Stardock please help,
Please don't take any of this as negative as I'm just expressing my frustration as constructive feedback.
Myself and many (not all) players are playing increasingly large maps and players especially with workshop (have been since opt-in patch v. 1.1 was released). However, everytime I submit a ticket or add to an existing ticket the first thing that is said is "Have you tried the latest patch v. ### released today (or recently)". The answer is NO!! some of these issues have been around since beta and are being addressed slowly (and that is fine). However, I don't need the generic reply every time to attempt the new patch and this is why... and please help me understand if I'm incorrect as I don't want to be frustrated as I enjoy all your games and your company.
Now on a positive note, I thank Derek and the rest of the Stardock team for looking at many of these issues and appreciate all the hard work you do. I try to help in anyway I can and hope to continue to help you in the future. I just can't enjoy the game as a customer and then play 20+ hours on a game just to test a bug. If you need any additional information on games or issues I'm experiencing please let me know as I'm happy to help.
Thanks,
Seilore
Seilore I feel your pain . I have had to take a break from the game waiting for 1.10xxx. Thank god for SK . Although it has its problems also . I love GC and know they are working issues, but it gets so frustrating at times.
Me too I started a new game today in ver 1.03 and the update went through and the game locked up on turn 128 I'll start a new game from scratch and see what happens? I have games in ver 1.03 that are up to turn 600+ without freezes or lock ups.
If you guys ever have a late game saved game that has problems, send it in. Those things are like gold. I tend to use them for AI work and performance but I bet if you report your specific hardware and send a saved game that we can put together an identical system here and see if we can reproduce it.
Stardock's IT department must be amazing with their appropriation of PC HW upgrades, or they have an amazing CEO which ensures them the best tools to work with
But in all seriousness, I think Seilore's statements revolves around the question of whether it is the customer's or support's responsibility to reproduce issues, using their own platform as a testbed with varying differences in the use case (less planets, more planets, large maps, small maps, etc) in order to help isolate the issue for a developer. Having spent a career in development and test in the leading telecommunications companies, I can say its never the customer's responsibility. Support should certainly 'ask' if the customer is 'aware' of the behavior in other conditions (and many times they are to some degree), but not request the customer to do their job.
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Thanks for the reply Frogboy (you're up too late get some sleep ) My most recent ticket that is open has a save game from v1.1 (opt-in) started in that version as well. It has attached a save game with around 20 hours of game play sorry don't remember exactly right now.
Seeing the long turn (large map max factions so some of that is understood) Derek is working on it according to another post so that wasn't where I was getting frustrated.
Seeing choppy ship movement and have been well into games since the beta process. This I got a reply saying have you tried with the newest version. And are you seeing this with a game with only 7 AI. This is where my frustration started boiling over.
The save game is either in my ticket or Derek has it already from that other post by another player about long turn times.
Again thanks for the reply I do appreciate you and your team even if I get frustrated I know you guys are awesome.
As for requesting games with fewer races involved, some of us can help there, too. I'm playing large maps with vanilla races, so I can't set a game up with double digit players. At least I don't know of a way to do that yet.
I don't see a lot of the problems that are being reported, so I'm not sure what I can do, but I'm willing to try to duplicate them. I'm sure the majority of players are willing too, especially founders. We all have an interest in seeing the game get better. Otherwise, we wouldn't have spent $100 or more on it. (Some of us have multiple copies. I'm sure I'm not the only one).
Try out steam workshop. Its fairly bulletproof now IMO. Just subscribe to a handful of interesting looking races, and they will hot load into your game.
Yea, my view is that the customer has zero responsibility to help "debug" the problem. They paid for the product/service.
Now, my personal motivation for making games is to make them WITH the players. So I love talking to people on the forums and seeing if we can work together to make something better. But at the same time, I don't think they have to talk to me if they don't want to.
How do I send in a saved game? please?
I'd just put it up on dropbox and post the link.
Ok mate will do
thx! you rock!
no you rock!!!
you BOTH rock
I played a new game purely on 1.1 and it froze at turn 128 heres the link I can add more saves if needed? setting up that dropbox is a pain in the proverbial!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/6ba87g0epojzmbg/Auto-Save.GC3Sav?dl=0
Wow sir you are awesome.. Its great to see a CEO looking at issues with the rest of us
I do have a lot of issues with 1.1... in order for me to play GCIII I have to keep my game at 1.03 and keep steam at offline mode. I am in the process of writing a quick summary of issues I am running into. I will post soon.
I was about to give up this game, but seeing you (and other helpful members) online and helping people renew my confidence in this game and the dev staff (and this great community).
Seilore, we definitely appreciate your saves. I spent yesterday afternoon on the one you sent in and provided a break down of where all the time was being sent in it. Our developers went through that breakdown for performance optimizations. And we updated the 1.1 patch with the updates we could get that were significant and we could get in quickly. On the save you provided it reduced the turn time by about 30 seconds per turn.
We have more to do, certainly. We want to make it as fast as possible, but do keep in mind (as I mentioned in the other thread) games with that many players and on that large of maps are going to take time.
As for support asking for latest versions, sorry, that is in their DNA. Please understand that a huge percentage of issues are addressed with that single question. And that if they don't ask and we get developers looking into issues that have already been fixed then real issues aren't getting fixed and it makes it slower for everyone. Also if you aren't on the latest code and the issue is something that has changed with the latest code it may not be relevant anymore. But we understand this is harder on a game that can take weeks to finish one game.
Also you are not our typical support customer. You have been cataloging bugs and supporting the game throughout. You are an expert. But they don't know that and can't assume everyone is an expert, so they have to start with the basic stuff. I feel the same way when I call into my provider about an internet problem, I have already run a trace route, I know my PC is setup correctly, I can ping my router, I do not need to check to see if the cable is plugged into my PC. But I do it because they can't know that I know that.
I do agree with you on the point of asking if it happens with 10 players. I don't mind the question as a "did you notice if?". Like if you crash when starting the game as the Iridium they may ask if it also happens with the Terran to try to get the devs as much information as possible. But you certainly don't need to feel pressure to go test in these other situations. You are doing us a favor by calling in at all. We are not doing you a favor by lowering the turn time in your game, that game is gold to us. I'll mention it to support.
The only case where support should check and really isolate off before it comes to us is Mod support. They should ask if you are running mods and try to isolate out if the issue is caused by that. You can break the game in all kinds of crazy ways with mods and we don't have the bandwidth to help a modder figure out why his specific mod doesn't work (it's "best effort" support, post it and we may check it out and help, but I don't want anyone to expect that if they make a mod it's Stardock's responsibility to make sure it works). Outside of that we support 100 player games, we support MP, we support steam workshop, so bring on the issues.
And thanks again for your help. If you ever make it to Michigan you need to stop by the studio and I'll buy you a drink.
Derek I do appreciate that you took the time to do this and was not frustrated in the slightest by anything you did.
Thank you.
Yes you are, you are doing me a huge favor by lowering the turn time and I am extremely satisfied you and or Frogboy when you take the time to look at it personally. No one else provides that kind of support which is why I continue to support Stardock and would purchase additional games if/when I have the means to do so Frustrated with the support tickets yes, however, with all other aspects of support I am extremely satisfied and you all do us the community favors all the time by helping in anyway that you can.
Don't use mod's and if I did I would never expect you to support it, maybe point me in the right direction if I'm stuck on something and everything else failed but, that's about it.
Live in Wisconsin so right next to you but, doubt I'll make it that way any time soon but, I appreciate the thought
I just posted the changelog for 1.11 (which went out this afternoon). It contains 3 performance boosts specifically from the game you provided yesterday.
Derek you are awesome!!! and I mean it. If there is anything else you need let me know.
This save is well past turn 128. I played a few turns and it ran fine for me (no hangs). Do you have a save that reproduces the hang?
Hmmm... Just tested it and I'm not seeing any difference in turn time... Should this have an immediate effect or would I have to start a new game to see this?
I'm sorry Derek that game froze up and it didn't autosave for some reason? it might have been that the 1.11 update was going through at the time if I get it again I'll post the link asap now that I've got dropbox working. Thanks for all your hard work
Np, feel free to PM me if you come up with one.
It should have an immediate effect. For me your between turn time (on this computer was about 4:40 (m:s) before the change and 4:04 after. So it saved about 30 seconds. At that duration it may feel the same (it may be hard to appreciate a 30 second save across 4 minutes unless oyu were measuring with a stop watch as I was) but it was definitely faster. Again it's only the results of 1 days work, we have more to do.
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