How a Bug Nearly Took Down Home Tycoon City
by Bonzo, HSM Editor
One little bug.
After months of planning, developing, and testing; one little bug nearly ruined Home Tycoon for many of it’s potential users. Bugs are consequential software issues which you can’t really always catch until you make a program public. You can catch the easy ones, the obvious ones, and then the testing or quality assurance team is responsible for catching the ones which aren’t so obvious. I worked for a while as a game tester, and if you think it’s fun – trust me, the charm wears off real fast. You can grow to eventually hate the game you’re being paid to play. It is tedious, mind-numbing, boring work sometimes, but very necessary as the development team in charge of programming can’t always catch everything.
Sometimes the bugs don’t present themselves because the programmers have a specific way of looking at a game. It’s an almost specific map, taking you from point A to point B, as they see it intended to be. It is when you hand it over to the users who never want to follow that map that you realize the path isn’t always as clear as you may think. Gamers, as a rule, like to break stuff; we like to do things off the grid which were not intended to be done in the game. We don’t like rules, and we find ways of going off map. Home’s glitching community is a testament to that.
This one wasn’t about a glitch though; it was just an inconvenient bug, which during a Q&A session with Hellfire games shortly after the game launched, I was informed the bug didn’t show up in testing but showed up at launch. This bug prevented your workers from regenerating while you were offline. If you had the bonus helmet from the E3 booth, then you started out strong with thirty workers. Most users had to either buy or find them as they completed missions or searched through briefcases.
Workers are very important, because you can’t do anything without them. You can’t build, destroy, or collect revenue. So this bug made it so that you could only regenerate your workforce by staying in the city and waiting for them to regenerate.
Not everyone is going to spend money. That’s just the way it is; a lot of people don’t see the value or just can’t. Regardless of the reason, the fact that you couldn’t do anything without workers because you didn’t want to wait around for them to regenerate alienated a lot of users. It’s hard to say if the game has been a success or not, but just from the forums and from the general consensus around the Home community, this single little bug was a deal breaker for a lot of players.
Can’t do anything without workers
This is unfortunate, because the game is actually a lot of fun. But I have to admit that I myself abandoned the game until the bug got fixed. There is a lot going on in Home now. I log on, I go about playing different games, and there are games which are time sensitive. You have to wait a certain amount of time in between playing one session to the next. Having a restriction to basically run around an empty city while your workers regenerated was off-putting. Even then, when you have enough workers, if you have more than twenty buildings, you run through your workers collecting revenue. There’s a bit of a balance you have to achieve, really. You collect revenue, and once you have enough, you build another structure, and then you wait to collect revenue again. That process is hindered if you have to wait a couple of hours in that space to regenerate your workforce.
Now that bug is finally fixed. Your workers will regenerate as you spend time elsewhere in Home, or if you are completely logged off. This bug alone hindered me from purchasing any expansion packs, or any content involving premium currency. I did purchase a few upgrades in the form of virtual items I could use elsewhere in Home, which benefit you in game, but I steered clear of the premium currency items, and the entire game as a whole. I like supporting developers because I understand the effort it takes to develop content, especially when they give away the farm the way they often do in these freemium platforms. That doesn’t mean I will throw money at them for anything they produce; I am very selective about what I spend on.
I enjoyed this game the first week, but was so frustrated by the bug I just gave up on it. Now that the bug is fixed, I can return to enjoying it again, and I hope that others who gave up on it completely will give it a second chance. There’s value to this game; it is far from perfect, and if you want to continue measuring these games against the PSN downloadables or disc games, chances are you will be disappointed every time. They are two different animals, and you have to judge them accordingly.
Hellfire shortened the work regeneration from ten minutes to five to compensate, but that has now been made a permanent feature which should help even more for those still frustrated by the unfortunate bug. They are also hard at work on the next expansion, so if you feel you’ve seen all there is to see in the game think again.
For now though, I am glad to get back to it, and to see my city growing again.
October 26th, 2012 by BONZO | 10 comments
BONZO is an editor and artist for HomeStation Magazine.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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
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!