Gem shop needs fixing - is this what you guys told your management why people are not buying gems?
Gem shop needs fixing - is this what you guys told your management why people are not buying gems?
You got me to thinking this is a good course of action. I'm only doing basic island maintenance, but even that is frustrating with the constant zone refreshes and other loading issues. Now the game has started refreshing on me and reloading. Like it didn't take long enough to load the first time. Logging in once a day, I can still do several maintenance tasks and then call it good for the day. Would just need to put some buildings to sleep.
OMG I was crying when I read UBS post about this "update". Quote: "As some of you already pointed out, our cooperation with MiPuMi was completed. They were a huge help in moving The Settlers Online to Unity and setting us up for working in this new environment." How about you change it to something like "They were a huge help it totally screwing up the game to the point where it's unplayable and now we have absolutely no idea how to fix it."
Quote: "With the upcoming version, we will add the last bit of code for Unity to the game. This won’t bring any noticeable changes for you but will simplify the development for us."
Well hell that's just great, why would I want to see any changes? I mean I don't know what I'd do if I clicked something in the star menu and it didn't show me something totally random. And yes, I'm so glad you're going to fix the gem shop. What an idea! Because the whole game is run through the gem shop and if you "fix" that the whole game itself will run sooo much better! Glad you guys are on target. Because I can't think of a single person who'd "play" this busted crap of a game and say to themselves "Hey let me to spend my hard earned money on a game that's unplayable!"
Well, I must agree with more than a few of the respondents here who questioned:
Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate the incredibly tough situation you all must be dealing with. I think you all must appreciate our situation as well. Best wishes in the continuation.
- The rush to 'fix' the gem shop. Though it is laudable to fix this, the gem purchase function has been like that for years; years. It has seemed to work well enough till now, what made that THE priority now. Shouldn't the game be working properly BEFORE one can expect the players to spend money on it?
- The adventures/general's focus issue (the 'focus' issue may be the same focus issue with buildings on home isle, idk, but for this issue I am discussing our beloved adventures). A major focus of the game (and most events) revolves around adventures/ventures. This ability to play adventures has been SEVERELY hampered since the move of the game to Unity. The amusing thing is that of all the issues BB has discussed, not one post by BB has addressed the lack of functionality in playing adventures. Goodness can only guess what playing PvP might be like, I doubt anyone has even tried thus far. TBH, if I had to play solely on Unity, I would not be playing more than one login a day just to keep the counter rolling, there is no way to play adventures without the option to use the Client, which allows full functionality as the game provided previously. If this ability goes away and serious improvements are not made to Unity's ability to properly handle adventures, I fear your player base will shrink even further.
“Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends.”
J. R. R. Tolkien
It saddens me to read through this thread, as it confirms that there's still more or less no progress in making the game playable. The previous download client using Adobe Air wasn't the best, and was always likely to be a temporary solution, but it did work.
If you really want The Settlers to survive, then I suggest you eat some humble pie, take the Unity live version offline again and reinstate the DLC version which I'm sure is still around. At least then the game will be playable and your developers can work on a long term solution using Unity, or, shock horror, something else. I have to point out that more or less every other game of this type that I played during the run up to the "death of flash" chose to switch to HTML5, and for the most part they ended up functioning well after a few teething problems. I do also play one game which has remained with a DLC version like yours.
I haven't even tried to log in for weeks, as every time I see the same thing, game takes ages to load, and nothing works properly when it is loaded. I'm sad that this is the way it is, I have some good friends on the game if they too haven't got fed up with waiting and moved on. I fear now that TSO is past the point of no return. It gives me no pleasure to say "I told you so" (and so did many others) but, y'know, we did. You had 2-3 years to manage the transition away from flash, and from the appearances at the user end of things, those years were wasted up until the last minute.
From what I've seen so far, the decision to move to Unity was ill-judged. Even on the test server, it didn't perform well. We hoped it would be better when it went live, but from all appearances, many faults from the test server were still present. It's now many months later and still the game isn't credibly playable, it's not even where the DLC version was.
Sorry guys, but unless you really pull a rabbit out of the hat and make genuine progress, I'll be sad to finally write TSO off, after 5 years playing (since Anno Online was killed off), but I play games to distract me from the frustrations and problems of the world, not to add to them.
Good to see you LLew! Excellent post.
Yeah, pretty much all of this.
TSO used to be fun, but the gaps between even trying to log on are getting longer and longer. All I need to do is visit the forums and read about all the frustrations and headaches, and think, "Nope, that's not what I want to add to my day.".
Somewhere shy of ten years down the tubes because a bunch of tech-types can't do (or aren't being allowed to do) their jobs.
This is exactly I was quite vocal about why I stopped spending on Gems. BB made it blatantly obvious that the transition and longevity of TSO wasn't a priority, so I made it clear that neither was it a priority for me to spend my money here. :/
Why do I need to know what science benefitted my explorers in the loot messages? Those messages do not identify which explorer to start with. The science is available from the explorer in star. The added info adds a step to accepting the loot message -- one has to scroll and with screen freezes and lags, this is annoying.
This is one of the new features, one of the improvements that needs to be nixed.
There is a ton of clutter that occurs when hovering over a specialist in star. I know what the bookings are and if not, a single click brings it up. So again, info popups interfere with sending the specialist on its mission.
This is one of the new features, one of the improvements that needs to be nixed.
I am unable to see how much time a building has left to complete production. I can in 2 different places see the total production time. We need to be able to see how much time is left. Fix this please.
A lot of the issues can be attributed to bandwidth (comm and processing) and resource utilization. The constant string of "page unresponsive" messages leads to the conclusion that the server I/O handler is now working very well. There are lots of places where the data transfer can be reduced without impairing the game. Reduce the comm band width (and that results in a processing BW reduction) and there will be some level of improvement.
I post this in the hope that someone cares enough to read and consider the points made. Based on best evidence available, that is a risky assumption. Prove me wrong.
Agree 100%!! If I want to see individual loot mail, for many expos, I have to scroll down within the mail just to click to accept the loot. Thus adding an extra step. Any way to make it so we don't have that extra step with those expos would be awesome.
Better yet, how about giving unique info in the loot mail title for expos like the Scared expo so I can easily their mail is in the list of mail as I would really like to be able check Scared's loot mail individually.
The fact that BB is prioritizing fixing and or doing stuff with the gem shop to make gem purchases faster BEFORE making the game much more playable for the players speaks volumes about how much they care about and value the players (we're just $ signs to BB)
BB, if you are wondering why gem sales are down (which I'm betting they are). Maybe it is because players don't want to spend $$ on something that does not bring them enjoyment. I'm sure I can speak for many when I say I want to have confidence in the game before I spend more on gems. And yes, I am a gem player who has has easily spent $200+ on gems. I even had to fight for months with your payment vendor just to be able to give you guys $$ (That has since been resolved)
I highly recommend you focus your energy on getting the game back to a much more playable state before setting your eyes on players buying more gems. Even if you can get it as playable as it was on the downloadable client, I think you would make many players happy
Tonight for example, it took me over 45 min to send out my expos. Some I even had to send out multiple times because the constant zone refreshing would make it as if they were never sent. Most days are decent & it doesn't take too long to do. Today was not one of those decent days. And for context, I had only turned on my computer and then logged into the game about 10 min prior. I had not had any other tabs open. And had not gone off of home island. So none of the usual suspects for why the game would by laggy and full of zone refreshes
As for the guild I'm in, it kinda says something when some guild members are speaking up in here more then they are online in game. Many are having way too many issues with the game. Thus only logging in once in a blue moon just to see if anything has improved. In guild chat, I will speak up. And I'm lucky if there is more then one, maybe two other players that speak up. Most of the time, I don't see anyone else in guild chat besides myself. And having no lights to indicate when guildies or friends are on just makes it feel more lonely on there when no one speaks up