude (because it is tbh), but I really need to emphasize how much patches like this hurt the game and its reputation. I haven’t loved a game this much in a very long time so it kills me to see patches like this damaging it.

That’s fair, but it’d probably help more to be specific with what bugs you are encountering like a bug report.
I have been having difficulty finding people consistently saying what the issues specifically are…
But yeah I agree this is a messy one

@Tundra
they are not an indie studio. they signed with a publisher for this game. The definition of an independent (indie) studio is not having a publisher. And yes, the internet uses the term wrongfully a lot, but this does not mean you should, too.
And while they are a small studio, this game is not labeled early access. We all know it should be but they did not do that. This is labeled as a full release, that costs money and has hundreds of dollars worth of in app purchases. Its a comercial product meant to generate revenue.
With that setup it is completely unaccaptable to release unfinished and untested patches and make your paying customers your beta testers. If you want to do that, you need to lable your product early acces. but again, they did not do that because of financial reasons.
it is beyond me how they think they can treat their community like that. this community is sooooo forgiving and supportive to a point where they seem to take us for granted. every other game would have been review bombed to hell and back for a patch like this. This is an update capable of killing a game since it renders the game unplayable for big parts of the community.
they manage this game like it is a hobbyist project while in reality their community has invisted millions of dollars via kickstarter, sales and IAPs. they don’t respect their users time and investment and thus deserve all the negative feedback they get.

Yeesh…

Sorry this update has caused so many issues. The team definitely doesn’t feel good about how this one went, and we’ll be handling these types of patches differently in the future - likely with a potential PTE branch or something similar. A separate public beta is not always a great choice for a game our size (since it just splits the queues, and then most players play on live anyway), but this kind of update does need more public testing. To give some more background on a few topics people have brought up in this thread:

• We have a couple people internally who have QA as part of their role, but controllers are a tough one due to the HUGE amount of hardware options. For example our programmer for this feature has over $1,000 invested in the most popular controller types, and it still doesn’t cover a ton of options that players use in the wild and expect support for.

• Yes we do have a private beta group as well this ran through, and we’re super thankful for any testing they can do. However it’s a smaller group of volunteers, so again nowhere near covering all the controller types we’d need.

Either way, fixing controller issues in the new system is our primrary concern now, and we’ll do our best in the future to avoid an update like this. Please keep reporting bugs, and after we get things patched, the new system will be better for the game in the long haul after these growing pains.

Thank you @George !!

thanks George. Would recommend reachiong out to get testers to cover your controller bases, this community loves to help