As a software engineer, let me tell you: there is no such thing as a bug-free software. The Unreal Engine is not bug-free. The operating system it's running on is not bug-free. The frickin' hardware is not bug-free. The very platform I'm writing this message on is not bug-free. Satisfactory is a VERY stable game. Yes, there are a couple of glitches, but game-breaking bugs are few and far between. Coffee Stain Studios is doing a phenomenal job when it comes to software quality - and also in terms of openly communicating stuff.
As a singleplayer game I'd agree, it's rather stable. But from a multiplayer standpoint, it suffers from many of Unreal Engines multiplayer issues / complexity.
7 Days to Die enters the chat: "Hold my Beer." XD They somehow make it work and I don't know how. NO ONE expect you to replicate their endless alpha experience. :)
Yes definitely. Am not working in the software industry but can learn a lot of the way communication is done by Coffee Stain. Really world class imo what they are doing.
I've been a fan of this game for years, and I often think specifically about this game exclusively for the community work Jace and Snutt are doing. I have no point here, other than I'm lonely and need friends, so if Jace or Snutt wants to hang I'm very far away from where they live and work.
@@DPedroBoh by doing "huge" updates (we did not see that for long time now) it rly makes ur replay it again, very good system, wish more games would develop like this.
Coffe Stain is the prime example of a software studio that openly communicates to their community, I can tell you there's not a single person in my peergroup that does not love them for their amazing work!
This transparency is so good. You guys really have nothing to worry about, you're doing awesome. But the fact you're publicly pointing out examples and ideas of how you could do better is unheard of. Thank Jace, helps a lot. Actually.
I also think communication is the #1 thing to improve this issue. Basically; I think what you did with this video can be done within the forum as well. Accurately marking the tickets and putting a sticky note at the top of the ticket with a short explanation as to why it is marked that way would go a long way.
Even if it's just the tickets above a certain threshold of upvotes/duplicates, it would reduce the feeling of "hey there's this highly upvoted bug and it's not getting fixed". For example, 2 friends and I tried to play a few weeks ago in multiplayer and it ended up not feeling worth it because one of us was hitting crashes (slightly annoying but can be dealt with) but then also got the bug discussed around 11:00 where they spawned as a new character instead of the character that crashed and was no longer near base. So they'd spend like 2/3 of their time finding their original body to kill/loot it. Hearing this explanation about why that might be fixed is very helpful for my friends and I.
Just like everything else though, it means taking away from something else. Time spent focusing on the Q&A site means time not spent on the game itself. Hiring more people just to manage the Q&A site means more overhead for someone needing to watch over these new people, let alone pay them with money that might have been better spent hiring someone else for a different role/department. That being said though I am fully with what he said, where despite knowing how much trouble it is to manage, I'm still not really interested in engaging much with the Q&A site due to the perception where it doesn't seem to be taken seriously enough.
Just wanted to say that ive spent most of my time (100s of hours lol) on the experimental build and the number of bugs ive noticed could be counted on one hand. Considering the state of some AAA games you see released I think its pretty impressive. Good job guys.
Having official responses to some of the old bug reports would probably help people feel heard. If the hypertube bug was flagged as "low-priority, but on the list" then people would at least be able to be confident that coffee stain knew about it.
@@shelbyseelbach9568 While I agree, not everyone is as autistic as me to automatically assume such stuff. Neurotypicals usually need a bit more communication than the bare minimum. Unless the topic is emotions, then they need less than what logically would be the bare minimum.
Your game was worth twice the price when it was first released and with the updates that have come out since I'd say it's one of the best games I've ever played. I got the game on the EA release date on Epic and even bought a New Computer to run the game. I have played nearly every day since and still have my 2nd save from restarting after Update 3 having played over 1950 hours to date. To say Satisfactory is incredible is an understatement. Thank You and the design team.
I've bought the game so many damned times, because I wanted people to play with... I went and bought like five copies when it came to Steam, so I could feel like I may have friends ( I wish I was kidding )
I had to check: I paid £22.39 and have played for (a rather disturbing) 1,362 hours, which means Coffee Stain have charged me the Princely sum of £0.0164 or 1.64p per hour of entertainment. A number that only goes down the longer I play. And I've thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. Frickin love this company.
I legit forget that this game is still in early-access sometimes. That’s how smoothly it handles, and that’s coming from a person with a potato PC that just blew out its power supply for no apparent reason.
Huge huge huge respect for keeping up contact with us and avoiding that radio silence wherever possible as you said. Thank you so much for the work you and the team put into the game in every aspect 💕💕💕
Think in a part the frustration that you might hear from the community is also a good sign. People are only frustrated and will communicate about it to you if they have a connection to the game. As a fan you begin to love the game but that also comes with some frustration if you see your love has some bad spots. Even if you can still enjoy the game 99.99999% of the time. Hope you appreciate the love even if it is packaged differently sometimes.
I disagree, frustration can easily turn into excessive frustration and lead to leaving the game and a flood of hate. The video mostly mentioned "convenient" long-term bugs, but there are also those that have not been fixed for years (especially desync in multiplayer) and are bugs that completely ruin the gameplay for which there is no feedback. Players then feel abandoned.
@@paintspot1509 I know at least one, for example, a bug causing trees cut down by the host to become uncuttable for clients, making it impossible for them to travel with a truck or build in those areas of the map. In short, after a few hours of gameplay when such a bug appears, the "save" becomes unplayable in co-op. The bug has been reported dozens of times by different people, and all those tickets are still marked as open.
@@migegowy My assumption of how this came to be: an unfortunate chain of events that led to those tickets not having a status change. But most likely the problem (those tickets are describing) is already being discussed internally anyway. And as it's a multiplayer problem it might have been prioritized lower and thus not addressed yet or it even is one of those time consuming "no one knows why this happens, as everything indicates that it shouldn't happen" problem, where they just didn't have the time to do an in-depth analysis of all accompying components of the engine / other libraries / whatever yet. Maybe it is a classic case of "well, it runs on our machines. how do we debug it?" or a "oof, if we refactor that part of the code it could backfire on so many levels..." - we just don't know. In other words: Don't be tricked by your own assumptions, that no response means "abandoned" or "ignored". The latter one even would imply an actively made decision. But for either one to be fully true the bug would have to still exist in version 1.0. As long as that's not out you'll have to be patient. Because remember: We are still talking about early access here. Maybe the frustration comes due to the game being very good and very playable in single player and not having the same experience in multiplayer. But again remember: Multiplayer is a whole different level of complexity in all directions: making it possible in the first place, debugging it, testing it etc. I myself work in support and we also have a "ticket system" and my ticket list surely is by far shorter than the one Coffee Stain is having. And still it is hard / nearly impossible to keep track of each and every ticket and its status. And in addition a "in progress" (or other states) alone can be interpreted differently: for my side it's "okay, I have new info I can work on and I will address this as soon as I am done with XYZ" and for the other side it's "oh, finally somebody is actively working on it!". And sometimes this inevitably leads to follow up questions, which have to be answered, which leads to more workload etc. etc. What this has to do with Coffee Stain? I just want to give an example how you just can't know each and every company internal process and thus shouldn't begin to interpret situations that might be completely different than you think.
Thanks Jace, helps a lot! I wholeheartedly agree that being more communicative on the QA site would do wonders. Personally, I'd feel 1000% better seeing posts - whether it's mine or someone else's - marked anything other than "open", especially since that feature already exists on the site. Otherwise posting can seem kinda pointless. Besides that, though, Coffee Stain has to be one of, if not THE most engaging developers I've ever seen.
Wow Jace, you've really outdone yourself with this video (and everybody who helped with the script)! Very concise, not forgetting a single aspect of the issue, explaining everything extremely well and entertaining, and your oratory skills knocked this one out of the park this time. Kudos!
What the best with Coffee Stain, is that they listen to their community and crae about players' opinion. This is the most perfect game studio I've never seen
As someone who has done and does QA/tech support for a living this was a great breakdown on the pitfalls and clarity that is often lacking in communicating how important priorities are for software development no matter the industry that development takes place in.
I think the a huge but simple improvement to the QA site is simply more labels for posts that staff/developers add, and split it into sections/labels. For example, there's a priority section where bugs can be labeled as low, medium, high, extreme, etc... Another could be a few more status, such as : duplicate (link to original), will fix in the future, will fix soon. I feel like that alone would be a huge improvement, as long as they are actually used! Keep the hard work going!
I am thinking that it is the greatest hint in all todays comment. Do You think It is possible to improve the Q&A board? Maybe some additional (community supported?) moderation team?
That would be very nice, but that would also be veeery resources consuming, which mean less resources spent on actually fixing those bug or making those features.
As a software engineer, this 15:00 really reminded me of my current situation. We're starting to grow our dev team in my company and it's just SO hard to re-organize teams in a way that works efficiently and scales with new members being added to teams. I can't imagine how difficult it must be for a game development team to split everything in different contexts, so teams can work independently of each other, and the onboarding of new members is not an impossible and never ending task for them. I am fascinated with Coffee Stain Studios team. I love your no-crunch and wellness culture (as it should always be, though). I've even considered applying to work with you in the future. Keep it up!
I've seen the look on the faces of new hires coming in to an existing project. There is huge amounts for them to learn just about the code base before they can become productive. At this point any new team members would probably be getting up to speed at the time 1.0 is released. Certainly they could be handling some of the small stuff before then but even that risks substandard code and drains other team members that have to support them.
Same for me took me about a year to pick up the architecture and details of our products. Breaking up software in different contexts is actually quite doable. But you really need the big picture of the project. Otherwise, you do more harm than good. But new people are great for testing or adding new features or content. And you won`t get the next John Carmack unless you let him do all the work and mistakes necessary to gain the knowledge.
There's definitely a substantial delay to being productive on a pre-existing project, and a dangerous period of thinking you're being productive but you're in fact introducing bugs and other technical debt that will get worse as you build more on top of it.
Not everyone is a project management expert but this should really help people understand why certain things happen the way they do. Great explanation!
I think the general problem of this always is and has always been to try to communicate progress by using a rigid system with a not so rigid reality. Even the simplest expressions can mean different things in different contexts. Let's say there's a state of "in progress" -> The one side might interpret that as "actively working on something in that very moment" and the other side as "it was read and put on another list to be visible with a given filter among hundreds of other problems and thus is different than only read / only received". And those different views can even be either between customer and company or even between employees in the same company.
Great video Jace. As a Product Manager working in software development, I'm constantly battling with bug prioritization and it's a never ending battle (as it should be). This is a really relatable video and is a good summary of the challenges a development team faces when prioritizing their backlog. Keep up the good work and good on you for being honest about where you think you could do better.
I honestly have no clue how people get this game to crash on a regular basis. I have personally experienced less than 1 crash per 100h of gameplay across several hardware constellations. Some polish, rare frame drops and some actual bugs aside: This game is a remarkably stable and satisfactory (heh) early access title. I could not name another one like it. Keep up the great work Coffee Stain :3
Same, knock on wood I’ve had zero crashes in solo and multiplayer. It’s been solid online. I also run this during my non playing hours on a MacBook in parallels which is in low power mode going through the night and day when needed. No crashes to report yet. The thing is solid. For those with crashes I’d be curious if their hardware just simply has defects. I.e. you could have bad spots on your memory that only hit when it reaches that point. It’s also hard to tell the integrity of hardware beyond roughly testing with a stress test. My latest build with an i7-12700k with ddr5 that does have error checking and 4080 has been the most stable so far. Nothing can’t be fixed without a sign out of windows but even that’s extremely rare.
Two awnsers: 1: Multiplayer, 2: Mods The vanilla game in single player is increadibly stable. Multiplayer adds a hydra of possible crashes. Like: If I'm the joiner the other the host I cannot opperate the buggy or trains (Update 5) It probably has to do with physics or loading the world in a very fast vehicle. And mods: The ficsit farming mod worked great last november, than the ficsmas update hit and the game crashed as soon as you got close to one of the farming pods. Fix: Dismantle it from afar and rebuild, done.
You would be surprised how pc can crash if they arent properly maintained. Sometimes its just windows with broken system files. There commands for it to fix it. Last time there were two Sysfiles entries where it only should be one. Built in scanner detected it and fixed it and tadaa way less issues. Windows is not as stable as it looks like.
i love how transparent you guys are. What i dont agree with "need to do better with communication" you guys are phenomenal at responding to us when we have an issue. Regardless of changing statuses on the QA site.
from my experience your team seem to be one of if not the best when it comes to communicating and resolving issues throughout the development of a game, not that there aren't things you can improve on, there always will be but I am extremely happy with the effort you and Snutt put in when it comes to communicating and addressing issues with the Satisfactory community, keep up the good work and thankyou for such an incredible game, I'm so excited for the eventual full release and everything else to come, love you guys
As a software Engeneer myself, I think it is good to see, that you have a strategic aproach to bugs. A lot of Projects I have seen, went overboard, because the project Managment forgot to formulate a strategy for bugfixing. And I agree: It is better to delay the fixing of a minor bug, if there is nessesaty to fix a major bug or the bug is part of something that is already planed.
I just got the game, I am completely hooked and I’m thinking how could this get any better. I start looking up videos to learn mechanics and found your channel. You are an example of what every dev in the industry should be.
A few months back I was explaining why some bugs don't get fixed right away to my 10 year old (I work from home so he overhears me talking to myself about work occasionally.) So I laughed out-loud when you brought up the leg-braces in hypertubes bug. He'd been watching me play the game the night before so I used that bug as an example of non-critical bug I'm a Software Dev myself and to add some emphasis to the points here about prioritization; feature and bug prioritization is such a fundamental (and fundamentally difficult) part of project planning that being able to correctly guess how long something will take to do and be right even 50% of the time would qualify as a super power! Satisfactory is so stable it's honestly remarkable, you all are doing a great job, keep it up! Also, this is some A++ community communications!
EVERYONE WHO READS THIS should remember, in their various complaints in life, that the people behind the scenes are real people, who have real feelings. Jace is clearly a little hurt and frustrated by toxic players and his inability to please them sufficiently.
@@ArmedSpaghet you forgot microsoft. "hey, who wants windows 11? nobody? great, here you go, your hardware is now obsolete." or my experience with teams: "you have a mic? let me just go into your system settings and fix that. see? now nobody has to hear your annoying voice. not even on any other program, cause we're too lazy to implement audio management in the app, so we'll just screw up your system settings instead." that last one happened to me, on windows 10, several times. and they're still pretending to deliver good products.
11:12 The cloning of a new avatar each load only started for me maybe eight weeks ago... It had never happened in the previous years playing this game, and now it's there every time. I have ten avatars gathered near the Hub listening to the boombox.
Weird. I had that issue in my single player game when I first started playing when Update 4 was new and during Update 5 as well. Funnily enough when I started a new game finally when update 6 came out, the issue went away for me.
And this is why you guys are the best in the industry. Clear, concise, honest and straight forward information that you give to your community in a way that even uninformed people can resonate with it and understand it. Keep up the work guys
Jace, Very well explained. I'm a dev team lead, and you did a great job explaining how bugs are triaged to maximize impact while not wasting time in areas that are expected to change in the future. I started with SF on U3, and have been amazed since that first play how stable this game is in early access. The CSS team is doing an outstanding job. Thanks for making such a great game, and know that many of us know why things are as they are. Couldn't agree more with Alan Darkworld below.
Another fantastic video from you guys. I love how open and honest you are with your developement process, it really gives the rest of us insight into how everything fits together. Thank you for that. Regarding the object limit, I realize it would probably be a nightmare to implement, but would a database like SQLite be a possible solution for that issue?
No, trying to rip out Unreal Engine's active object implementation and somehow replace it with an SQL db probably wouldn't work or help or be feasible.
Thanks Jace, helps a lot! I do want to thank both you and Snutt for your frankness and clarity in your speaking, and how you guys deliver information. It seems like very few companies are willing to be this open with their customers anymore. I do agree with ending the radio silence on open posts on the QA site would be an excellent step towards communicating what is and isn't seen, what is or isn't ever going to be added, and so on.
@17:55 100% agree with this, i noticed this with your game and space engineers.... things just being "open" it is always nice to see updates or some comment stating if the issue has been looked at, will it be fixed sooner, or later, etc.... basically a QN type tracking system that has a task to update the submiter of the bug
You folks do a really wonderful job of addressing and fixing bugs and glitches. Satisfactory is still remarkably stable for an Early Access title. I appreciate all the work you have put into this game, and continue to put into it. I'm just glad you don't let the hardliners get to you :) Keep up the good work!
Have you talked with Epic about the Object limit maybe they'll have a solution? For QA forum: YES to being more active on your part communicating back, and marking issue states, also can give us the ability to report dupes so you could review and close duplicated issues easily. One more thing you might add to the forum is something like "community tasks" if you working on specific bug or need testing in specific area write a post outlining the issue, how to test it, and what data to provide back to you.
It might make sense to consider visibility as part of severity. Blade runners and hypertubes are commonly used enough that probably every player will see that visual alignment bug, so even though it doesn't make the game any less playable, it does make it feel kind of sloppy for something like that to glitch out. Which in turn feeds in to how people feel about how feedback is handled.
Spot on with the point about feedback on the QA site, seeing that a bug has even been acknowledged would help a lot of people to understand that they aren't being ignored. Cheers for the ongoing communication, its always great to get insights into these things :) You and the rest of the team at coffee stain do a great job
I think you guys are doing wonderfully, even in the experimental branch the bugs are few and far between, and they're almost always trivial things. I think this is an important thing for many early access Devs to understand, that you can't develop a game in the most efficient "add all features first, fix all bugs last" way as you would strive to with a more standard release, because there's people already playing it, and if it's broken they get upset. I left a comment about Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts as a joke here when I marked this video into my watch later folder because that game has a serious issue to the point where on most new content updates two thirds of the comments were people asking when will we finally get a bugfix update, and while now it's somewhat better, the game was for a time in a state where it was nigh unplayable and most of the content creators some of which built their initial careers on the game just stopped playing it. I am very glad to see that Satisfactory does this right, and also I'm glad to see all this communication about the game, because even if we don't get a fix, just knowing that the devs acknowledged the issue is a big plus.
I definitely think that the solution is improved communication. This very video is part of it. I already knew that things like how models go haywire in Hypertube would be shoved at the bottom of the priority list because it doesn't affect gameplay at all, but that might not have been obvious to everyone. The bugs I've been experiencing that actually caused serious problem are things I only learned now are known issues, and why they haven't been fixed yet. I think it's obvious that the Coffee Stain Studio team is working hard given how many features keep getting added and how the performance is improving. So most players know you're working on things. However when a bug isn't getting fixed we don't know if it's because we haven't reported it enough, the problem is on our side, or because it's been set aside for the time being. That made me feel rather helpless.
As a game dev. myself I'm familiar with all of the issues mentioned and this is by far one of the best worded versions of all these concerns I've ever heard. I think the suggestion for improved feedback on the QA site is spot on but otherwise please keep on doing what you're doing! And more power to you all for keeping down the "crunch time" in an industry that seems to think it's required for success. Thank you all for such a fun game and entertaining community interaction. :- )
@5:10 but that is what you SHOULD do. People need to understand, it is early access, they are the testers. They are meant to find the bugs and deal with it. If the game is "broken" or "unfair" or "unplayable" that is not an issue that should be resolved instantly. It is early access, it is not a completed game.
Thanks Jace, this actually helps a lot! I am personally quite happy with the way you guys address things. And although some small issues bug me quite a lot, I totally trust you guys prioritizing the work. Mostly because you did a hell of a job till now.
You're doing an incredible job already! I haven't seen any other game in early access being this clear and healthy about their work process. Keep up like this 👍
The biggest bug in this game is that I bought it a week ago and already have 80 hours in it. Please stop making it so fun it’s tearing my family apart (she already took the kids).
You've done a fantastic job communicating the situation and shining light on both perspectives (developers/players)! I can't wait to play 1.0 (I have the game in my library, but I want to play the fin*ish*ed game). But as long as the game doesn't stay in EA forever, I am fine waiting a bit longer seeing how busy and well-organized you guys are working on it.
First, let me say that you have such a good development team, it's amazing what you guys do. I think one of the things that could help the most while costing the least to develop might be some way for someone to see other related bugs when they are reporting a bug, like how stackoverflow has suggestions of related questions when you are asking a question. Or maybe it can send users to a forum post where you talk about how, yes, trucks are quite buggy right now, but we have an overhaul on the roadmap so it's a known issue. In this way you might be able to reduce the noise and man-hours that go into acknowledging all the bug reports. Thank you very much and keep up the good work!
I always enjoy these in-depth behind the scenes videos and this one definitely delivers. It does feel bad when issues stay in a game for a long time but i do agree, you can address/fix it but there is no guarantee that fix doesn't cause issues later down the road. When you're always adding features/new content other systems will break in ways you never expect. Best to let it happen then once you're done adding stuff go back and fix all of it then it won't break again.
Was great, I grabbed the game in Update 5 and reported a few minor issues, or commented on already noted ones. At least for me, when i came back for update 7 most of the ones I noted have been fixed. The most annoying for me was scanner kept pinging hard drives even after you found/opened them. So much more useful now :D Thanks.
It's really nice to get a view on this topic, thanks for the video! Honestly I think your bug management in fantastic! Of course, a few annoying bugs, but nothing game breaking, and I feel like the game, even in early access, is a lot more polished than a lot of released game. I would just wish for a little less bugs with the dedicated servers. There are quite a lot that are very frustrating. But as you said, it may also come from my network or hosting service, hard to tell. Anyway, keep up the good work, in my opinion you're doing as good as I can wish for! Cheers from France
I know bugs in a game can be frustrating, but for me one of the attractive features of early access games is the opportunity to see a game grow, and looking for ways to deal with the bugs until they get fixed. Honestly this is one of my favorite games that I always come back to. Nice to see this kind of video where everything is handled with courtesy and understanding, not many game devs are as nice as these guys. Keep it up!
I just got done doing an "Ya sure i can add that feature in quick and easy. Should only take 2hrs to add in" today. I said that 3 weeks ago. It was just supposed to be a quick little QC confirmation, but no it turned into a massive ball of what if's and scenario's.. bah. they are a trap.
Thanx Jace... for explaining the obvious in a early access game.... Helps ALOT? In my opinion the QA site have become a mess... Stopped using it a LONG time ago.... This is my opinion
As someone who has reported bugs for different games, but not for Satisfactory, it would be amazing to even hear 'known issue' from a developer, or something like 'known but not a current priority - Oftentimes I'm not sure if bugs have 'slipped through the cracks' as you pointed out, or whether I'm harping on an issue that the developers know about, but would a big job to fix compared to the size of the issue. I'm glad to hear this perspective!
Because you were talking about communication, This game studio has the single best communication I have ever seen out of any company ever. Look at Blizzard, look at Mojang, Rockstar, Valve. All of these studios are mute in comparison to you. You guys are truly a one in a million and we appreciate you for all that you do
A big "agreed" on making sure the qa site is more up-to-date when it comes to your assessment of the threads. What sucks is that it's busywork for engineers who would otherwise be more productive. A suggestion then: recruit a volunteer (me?) from the community who knows enough about the game and software engineering to do the reading, distill the threads down to easy questions, and then contact the right person to get a basic answer to update the thread with. Once the initial mucking out of old issues is done, it shouldn't be a big task, and it would greatly improve the connection between community and dev team.
Oh my god. This video was in my suggestion list for 3 days. Like, should I care about a video about QA? Finally watching it and oh my god. This is nothing less than software QA and product management masterclass, disguised as a casual discussion. This should be watched by every young software engineer. You are truely pushing boundaries with communication!
Your point of improving the communication made me smile. You, madams and sirs, are the top of all other game developers when it comes to communicate with your community. I like the game a lot but i´m not playing it every day or even week. But I do always watch your dev stream (not live though due to work) and all the other stuff on youtube and i learned a lot of the developing process of a game and all the things that have to be done around, not mentioned to the game directly. So thank you for that experiance too - yes - I have to say - Thanks Jace, helps a lot.
This is very similar with my experience as leader of a dev department. We are developing a lot of products for the cloud and we have an issue tracker where we're facing the same situation. A good balance of feature dev & bug fixing is really crucial to follow the course to stay profitable. We are working in smaller teams (5-7) who are dedicated to a specific app to reduce the overhead as well. You're shared lessons learnt about maintaining the ticket status is the same we had to learn. You are really doing an awesome job in your delivered quality (product & communication). I'll pretty convinced that your project will work out for all of you. Thanks for putting such an effort and passion into it.
I agree with what a few others already mentioned, having a priority shown below the status on the QA site would show that a bug has been acknowledged while (hopefully) not requiring too much more work on your side. If no priority is given we'd know that it hasn't really been looked at yet. Then again, if we end up with high priority bugs staying on the list for years that would kind of defeat the point, so who knows whether this is sensible. Still, overall I think you do a great job communicating, and most people that actually go to the QA site probably also know that some bugs will be low-priority. There will always be some people complaining, but who cares.
early access games are like a double edge sword for, its amazing to get an early view of the game and give feedback, but for me i often lose interest after a few hours because "i've seen it all" but honestly, your game keeps bringing be back, keep trying out new things and overall amaze me. i have around 400h in and still didn't see everything or even reach the endgame. You are doing an amazing job in terms of gameplay, communication and player feedback. Especially the communication, that is really rare in todays industry. Honestly one of my fav developers of all time. Fantastic work!
I think you guys are doing fine. Yeah, communication on Q&A could be better, but the fact you bring this up yourself shows how much you care and that self reflection is alive and well at CSS. We appreciate that very much! Also, compared to other developers you're doing a great job on the bug fixes even before releasing a new update. There's always room to improve and I love that you're continually aspiring to do just that, but don't be hard on yourselves or let destructive criticism get to you. I don't even play Satisfactory thaaat much (just takes a certain mindset I can't uphold for too long at a time for some reason) I still think you're the game developers with the best communication already.
I actually really like the work you put into fixing bugs. QA site and having real community managers are far better than most publishers do. I know the struggle of getting into architecture and learning the big picture as well as the bits and pieces of code you should work on. But it`s also a great opportunity to force the senior to explain what he did and why and sometimes juniors can bring in new ideas as well. I also really like the idea of a stable and experimental version of the game. I had a great time with some bugs, and you really try to include your player base in the development of the game. Might be worth spending some time internally and on stream to work out the root issue with some bugs. Pretty much like an advanced ticket system where you try to fit a bunch of reports into your own wording. Fit them into your roadmap, and then you can either publish a fix, shift it into a bigger rework, etc. Also switching or committing to tools plays a huge factor in calculating the time and effort you put into bugs. Personally, I think updating satisfactory to unreal engine 5 for a 1.0 release would be worth it. But this step questions all effort you put into bugfixes, as you have to rework almost every part of the game if you switch engines.
Regarding communication (specifically - marking issue status on forums): I think this would go a long way. Our (my role at my company) system has a similar status field where we can set it to "In Progress" or "Won't Fix" or "Known Issue" or something like that, which allows us to communicate to the person who submitted the request what their status is. I think people who have year+ old posts where they're still bumping it with "Still not fixed" might appreciate a post saying that it's acknowleged but isn't a priority or will get fixed in the future or won't get fixed. I love the communication y'all put out on TH-cam to talk about what's going on. You're probably the most transparent company I can think of.
Jace, good vid , helps alot. U7 was for many people just the blueprints. But i noticed a lot of bug fixes as well. (and alot of new bugs to :)) for example i could not find any bugs anymore wth the pipes. Water and oil extrractors got fixed. The way splitters work changed. the way all the generators work (the resources fill up in the machine when hooked up, instead of when the power gets connected. (big change) and many more things went under the radar. Satisfactory has way less bugs now in EA then many AAA games on release day. Anyways, good talk!
I like this, thank you! Really nice insights into what software development is like and the challenges involved. One thing I'd like to add is that a healthy team is a team with autonomy. At work, my stakeholders are internal, rather than a community of millions, but the principle is the same. If you treated bug reports and feature requests as a list to get through, you'd be miserable, and you would soon have no team. You know your capabilities better than anyone, your long term vision, and you need to feel like you're moving forward, not just struggling against a never ending tide of bug reports. No one wants to do that job. It's very important for a team to be able to determine its own direction and priorities. I've also learned that bugs don't scale down in effort forever. It may seem silly that this really basic issue hasn't been fixed, like why didn't someone just fix it when it came in? It's so easy, it's like a single line, surely. But a single line change is not 1% the effort of a 100 line change. You first need to coordinate. Having three people fix this bug without talking to each other is wasteful and frustrating. When you pick up the bug you need to context switch to it. You need to understand the context to it. You need to consider how this fix will interact with the rest of the code base and extremal systems. You need to make the fix, then verify it, then convince yourself you didn't break anything else. You need to write your PR, include testing notes so others can do what you've just done, and then you can move on. Until someone notices an issue or has some thoughts and you have to context switch away from what you were doing back to this to get it through. The code itself is actually a pretty small part of that. And a change 100 times bigger in terms of code will take longer, but not 100 times longer. In my experience, it'll take 3-5 times longer, depending on the familiarity of the engineer with the issue and systems involved (ah yes because engineers are actually human beings who differ). Which is all to say...I get it, and thank you for making a kick arse game. I love it, I definitely feel I've gotten my money's worth out of it, and I look forward to what it will become in the future.
15:36 I've seen quite a few online projects fail simply because communication was poor between the team. Also (I forgot where it came from), but there was a graph showing that as you add more people to a project, the efficiency may go up at first, but quickly goes away after some number of people due to communication issues.
Lol, so, so sorry you had to make this for the community. Great job though uncle Jace, very well done. You guys (Coffee Stain Studios) are in the top 3 best developers that have ever existed in the approximate 45 years of video game history. Keep up the amazingly great, it is what it is, work.
Being a software engineer myself (just for "boring business stuff" ;) as all those crunch nightmare stories always made me hesitate to even try to get into game dev - love your not doing this), I can totally relate to everything you explain here. I really just hope, your community will understand as well. Can also tell hours of stories of bugs just because some admins don't even get their own network. Talking about throwing more resources at the problem: Looks like you have great PMs, because I was missing the joke about the definition of a PM - "A project manager is a person who thinks, nine women can deliver a baby within a month". Keep up the great work (just recently got into your game but immediately addicted) and really enjoyed this video.
Love you devs, thank you for putting so much effort into the game and for communicating to us the player base so honestly and openly. We all notice and appreciate it so much. We can all abide some bugginess. Press on with major updates; damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
As a software engineer in a large software company, this hits home for me. We always joke that our PMs (project managers) think that if 1 women can have a baby in 9 months, then 9 women can have a baby in 1 month...makes total sense, right?!?!
Dude, as a long time game dev myself, lemme tell you - you folks are doing an awesome job, throughout the whole thing. The game is already more stable and more polished than a bunch of "full" releases out there, with much bigger teams and budgets. I'm thoroughly impressed with how well the game runs, considering you've picked quite a tough case - going for pretty, modern 3D graphics, in a big world, but also populated by a huge number of arbitrarily-placed player-constructed objects, so a bunch of both design and tech optimizations fly out the window right there. And it's got multiplayer. Seriously, it's amazingly performant and issue-free considering what you've taken on, and even just in general. And your communications with the players are great too, it's always fun and informative, always understandable, always feels like you're keeping us in the loop in the best way. I want to high-five everyone on this team.
I think the improved communication on the QA site is the big winner for this. Maybe even add a possibility to put a line of text or two explaining why it's not fixed yet? Videos like this are very open and transparent, but not everyone on the QA site sees them, so putting a small text version of it there might help people understand. :)
Fair point made man... I never doubt and see Coffee Stain's involvement in Satisfactory to be anything BUT satisfying for all these years. I think majority of us who understand programming stuff, we know it is not always easy to 'fix' a bug. Many related codes are involved or connected and thus a big fix can mean overhauling an entire batch of codes. Compared to so many game companies, Coffee Stain is basically THE GOLD STANDARD in recent years.
Love the communication here team. Definitely helps to explain things for some who may be unfamiliar with a typical software development team. You guys do a great job setting good standards on game development and communicating back with the customers on changes upcoming.
As a software engineer I totally agree with all the points brought up! It really comes down to how much it affects something and if the feature impacted is widely used or not. Some bugs can introduce many unintended changes if we’re not careful.
Fantastic explanations, they are greatly appreciated. This game is beyond any other game out there. I have never played any game in my life (I'm 52 now) even a fraction as much as this game. I fully expect to still be playing it when I dies 48 years from now (yes, I am planning to live to 100). Thank you Coffee Stain, and thank you Jace.
this was a great chat. as a fairly new dad, i love the fact i can play this game at my speed. I love Satisfactory's take on this type of game play. Cant wait to see what else comes out during this journey.
![[Watch Party] RoV Pro League 2024 Winter | ( Bacon Time Vs FS )](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/lD6z1BugdZw/mqdefault.jpg)
As a software engineer, let me tell you: there is no such thing as a bug-free software. The Unreal Engine is not bug-free. The operating system it's running on is not bug-free. The frickin' hardware is not bug-free. The very platform I'm writing this message on is not bug-free. Satisfactory is a VERY stable game. Yes, there are a couple of glitches, but game-breaking bugs are few and far between. Coffee Stain Studios is doing a phenomenal job when it comes to software quality - and also in terms of openly communicating stuff.
Heck as a software engineer. Most likely the bugs aren't bug free!
Seriously. I've encountered occasional issues with the game, but in both reliability and polish it's better than many fully-released games.
Factorio is bug free
@@ataarono Factorio has biters, not bugs
As a singleplayer game I'd agree, it's rather stable.
But from a multiplayer standpoint, it suffers from many of Unreal Engines multiplayer issues / complexity.
The 1.0 release note should definitely include "Now acceptably stable."
"Now Satisfactory Stable"
@@BanWiz Hurry Upp!!! Get the horses... erm... Doggos :D
I would love this
stability is satisfactory
7 Days to Die enters the chat: "Hold my Beer." XD They somehow make it work and I don't know how. NO ONE expect you to replicate their endless alpha experience. :)
"We could improve communication." - game dev with the best communication ever
respect.
And that attitude is why they have the best communication.
@@davidmartensson273 i agree totally
Yes definitely. Am not working in the software industry but can learn a lot of the way communication is done by Coffee Stain. Really world class imo what they are doing.
I've been a fan of this game for years, and I often think specifically about this game exclusively for the community work Jace and Snutt are doing.
I have no point here, other than I'm lonely and need friends, so if Jace or Snutt wants to hang I'm very far away from where they live and work.
... as they explain that their communication through things like TH-cam etc. is good, but other specific channels can be improved.
There is a HUGE bug with this game... I just can't stop playing it 🤷
Seriously, i "beat it" like 5 times since update 2. One for each big update. How do i stop playing it?
Yessss it's amazing
@@DPedroBoh by doing "huge" updates (we did not see that for long time now) it rly makes ur replay it again, very good system, wish more games would develop like this.
Have you tried to shoot that bug? Or study it, or capture it. Maybe not in that order.
@@youcrom Would a strong bug spray be any help?
Coffe Stain is the prime example of a software studio that openly communicates to their community, I can tell you there's not a single person in my peergroup that does not love them for their amazing work!
They sure know how to make their customers trust them. Commendable.
Seriously, I love these guys so much for their communication. Many other studios will go radio silent, and nothing breaks trust more than that.
Are you trying to say only the married people in your peergroup don't love them? 😅
This transparency is so good. You guys really have nothing to worry about, you're doing awesome. But the fact you're publicly pointing out examples and ideas of how you could do better is unheard of. Thank Jace, helps a lot. Actually.
I also think communication is the #1 thing to improve this issue. Basically; I think what you did with this video can be done within the forum as well.
Accurately marking the tickets and putting a sticky note at the top of the ticket with a short explanation as to why it is marked that way would go a long way.
Even if it's just the tickets above a certain threshold of upvotes/duplicates, it would reduce the feeling of "hey there's this highly upvoted bug and it's not getting fixed".
For example, 2 friends and I tried to play a few weeks ago in multiplayer and it ended up not feeling worth it because one of us was hitting crashes (slightly annoying but can be dealt with) but then also got the bug discussed around 11:00 where they spawned as a new character instead of the character that crashed and was no longer near base. So they'd spend like 2/3 of their time finding their original body to kill/loot it. Hearing this explanation about why that might be fixed is very helpful for my friends and I.
@@WheatGrinding you can kill and loot them??? I always grinded my equipment back 😭
@@asquare3412 Sure can! Also helps if a friend joins and leaves their body in an annoying location
@@asquare3412 Always assume it's cool to kill your friends (Disclaimer for idiots: IN GAMES!)
Just like everything else though, it means taking away from something else. Time spent focusing on the Q&A site means time not spent on the game itself. Hiring more people just to manage the Q&A site means more overhead for someone needing to watch over these new people, let alone pay them with money that might have been better spent hiring someone else for a different role/department.
That being said though I am fully with what he said, where despite knowing how much trouble it is to manage, I'm still not really interested in engaging much with the Q&A site due to the perception where it doesn't seem to be taken seriously enough.
Just wanted to say that ive spent most of my time (100s of hours lol) on the experimental build and the number of bugs ive noticed could be counted on one hand. Considering the state of some AAA games you see released I think its pretty impressive. Good job guys.
for real.
Having official responses to some of the old bug reports would probably help people feel heard. If the hypertube bug was flagged as "low-priority, but on the list" then people would at least be able to be confident that coffee stain knew about it.
If it was reported, they know about it.
@@shelbyseelbach9568 While I agree, not everyone is as autistic as me to automatically assume such stuff. Neurotypicals usually need a bit more communication than the bare minimum. Unless the topic is emotions, then they need less than what logically would be the bare minimum.
Maintaining a list of known issues is generally good practice.
@@peachypet808 i dont think this has anything to do with the neurology of people. Some people just like clarification...
@@poodlecow6525 Yeah but neurodivergent pwople more often than not need it
Your game was worth twice the price when it was first released and with the updates that have come out since I'd say it's one of the best games I've ever played. I got the game on the EA release date on Epic and even bought a New Computer to run the game. I have played nearly every day since and still have my 2nd save from restarting after Update 3 having played over 1950 hours to date. To say Satisfactory is incredible is an understatement. Thank You and the design team.
I've bought the game so many damned times, because I wanted people to play with... I went and bought like five copies when it came to Steam, so I could feel like I may have friends ( I wish I was kidding )
@@stois r/sadcringe
I had to check: I paid £22.39 and have played for (a rather disturbing) 1,362 hours, which means Coffee Stain have charged me the Princely sum of £0.0164 or 1.64p per hour of entertainment. A number that only goes down the longer I play. And I've thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. Frickin love this company.
@@Robonord427 WOW on that basis I'm in it for £0.006189528 thats NIl Pounds and NIL pence
I legit forget that this game is still in early-access sometimes. That’s how smoothly it handles, and that’s coming from a person with a potato PC that just blew out its power supply for no apparent reason.
Huge huge huge respect for keeping up contact with us and avoiding that radio silence wherever possible as you said. Thank you so much for the work you and the team put into the game in every aspect 💕💕💕
radioACTIVE silense
Think in a part the frustration that you might hear from the community is also a good sign. People are only frustrated and will communicate about it to you if they have a connection to the game. As a fan you begin to love the game but that also comes with some frustration if you see your love has some bad spots. Even if you can still enjoy the game 99.99999% of the time. Hope you appreciate the love even if it is packaged differently sometimes.
I agree completely!
I disagree, frustration can easily turn into excessive frustration and lead to leaving the game and a flood of hate. The video mostly mentioned "convenient" long-term bugs, but there are also those that have not been fixed for years (especially desync in multiplayer) and are bugs that completely ruin the gameplay for which there is no feedback. Players then feel abandoned.
@@migegowy I don't know of any bugs that "completely ruin the gameplay".
@@paintspot1509 I know at least one, for example, a bug causing trees cut down by the host to become uncuttable for clients, making it impossible for them to travel with a truck or build in those areas of the map. In short, after a few hours of gameplay when such a bug appears, the "save" becomes unplayable in co-op. The bug has been reported dozens of times by different people, and all those tickets are still marked as open.
@@migegowy My assumption of how this came to be: an unfortunate chain of events that led to those tickets not having a status change. But most likely the problem (those tickets are describing) is already being discussed internally anyway. And as it's a multiplayer problem it might have been prioritized lower and thus not addressed yet or it even is one of those time consuming "no one knows why this happens, as everything indicates that it shouldn't happen" problem, where they just didn't have the time to do an in-depth analysis of all accompying components of the engine / other libraries / whatever yet. Maybe it is a classic case of "well, it runs on our machines. how do we debug it?" or a "oof, if we refactor that part of the code it could backfire on so many levels..." - we just don't know.
In other words: Don't be tricked by your own assumptions, that no response means "abandoned" or "ignored". The latter one even would imply an actively made decision. But for either one to be fully true the bug would have to still exist in version 1.0. As long as that's not out you'll have to be patient. Because remember: We are still talking about early access here. Maybe the frustration comes due to the game being very good and very playable in single player and not having the same experience in multiplayer. But again remember: Multiplayer is a whole different level of complexity in all directions: making it possible in the first place, debugging it, testing it etc.
I myself work in support and we also have a "ticket system" and my ticket list surely is by far shorter than the one Coffee Stain is having. And still it is hard / nearly impossible to keep track of each and every ticket and its status. And in addition a "in progress" (or other states) alone can be interpreted differently: for my side it's "okay, I have new info I can work on and I will address this as soon as I am done with XYZ" and for the other side it's "oh, finally somebody is actively working on it!". And sometimes this inevitably leads to follow up questions, which have to be answered, which leads to more workload etc. etc.
What this has to do with Coffee Stain? I just want to give an example how you just can't know each and every company internal process and thus shouldn't begin to interpret situations that might be completely different than you think.
You guys are doing FANTASTIC and so many of us appreciate all the work you are doing!
Thanks Jace, helps a lot!
I wholeheartedly agree that being more communicative on the QA site would do wonders. Personally, I'd feel 1000% better seeing posts - whether it's mine or someone else's - marked anything other than "open", especially since that feature already exists on the site. Otherwise posting can seem kinda pointless. Besides that, though, Coffee Stain has to be one of, if not THE most engaging developers I've ever seen.
Wow Jace, you've really outdone yourself with this video (and everybody who helped with the script)! Very concise, not forgetting a single aspect of the issue, explaining everything extremely well and entertaining, and your oratory skills knocked this one out of the park this time. Kudos!
What the best with Coffee Stain, is that they listen to their community and crae about players' opinion. This is the most perfect game studio I've never seen
As someone who has done and does QA/tech support for a living this was a great breakdown on the pitfalls and clarity that is often lacking in communicating how important priorities are for software development no matter the industry that development takes place in.
I think the a huge but simple improvement to the QA site is simply more labels for posts that staff/developers add, and split it into sections/labels. For example, there's a priority section where bugs can be labeled as low, medium, high, extreme, etc... Another could be a few more status, such as : duplicate (link to original), will fix in the future, will fix soon. I feel like that alone would be a huge improvement, as long as they are actually used!
Keep the hard work going!
I am thinking that it is the greatest hint in all todays comment. Do You think It is possible to improve the Q&A board? Maybe some additional (community supported?) moderation team?
That would be very nice, but that would also be veeery resources consuming, which mean less resources spent on actually fixing those bug or making those features.
The item disconnect through hypertubes is a fun one to watch, it also happens with masks now too. 😸
As a software engineer, this 15:00 really reminded me of my current situation. We're starting to grow our dev team in my company and it's just SO hard to re-organize teams in a way that works efficiently and scales with new members being added to teams. I can't imagine how difficult it must be for a game development team to split everything in different contexts, so teams can work independently of each other, and the onboarding of new members is not an impossible and never ending task for them.
I am fascinated with Coffee Stain Studios team. I love your no-crunch and wellness culture (as it should always be, though). I've even considered applying to work with you in the future. Keep it up!
I've seen the look on the faces of new hires coming in to an existing project. There is huge amounts for them to learn just about the code base before they can become productive. At this point any new team members would probably be getting up to speed at the time 1.0 is released. Certainly they could be handling some of the small stuff before then but even that risks substandard code and drains other team members that have to support them.
Same for me took me about a year to pick up the architecture and details of our products. Breaking up software in different contexts is actually quite doable. But you really need the big picture of the project. Otherwise, you do more harm than good. But new people are great for testing or adding new features or content. And you won`t get the next John Carmack unless you let him do all the work and mistakes necessary to gain the knowledge.
There's definitely a substantial delay to being productive on a pre-existing project, and a dangerous period of thinking you're being productive but you're in fact introducing bugs and other technical debt that will get worse as you build more on top of it.
@@MrHaggyy ... and will JohnCarmack++ stay and work for the organisation that paid him to make all these mistakes?
Not everyone is a project management expert but this should really help people understand why certain things happen the way they do. Great explanation!
Explaining the software developing process and bug tracking/prioritizing to non-developer is never been easy
But I think you’re doing well !
I think the general problem of this always is and has always been to try to communicate progress by using a rigid system with a not so rigid reality. Even the simplest expressions can mean different things in different contexts. Let's say there's a state of "in progress" -> The one side might interpret that as "actively working on something in that very moment" and the other side as "it was read and put on another list to be visible with a given filter among hundreds of other problems and thus is different than only read / only received".
And those different views can even be either between customer and company or even between employees in the same company.
As a Software Tester myself I really feel you and appreciate that you shared your experiences with bugs. :)
Thanks Uncle Jace, Helps a lot!
Great video Jace. As a Product Manager working in software development, I'm constantly battling with bug prioritization and it's a never ending battle (as it should be). This is a really relatable video and is a good summary of the challenges a development team faces when prioritizing their backlog. Keep up the good work and good on you for being honest about where you think you could do better.
I honestly have no clue how people get this game to crash on a regular basis. I have personally experienced less than 1 crash per 100h of gameplay across several hardware constellations. Some polish, rare frame drops and some actual bugs aside: This game is a remarkably stable and satisfactory (heh) early access title. I could not name another one like it. Keep up the great work Coffee Stain :3
I agree. However, crashes seem to be more common when playing online. The host seems fine, but others who join thier game crash from time to time.
Multiplayer tends to crash quite a bit, but single player is much better
Same, knock on wood I’ve had zero crashes in solo and multiplayer. It’s been solid online.
I also run this during my non playing hours on a MacBook in parallels which is in low power mode going through the night and day when needed. No crashes to report yet. The thing is solid.
For those with crashes I’d be curious if their hardware just simply has defects. I.e. you could have bad spots on your memory that only hit when it reaches that point. It’s also hard to tell the integrity of hardware beyond roughly testing with a stress test.
My latest build with an i7-12700k with ddr5 that does have error checking and 4080 has been the most stable so far. Nothing can’t be fixed without a sign out of windows but even that’s extremely rare.
Two awnsers: 1: Multiplayer, 2: Mods
The vanilla game in single player is increadibly stable. Multiplayer adds a hydra of possible crashes. Like: If I'm the joiner the other the host I cannot opperate the buggy or trains (Update 5) It probably has to do with physics or loading the world in a very fast vehicle.
And mods: The ficsit farming mod worked great last november, than the ficsmas update hit and the game crashed as soon as you got close to one of the farming pods. Fix: Dismantle it from afar and rebuild, done.
You would be surprised how pc can crash if they arent properly maintained. Sometimes its just windows with broken system files. There commands for it to fix it. Last time there were two Sysfiles entries where it only should be one. Built in scanner detected it and fixed it and tadaa way less issues. Windows is not as stable as it looks like.
I want a jetpack lizard doggo! It can keep up with us and travel vertically in our factory instead of staying in an enclosure
i love how transparent you guys are. What i dont agree with "need to do better with communication" you guys are phenomenal at responding to us when we have an issue. Regardless of changing statuses on the QA site.
from my experience your team seem to be one of if not the best when it comes to communicating and resolving issues throughout the development of a game, not that there aren't things you can improve on, there always will be but I am extremely happy with the effort you and Snutt put in when it comes to communicating and addressing issues with the Satisfactory community, keep up the good work and thankyou for such an incredible game, I'm so excited for the eventual full release and everything else to come, love you guys
As a software Engeneer myself, I think it is good to see, that you have a strategic aproach to bugs.
A lot of Projects I have seen, went overboard, because the project Managment forgot to formulate a strategy for bugfixing.
And I agree: It is better to delay the fixing of a minor bug, if there is nessesaty to fix a major bug or the bug is part of something that is already planed.
I just got the game, I am completely hooked and I’m thinking how could this get any better. I start looking up videos to learn mechanics and found your channel. You are an example of what every dev in the industry should be.
A few months back I was explaining why some bugs don't get fixed right away to my 10 year old (I work from home so he overhears me talking to myself about work occasionally.) So I laughed out-loud when you brought up the leg-braces in hypertubes bug. He'd been watching me play the game the night before so I used that bug as an example of non-critical bug
I'm a Software Dev myself and to add some emphasis to the points here about prioritization; feature and bug prioritization is such a fundamental (and fundamentally difficult) part of project planning that being able to correctly guess how long something will take to do and be right even 50% of the time would qualify as a super power!
Satisfactory is so stable it's honestly remarkable, you all are doing a great job, keep it up!
Also, this is some A++ community communications!
I've never seen any other game dev for any other game communicate as well as you all do. Keep up the good work.
This transparency and communication is wonderful, man. Great job!
Being a developer myself I love how open and honest you are communicating the limitations of what a team can achieve.
As the devs over at Ghost Ship said in one of their latest patches: "a game with no bugs is a game with no players"
Thanks Jace! Helps a lot!
The only good bug, is a dead bug! Remember Klendathu!
I'd like to know more...
EVERYONE WHO READS THIS
should remember, in their various complaints in life, that the people behind the scenes are real people, who have real feelings. Jace is clearly a little hurt and frustrated by toxic players and his inability to please them sufficiently.
Except people who work for Meta and Nestle and many oil companies. Those people can be pretty cruel and not even human.
@@ArmedSpaghet you forgot microsoft. "hey, who wants windows 11? nobody? great, here you go, your hardware is now obsolete." or my experience with teams: "you have a mic? let me just go into your system settings and fix that. see? now nobody has to hear your annoying voice. not even on any other program, cause we're too lazy to implement audio management in the app, so we'll just screw up your system settings instead."
that last one happened to me, on windows 10, several times. and they're still pretending to deliver good products.
Wow this comment is so woke of you I'm not going to lie kinda gay
11:12 The cloning of a new avatar each load only started for me maybe eight weeks ago... It had never happened in the previous years playing this game, and now it's there every time. I have ten avatars gathered near the Hub listening to the boombox.
Interesting. I had that issue like 2 years ago, but now I do not. I use experimental Branch.
@@markoprusevic9175 I had been on the Exp. branch and recently changed to EA when Update 7 dropped. Wonder if there is something there...?
Weird. I had that issue in my single player game when I first started playing when Update 4 was new and during Update 5 as well. Funnily enough when I started a new game finally when update 6 came out, the issue went away for me.
800 hours of gameplay so far...still thinking about factory building while at work...doing a great job Jace and team
i'm closer to 1500 hours, it's still fun.
There goes my wife and job…
And this is why you guys are the best in the industry.
Clear, concise, honest and straight forward information that you give to your community in a way that even uninformed people can resonate with it and understand it.
Keep up the work guys
You guys are doing a wonderful job, and you striving to improve is more than we can ask for. Thank you CSS!
Jace, Very well explained. I'm a dev team lead, and you did a great job explaining how bugs are triaged to maximize impact while not wasting time in areas that are expected to change in the future. I started with SF on U3, and have been amazed since that first play how stable this game is in early access. The CSS team is doing an outstanding job. Thanks for making such a great game, and know that many of us know why things are as they are. Couldn't agree more with Alan Darkworld below.
Another fantastic video from you guys. I love how open and honest you are with your developement process, it really gives the rest of us insight into how everything fits together. Thank you for that. Regarding the object limit, I realize it would probably be a nightmare to implement, but would a database like SQLite be a possible solution for that issue?
No, trying to rip out Unreal Engine's active object implementation and somehow replace it with an SQL db probably wouldn't work or help or be feasible.
Thanks Jace, helps a lot!
I do want to thank both you and Snutt for your frankness and clarity in your speaking, and how you guys deliver information. It seems like very few companies are willing to be this open with their customers anymore.
I do agree with ending the radio silence on open posts on the QA site would be an excellent step towards communicating what is and isn't seen, what is or isn't ever going to be added, and so on.
@17:55 100% agree with this, i noticed this with your game and space engineers.... things just being "open" it is always nice to see updates or some comment stating if the issue has been looked at, will it be fixed sooner, or later, etc.... basically a QN type tracking system that has a task to update the submiter of the bug
You folks do a really wonderful job of addressing and fixing bugs and glitches. Satisfactory is still remarkably stable for an Early Access title. I appreciate all the work you have put into this game, and continue to put into it. I'm just glad you don't let the hardliners get to you :) Keep up the good work!
I have so much respect for the amount of work that goes into creating and maintaining a game, you guys are doing an amazing job, keep it up!
Have you talked with Epic about the Object limit maybe they'll have a solution?
For QA forum:
YES to being more active on your part communicating back, and marking issue states, also can give us the ability to report dupes so you could review and close duplicated issues easily.
One more thing you might add to the forum is something like "community tasks" if you working on specific bug or need testing in specific area write a post outlining the issue, how to test it, and what data to provide back to you.
It might make sense to consider visibility as part of severity. Blade runners and hypertubes are commonly used enough that probably every player will see that visual alignment bug, so even though it doesn't make the game any less playable, it does make it feel kind of sloppy for something like that to glitch out. Which in turn feeds in to how people feel about how feedback is handled.
Spot on with the point about feedback on the QA site, seeing that a bug has even been acknowledged would help a lot of people to understand that they aren't being ignored. Cheers for the ongoing communication, its always great to get insights into these things :) You and the rest of the team at coffee stain do a great job
There's a bug in the game... It looks like a kitten sometimes?
I think you guys are doing wonderfully, even in the experimental branch the bugs are few and far between, and they're almost always trivial things. I think this is an important thing for many early access Devs to understand, that you can't develop a game in the most efficient "add all features first, fix all bugs last" way as you would strive to with a more standard release, because there's people already playing it, and if it's broken they get upset.
I left a comment about Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts as a joke here when I marked this video into my watch later folder because that game has a serious issue to the point where on most new content updates two thirds of the comments were people asking when will we finally get a bugfix update, and while now it's somewhat better, the game was for a time in a state where it was nigh unplayable and most of the content creators some of which built their initial careers on the game just stopped playing it.
I am very glad to see that Satisfactory does this right, and also I'm glad to see all this communication about the game, because even if we don't get a fix, just knowing that the devs acknowledged the issue is a big plus.
I definitely think that the solution is improved communication. This very video is part of it. I already knew that things like how models go haywire in Hypertube would be shoved at the bottom of the priority list because it doesn't affect gameplay at all, but that might not have been obvious to everyone.
The bugs I've been experiencing that actually caused serious problem are things I only learned now are known issues, and why they haven't been fixed yet. I think it's obvious that the Coffee Stain Studio team is working hard given how many features keep getting added and how the performance is improving. So most players know you're working on things. However when a bug isn't getting fixed we don't know if it's because we haven't reported it enough, the problem is on our side, or because it's been set aside for the time being. That made me feel rather helpless.
As a game dev. myself I'm familiar with all of the issues mentioned and this is by far one of the best worded versions of all these concerns I've ever heard. I think the suggestion for improved feedback on the QA site is spot on but otherwise please keep on doing what you're doing! And more power to you all for keeping down the "crunch time" in an industry that seems to think it's required for success. Thank you all for such a fun game and entertaining community interaction. :- )
@5:10 but that is what you SHOULD do.
People need to understand, it is early access, they are the testers. They are meant to find the bugs and deal with it. If the game is "broken" or "unfair" or "unplayable" that is not an issue that should be resolved instantly. It is early access, it is not a completed game.
Some bugs are acceptable, yes. But "steaming pile of trash" is not acceptable - in our opinion - for people who have paid $30 for our game.
Keep making videos like this. I really like hearing about the Dev Process and how stuff works internally
oh so you get to defend your game against bugs. but we dont get to defend our factories against bugs ingame.
and we never will :)
you can defend yourself from the stingers though!
Imagine building a bunch of jump pads on a huge wall around your factory, and feeding toxic waste onto them with conveyor belts…
@@CoffeeStainStudios gief horde mode base defense!
Thanks Jace, this actually helps a lot! I am personally quite happy with the way you guys address things. And although some small issues bug me quite a lot, I totally trust you guys prioritizing the work. Mostly because you did a hell of a job till now.
You're doing an incredible job already! I haven't seen any other game in early access being this clear and healthy about their work process. Keep up like this 👍
The biggest bug in this game is that I bought it a week ago and already have 80 hours in it. Please stop making it so fun it’s tearing my family apart (she already took the kids).
You've done a fantastic job communicating the situation and shining light on both perspectives (developers/players)!
I can't wait to play 1.0 (I have the game in my library, but I want to play the fin*ish*ed game). But as long as the game doesn't stay in EA forever, I am fine waiting a bit longer seeing how busy and well-organized you guys are working on it.
First, let me say that you have such a good development team, it's amazing what you guys do.
I think one of the things that could help the most while costing the least to develop might be some way for someone to see other related bugs when they are reporting a bug, like how stackoverflow has suggestions of related questions when you are asking a question.
Or maybe it can send users to a forum post where you talk about how, yes, trucks are quite buggy right now, but we have an overhaul on the roadmap so it's a known issue.
In this way you might be able to reduce the noise and man-hours that go into acknowledging all the bug reports.
Thank you very much and keep up the good work!
Damn you guys are so open about your development methodologies, Kudos to you and your team.
I always enjoy these in-depth behind the scenes videos and this one definitely delivers. It does feel bad when issues stay in a game for a long time but i do agree, you can address/fix it but there is no guarantee that fix doesn't cause issues later down the road. When you're always adding features/new content other systems will break in ways you never expect. Best to let it happen then once you're done adding stuff go back and fix all of it then it won't break again.
Was great, I grabbed the game in Update 5 and reported a few minor issues, or commented on already noted ones. At least for me, when i came back for update 7 most of the ones I noted have been fixed. The most annoying for me was scanner kept pinging hard drives even after you found/opened them. So much more useful now :D Thanks.
It's really nice to get a view on this topic, thanks for the video! Honestly I think your bug management in fantastic! Of course, a few annoying bugs, but nothing game breaking, and I feel like the game, even in early access, is a lot more polished than a lot of released game.
I would just wish for a little less bugs with the dedicated servers. There are quite a lot that are very frustrating. But as you said, it may also come from my network or hosting service, hard to tell.
Anyway, keep up the good work, in my opinion you're doing as good as I can wish for!
Cheers from France
I know bugs in a game can be frustrating, but for me one of the attractive features of early access games is the opportunity to see a game grow, and looking for ways to deal with the bugs until they get fixed. Honestly this is one of my favorite games that I always come back to. Nice to see this kind of video where everything is handled with courtesy and understanding, not many game devs are as nice as these guys.
Keep it up!
I just got done doing an "Ya sure i can add that feature in quick and easy. Should only take 2hrs to add in" today. I said that 3 weeks ago. It was just supposed to be a quick little QC confirmation, but no it turned into a massive ball of what if's and scenario's.. bah. they are a trap.
Thanx Jace... for explaining the obvious in a early access game.... Helps ALOT?
In my opinion the QA site have become a mess... Stopped using it a LONG time ago.... This is my opinion
As someone who has reported bugs for different games, but not for Satisfactory, it would be amazing to even hear 'known issue' from a developer, or something like 'known but not a current priority - Oftentimes I'm not sure if bugs have 'slipped through the cracks' as you pointed out, or whether I'm harping on an issue that the developers know about, but would a big job to fix compared to the size of the issue.
I'm glad to hear this perspective!
Huge respect for trying to tackle this topic with your community. Often has no good resolution. Love it.
Because you were talking about communication,
This game studio has the single best communication I have ever seen out of any company ever. Look at Blizzard, look at Mojang, Rockstar, Valve. All of these studios are mute in comparison to you. You guys are truly a one in a million and we appreciate you for all that you do
A big "agreed" on making sure the qa site is more up-to-date when it comes to your assessment of the threads. What sucks is that it's busywork for engineers who would otherwise be more productive. A suggestion then: recruit a volunteer (me?) from the community who knows enough about the game and software engineering to do the reading, distill the threads down to easy questions, and then contact the right person to get a basic answer to update the thread with. Once the initial mucking out of old issues is done, it shouldn't be a big task, and it would greatly improve the connection between community and dev team.
Oh my god. This video was in my suggestion list for 3 days. Like, should I care about a video about QA? Finally watching it and oh my god. This is nothing less than software QA and product management masterclass, disguised as a casual discussion. This should be watched by every young software engineer. You are truely pushing boundaries with communication!
Your point of improving the communication made me smile. You, madams and sirs, are the top of all other game developers when it comes to communicate with your community. I like the game a lot but i´m not playing it every day or even week. But I do always watch your dev stream (not live though due to work) and all the other stuff on youtube and i learned a lot of the developing process of a game and all the things that have to be done around, not mentioned to the game directly. So thank you for that experiance too - yes - I have to say - Thanks Jace, helps a lot.
This is very similar with my experience as leader of a dev department. We are developing a lot of products for the cloud and we have an issue tracker where we're facing the same situation. A good balance of feature dev & bug fixing is really crucial to follow the course to stay profitable. We are working in smaller teams (5-7) who are dedicated to a specific app to reduce the overhead as well. You're shared lessons learnt about maintaining the ticket status is the same we had to learn.
You are really doing an awesome job in your delivered quality (product & communication). I'll pretty convinced that your project will work out for all of you. Thanks for putting such an effort and passion into it.
I agree with what a few others already mentioned, having a priority shown below the status on the QA site would show that a bug has been acknowledged while (hopefully) not requiring too much more work on your side. If no priority is given we'd know that it hasn't really been looked at yet. Then again, if we end up with high priority bugs staying on the list for years that would kind of defeat the point, so who knows whether this is sensible.
Still, overall I think you do a great job communicating, and most people that actually go to the QA site probably also know that some bugs will be low-priority. There will always be some people complaining, but who cares.
This is a great overview in general not just for your studio but about bug priotization in general! awesome!!
I really enjoyed this video. So refreshing to see a game developer explaining things so clearly and honestly!
the blade runner bug should become a feature in 1.0 imo.
it can just randomly happen with a super low chance as a funny nod to early access.
early access games are like a double edge sword for, its amazing to get an early view of the game and give feedback, but for me i often lose interest after a few hours because "i've seen it all" but honestly, your game keeps bringing be back, keep trying out new things and overall amaze me. i have around 400h in and still didn't see everything or even reach the endgame. You are doing an amazing job in terms of gameplay, communication and player feedback. Especially the communication, that is really rare in todays industry. Honestly one of my fav developers of all time. Fantastic work!
I think you guys are doing fine. Yeah, communication on Q&A could be better, but the fact you bring this up yourself shows how much you care and that self reflection is alive and well at CSS. We appreciate that very much!
Also, compared to other developers you're doing a great job on the bug fixes even before releasing a new update.
There's always room to improve and I love that you're continually aspiring to do just that, but don't be hard on yourselves or let destructive criticism get to you.
I don't even play Satisfactory thaaat much (just takes a certain mindset I can't uphold for too long at a time for some reason) I still think you're the game developers with the best communication already.
I actually really like the work you put into fixing bugs. QA site and having real community managers are far better than most publishers do. I know the struggle of getting into architecture and learning the big picture as well as the bits and pieces of code you should work on. But it`s also a great opportunity to force the senior to explain what he did and why and sometimes juniors can bring in new ideas as well.
I also really like the idea of a stable and experimental version of the game. I had a great time with some bugs, and you really try to include your player base in the development of the game.
Might be worth spending some time internally and on stream to work out the root issue with some bugs. Pretty much like an advanced ticket system where you try to fit a bunch of reports into your own wording. Fit them into your roadmap, and then you can either publish a fix, shift it into a bigger rework, etc.
Also switching or committing to tools plays a huge factor in calculating the time and effort you put into bugs. Personally, I think updating satisfactory to unreal engine 5 for a 1.0 release would be worth it. But this step questions all effort you put into bugfixes, as you have to rework almost every part of the game if you switch engines.
Regarding communication (specifically - marking issue status on forums): I think this would go a long way. Our (my role at my company) system has a similar status field where we can set it to "In Progress" or "Won't Fix" or "Known Issue" or something like that, which allows us to communicate to the person who submitted the request what their status is. I think people who have year+ old posts where they're still bumping it with "Still not fixed" might appreciate a post saying that it's acknowleged but isn't a priority or will get fixed in the future or won't get fixed.
I love the communication y'all put out on TH-cam to talk about what's going on. You're probably the most transparent company I can think of.
Jace, good vid , helps alot. U7 was for many people just the blueprints. But i noticed a lot of bug fixes as well. (and alot of new bugs to :)) for example i could not find any bugs anymore wth the pipes. Water and oil extrractors got fixed. The way splitters work changed. the way all the generators work (the resources fill up in the machine when hooked up, instead of when the power gets connected. (big change) and many more things went under the radar. Satisfactory has way less bugs now in EA then many AAA games on release day. Anyways, good talk!
I like this, thank you! Really nice insights into what software development is like and the challenges involved.
One thing I'd like to add is that a healthy team is a team with autonomy. At work, my stakeholders are internal, rather than a community of millions, but the principle is the same. If you treated bug reports and feature requests as a list to get through, you'd be miserable, and you would soon have no team. You know your capabilities better than anyone, your long term vision, and you need to feel like you're moving forward, not just struggling against a never ending tide of bug reports. No one wants to do that job. It's very important for a team to be able to determine its own direction and priorities.
I've also learned that bugs don't scale down in effort forever. It may seem silly that this really basic issue hasn't been fixed, like why didn't someone just fix it when it came in? It's so easy, it's like a single line, surely. But a single line change is not 1% the effort of a 100 line change.
You first need to coordinate. Having three people fix this bug without talking to each other is wasteful and frustrating. When you pick up the bug you need to context switch to it. You need to understand the context to it. You need to consider how this fix will interact with the rest of the code base and extremal systems. You need to make the fix, then verify it, then convince yourself you didn't break anything else. You need to write your PR, include testing notes so others can do what you've just done, and then you can move on. Until someone notices an issue or has some thoughts and you have to context switch away from what you were doing back to this to get it through.
The code itself is actually a pretty small part of that. And a change 100 times bigger in terms of code will take longer, but not 100 times longer. In my experience, it'll take 3-5 times longer, depending on the familiarity of the engineer with the issue and systems involved (ah yes because engineers are actually human beings who differ).
Which is all to say...I get it, and thank you for making a kick arse game. I love it, I definitely feel I've gotten my money's worth out of it, and I look forward to what it will become in the future.
15:36 I've seen quite a few online projects fail simply because communication was poor between the team. Also (I forgot where it came from), but there was a graph showing that as you add more people to a project, the efficiency may go up at first, but quickly goes away after some number of people due to communication issues.
Lol, so, so sorry you had to make this for the community. Great job though uncle Jace, very well done. You guys (Coffee Stain Studios) are in the top 3 best developers that have ever existed in the approximate 45 years of video game history. Keep up the amazingly great, it is what it is, work.
Being a software engineer myself (just for "boring business stuff" ;) as all those crunch nightmare stories always made me hesitate to even try to get into game dev - love your not doing this), I can totally relate to everything you explain here. I really just hope, your community will understand as well. Can also tell hours of stories of bugs just because some admins don't even get their own network.
Talking about throwing more resources at the problem: Looks like you have great PMs, because I was missing the joke about the definition of a PM - "A project manager is a person who thinks, nine women can deliver a baby within a month".
Keep up the great work (just recently got into your game but immediately addicted) and really enjoyed this video.
Love you devs, thank you for putting so much effort into the game and for communicating to us the player base so honestly and openly. We all notice and appreciate it so much.
We can all abide some bugginess. Press on with major updates; damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!
As a software engineer in a large software company, this hits home for me. We always joke that our PMs (project managers) think that if 1 women can have a baby in 9 months, then 9 women can have a baby in 1 month...makes total sense, right?!?!
Dude, as a long time game dev myself, lemme tell you - you folks are doing an awesome job, throughout the whole thing. The game is already more stable and more polished than a bunch of "full" releases out there, with much bigger teams and budgets. I'm thoroughly impressed with how well the game runs, considering you've picked quite a tough case - going for pretty, modern 3D graphics, in a big world, but also populated by a huge number of arbitrarily-placed player-constructed objects, so a bunch of both design and tech optimizations fly out the window right there. And it's got multiplayer. Seriously, it's amazingly performant and issue-free considering what you've taken on, and even just in general. And your communications with the players are great too, it's always fun and informative, always understandable, always feels like you're keeping us in the loop in the best way. I want to high-five everyone on this team.
I think the improved communication on the QA site is the big winner for this. Maybe even add a possibility to put a line of text or two explaining why it's not fixed yet? Videos like this are very open and transparent, but not everyone on the QA site sees them, so putting a small text version of it there might help people understand. :)
Fair point made man... I never doubt and see Coffee Stain's involvement in Satisfactory to be anything BUT satisfying for all these years. I think majority of us who understand programming stuff, we know it is not always easy to 'fix' a bug. Many related codes are involved or connected and thus a big fix can mean overhauling an entire batch of codes. Compared to so many game companies, Coffee Stain is basically THE GOLD STANDARD in recent years.
Love the communication here team. Definitely helps to explain things for some who may be unfamiliar with a typical software development team. You guys do a great job setting good standards on game development and communicating back with the customers on changes upcoming.
As a software engineer I totally agree with all the points brought up! It really comes down to how much it affects something and if the feature impacted is widely used or not. Some bugs can introduce many unintended changes if we’re not careful.
Fantastic explanations, they are greatly appreciated. This game is beyond any other game out there. I have never played any game in my life (I'm 52 now) even a fraction as much as this game. I fully expect to still be playing it when I dies 48 years from now (yes, I am planning to live to 100). Thank you Coffee Stain, and thank you Jace.
this was a great chat. as a fairly new dad, i love the fact i can play this game at my speed. I love Satisfactory's take on this type of game play. Cant wait to see what else comes out during this journey.