Thoughts on latest patch 7989

Well Gorb we are talking here about issues that were in close beta… Prelates bug as instance…

Honestly was expecting more bugfixes on this. Taking weeks to fix TC drop only is surprising. If they patched it a couple days after it became big sure, but it took a surprising amount of time to only fix this.

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I’m around in the age4 forum for about 8 month now, complaining about the most basic things such as not all hotkeys beeing rebindable ingame.

You can literally open the custom hotkey profile file as a textfile and change it yourself by replacing the “Alt” String with something else.

There are so many posts complaining about most basic things for over half a year.
Zoom level too close , hotkeys and controls are done by someone who hasn’t played an RTS with a keyboard before, UI and Minimap scaling beeing too small, visual clarity, hitboxes of things cause they are hard to click on when unit models surround it, why even display animals in your towncenter or stables when you aren’t willing to animate it?
Not even some text descriptions of upgrades were fixed such as HRE maa twohanded upgrade giving +15 hp or the mongol packup speed bonus not beeing 50% but more than that.
This and the camera zoom level are literally just editing a single number or string to edit/fix since the function is already there, and yet we haven’t seen fixes for ~8+ months since closed beta starts.

The devs of this game either have insanely low priority for feedback, meaning they don’t care about it, or as you discribed are so clueless about changing the most basic things such as editing a flipping text they have in an upgrade description.
Pick your poison.

But that’s just classic fanboyism here.
I post about the same stuff for half a year in the forum now, and again beside the HRE MAA debuff on atkspeed after upgrade I can’t remember any bug or QoL thing getting fixed/improved on.
It’s all the exact same from testing phases when it comes to bugs/qol, so why have a testing phase at all?

Don’t get me wrong, the camera panning issue is a really good fix, but damn this relic printing thing has flipping tutorials on youtube for 2 weeks now.
Imagine some buggy gamebreaking stuff on league gets viral, it would take maximum 24 hours to fix it.

There is absolutely no excuse for a seperate AoE4 team, on such an insanely huge IP, backed up by microsoft, one of the biggest and richest companies in the world, to have such low quality standards for the game in this regard to not have any resources on the company left for checking and fixing issues in their client.

You just make classic excuses that I read for over half a year now from different ppl trying to defend the game they like cause they are emotionally invested in it.
I like the game too, but imagine you give feedback about certain issues for the same amount of time and absolutely nothing is getting tackled.
Just absolutely nothing, even tho it was all the feedback you got from the testing phase.

Sorry to say it, but there is nothing else to call it but lazy.
They have a buggy and unfinished game rn and only cause you are Age doesn’t mean you are shielded from critizism.
Especially when you ignore testing phase feedback so systematically.

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Someone mentioned that the Prelate bugs where fixed on the HRE reformation rant thread. I want to test this myself, but I am at work rn.

It’s not.
It still happens nearly every game to me that a prelate bugs out.

I always play with 2-3.
Maybe you are more lucky(meaning lowering chances) by just playing 1??

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That is a shame, nah I play with 1 prelate in the first age, 3 in the second age. Then make an extra 6 to support my army with 1 relic in case of elephant spam.

I just haven’t played today since I woke up, made coffee, played Overwatch, then went to work lol

Yeah the cover for this slop job is getting kind of embarrassing. I’ve been developing software for over 10 years now, both professionally and as a hobbyist, and I can totally understand the complicated nature of the work, but some of these bugs are extremely rudimentary. One bug I reported looks like they have local AI games sending attack pings over a network socket that doesn’t exist, because it’s not a MP game, all of which causes it to not work and display an error on the screen. That should take all of a few minutes to fix. There are a lot of small bugs that were reported that could have been fixed quickly but for whatever reason they just opted not to.

Personally, I think a couple years from now, the game will probably be pretty good, mature, and stable, but it will never change the fact that the rollout, the state of the game on release, and community outreach during and the maintenance schedules are really shoddy. It does make me wonder exactly how much time & resources are being invested here.

Hopefully a much larger patch addressing the deluge of bugs on the report board is right around the corner, but don’t have a lot of confidence right now.

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Its industry standard to fix gamebreaking bugs quickly. Name a single other game which would go this long with gamebreaking bugs. Literally none last longer than 3 days with a bug on the scale of the relic duplication.

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A “hotfix” shouldn’t take months LOL

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It’s been close to three weeks since release, and not months and it doesn’t work like that.

They will continue to release patches and hot fixes when they have those ready and not about how long time it’s been since release.

False choice. But that’s to be expected given your apparent lack of understanding of software.

The thing is, I don’t expect anyone to actually know software dev. You don’t have to be a software developer to report performance issues, or criticise game balance.

But when you start talking about how people are going their jobs, knowkedge is required. Otherwise it’s nothing more than a hot take.

Who’s being shielded from criticism? :laughing:

Nobody’s stopping you from posting. From where I’m sitting, it sounds like you want to be shielded from criticism.

Cyberpunk?

I mean it’s a low bar but you did ask for a single game. Plenty of games launch with bugs. Plenty persist for weeks, if not months. I don’t know what you want me to say. You’re pretending this is something unique to Relic when it isn’t.

Hey, me too!

The problem is our relative experience is pointless here. People are agreeing with you, or disagreeing with me, based on our opinion of the patch, and ignoring any expertise we might have (unless they agree with it).

It doesn’t help when you call opinions you don’t like “cover” and “kind of embarrassing”. What has happened to the Internet that people aren’t allowed to have different opinions anymore? We’re talking about video games, not politics (where I’d at least understand it more).

Because it sure seems like I’m getting a lot of rather pointed and unfair labels - would it help if I started returning the favour? I don’t think it would, but that seems to be how discussions work nowadays.

Some of them may look to be, or may even be. In your job, do you keep putting off the serious issues to fix the small issues? There are always small issues.

Wouldn’t you agree that large issues (like the camera panning performance hit) should be prioritised? Or not?

You have no idea who I am and what I know about and what not.
I know quite a bit about software, got an educational degree in IT (northrhine westphalia) and worked as a java dev so throwing this back at you really quick:

But that’s to be expected given your apparent lack of understanding of software.

Every definitive edition got better support and stuff like text issues or up to date descriptions of upgrades weren’t adjusted for half a year.
There is no excuse for that, and you don’t need a major in IT and 10 layer deep certificates for a certain coding language of your purity checking choice to adjust a string for descriptions or a number for movespeed / max zoomout.

This stick you do here is just one big purity test to shield the game from any legitimate concirns or critizism people may have about the history of the game already.

You are trying to shield them from critizism. This was my point.
You display hotfixes or QoL adjustment with a different base hotkey design or the adjustment of upgrade descriptions as this mastermind coding task right now which is absolutely ridiculous.
And I hope you notice that.
All other Age:DEs got way better treatment, when it comes to big bugs or other things resulting in an unpleasent playerexperience.
Especially when you get the same feedback for over half a year and tackle none of these issues, players start to feel a lack of commitment by the devs into the game.

This demotivates or infuriates people with the train of logic “When the devs don’t take the game serious, why should I then?”.

Just to quote myself again:

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I made an assumption based on the level of understanding you’re demonstrating. Does me being a developer make me automatically correct? No. But if you can judge Relic for their apparent work, I can judge you for your apparent understanding.

Or is that not fair?

No, you don’t. But the fact here is that Relic pushed a very significant fix to performance. If I’m doing “purity tests”, what are you doing? Ignoring the good work they did in this small patch to make them look worse?

The game hasn’t been out for half a year. They will have had an internal roadmap up to and including release. You get testy at me when I assume you’re not a programmer, but if you don’t have an idea of how games development projects are managed, what do you want me to say? :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

I do not know what Relic are currently working on. But I read postmortems, I watch developer conferences and talks. I study it. I understand the typical management of a video game, up to release. To say “we reported an issue back in a beta test, why isn’t it fixed” is to demonstrate that you don’t understand how the project is managed. Or written.

Am I not allowed an opinion? What makes your more valid than mine?

Why is it wrong for me to post my opinion, but right for you to post yours?

Who is ignoring something? Do you even read what I write?

Performance optimizations are always welcome.
The more ppl can enjoy the game, the better.
I was talking about Bugs (partly completely gamebreaking), QoL and wrong/outdated tooltips and upgrade descriptions that make the game look unpolished and kind of abandoned/half baked.

Rest of your post is the same thing as before.
You just make blind excuses for their insanely low close to 0 priority in their clientfixing right now.

At least that’s what their treatment of the game since closed beta has shown so far.

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The problem right now: most of the issues that we are reporting day by day, were already reported in the beta. Nothing happened. But I think they will fix everything slowly, just the start is a little bit rough. ( I hope so )

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Spirit of the law also released a video regarding this topic just a few hours ago.

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I missed that, sorry! But I kinda think this kind of stuff is why I do miss the odd good thing you have to write:

It’s pretty simple. If I’m making “blind excuses”, you and others are making “blind attacks”. Assuming I have the right to an opinion, the same as you, I don’t understand why you can’t respect that.

The camera panning fix is a good example of good prioritisation. Therefore, if you’re claiming they have bad prioritisation, you are wrong. Flat out, just wrong. Because they prioritised something important, and nobody here

a) knows what else they’re working on at the same time, and
b) knows how much effort the fix took

And that goes for me as well. So maybe in a week or two’s time I’ll look very silly. Or maybe you will. Patches might not comes as fast as you’d like, but I believe patches will come. I always do, that’s just how I’m wired. You can call me (overly) optimistic if you want, but if you could dial down the completely pointless insults a bit, that’d be good too.

I respect that you are frustrated and want more improvements to the game. I don’t call you blind (except in quotes, to make a point). Right?

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I hope you notice how increadibly hard you try to gaslight me here right now.

You were attacking others and me because of having no clue about programming, the devs, the game, their schedule or the company management.

You can have an opinion, I am just saying that I read these excuses of “it’s gonna be fixed soon, they are working on stuff behind the public knowledge, yadda yadda” for over half a year now with absolute minor close to 0 fixes.
Exactly this lack of focus on obvious issues the community agrees upon is what is getting critizised.
And this lack of focus/prioritization is there.

Still waiting for the countless bugfixes the game has.
I would suck up absolutely anything, but there was just simply nothing done for such a long time.

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Not even close.

I said you were demonstrating no understanding. And? Bear in mind that’s not how I started my posts. You chose to reply to me calling me a fanboy, and other things besides.

How is this gaslighting? How does this even match the definition of the word? I’m not saying you’re lying, am I? I’m not trying to convince you something else happened. The thread’s here for everybody to read. I’m not making you debate your own sanity.This is a very serious accusation for you to be making.

If you’re accusing me of gaslighting you I’d argue that no, I’m not allowed an opinion. You are attacking my character just because you can’t handle mild criticism over your hot takes on games development.

Feel free to want more from the devs, but I’m going to stop replying to you here. PM me if you want to resolve whatever this is, but I have very little time for people making these kinds of accusations just to score points on a web forum.

This is the problem when a game is released with large extra features promised “soon”. By extra features, I’m talking about ranked, the scenario editor, etc.
Once the game is released, project managers reassign the devs to work on those promised features, and there’s little time for bug fixes and the like.

This isn’t just Relic, it’s how games are released these days. That being said, it does not exempt them from criticism. It would’ve been better to put off the release by one or two months OR not to promise those features too soon, so more devs could’ve been allocated to bug fixes and QOL features.

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