Ever since @SavageEmpire566 stopped replying to bug posts, absolutely nobody from the admin or dev teams ever bothers to at least ack them. Was he laid off? Who should be reviewing bug reports now? If you are using some sort of AI assistant, have you let the community know? It’s basic stuff, folks. We don’t know what bugs are known, being worked on, merging similar reports… The DLC is packed full of bugs, most minor but a few major ones, plus the ones carried over from previous patches.
I know you guys must be really tight on resources now, but everywhere people are saying it’s more effective to report bugs on Reddit than in the actual official frickin’ forum, that should be a big red flag:
Cobalt Dragon has responded to a few recently so it’s not abandoned (mainly ones that have fixes coming). Not sure what’s going on with the rest of it though.
The developers, as they do every subforum, will still be reading Bug Reports.
I’d prefer if they posted as well, but generally that seems to be a separate (and wider) problem to picking up on issues and fixing them. Every patch where I see fixes, some always tend to correlate to ones I’ve seen raised here.
Wheel-less siege has been reported multiple times, even embarrassingly experienced and mentioned by Drongo at least a couple of times in his casts. It’s a bug spanning 2 or 3 major patches. There are 2 or 3 threads in the bug reporting section that nobody has bothered to merge, much less acknowledge.
Of course I would expect some bugs to correlate to what players report here as I imagine the devs see them as well. It doesn’t necessarily imply that they are actively looking at the bugs subforum. Sure I would hope so, but it’s a baseless assumption as it stands. For months now I haven’t seen evidence to support the fact that someone is listing, tracking, fixing them.
You know what happens when you have no idea someone is looking at your reports? You stop reporting. Good luck using our combined resources - the community - to help make the game better then.
Devs have been uncommunicative since the closed beta days, this is no surprise, but it’s gotten worse, and that was a very low bar already.
Ironically, someone posts non constructive criticism calling the game shit (y’all know what post that is - now deleted it seems) and several devs instantly decide to get chatty.
I’m well aware there’s a backlog, but the point remains that the devs read the forums. Always have, always will.
If you don’t want to believe me, that’s fine. I’m just saying what is, and agreeing that communication is poor. But it’s poor across the board. Something institutional needs to change there. No idea what.
The only activity in that thread that I saw was from a moderator, who isn’t a dev.
They made an official “known bugs” page and never used it, not even when Savage was around. It’s insulting that they don’t have an in-game bug reporting system, you have to come to a forum and make extra effort to help them fix their mistakes, then you get no reply, not any indication that it’s been seen or considered. I 100% feel you this is bullshit. I gave up reporting and eventually gave up playing. If they’re giving up why the hell should I bother. Yea, they’ll pick to fix some things eventually when they feel like it. But to not get any validation or response to a user’s thorough investigation and debugging is a slap in the face.
I have definitely felt them take my feedback and fix things. Trees would block your cursor from manually garrisoning units into buildings (the forums won’t let me link this one?), selecting buildings would display a faint white grid everywhere and I reported a few Mongol buildings featuring broken textures.
And although some recognition was pretty much just “Thank you for the report”, it was however nice to see how they sometime viewed the issue themselves. Notably this example with Mongol control groups being erased when unpacked.
So I don’t know what the situation is currently. I have stopped reporting things since. My reasoning is that, they haven’t communicated whatever happened to Savage, and or if there is any replacement at all. There are plenty of things I would be reporting, but I don’t currently see a point if that side of the forums is dead.
This is how Asobo handles bugs reported in the official MSFS forum. Asobo employs around the same number of people as Relic does (before someone throws that as an excuse):
How hard would it be to do something like that? To me it doesn’t even matter that some bugs will never get fixed, as a customer I understand that and I appreciate the honesty and frickin’ being communicative at all.
I didn’t buy the DLC for AoE4 because the game isn’t deserving of more of my money. Not being appreciative of people reporting bugs is one of many reasons.
Though I also have a sneaking suspicion that you are taking a fairly healthy, efficient, capable studio’s exceptionally good practice (very few 3A game devs maintain such open conversation with the community about bugs!), and asking why an exceptionally dysfunctional and underfunded publishing section can’t do the same.
Remember, Asobo did manage to turn the first Plague Tale, an original game, around from a troubled project into an award winner, and then quickly produce a well-regarded sequel.
Meanwhile, in this franchise:
In the most popular entry of AoE2DE, we have a most rudimentary feature like changing game speed being broken since release, we have major UX issues that were never responded to except through band-aid solutions like “putting humongous, art style-breaking exclamation marks above villager’s heads”;
In the wider franchise, we have bugs that are fixed three times, each time fixed wrong a different way (this describes at least three issues I know of), we have extremely visible bugs not being addressed, we have “wrong versions of” patches released then left alone for months…
I’m afraid this isn’t a place where you can expect things - not just the end results, the whole work processes - to not be broken.
