Comments on: How a Bug Nearly Took Down Home Tycoon City

By: Novus-Cooldown

Novus-Cooldown — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 21:00:39 +0000

Right you are about the day-one bugs, Norse. There ARE, however, effective ways to notify your entire player base about what’s going on through the text pop-up that everyone sees when they enter the game space. We can update our in-game newspaper on the fly, so we were able to tell everyone about the impending bug fix immediately. Then there’s social media, newsletters, forums, Q&As and the PS Blog to reach those who might not have logged into Home in a few days.

For other games that don’t have this feature built in, there’s at least the Home Message of the Day, though that doesn’t guarantee coverage for more than 24 hours.

By: Novus-Cooldown

Novus-Cooldown — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 20:54:22 +0000

Fortunately, we were able to notify every player that we were working on the bug through our newspaper pop-up that you see every time you enter the game, in addition to our other channels (Facebook, Twitter, forums, newsletter, and PlayStation.Blog). We made sure everyone knew we were on the case, and got the word out as soon as it was fixed.

By: ted2112

ted2112 — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 13:29:32 +0000

I haven’t played Tycoon non stop, so I don’t think I have run into the worker problem like others have. It has been smooth for me, and so far I am really enjoying the game.

The only thing I could suggest if you guys and gals at Hellfire are listening (I know you are!) is maybe be able to spin the city view, so we can look at our amazing cities from different points of view!

By: Gary160974

Gary160974 — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 07:37:46 +0000

Every game in home has such a short shelf life that most users have forgot there were bugs. Because they are already on the next big thing. If that was a brand in real life that kept giving you faulty product would we forget so easy. Or would we avoid the brand

By: KrazyFace

KrazyFace — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 07:17:37 +0000

To my mind Snake, one of the reasons Home games are released with so many bugs is because of the people they use as privileged late testers. The people who’re a friend of a friend that gets into Home things early, if you get me.

What they need are people who’re actually keen on ironing out bugs and take their position seriously, to further the game’s progress, rather than “being in the beta” for nothing more than status bragging.

By: Snake_the_Great

Snake_the_Great — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 15:33:44 +0000

It seems like Home needs better tools that simulate the live environment more accurately. They can’t just have nearly every major game coming out with critical bugs that didn’t appear in the dev environments. (okay, yes they can, but we HATE IT)

By: Burbie52

Burbie52 — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 09:55:04 +0000

I did a lot in Tycoon the first week, even waited for workers at times by leaving my avatar there to generate workers and turning off my TV to go do something in real life. I am glad that they have gotten this fixed now. My question is this, the first day or so you got your money back if you destroyed roads and such to fix my beginners mistakes. This was invaluable to me because I didn’t have a clue what to do here. Then after two days or so, it started to not ad back the cash into my inventory when I destroyed something.
Now this means one of two things, either they never intended for that to happen or this is another bug. I am not talking about the buildings we paid for with coins, them not allowing “pay back” for those I understand, I am talking about the ones we get free for in game cash we collect. It would allow people to adjust their city structure when they want to add freeways and the like which are premium packs and without this ability it hinders sales of these things.
Example: I am not going to destroy a building that cost me 28,000 dollars and 12 workers to make to move it for freeway ramps, therefore I haven’t bought the freeway building pack because of this.
I don’t know whether this is intentional or not, but I have a lot of friends who feel the same about this.
People should be able to make adjustments, especially in the beginning stages in case they are new at it like I was and make big mistakes.
Nice read Bonzo

By: KrazyFace

KrazyFace — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 07:32:08 +0000

It was tough going, that’s for sure. Thankfully, I run Home while I’m doing other things, so worker re-gen wasn’t too much of an issue for me, much. Plus, I found another (much more helpful) bug that helped me out considerably, but I won’t elaborate for obvious reasons ; )

Bugs like the worker one in Tycoon can indeed damage a games rep with gamers extremely quickly (thank you Age of Internetz) and being so tarnished will heavily affect its sales and in turn, an entire developer’s reputation and income. What surprises me about this fact though is how some people react to this scenario; being personally insulted by a game’s performance isn’t only a bit daft, it’s almost as if people think it’s done on purpose! Alas, just another ugly indication to how spoiled we are sometimes. Having said that, if you’d spent $50 on anything broken then it’s understandable. But learn from that, and do some research on the next thing you plan to throw buckets of money at in the name of entertainment. As the meerkat says, SIMPLES!

Another good read Bon, cheers.

By: NorseGamer

NorseGamer — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 06:58:33 +0000

It seems, whether any of us like it or not, that very few major Home games can escape opening-day bugs of various types — due to instability, server stress, bad code, et cetera.

I’ve seen this firsthand: Cutthroats 2.0 worked perfectly during QA testing, and then bugs popped up when the game hit the live environment — which VASG has taken steps to weed out.

Mercia, Home Tycoon, Juggernaut’s Cutteridge Ghost Stories…the list goes on. Launch bugs, for various reason, appear to be de rigueur.

What’s sad is, as you pointed out, there’s no effective means of communicating repairs and reparation efforts to the entire consumer base. That said, how a developer handles a crisis is sometimes as important as avoiding crises altogether; if done correctly, they can actually strengthen their reputations with their consumers. So far, Hellfire, Juggernaut and Lockwood have all done this well.

By: Kid Fleetfoot

Kid Fleetfoot — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 04:16:11 +0000

Thanks for a behind the looks scene. I would think that many if not most of us that things sometimes things just don't go as planned but it's nice to be reminded. I believe Tycoon may have failed completely had not Hellfire posted as to the problems on the PS3 forum and given people an email address to write to. Sorrowfully, the only ones who know about the efforts to fix problems may be those who read the forums. And now of course those who read this article.