hitzu

Oh, don't please use the "realism" argument in the game full of cubes, when the ecosistem we should learn not to destroy happily destroys itself, the game where you have to build robots in order to make a light bulb, where the mass magically appears or disappears based on the skills of whoever turn the ON button on a workbench, where the law of energy coservation doesn't work, where some animals population reproduces in the seconds after raid hunting, where the more people observe the rocks the more they forget about gravity and solid surfaces, where human footprints traverse through layers of rock and soil from the deep underground to appear on the surface, where the world depth depends on the ocean depth, where the planet's curvature doesn't depend on its size, where water can be basically dug out, where wild plants can grow in hostile environment but the same cultivated plants can't, where all gases and liquids can travel any large distance trough pipes, but only if the pipe is made out of the same metal the whole its length... I can go on an on. Yes, some of them are bugs, but most of them are game simplifications purposefully made against realism. So please, don't use "realism" argument to defend a game mechanic. The only thing matter is whether or not it serves its purpose in a fun and interesting way. If not - it's a gameplay disaster.

I've see two premature deaths of two servers because of how tedious and unfun the mining, ore extraction and tilling storing currently is. And most probably I'm not gonna play maybe a year or how long it will take to release 9.0, but my guts tell me I will be bored even faster with now two types of tiling! Sofisticated politics? No! Thou shall dig! Dig or die! :D

That's not my argument but the reason for the choices we make and therefore i need to make this aware to you. I cannot refrain from telling you this, given it's the exact reason why we do some things. Our design is based around realism, with simplifications of course, but many of them over the course of development will be gone, too. Obviously for different reasons some parts are more realistic while some are less. The sweeping hands talent for example is as unrealistic as the carry weights - but still way more realistic than other games offer. The production chains is something we want to make more realistic than other things, giving the benefit of a use for a lot of different professions and the economy and the impact for ecology - which are two important pillars of the game content.

Sure, you don't need robots to make light bulbs, but in the future we are going to introduce different tiers of machinery to do things. For the ore processing we'll introduce that and have several mac...

spiritmammoth

I live in a city founded on extensive mining. There are huge mine dumps, and of course they are ugly and very little grows near them 50 years later. The rivers downstream are polluted still. Every so often a dam near the mines breaks and kills more of the environment.

There are entire companies whose sole job it is to transport the tailings and waste from the mines.

Don't worry, you have the realism quite well modeled.

And it's still a lot of fun.

That's what i see working best ingame too. On some servers i play on some players that are loving mining, mine stuff, sell it and offer tailings storage as a company for the whole server. That works best and the miners are mostly rich given what they sell the ores for and take for the tailings. Still, i'm totally aware not every server has such dedicated people that are into mining anyway and don't feel any tediousness, so we'll surely try to balance it out so it is fun for most people.

FungusGungus

I think the problem is that they have a roadmap suggestion and haven’t bothered to work on the #1 thing on there

We just can't. The game is not in a state where it could support the fast chunkloading that would be needed for trains - it was clear to us that this will be one of the last and most optional features of all the things we want to do, no matter how many votes it gets. Votes alone don't decide what is implemented, they tell us what people think would be really cool. And trains would also be really cool for us. But there is no way to implement them at the moment, that is something you might see after the end of early access. I've already told our web developer that he might want to clarify what the roadmap is - a way to show what you find most cool to us and a way to show you what we plan to implement from us, not a vote on what we do next. I'm quite sure that will be part of the website relaunch that is planned for the future.

Awsomeman1089

Thanks for the information about the roadmap. The part I don't like about the new ore system is that you would have to spend a lot of time building stuff just to get rid of the waste. That is super boring with tailings already. It feels just like smelting except you have to do it over and over.

Eco is meant to simulate real life to a certain degree and ecology is one of the basic game pillars. I know that it can be very tedious for players to store those things away, but on bigger servers that ususally works quite good with multiple people collaborating. For sure, in singleplayer we'll give you the option to adjust resource needs and therefore waste production, but in the end there will be a use of storing the new waste products - because in opposite to tailings they WILL be dangerous and not storing will cause major problems.

Sure, we need to balance the game between fun and realism and we do that - but waste is a major problem in real life and there just is no way for the some of the new waste products to be used. In the end it is supposed to be tedious to make you think twice if you really need that much of a specific product. I know that given the professions and goods not being nearly completed it doesn't feel like that in the moment, but in the end it hopefully will....

The roadmap is showing what we currently work on and a voting page for all the features we plan to include in the game until final release, the order of the items does NOT represent if or when they are implemented into the game - that's also written on the roadmap page. We don't have a long-term roadmap, we are introducing the planned features for the next patches via our dev-newsletters. Decision on what is implemented next takes serveral things into account, not only the roadmap votes. We also regularily put in small stages of one of the roadmap items, so quite some of them already have a lot of it implemented, but not everything.

Sorry to hear you don't seem to like the new ore concept - it'll introduce a lot more things to do and new professions. Eco is a game that tries to resemble realism, which the new features offer.

For fixing tediousness for single player, we'll have new configuration options for resource needs and crafting time, too.

That's an issue with the room calculation that is marked as fixed for 8.2.

It's not coming out before June 10, but until then it should be very ready to ship as fast as possible.

hitzu

Yeah... Factorio and the Wube team really spoiled me. Quelle dommage that their workflow and attitude is not the industry standard for early access games. I feel kinda trapped in the position where I should excuse but I don't quite understand for what. For my playstyle? For not being in the paid QA team to properly report bugfixes and not understanding what bugs are resolved for what version and what bugs are proudly considered features? For not finding concrete and up to date information from all the sources including personal responses in Discord, Reddit, the Forum, and ever-wrong wiki, (not mentioning that it's nearly impossible to google something with "eco" prefix and get the game related information) rather than from one reliable source like devlog? Or maybe I should excuse for that SLG cannot hire a professional community manager?

You don't need to excuse anything. It's not like we are doing most things as of business standards and i'm neither the person that decides what will be announced in a newsletter or blog post - that's decided by different people. My job is to communicate with you and give you the answers for question you ask for and cooperate with people, admins, modders and projects from the community, giving your feedback back to the developers. Your feedback was given to them.

And even though i'm not a professional community manager - which some people do like way more than a professional person, btw, given a lot of our former community players didn't even regularily play the game - i feel i'm doing a good job in that. I'm sorry if you don't feel the same and i'm happy about any suggestions you have for me to improve.

But i'm not the guy that decides where the game heads, how the game is developed, when bugs get fixed or how big our Quality Assurance team is, despite i'm having some influence on t...

BullshitSloth

First I want to say I love this game. It’s extremely enjoyable to build a society with friends while working towards a common goal.

However.. you guys have GOT to optimize this game. I understand wanting to add more features and content but my god the bugs, glitches, and the sheer ridiculous amount of CPU resources this game uses are infuriating to put it lightly. I cannot comprehend how this game can not load chunks which causes the player and their cart/truck to fall through the world.

Again I love the game but please focus on making it function better before putting more content into it.

That's what our focus was on for all patches since 8.0 to 8.2. We cannot only do that stuff, either, though, as we need to cater to the people requesting new features, too.

The chunkloading in 8.2 is way better than it is now, but Eco is and forever will remain a extremely CPU heavy game (by design - it is a big simulation with underlying databases that accumulate gigabytes of data in no time) that requires a lot of resources. Optimizing stuff at this stage of development is hard and a lot of the work lost on every new feature. We know it's running too bad for now, but you shouldn't expect it to run "good" before the main features are finished and working. Of course you can expect it to run "okay". That is what we're trying to do.

hitzu

Performance and bugs are number one priority at the moment, which is why there have been nearly no new features from 8.0 to 8.2.

Then you have to give some publicity on that regard. Yes, talking about bugfixing and game stabilizing is not as fun as about new features, but it's important to make players sure you pay attention to them as well.

Governments are not a decoration though, but one of the major game pillars and they work quite well with less than hundred players - i'm doing all that stuff with my server since at least a year already, just with manual work and imagination. And yes, the server has a 30 days reset cycle and the same bugs than anyone else.

It doesn't mean it will be like this on the majority of the servers. It just proves you are capable to do that.

In regards to bugs you might want to report them on Github

My experience with that was, let's say unsatisfying to continue. For example, some of our players found bugs that were marked as resolved a long time ago, like the bug with otters not giving carcass, but it's still occurring. And according to the Discord moderators, some major bugs like the ecosystem instability when species die without players' intervention are not even considered as bugs at all, after that, I'm not sure it worth to spend time to make a GH report. Some information given by moderators is simply untrue, like when they said with 100% confidence that wild version of a plant doesn't spread from a hand planted ones and all the cases are just a coincidence because of the good climate/soil conditions at that place. We just made an experiment with extinct rice and another one with near extinct trillium not presented on the continent where the experiment took place that they successfully reproduce from hand planted ones... That's just awkward... And this casts the shadow on the trust to the team.

As for crashes, I don't remember all the cases but the most common occurs when two people try to simultaneously shift-drag same stuff from one container to another which happens often while teamworking.

Broken Professions, XP Imbalance and Goods Productions are all other milestones for 9.0

Great! Then shout out about it!
I'd take a look at how hunters will progress and how all the professions (not just the mechanic) will be relevant at the industrial era when every kind of woodwork is no longer needed and calories consumption shrinks to minuscule values (our chief is depressed after being #1 needed person to become almost obsolete and our farmer is doing everything but farming because with the introduction of trucks, tractors, and excavators not only they while playing at the same rate as usual and produced food for 3 months ahead, but also the food consumption drastically decreased so the food stock will last pretty much forever).

Then you have to give some publicity on that regard. Yes, talking about bugfixing and game stabilizing is not as fun as about new features, but it's important to make players sure you pay attention to them as well.

I don't have the feeling we don't do that. We've acknlowedged the issues in the changelogs since then, it's written on the roadmap, i'm answering people accordingly on all our channels and doing anything i can to make sure people know. The only thing we do not do is making a whole blog post or newsletter about the issue (but they did include information to that, too!). And that should be understandable, given those are mainly marketing, not information.

It doesn't mean it will be like this on the majority of the servers. It just proves you are capable to do that.

Eco is not about the majority of the servers, but about the capabilities the game offers. It's totally intended that every single server works (up to extremely) different. It's up to the players to make thin...

hitzu

Performance, performance, performance, bugs, bugs, bugs. That's what should be your number one priority. And then the economy foundation should be stable. You can of course make decorations like govts on top of that but it will be a huge disappointment when it will turn out to be unplayable. There will be no real politics in the world with less than hundreds of active players. It will by just fluffy decoration or annoying content gating depending what benefits all of this should bring. But your game is currently built to be at best a month or two long session for a couple of friends who get will eventually get bored and annoyed by everpersistent bugs dated since 0.7, repeating crashes 10 times a play session, memory leaking, incomplete base mechanics, broken professions, absolute imbalance in XP gaining, storaging, and goods production, not even mentioning of a total game logic inconsistency across the whole game. And do you really think anyone could play politics on top of that unstable foundation? Of course no, but no one could stop you not listening the voice of common sense in favor of some sort of dream you're dreaming backed up with fanboys' echo. You decide.

Performance and bugs are number one priority at the moment, which is why there have been nearly no new features from 8.0 to 8.2.

Governments are not a decoration though, but one of the major game pillars and they work quite well with less than hundred players - i'm doing all that stuff with my server since at least a year already, just with manual work and imagination. And yes, the server has a 30 days reset cycle and the same bugs than anyone else.

In regards to bugs you might want to report them on Github or at least go into detail which already existing bugs are most annoying to you - we have a lot of minor bugs with different priorities and often some players extremely dislike one bug, while others don't care at all. I've been making sure all the bugs that were reported to me as extremely annoying by several players in the past were treated with priority.

Regarding crashes - i never had a single crash in a release version of Eco since im playing it, aside from server cra...

PM_ME_STUFF_N_THINGS

It's awesome you guys are constantly expanding and improving Eco, sadly that seems rare these days with EA games.

Can you please also increase focus on bug fixing, there have been several annoying bugs in the game for months now, almost years.. some spanning 0.7 and 0.8.

Rubble behaviour, unstuck/stuck weirdness, performance issues to name a few. Performance is getting better in recent versions but still needs focus.. and keep up the good work lads :)

That's the focus of the current updates in work.

Bugs do have a priority you can look up on GitHub, we nearly cleared all high priority bugs recently.

Rubble is some portal magic, we've tried fixing that a hundred times now, but some issue keeps getting back, this likely will require more in-depth changes we cannot do with a single patch.

With the upcoming changes to laws and government, introducing constitutions in Update 9.0, we also thought about ways how several different governments could exist next to each other and even how different tiers of governments could be implemented into the game. Check out our newest newsletter to get to know what our vision on that is:

https://steamcommunity.com/games/382310/announcements/detail/1629653127994357345

You cannot fix this, it's caused by Require Auth being disabled which causes steam players to be displayed as a Hash. We removed the Require Auth option for 8.2, so this is no longer a problem. If players can't join with require auth off and you are not a cracked server, you should try to get that fixed. Support will gladly help you with that.

To clear this up: The master server died.

You can login to your SLG account and link it with steam, then it appears in your steam library.

The SLG version can be played with people from the Steam version and the other way round, too.

xavia91

but now I ll have to configure every tree manually, that's not so nice.

This might not be so nice in your case, but allows you to easily adapt only specific plants that you want to change and customisation is something we really want to offer, so having more options is something we see as an improvement.

Hey there,
thanks for your feedback. I'll also give you some dev-feedback :)

Stores:

As some people have already said, they are an essential feature of Eco to be able to bring people with different playtimes, timezones and other things together in a very basic, but at least some form of collaboration. Eco is not a MMO and forced socialisation is not what we want - we want to promote collaboration, in an as easy as possible way. Sure, not everyone will talk in the chat, not everyone wants to do, but still everyone can participate in basic collaboration by selling their goods and taking part in the economy. A game like Eco - that you can shutdown at any time and still tries to resemble real-life in quite some ways - couldn't work if we didn't offer options for players that do not have as much time to actually participate and have fun in the game. So while i understand your suggestion and see where you come from, it just doesn't fit the game as we are envisioning it.

Skill Scrolls...

I personally don't. I prefer the cycles.

You can change the growth time in Mods/Organisms for every plant. The config option is called something along "MaturityAgeDays".