OWI´s reputation among long time players is terrible.
frank_william
Member Posts: 0 Civilian
Squad is broken and the devs are showing now intention in ever solving major issues or even agknowledging they excist. What i mean with squad being broken is the simple fact that there are literal game breaking bugs that have gone unresolved for years. And every update there is more bugs that OWI doesnt seem to think are worth time fixing. And they must know about these bugs because they are so extremely common Like the silent m4 burst, a silent rifle? To me that seems like a working overtime through the holidays problem. But i dont know, im not a developer. Another exemple could be "the soundbug" you know the random phantom soldiers unloading their whole mag into thin air. And this one is so common that everytime i hear an enemies rifle going off close to a friendly hab i just ignore it. Doesnt seem like sound is an important factor in identifying where your enemy is.
Anyhow i wanted to make this post with the hopes of reaching the devs or someone responsible at OWI. We love your game but so many of us think Squad is broken. I just cant help imagining a day where squad is broken that our love for the game isnt gonna be enough to overlook all that is broken. Its starting to feel more and more like there will be a day when Squad is unplayable.
I love the fact that you are trying to secure Squads future with emotes, its not hard to see that you have to make money to keep Squad alive, we get that. But in my experience very few people feel like they want to support further monetarely. In my community emotes are just being mocked and the general consensus is that OWI is incompetent and that Squad is broken.
To my naive mind it seems so simple. Especially if you want to sell DLC. You need our respect and we need you to show us that you care about players experience. We want to support you with our hard earned money and every player knows that emotes are just a way of doing that. But over the past year you have really made it hard to justify doing so. The number one complaint or wish is... Bugs, please fix the bugs. why are you not fixing the bugs. You as a company would gain so much in just fixing the damn bugs. And not even all of them. If you came out tomorrow and said "-We have come to the conclusion that long standing bugs and QOL issues is having a major negative impact on players experience. Therefor we will set aside some time to focus on solving these problems." People would flip their ****, atleast the sweaty nerds im used to playing with. We dont want new maps, we dont want fancy shaders, we dont want new faction. We just want you to fix the bugs, bugs that breakes the game. As in game breaking bug. Why you havent already done this is beyond me. Take for example the runningman bug, you know the one. Picture in your mind someone buying your game, downloading and installing it. Joins a server wiithout a queue, has some fun messing about. Then decides to join a server that has a big queue, thniking it would result in better gamplay. yeah sits in queue for 15min. finally connect. LOL no, they get dropped back to the server browser. Theyre thinking ok that was weird but join the same server thinking would still be first in line. No they sit another 20min in queue. Finally connects to the server and gets stuck staring at an animation of a guy running. And this bug was intruduced 2 updates ago?
This turned into rant, sorry. My point is that from an outside perspective it looks like you dont think the example above is an issue worth spending time on. Then why would we want to give you money to do what? From our perspective it looks like you want more money to release more updates, with game breaking bugs that you dont really want to fix, like ever.
I mean no harm. I am terrible at written speech so if it seems harsh, sorry its not my intention. We love you and your game but stop giving us so many reasons to critique you. Bye now
Comments
Fixing legacy bugs(the long time issues) have been a priority for near two years now. A lot of the codebase building the systems of the foundation of Squad have and still are being completely revised/rewrote. The fruits of this labor will start to slowly show over time since the integration to UE4.27 opens a lot of doors for things to start being brought to fruition. Things will be a little rough for a little while, since integrating to a new engine version breaks a lot of things and has some growing pains, but this will be ironed out.
The sound bug has been acknowledged countless times, it's a UE4 floating point accuracy error which becomes an issue the further away you are from map origin source, which unfortunately the larger the map, more issues like this can occur. It's essentially a mathematical error where the math becomes inaccurate the further you are away from somewhere and it tries to send the info to you. So things like ghost SFX and VFX are one symptom of this, other issues are CMD call-ins not hitting where they were called in(this was mostly fixed) and the old school scope jitter bug(which is fixed). It's not something that is easily resolved and takes a lot of time to improve.
In development there's a priority ladder, specific things are much higher and categorized as critical(high) priority and are focused on first before things seen as low priority. You also have to remember, the community only see's a small percentage of the bugs and issues, a vast majority of issues are caught by Developers/Quality Assurance well before the build releases. For every one issue that slips through on release, there's 10 that are caught and fixed before release.
I felt so strongly about this subject I came to visit the forums for the first time after 3k hours of gameplay. I ardently support the work OWI is doing on Squad and would like to voice my deep concern over the implementation of the 4.2 update. My social circles also view this implementation of emotes not as an earnest attempt to improve Squad's gameplay or social performance, but as a novel choice by a high handed manager. The fact that so many bugs go unaddressed by the development notes, and the hard work that is being done to fix them goes unmentioned for extended periods is tantamount to ignoring them in the community's eyes.
I come from Project Reality (official predecessor from Squad), I played that maaany many years, and thank you SO much for taking the time and creating this thread and posting your thoughts, I can relate to them SO well!!! There probably only is one way of getting OWI to read your amazing post (and other feedback threads by me, scroll down on that page) and act on them, and that is, downrate Squad on the Steam shop like I've been doing for YEARS now, and add your entire comment in that review. ONLY THEN, OWI might notice their sales going down and finally realize which bugfixes are important and which are not. My current review btw, with all the crazy OWI-team decision-things that added up over the past 7 years (! anniversary was yesterday as you can see in the date ^^) :
I don’t understand, does the person who develops the user interface generally have at least some experience in working with other different programs?
Some UX problems I noticed:
"In development there's a priority ladder, specific things are much higher and categorized as critical(high) priority and are focused on first before things seen as low priority."
This is not believable at all considering usarmy/m17 appearance update while plenty of far more important(and very visible to the player in general gameplay) things are visually bad/incorrect, and they do affect gameplay(like pla camo brightness). You can't honestly tell me that's more important than getting the new faction right.
On top of all of those blatant balance problems that are known but never touched. What OWI did to zbd04 can even be considered sign of racism.
A new faction(pla) being in such broken state with almost no fix is just hilarious.