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"PZ Mega Fan number 1" tester has trouble finding drinking sources in B41.
"PZ Mega Fan numero dos" tester was completely not expecting BASEMENTS in B42
We should let that sink in for a hot minute.
#LANoireDoubt.jpeg
god you guys are mean sometimes
You're not wrong
Poppycock, i am the goodest of bois
I find the dark bits a bit too dark, I don't like it when I can't see anything at all. Will Cat's Eyes affect this?
Running past zombies - me in Dead Maze. ;P (Don't worry, that game's not competition, they stopped developing it years ago, and just keep the servers running. Friend keeps saying Project Zomboid is what Dead Maze could have been if they'd continued with it.)
I expected the spinning wheel to spin. I guess you'll add that some time. :) (And boo at not having the skeleton in vanilla. :P Nice deco btw!)
For once advertisements in the mail are welcome! :)
Any idea when the wide masses can look at the beta branch?
Another section that made me confused was the crafting section in this thursdoid. Specifically, the part that implied the small team of devs on crafting becoming ill and unreachable was a major reason for massive delays in this update. It's situations like this that make me wonder why Indie Stone insists on making these updates so massive in scope instead of more focused. I hope that in the future, you guys will go the Minecraft route of going with smaller updates with a quicker release schedule instead of massive updates every few years, especially when these huge build updates frustrate your fanbase and spread your resources too thin.
Finally, near the end we see some revamped flyers and art tidbits to find in game. These are cool, but I don't fully understand why resources were committed to this when it's also stated that you guys were happy with what you had already. I don't think that this is the time to be going back and redoing work that was already considered good and complete when just about everything should be in the polishing/testing phase.
I am aware this is long and pretty scathing, but I am actually a huge fan of PZ and have a lot of respect for Indie Stone. You guys are true artists, and that's why I am so frustrated. There seems to be a sense from the devs that B42 needs to be perfect on launch, but this is still an early access title. Nobody expects it to be perfect, and you have options available to let your fanbase test the build before it's official release by using unstable beta branches. I want B42 badly obviously, but I would prefer it this year with some jank to be ironed out instead of next year perfected. I hope with the next month's thursdoid, we can get some mention of when to expect B42's release and some actual progress reports instead of vague mentions of what might be happening soon. I make this comment with love, not hate.
OMG ok, i agree this was disappoint but wow, you wrote asf
"I am aware this is long and pretty scathing, but I am actually a huge fan of PZ and have a lot of respect for Indie Stone. You guys are true artists, and that's why I am so frustrated."
And
"I make this comment with love, not hate"
That won me over. You have my respect sir.
We ALL need to be more mindful in our criticisms. I'm not suggesting we need to constantly be sucking their knobs, but we DO need to remind TIS why we're here offering all this criticism
I don't even want to entertain the idea that people somehow get into some sort of gatekeeping about who is and who isn't a megafan. Someone who followed the game for more than a decade, and has been an constant in feedback all this time is a mega fan, even if they didn't keep up with b42 news.
Megafans come in all forms. Ultra-hardcore players, casual players, those with 1000+ mods, and those who play vanilla. Whether someone joined with Build 41 or has been around since 2011, they can still be a megafan.
That is exactly what we're doing and will continue to do until its public release, and what we reported on in this blog is simply the beginning.
We're are letting a myriad of people play b42 for the first time, we started recently and wanted to report on the feedback so far, because it's the last Thursday of a month and that's blog day.
Testing will ramp in rounds up as we widen the pool of testers.
We will continue to get feedback from people with different backgrounds, playtimes, b42-news-awareness, and who enjoy the game in various different ways. All of it is useful for us.
We know perfectly well that the unstable beta release doesn't have to be perfect. This isn't our first beta release, after all.
But simply releasing the build in its current state for hundreds of thousands of people or more, and then sifting through thousands of feedback posts, is not something that any game dev wants at this stage before their next content drop. We already know the build is not ready for it.
When it releases, it will be enjoyable, but it will also still have plenty of bugs, don't worry. :)
It's all about finding a good balance though.
With B42's Unstable release, there will still be plenty of bugs to fix, balance tweaks to make, there will be additional QoL and feature updates as there always have been when a build was released to the public who then reported issues and gave feedback on what works well and what needs love. That's how we reach a stable build, and make an update that people enjoy and love playing.
I hope nothing I say comes off as arrogant or belittling, I understand that most of us share a common love for the game. You guys can't wait to play it, and we can't wait to get it out to you, but the build is simply not ready for public testing at the moment.
Won't blame someone for not reading every single blogpost, much less retaining all of the info in each of them, or connecting dots that aren't instantly obvious. Also can't repeat the same thing every blog, so it's only natural that some things aren't always instantly clear from "the outside".
Some things simply relied on people who had to be absent from work for prolonged amounts of time, and as a result, we had to deal with a delay in that feature but were able to put additional people to the task. We then decided that it is feasible to put some parts of the feature up for a release during the beta lifecycle, because the build does not inherently rely on that on being in the game, and we can put people on more important things.
Nothing about the Flyers is holding back an Unstable release.
They are not taking away dev time from anything that is crucial to the Unstable release, either.
If the crucial things had been already ticked off for an Unstable release, Flyers or the rework of them would not have held back the Unstable release, sorry if the blog makes it come off that way.
I do hope that with the increased resources we can find a way to make future content updates more bite-sized, though. But that will have to become feasible. It wasn't when B42 started, and it also remains to be seen if it is feasible post Build 42.
The animation overhaul started a lot of years before Build 41, and at the time it was simply not feasible to keep updating the live-game every couple of months, while other parts of the team work on far-reaching systemic changes to the game.
That's why we took a huge risk to stop updates after Build 40 and take our time to cook up something good, and I think Build 41 proved us right on that one.
With Build 42, we're at the tail end and it will release on the Unstable beta branch within the next couple of months, unless something happens and/or we and testers aren't happy with the build, for whatever reason. This caveat is always true, release date or not, and we wouldn't be the first to release the equivalent of a twitter jpeg that says "sorry it's not ready yet, it's delayed further" and are then met with a lot of anger and ridicule. But we're not at that point. If we already knew it wouldn't release in 2024, we'd say so.
Our game has plenty of long-standing imperfections that should make it clear that perfectionism isn't exactly the issue :D
I really hope this comes across the way I meant it, and not somehow arrogant or antagonizing.
I didn't take anything in your post as insulting either.
I enjoy interacting with people who love the game, are curious about it, and who provide constructive feedback. It's more enjoyable without insults or conspiracy theories.
Thanks for taking time out of your day to let us know, too.
I do agree that mega fans come in all forms, and all level of skill or involvement, but you can't really be a mega-fan and not know how to find water sources in B41. (or previous builds for that matter).
Likewise, what does it say about the mega fan that they failed to interest themselves in any of the announced major B42 features?
A person can be in love with PZ, suck at it and have short playthroughs that don't last very long. i'd also go so far as to say that the game should also be tested by complete noobs or people who are usually bad at it, because it has to be fun for everyone ideally.
But a "mega fan" loving PZ is consubstantial to them having any passing interest at all in the future of its development, or at least being vaguely aware of announced features. Yet most of those testimonies display a general lack of understanding of the current build, an ignorance of the next, and the way the feedback is expressed, i just don't see much value in it if i'm honest.
That kind of sounds disingenuous to me to pretend like it's completely okay for someone to be a mega fan and have basically not played PZ in years or having taken any time at all to research announced features. Likewise, i don't think it's fair to engage in gatekeeping. It's just that when i think of a fan, i have a reasonable expectation of someone who engages with the game and has a passing interest in its development. Those people being the crux of your internal testing phase just raises questions. How are they picked? what do you expect from them? Is it just to test that it's fun for them to play? Clearly you can't be expecting in depth bug busting, QA testing or any in depth sort of things, goodness gracious, they're barely managing to find water to drink.
Either way though. Because one could assume that the point of thursdoid is not to be promotional material that each month reiterates on all the announced features, i do not understand what the value of reporting this feedback in the thursdoid is. Yes, we were aware of basements. Yes we were aware of the lighting rework or the cities glow-up. Because we've read past thursdoid or the list of announced features, you've expanded on them countless times at this point, and thus we come at the thursdoid with this prior knowledge.
What this all does at the end of the day, is give off the vibe that while the B42 is progressing at a snail pace, instead of an EA beta branch, you're doing a "friends & family" sort of testing, and this sort of debatable feedback/testimony serves to alienate the player base a bit more.
We've had "it's being polished" multiple months in a row by this point, this Thursdoid is just a bit more of the same, with the added fun (with a capital F.U) that some people who really have little business being your crutch internal alpha testers are getting their hands in on it while the plebs are left reading their "wild" experiences "LMAO a basement, so random, at least i can find water to drink now"
I think that Thursdoids work better when they're concise and to the point, and focus on feature showcases and not on internal shenanigans that we don't really have an -in- on. I do always love seeing showcases, city glow-up examples and the like. I don't really love reading inanities about how the build i've been waiting 2y for is being playtested by people who have trouble finding water to drink.
See instead of dubious testimonies and feedback, i would have vastly preferred reading that from you in the Thursdoid. The obvious caveats you gave are a given to most people i should think, but to skip over that crucial bit of info in a dedicated update blog post, i just can't understand.
I will reiterate what i wrote elsewhere, If you must do limited internal testing, i would advise keeping the results of that testing for internal use. Otherwise, the optics of it for an EA title are just all sorts of negative.