Not Testing Your Patches + Completely Wrong Focus In Patches

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I am going to take a big long break from this until you guys have sorted out the current mess you are creating in the game. You guys need to rethink your approach how you are dealing with the early access soon before it completely runs out of control and make your customers extremely frustrated and force them to stop playing the game which will in turn reduce your test data you get back to see where you can improve the game. It will have a negative effect on your business even when people already paid for the game.

I know it is early access for all those trolls that will spam this thread with "It is Early Access, dumb dumb dumb"
The idea around early access is also to see your game improve and the people who plays it to keep on playing it so that you can get some useful data back to make better decisions on changes and fix the major issues that you did not think of or could not tested at all.

First of all. I am also a developer but not a gaming developer, yet we follow the same basic principles and we all face stress and pressure to meet deadlines.
You develop something, either a new feature or fixing a broken feature, once you are done you test your work most developers do not test their work thoroughly because they know they have a QA team or a testing team but if everyone is under pressure which I get the idea it is happening then both the QA and Developers are making big mistakes.

So please focus and TEST YOUR WORK! I know that you guys want to push as much out as possible to get the game at a really good state as soon as possible but I see a lot of issues come up after every patch. I would rather get 1 patch a week knowing it is stable, it works great and all the changes are logically correct and it has been tested rather than a patch a day and it just pisses me off so much that I want to unintall it beacuse of all the crap and bugs that are introduced.

You guys are trying to balance the game by nerfing the workshops and caravans and trying to do balancing changes which is great but there are a lot more broken stuff that needs to be fixed first. It feels to me that there are not a priority list and just random things get nerfed and buffed and get fixed.

Here is an example:
The Caravan nerf was implemented and the idea was to balance out the income you earn from Caravans but it completely backfired because the whole world economy is broken now. Cities are running empty with gold, produccts are not being added anymore and it just feels like a massive mess right now and we noticed this as soon as we ran the game. I had 4 Caravans running after playing for 10 ingame days, 3 of my Caravans were destroyed and I have to buy new Caravans.

It cost me 15k to buy a new Caravan, it is only profitable in about 2 weeks then the Caravan has to run for roughly another week or two depending on the economy and where they buy their goods to cover the investment that I had to put in the Caravan, then it is only profitable meanwhile my Caravans get attacked and destroyed, so you have basically made it completely pointless to buy a Caravan.

Late game this is not an issue because I do not care about Caravan income but early-midgame, I am totally depended on Caravans to have a stable income. Forcing me to attack bandits from Early-mid-late game is really a illogical approach, you want the player's income to evolve from hunting bandits to having the troops wages covered by the income for a stable business. If you expect the player to constantly fight off bandits for the whole journey of the game, then you make this game extermely repetitive and grind which will end up really boring.

Workshops are depended on Caravans to sell their goods to other cities but it as a chain effect now and now my workshops are maybe making 100 a day. The whole economy is completely broken.

Yet, No one at Taleworlds tested this, it if was tested, you would have picked up on this within 10minutes of running it and someone could have adjusted the change to be more approriate, no one in the development team has thought of the consequence of this change, it was just applied and we as the customers have to deal with it.

Your focus is ultimately completely in the wrong direction, the game as is after the steam rolling fix is balanced for an early access game. It does not need any other balances changes for now, what the game needs right now is bug fixes, fix the perks, a stable game, some features that were not implemented or needs improving on etc.
 
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i agree. Seems they have not tested the new patch at all. For exemple, i discovered the child bug just when i went to the tutorial village elder and find him looking as a baby... i mean, it took less than 5 min of gameplay .-.
 
I bet it's fixed or rolled back within the next 12 hours, but yeah I agree. I've said before, I'm very disturbed that they're spending precious work on nerfs and such that nobody is asking for and not fixing the core game and stuff that ruins games.
First red flag was the arena exp, add it in ... oh okay neat..... nerf it and the prizes..... wait no wtf fix the perks and make babies grow up gooder
 
I agree regarding the focus. There are so many things not working yet, like perks and faction bonuses, that will surely affect balance. Better to spend time on that than on balancing at this stage I think.

The changes they have introduced now with regards to caravans, workshops and item modifiers on loot all contribute to making the game a grind, and I doubt that was their intention.
 
I consider with great regret that the Beta Branch is not used at its fullest potential, in fact, not used at all. This kind of experiments belong in Alpha, where players opted to test undercooked features.
We all rang bells, made threads about the blocking issue of the AI that started in the beta (and the dark UI) to make sure that they know, so that they would not push the beta as is to the main branch, but they did.
They pushed it with the broken features and now there are more threads about the AI being broken, because those that didn't sign up for the Beta did not want to be receive broken mecanics.
The Caravan Update would have been fine, if it started in Alpha, tweaked according to feedback, then pushed in Beta, tweaked according to feedback, and then pushed in the main branch. Same thing for the blocking AI, it should've staid an oddity in beta, then removed entierly from the game, never making it to the main branch.
If the devs created a Beta branch (and potentially an Alpha eventually) because they want to listen to feedback, I don't understand why it looks like they did not read a single post aside from 'units are fat'
 
I consider with great regret that the Beta Branch is not used at its fullest potential, in fact, not used at all. This kind of experiments belong in Alpha, where players opted to test undercooked features.
We all rang bells, made threads about the blocking issue of the AI that started in the beta (and the dark UI) to make sure that they know, so that they would not push the beta as is to the main branch, but they did.
They pushed it with the broken features and now there are more threads about the AI being broken, because those that didn't sign up for the Beta did not want to be receive broken mecanics.
The Caravan Update would have been fine, if it started in Alpha, tweaked according to feedback, then pushed in Beta, tweaked according to feedback, and then pushed in the main branch. Same thing for the blocking AI, it should've staid an oddity in beta, then removed entierly from the game, never making it to the main branch.
If the devs created a Beta branch (and potentially an Alpha eventually) because they want to listen to feedback, I don't understand why it looks like they did not read a single post aside from 'units are fat'

Totally agree as I also don't understand why they got different branches, crash report tools and the feedback of more than 100k players just to kick the patch out in an, in my opinion, bad situation /status. Always get told EA is all about giving Feedback and helping out, supporting the development. Seems that problems where often "marked" in forums but still make it threw the testing branches.
 
Totally agree as I also don't understand why they got different branches, crash report tools and the feedback of more than 100k players just to kick the patch out in an, in my opinion, bad situation /status. Always get told EA is all about giving Feedback and helping out, supporting the development. Seems that problems where often "marked" in forums but still make it threw the testing branches.
Just created this thread in hope that we can help better funnel the good stuff to the next branch and keep the undercooked/broken things in lower branchers!
 
You guys realize this is going to be the pattern for the rest of Bannerlord's development cycle, right? Voice your frustrations, sure, but Taleworlds is what it is, they're not going to suddenly change a pattern of behavior that they've demonstrated for over a decade, and start getting things right. Especially not now that they've already got our non-refundable payments.
 
You guys realize this is going to be the pattern for the rest of Bannerlord's development cycle, right? Voice your frustrations, sure, but Taleworlds is what it is, they're not going to suddenly change a pattern of behavior that they've demonstrated for over a decade, and start getting things right. Especially not now that they've already got our non-refundable payments.
True. Let's just hope that they don't just take the money and run. For the time being I still have faith that Taleworlds will manage to sort this out.
 
You guys realize this is going to be the pattern for the rest of Bannerlord's development cycle, right? Voice your frustrations, sure, but Taleworlds is what it is, they're not going to suddenly change a pattern of behavior that they've demonstrated for over a decade, and start getting things right. Especially not now that they've already got our non-refundable payments.

Sadly I don't know how the Devs have been in times of warband. So for me it's the first game of tale worlds.
 
I just think they need to get their priorities in order.

Economy at the game's current state isn't a big deal.If you're rich in this game you can't spend it on ****. At best you can just bribe your way to world domination as the Lord AI is so dumb at one point they were selling all their fiefs for 1 Denar.

What needs to be focused on is getting all the core systems working. I know there's different teams working on different things, for instance I assume there's a team working on Siege AI right now and there's a team working on optimization and crashes, but the team working on the Economy needs to shift focus to fixing all the Skill perks so they actually work and fixing towns so that Prosperity doesn't negatively effect Food Production as well as increasing the amount of Food Fiefs can store so they don't instantly run out of food the second they become under siege. Not to mention I'm sure they could help out with coding some more Diplomatic options other than "Hey, join my army."

Focus on getting the balance correct AFTER implementing all the core features otherwise you're just going to have to keep implementing things then having to remove the changes you made the next patch which is counter-productive.

For instance, focusing on the economy before even all the Trade skill perks work is putting the cart way ahead of the horse.
 
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If you stay on the public branch its essentially one patch a week with testing. Why are you playing beta?

He's not.

If you read OP's feedback, as well as the feedback of other users in this thread, and in about three dozen similar threads, you'll find that that changes are being pushed onto Stable that either don't work, and were identified as not working during the Beta "trial" period (for example, the blocking issue referenced by Jarl Malcolm above), or which were not tested in Beta at all (such as Caravangate).
 
I never bought a caravan, so for me, caravans are a non-issue.

Id say your whole rant is almost pointless. It seems you cant play without relying on caravans and trade. Maybe start blacksmithing, in time you will have enough money, but first it is impossible to start from nothing.

There are people who say exp gain is too fast, but at the same time they dont play as a melee foot character, or say a crossbow character.
 
Sadly I don't know how the Devs have been in times of warband. So for me it's the first game of tale worlds.

In fairness, Warband was still very much a mom & pop operation, so the jankiness of M&B Original and M&B Warband was forgivable.

That said, Taleworlds never finished Warband. To this day, the game is full of half-formed ideas and bad optimization. That is the case with M&B Original, that is the case with M&B Warband, that is the case with M&B WFaS. Since very early in the dev cycle, most of the real progress in the M&B community has been made not by Taleworlds, but by the modding community. The most polished and complete "official" game - Viking Conquest - was actually created not by Taleworlds, but by one of the modding teams.

Taleworlds has a lot more employees now, but that hasn't stopped Bannerlord from achieving a "dev hell" reputation somewhat akin to Duke Nukem Forever. Many of the most glaring issues are things which have yet to be addressed officially, but were alleviated by mods made available within the first couple of days (see, for example, the popularity of mods like BannerlordTweaks). Given that the Warband era was plagued with problems that never got resolved, and now after many years of progress the Bannerlord era has shown no significant signs of change, I think it's fair to say that we need to temper our expectations and just accept that we're never going to get what we want from an official release. Bannerlord has a lot of potential, but the modding community will find it, not the devs.


-edit- I think of M&B like Minecraft. The basic idea of the game is brilliant. The devs hit conceptual gold! The actual implementation of those ideas...? Ehhh... that's a task for someone else.

It's the IKEA approach to game development; they provide the framework, but we need to build it ourselves.
 
I guess we just need to give the devs more time to sort it out. It took them 8 years to present an EA product. We already know they have serious problems in team and project management. We have to realize that this is not a game as a service product. The devs already have our money, we should be thankful that they are not just running away with it. I know this is a bare minimum for an honest market economy but look at the time we are living in right now.
 
In fairness, Warband was still very much a mom & pop operation, so the jankiness of M&B Original and M&B Warband was forgivable.

That said, Taleworlds never finished Warband. To this day, the game is full of half-formed ideas and bad optimization. That is the case with M&B Original, that is the case with M&B Warband, that is the case with M&B WFaS. Since very early in the dev cycle, most of the real progress in the M&B community has been made not by Taleworlds, but by the modding community. The most polished and complete "official" game - Viking Conquest - was actually created not by Taleworlds, but by one of the modding teams.

Taleworlds has a lot more employees now, but that hasn't stopped Bannerlord from achieving a "dev hell" reputation somewhat akin to Duke Nukem Forever. Many of the most glaring issues are things which have yet to be addressed officially, but were alleviated by mods made available within the first couple of days (see, for example, the popularity of mods like BannerlordTweaks). Given that the Warband era was plagued with problems that never got resolved, and now after many years of progress the Bannerlord era has shown no significant signs of change, I think it's fair to say that we need to temper our expectations and just accept that we're never going to get what we want from an official release. Bannerlord has a lot of potential, but the modding community will find it, not the devs.


-edit- I think of M&B like Minecraft. The basic idea of the game is brilliant. The devs hit conceptual gold! The actual implementation of those ideas...? Ehhh... that's a task for someone else.

It's the IKEA approach to game development; they provide the framework, but we need to build it ourselves.

Thank you very much for your post and the time to clear things up for me. Than let us hope the devs put out tools and a workshop maybe on steam so that the modders can play around with the game and make it great - like warband.
 
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