Not Testing Your Patches + Completely Wrong Focus In Patches

[Sarapen]

Yep, the complete lack of testing is so damn obvious that it hurts as a fellow coder. If I would roll out my patches at work like TW is doing theirs I would be unemployed tomorrow.

When I code something there are multiple testing layers. The first standard tests are done by myself, after I fixed the glaring bugs I hand the new version over to a collegue to give it a test. After this I have a small testing group that consists of future users and only then I bundle up the release and bring it to production.

 

[duchuy613]

At this point, I doubt they even have a QA team. It's feeling like they're just using EA as a reason to turn players into working as their QA team for free...
I usually just play my game as a mercenary, running around doing tourneys and invest in workshops/caravans, but it's a huge struggle now.

We play games for fun, not suffering. I think the dev team forget about this.

 

[SmattlePattle]

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.

My hope is that at some level TW/The Dev's realize this and aspire to do better. I can forgive them for a janky ride if we get there in the end, but I do get frustrated at how they don't seem to pay attention to the progress from the Warband era.

Viking Conquest had so many quality of life and features that Bannerlord lacks, which is nuts. Where are camps? Where's formation AI? Stamina options? Dismemberment?

I sometimes wonder if TW almost resents modders for beating them to the punch first and then refuses to ever implement their improvements in some sort of delusional "we cant let them know they were right" kind of attitude because the exclusion of things like freelancer, carrying on a battle as a party member, in BL, when they were modded into Warband a decade ago, is nuts.

I really want TW to give us the best base game possible, but its a reassurance that if they don't modders will.

 

[khuzait haircut]

Well, the very first patch that was supposed to be beta tested came out with untested features that broke the game economy...

It didn't completely break the economy. It nerfed the gold you get from towns.

In any case, if you stay on the public default branch you'll get the beta AFTER it goes through public testing. Once a week. Why is that complicated? If you feel its still broken wait a few weeks.

EDIT: BTW, in Warband towns don't always have enough gold to cover all your loot.

 

[Jarl Malcolm]

In any case, if you stay on the public default branch you'll get the beta AFTER it goes through public testing. Once a week. Why is that complicated? If you feel its still broken wait a few weeks.

That's the problem, the Beta 1.1.0 received no significant changes after public testing, AI blocking, dark UI, Charm exploit at the end of the tutorial have been reported but pushed to the main branch. Most people here don't just complain about some broken feature, but about the fact that they end up in Main.

 

[imgran]

I think the worst thing is NOT protecting the previous beta status. This is EXACTLY WHY THERE IS A BETA BRANCH, to try out undertested changes before fully implementing them. And instead of respecting that, they threw a bunch of new fixes into the bata at the same time they rolled it into the alpha branch, which is exactly HOW NOT TO RUN A BETA-ALPHA SYSTEM

 

[SmattlePattle]

EDIT: BTW, in Warband towns don't always have enough gold to cover all your loot.

Its less of an issue in warband because you don't have triple digit valued items really.
Don't give me a helmet that then becomes impossible to sell at 1/8th of its value, that is absolutely an oversight.

Also issues in Beta need to be fully addressed before merging to main stream, which afaik there does not seem to be fully occurring.

 

[Watercrown123]

I think the worst thing is NOT protecting the previous beta status. This is EXACTLY WHY THERE IS A BETA BRANCH, to try out undertested changes before fully implementing them. And instead of respecting that, they threw a bunch of new fixes into the bata at the same time they rolled it into the alpha branch, which is exactly HOW NOT TO RUN A BETA-ALPHA SYSTEM

+1, it was disappointing to see them totally ignoring their own brand new system.

 

[Azhael]

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.

Beautifuly worded, my friend. It hurts but it's probably true. I had hopes that after all these years Bannerlord would be a different case, but I'm getting disappointed really fast here.

Yep, the complete lack of testing is so damn obvious that it hurts as a fellow coder. If I would roll out my patches at work like TW is doing theirs I would be unemployed tomorrow.

This I can't forgive. Do they even run the game for 20 mins to check if what they changed didn't brake the whole game?

 

[Askorti]

It didn't completely break the economy. It nerfed the gold you get from towns.

In any case, if you stay on the public default branch you'll get the beta AFTER it goes through public testing. Once a week. Why is that complicated? If you feel its still broken wait a few weeks.

EDIT: BTW, in Warband towns don't always have enough gold to cover all your loot.

But the caravan change did NOT go through the beta branch, it went straight to the default branch WITHOUT testing.

 

[khuzait haircut]

But the caravan change did NOT go through the beta branch, it went straight to the default branch WITHOUT testing.

I see your point. My bad. Yes, this was a bad decision in my opinion, too.

 

[artemis_entreri]

Well, the very first patch that was supposed to be beta tested came out with untested features that broke the game economy...

I've been playing Beta 1.1.0 and these changes were not in Beta 1.1.0 prior to yesterday. No idea why these were pushed directly to live and skipped the Beta altogether.

Maybe a mistake was made in the CICD process?

Cycle should be something to this effect:
dev branch -> test -> alpha branch -> test + feedback loop -> beta branch -> test + feedback loop -> live branch

Could you roll this patch back TW?


Great game overall though, really have enjoyed playing and appreciate the EA.

 

[Tokashi]

If you stay on the public branch its essentially one patch a week with testing. Why are you playing beta?

The main patch also got the broken changes in, again, they did not test their code.

 

[Tokashi]

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.

Your whole response is completely pointless because that was not what I was ranting out. I was ranting about that they did not test their work. The broken features were released in the main patch and they are focusing on balancing the economy which is completely pointless if they have not worked on all the features to get the game working.

I am not dependend on the Caravans because crafting tier 5 swords will make up for all the caravans I have even if they sell everything at 2k for two weeks.

But what if I do not want to do Blacksmithing, I want to use Caravans as an income, and now I am forced to do blacksmithing. You clearly do not think that the game offers different ways to make money that each one should at least have a decent wayt to bring you income else the game becomes really dull and boring very quickly.

 

[tommytom2k2]

My trader caravan (which doesn't get a boost in trading skill, mind you), went from like 70-80 army cap down to 30 cap (slowly kept getting desertion warnings). Once they finally stabilized at 30 a week or so later, they were destroyed.

Excessively nerfed. Not worth paying 15k again to remake it.

Besides, I have 3k income from 2 towns and 1 castle (I vote away all captured settlements as I dont need them), an army of 246 top-tier units, and over 2mil denars.

Even paying 2500 denars for PART of a heavy calvary upgrade (just the war horse), I still am net positive. Most of my time is spent traveling to merchants/towns/villages to buy war horses and holding post-war-horse-upgraded units as prisoner for months until they are recruitable. Almost no towns or villages purchase war horses, so you have to find all the villages with war horses (some horse by them on the overmap) and hope they haven't sold them to a caravan yet, been looted, or lug you way over to the connect town to where they run them off to.

I get the realism of the war horses thing, but it's a bit ridiculous. I have a carry weight of 30k with hundreds if not thousands of horses, but war horse get consumed as soon as they spawn, pretty much.

 

[Tokashi]

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.

You are correct, Bannerlord will basically be like Minecraft. I take my hat off for the developers for making the game so much Modable that a community can take it from here and move on with it.

I have seen some great mods coming out, I think we will be really impressed by the mod community and not much from Taleworlds.

Taleworlds just have to make sure all the features are there and the game is stable, mod community can take it from there.

 

[Tokashi]

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.

I do agree but my post is more about that they should focus on fixing real problems of the game. Why even bother fixing the economy right now? What caused them to change the caravan, workshops or even the drop rate or the simulation results... all were working. yeah it was easy and really simple to get denars but still it was working.

Now they introduce a change that was not needed, broken the whole game economy and it is pretty much not fun to play it so yeah.

There are so many things that needs to be fixed, added or improved on. Quests, Perks, AI, Castle designs, Sieging AI, Your wife gets a baby every 2 weeks (DAFUQ) I mean my wife got pregnant and got 3 children in about 2 months... yeah yeah.
The prisoners escaping randomly and then if you execute them the whole world hate you now. So HOW am I supposed to completely beat someone without pissing off everyone and stop the lords from spawning and getting more armies randomly and spamming you with 300 recruits that gets destroyed by archers every time they attack me. It is like a never ending cylce.

 

[COOMER]

We are actually the QA team luv