I love Don't Starve, but I'm not buying Hamlet and neither should you.

[Faintly Macabre]

I first started playing Don't Starve on the PS4 when I got it from my Plus subscription for free several years ago. I loved it, and eventually purchased it on PC; between the two platforms I've got at least a thousand hours in, not even counting the several hundred more in DST.

While I love the game, it's had more than its fair share of bugs for as long as I've been playing it, and when Shipwrecked dropped, a pile more showed up.

Now I understand the realities of game development. Some games just never get completely fixed, because the reality is it's not feasible to continue to sink development time into a game from here to eternity; sales eventually die down and the cost of committing staff to continue working on the game doesn't. It's unfortunate, but eventually you just have to walk away.

The problem is that Don't Starve is still alive and in development. It recently got its Switch port (which was a bit of a trainwreck), and Hamlet was announced last September, and who knows how long work in secret had been going on. So while introducing it to whole new platforms and continuing to expand on it, Klei has largely ignored the state that the current game is in.

I say largely because back in September it looked like a honest effort was being made to not just fix up current content but even put some new content for the highly neglected Shipwrecked DLC. I got to the party late but was pretty excited when I found out, and saw things happening on the bug tracker for the first time in a long while; I quickly started submitting some issues of varying significance as I picked up and played the game again. But by January, the bug tracker once again filled up with reports with that ugly gray "Pending" tag sitting on them indefinitely. In fact, a handful of bugs that were supposedly "fixed" back in December and January didn't even get patched into the game for PC players until changes had to be made to the game to comply with the EU's new GDPR guidelines in May.

As much as I love this game and am dying for that sweet new Hamlet content that was teased yesterday, as things stand, I can't justify purchasing it. It is to me unconscionable to actively continue to try to make money off of a game that I don't feel you've done your due diligence in making the best product possible for the people you've already sold it to.

I know there's a lot of people whose fingers are itching by this point, just dying to hop in and come to the defense of their friends at Klei, and I get it. I really do. There's something awesome about having a game you really enjoy being developed by a group of people who interact with you, and listen to you a lot more than bigger companies seem to; they're your friends, and nobody likes their friends getting dumped on. But being your friends does not absolve them as their responsibilities as the creators of a commercial product they continue to make their money off of, and if you misguidedly decide to excuse the things they're doing, everybody is going to suffer for it. You'll never get the product you deserve, and neither will anybody else; not only will that hurt buyers, it will hurt Klei themselves, as potential sales of a game that's pretty good but should be better are lost.

Klei, please fix your damned game. Go over to the bug tracker and do something about all those ugly gray "Pending" tags. Please. I want to give you more of my money.

[Alfons100]

What bugs is it you are talking about anyways? The game feels pretty well-rounded to me. 

That doesn't instantly make it into a "vote with your refusal to give money" case

[364266_1452783569]

At least 99% of the games out there have less support than Klei gives. 
I'm not even a fanboy and I checked the bug tracker section and what did I see? 
Practically 100% of the bug complaint threads are either resolved or they got responded to by Janh (means they're working on it and are attempting to solve the problem.) 

The ones that haven't been resolved yet are for the newly released switch version. 
You are being insanely entitled and you can't even go into details as to what problems you're facing. You're being vague. 
You wonder why Klei doesn't solve your issues? Because you won't say what those issues are, you just say "I'm having issues, FIX them klei!" 

You somehow managed to type a whole wall of text and still gave us no information on what your problem is other than you have "issues" with the way they handled the game.  You need to give more constructive feedback than this, and besides at least 99% of the games out there don't even fix as many bugs & issues as Klei had. 

Didn't we just get an update last week?  I was crashing in the game due to an update they released,, I posted on the forum what the problem was and guess what? Klei fixed that crash in less than 24 hours because I gave a descriptive explanation as to what is causing it.  They can't fix issues when people are vague and give useless information.

[Faintly Macabre]

Both of you need to go look at the bug tracker. The real one, not whatever @364266_1452783569 is looking at. JanH hasn't replied to a bug for the base game in ages. And there are way more than just bugs for the Switch version; I know, because I posted quite a few over the past few weeks myself. If you don't think the explanations of what I've posted over there are descriptive enough, then apparently people aren't allowed to complain about bugs unless they can parse Lua and find the offending code themselves I guess.

Also, are you really using a patch they had to make because a previous patch seriously screwed their game up for a very large number of players as evidence that they're on the ball? I'm not big on the fanboy label but if you're not one, you should consider it; you'd be really good at it.

@Alfons100: Nothing instantly made anything anything. I've been playing this game for three to four years.

[364266_1452783569]

He replied in less than 24 hours ago in the bug tracker forum, they're reading it.

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forum/17-dont-starve-bug-tracker/ 
Don't know why you're being aggressive to me, I'm just saying how it is while you're being in denial.

[YumoS]

i stopped playing shipwrecked after a critical bug with the volcano. it messed up the day count and seasons. i agree with some bugs getting not fixed.

[Faintly Macabre]

29 minutes ago, 364266_1452783569 said:

He replied in less than 24 hours ago in the bug tracker forum, they're reading it.

https://forums.kleientertainment.com/forum/17-dont-starve-bug-tracker/ 
Don't know why you're being aggressive to me, I'm just saying how it is while you're being in denial.

I and many others use this bug tracker over here. If the bug tracker readily accessible through the navigation bars at the top that they're using for every other game on the site isn't the right one to use, that's probably something that ought to be addressed.

You came in here calling me entitled and treating me like a moron. You know exactly why I'm being "aggressive."

[364266_1452783569]

Yeah well they don't read that one for some reason, post in the one I linked you. 
I didn't notice that bug-tracker section actually and only now do I know it exists.  I been using the default bug tracker and they fixed my issues in under 24 hours releasing a patch. 

I think I know why the reason it's getting ignored.  It's because a lot of those bugs are relatively unimportant and don't affect the player that much that it's a waste of money to invest in solving them.  They have higher priorities which is why my crash got fixed in under 24 hours. 
They are not going to invest a whole entire week just to fix something like "Bee Mines and Tooth Traps can be planted on the ocean" years after the game is released, UNLESS it was something they could fix in like 5 minutes.  It's a priority thing, watch if you said your game was crashing and posted information that helps them deduce why, watch how fast they will fix this bug because that's a big deal.

So to answer your question, they don't care and they're not going to say that because it gives them a bad reputation.  They'd rather release the game on switch, make tens of millions of dollars, than to fix this minor bug that affects maybe 2 players at most.  That's just a reality to the game industry business and it's up to you to decide if you want to accept that.

I do a lot of software development and when handling tickets we sort them by priority with my manager deliberately saying "ignore the low priority ones unless they can be solved in a few minutes, they don't affect that many customers and can be mostly ignored."  Klei is not evil for not wanting to invest thousands of dollars into something extremely minor.  You may not find it to be minor but that won't change the way they perceive it.  You can try to argue with me or complain on the forum some more but do you really think they are going to admit the things I just said?  That's bad PR, your thread will be ignored or any response they give will deflect it because they can't directly admit it's low priority.  Anyone on their team who chooses to fix your low-priority bugs, are doing it on their own time out of generosity but no one on klei is going to want them to do that on-hours when their manager says no.

---------------------------------------------------------Edit---------------------------------------------------
I forgot to mention that even if an employee fixed your issues in a short amount of time, they still have to send it to QA for someone to test.  We don't know their process for testing bug fixes and how long it takes.  The people who do QA likely have a lot on their table with how many platforms they have to handle. 

Klei's team is not excluded to just one game, they're spread across all their projects, and we don't know how many QA people they have.  So that QA person can end up having to choose "Should I spend X days seeing if this bug-fix for tooth traps on the ocean works just fine, or should I stop people from crashing on the switch?" It is an absolute no-brainer which one he's going to pick.  As soon as he does that, he gets assigned more and more high priority tasks to take care of. 

We also don't know what his manager is like, and his manager could be the one who decides which tickets he needs to prioritize.  Klei is not going to admit such things because people can just twist their intentions/words and it can only go bad for them if they admit they're not prioritizing your issues. 

The best thing you can do to increase the chances of a low-priority issue to be fixed is for you to write up documentation that allows them to easily replicate the issue in under 5 minutes.  BY doing that, you are decreasing the time it takes for them to solve the issue, and then someone could've just fixed it on their lunch break.  Klei didn't say anything about the crashing I was having until I posted more information and deduced what could be causing it. 

They are clearly reading every bug issue and they are deciding "Do I have the time to fix this or not? Should I fix this or not?"  By seeing someone write up a detailed report on what causes the bug, it makes it easier for them to make that decision. (but doesn't guarantee it)

With all this said, I will still buy Hamlet.  I'm confident they will highly prioritize bugs on hamlet during the beta phase because that will give good PR and increase the amount of positive reviews for when it launches.  They have a lot of incentives to fix bugs during a beta phase, and I already know from their track record that any major bug will get fixed as soon as possible.

[Faintly Macabre]

On 6/14/2018 at 3:25 PM, 364266_1452783569 said:

Things

This entire post is a joke. It reads like most of it was pulled from the included bonus cheat sheet of a copy of Developer Apologia for Dummies or something. Even if I believed for a minute that you "do a lot of software development" -- and I don't -- I'd say that at best you're being very hyperbolic and at worst you work for an awful/amateur developer. You certainly don't work for a reputable game developer, because very few of them would be satisfied with the sloppy presentation that is Shipwrecked, or some of the unreliable/inconsistent quirks of the base game that remain unresolved after so many years.

Now there are absolutely some inconsequential bugs on the tracker over there; there's at least one or two I probably wouldn't have bothered putting up if I wasn't trying to make a point. But there are plenty of non-trivial issues, and even ones that should be critical in urgency -- it's still fairly common to CTD in a Shipwrecked world either inside the volcano or around tidal marshes, for example. But frankly, a bug shouldn't need to be game-breaking to warrant action; a good game should be well-polished, and I just don't think Don't Starve qualifies in the state it's currently in.

As for all this "we don't know how many people they have to do this" and "we don't know what their policy is on that": I don't care, and it's not supposed to be my problem. When you go to buy a game, you don't generally get a disclosure notice about their personnel allocation so you know whether or not to expect them to put satisfactory effort in making sure their game is at the level of polish it should be. And if you really believe that expecting not to have to deal with numerous bugs of varying severity throughout the course of perfectly normal gameplay is "insanely entitled", then somebody -- a bad developer, the proponents of one, maybe even just you yourself -- has suckered you good.

[d3v1n96]

Call me a fanboy or an idiot if you will, but I find the game to be fairly well rounded. I nearly never bump into bugs and when I do they usually don't have a significant impact on gameplay. If spending your time complaining about the game suits your fancy, you're welcome to do so. But I'd rather pick up the new content and delve deeper into a game that I love. If I didn't enjoy the game or thought it was deeply flawed I'd simply move on and play something else.

[EuedeAdodooedoe]

I should ask why there are so many bug tracker sections to begin with? If it's because of DLC, that's going to mess up things. @JanH or whomever, I would suggest having all bugs, archived or otherwise, in one section, and just have some sort of a tag system with [Archived] attached to the ones that are, and [Shipwrecked] and/or [Reign of Giants] available for bugs that are/may be for specific DLC. Multiple sections and various ways to submit bugs just make things ever-so-harder for us all. Sometimes you don't know which DLC is creating the issue,or where to post it if it's a combination of two DLC or not having a certain DLC, etc.

Already there are 4 versions of the game for single player that Klei needs to keep track of:

* Don't Starve

* Don't Starve + Reign of Giants

* Don't Starve + Shipwrecked

* Don't Starve + Reign of Giants + Shipwrecked

 

May be even a fifth if new bugs occur due to someone purchasing Shipwrecked first and then Reign of Giants. With Hamlet that will be at least 4 more versions of the game to keep track of! Better keep all bugs for the one game in one place, just with tags to get a better grasp of the issues.

So please, push this ("active" Don't Starve Shipwrecked bug tracker) into this (active Don't Starve bug tracker) or the other way round or something, if you can! Btw, the sections are a huge mess as is on the forum, and it's hard to figure out where I am sometimes. Some more visual aid for that would be great. Where do you post bugs for IOS/Android btw? In just the normal section of IOS/Android? That just creates another layer of confusion!

Just keep all bugs in one section!