Aleš Ulm 1725 Posted September 20, 2017 Hi there, fellow ylanders! We received a lot of feedback based on the last week’s Dev Diary. You told us about your concerns, about various aspects of the game, about things you didn’t like and those you want us to improve. Firstly let me thank you for that - well structured and voiced criticism is a very precious thing and we do appreciate it a lot. Ylands is a very ambitious and in many ways unique project (that will become even more apparent in the features planned for 2018) that started really small and only in the last few months gained larger momentum. We’re learning a lot as we progress and yes, we make mistakes. But there are two main reasons why I believe we’ll end up having a great game - we try not to repeat our mistakes and we listen to you very carefully, reading everything you post pretty much immediately, discussing it every day. And when we see something isn’t working, we change it. So far we have thoroughly discussed two topics you brought up. Bug reports and your feedback There are several things we believe are not working as they should and need to be improved on our side. Firstly there’s a rather unfortunate thing with issues' “states.” Whenever you report an issue, Ane, our Community Manager, places it in JIRA, our bug tracker system, and marks the issue as “Under review.” As soon as the issue is resolved, she changes it to “Resolved” etc. Some of you probably remember that some time ago the states of the issues were shown next to the issues in forums (some relicts of that can still be seen here and there). Unfortunately, at some point, we upgraded our forum system and the plugin that does that turned out to be incompatible with the new forum in some places. The issues are still being marked by us as they were in the past but their current state is no longer obvious. We decided that starting right now, whenever an issue is reported in the forum, we will edit its name so that it contains the number it has assigned in our system. When the issue is resolved in any way, it will be stated there as well. So if you report something under “Annihilator doesn’t work” in the appropriate section of the forum, it will change to something like “[YLN-2156] Annihilator doesn’t work” and eventually to “FIXED [YLN-2156] Annihilator doesn’t work”. The fixed issues in the changelog will be stated along with their numbers. We will start checking regularly for any issues that have been reported for a long time without being fixed, and whenever we find one we will reply to it, explaining why it’s taking so long. However, at the same time, we would like to ask you to be patient whenever you report something rather vague or difficult to reproduce. From now on issues reported by players will have automatically higher than the standard priority for fixing. Dedicated servers The first version of Dedicated servers was, based on numerous requests from the community, released a long time ago... which turned out to be a bad decision, since the version was quite buggy and feature-wise rather incomplete. While the importance of having Dedicated servers (DS) was (and still is) obvious, we were the in position where we suddenly had far too many things to fix, tweak and improve - many of those arguably more important than DS - like “basic” multiplayer, optimizations, fixing game crashes, memory leaks or issues with online launcher and others, so the improvements to DS came rather slowly. We are still improving DS but we understand your frustration because it’s not fast enough. Also, while the current state is sufficient for our internal needs, it has become obvious that you need more tools at your disposal. Unfortunately there’s no way how we can have this in the upcoming update - the one that is coming shortly before the game becomes available on Steam - because there are still even more important things to fix (just to be clear - it isn’t and never has been that we put higher priority on having new features over improving DS. DS is something that isn’t developed by gameplay programmers so it's quite unrelated). Since we don’t want for the newly coming players to feel like we consider the current version of DS "good enough" we decided to take a rather radical step and do the following: in the next update (the one to become available on Steam), DS will be removed from the official game distribution and will become a separately distributed “closed beta” those interested in helping us improve it will get access to it and will be able to host games just like until now we will create a new, specific thread where we plan to gather your feedback and post a description of what our plans are as soon as the next update is released we will start working on DS improvements intensively, regularly sharing our progress with you in that thread. Our obvious goal will be for the DS to become good enough to once again become a part of the official Ylands distribution... and we want this to happen as soon as possible along with the game being released on Steam we will start several dedicated servers, which we will use to test things on our own I can see how this may not make you very happy. Unfortunately, right now there’s no magical way how we can improve DS right away to fit all your needs, and yes, we’re saying that it will take some more time to get where we all want it to be - and that we plan to start working on that fully in what is weeks from now. But it is a plan set in reality. If having better DS tools is what you are after, you will get the chance to work with us more closely on its implementation and have immediate info on how we’re progressing. I do hope you'll understand our reasons and maybe even volunteer to help us once again. In any case, I'd like to thank you for your patience. It does take longer than expected but we hope it will be worth it. You can expect us to address other issues you brought up in the future Dev Diaries - until then have a great time and stay classy! 2 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Rogu15 0 Posted September 20, 2017 It's great that these two topics are discussed now. Both of those have mostly been in my mind regarding the game. Ylands is already awesome game and I love the amount of content. Exploration is what keeps me getting back to it with my friends, because there is always something new. And with dedicated server there is lots of bugs. Some more annoying than others. So I haven't posted any bugs here because I'm not sure if it was already posted or under process to be fixed (typical Finnish people). So sometimes it would be easier to post bugs if there would be easily accessible list or similar so that you would know what bugs have been posted and what have been already taken to process of fixing or if you need more information about some specific bug. The way of addressing bugs above may do the trick. We mostly play with dedicated server because the game just gives so much fun with friends. Map problem, new ship issues (you have to sit, etc to remove "sea sickness" after being on board) and sharks getting stuck in ships are pretty minor problems but sometimes do get on nerves when you die for nothing and can't get your valuable stuff back. It's alpha and we love it already! Thanks for great game and great community! Our hopes are high and I guess they are filled hundred times over! Enjoy your work and make some awesome bug fixing and content to the game we all love! Thanks for everyone on the team! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
WijkagentAdrie 384 Posted September 20, 2017 Hey Ales! I'm very pleased with this Dev Diary! Both the feedback on bug reporting and the dedicated server "solution" is realistic and more transparant. Perfect! I've still got a tiny suggestion/question: Can we give certain bugs lower priorities ourselves? Or do you/Ane assign a category to it when it's being entered into the system? Some of the bugs we report are of the category "game-breaking", others are a minor visual inconsistency. As for the dedi server: I feel this is the right choice! I will still be hosting my server to test Regarding this bit: 2 hours ago, Aleš Ulm said: If having better DS tools is what you are after, you will get the chance to work with us more closely on its implementation and have immediate info on how we’re progressing. What exactly can we do to help? Just play on the official dedi servers? Or is there more we can do? Adrie Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
BigBoss87 68 Posted September 20, 2017 Doesnt make mistakes who doent make decisions we just have to learn. Everyone can see the great potential Ylands has. It is already a lot of fun regarding issues. Thansk for this DEV D Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Aleš Ulm 1725 Posted September 21, 2017 Thanks for your understanding, everyone!@WijkagentAdrie We set priority ourselves based on how severe it is - but also based on other things (for example an issue considered normally critical may not be treated as such if the part of the code it comes from is already being reworked etc.) Having said that we always appreciate whenever an issue comes with any additional info. If you take your time explaining why you believe something to be more severe than it appears it can be really helpful because, for example, at first it may not be obvious that a seemingly unimportant issue might be something you run into very often or it prevents you from doing something else. So if you yourself tell us why you think something is critical (or trivial) it will be a welcome addition. As for how you can help us with DS - there's definitely more to be done than just playing In about two weeks (since the next one will probably be quite hectic - that's when the migration of players to Steam is planned to begin) I'd like to create a thread about DS and put there a rough list of features we'd like to add to DS, known issues etc. At that point, it would be great if you could also contribute to that list. Then we can discuss those features, talk about priorities etc. Ideally, this thread wouldn't die when the updated DS comes out but it would be used to discuss any potential future improvements. 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
silentghoust 15 Posted September 29, 2017 My community would love to participate in the DS beta as well! We have a dedicated server located in a database in Seattle, WA. If you need some U.S based hosting let us know! 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Aleš Ulm 1725 Posted September 29, 2017 Excellent! We'll be very grateful for any feedback you guys can provide us with! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
