Dtg Are You Actually Trolling The Community?!

I agree I think it is beyond fixing without a complete rebuild.

I still think the problem lies more with how stuff is loading (So the optimization of the core.).

If I understand correctly every train that is not included in the base route requires loading up the entire route associated to that extra layer. Instead of just the size of the loco.

Which makes sense why routes with more stock used causes blurry textures. If they are loading GB's instead of MB's.

Then using if you are say running a German route if the Game picks multiple different locos for frieght it has to load all the routes associated to those trains instead of just the trains themselves. So a 187, 155, MRCE 186 and a DB red 186. Probably only the DB red would be included with the routes. The other ones would have to load the entire route they are on.

Now if they were to add all loco stock to the base game and only unlocks if you own it then it would only need to add the locos and not all the extra memory to each route instead.

I think with the current approach they are only going to fix a bit where if they focused more on the core and loading they would see a better return quicker and then focus in the other bits.

But that may also cause loading time to increase if the locos are added so solve one problem and cause another.

 

I haven’t kept up with NEC: Metro-North, but has anyone heard literally anything about updates to that route? I’ve been waiting for an update to it to see it improve before buying but haven’t a thing.

 

Short answer, No. Long answer lmao no it’s another shove out the door and abandon case.

 

Whilst I agree is terrible, this isn’t exactly a new thing.

I can remember a bug on NTP where the game would crash approaching Miles Platting, making it impossible to do south runs - that took the best part of 18 months to be fixed if memory serves, and that was back in TSW2020 days. And this promising fixes that never arrive goes back just as far.

I think I would prefer it if DTG just told us it probably won’t get fixed. I can’t understand the thinking behind getting people’s hopes up, having people anxiously waiting around, just to never deliver. Maybe it’s so that people aren’t deterred from buying DLC, and then by the time it gets questions more DLC has released and it gets quietly forgotten about.

Either way, it’s such an awful thing to do to such a small and passionate community.

 

At some point DTG got too big and corporate to allow staff to spend much time on DLC that's already out of the door. It's like a slow, heavy train, inexorably moving on to the next station (project). It's a situation very difficult to slow and almost impossible to reverse.

So how do you get it back to a small, passionate, focused team that care about product quality? They could start by cutting down the marketing budget, and killing off the annual incremental game releases, which let's face it, are just big marketing exercises anyway. Then there's the community staff; no offence to them but there seem to be a lot for what is a niche game. A lot of companies I have worked for were management-heavy, more chiefs than indians so to speak. Jobs seemingly only existing to produce meetings and reports, but not actually providing anything useful.

Bottom line is I would not expect anything to change in the near future so set expectations accordingly.

 

Basically, we need the Preservation Crew back and some sort of fast track to get the fixes and updates through what appears to be this unassailable QA and release bottleneck.

I would tread carefully though re the CM’s, as comments in the Metro Rivals demise thread to the effect that money would be better spent on development and artistic personnel than marketing were met with threats of thread locking and forum suspension/bans. Obviously hit a bit close to home but when you have six or seven such posts (if you include the two agency appointments), your core game is full of tech and content debt, a major new IP bites the dust you need to forgive the customer base for voicing their concerns in that area.

 

Was gonna say the same thing re the CM’s….there’s only one thats decent. Get rid of the rest of them - utterly useless. Never really engage with the community really.
I remember way back when there was only one CM - can’t remember the chaps name, a European fella iirc, he was bloody brilliant!
This lot? The less said the better!

 

The silence is deafening again. If announcements are made DTG should already be prepared to come into the community or out with a statement that isn't just PR and that has some reassurance in. That's when you need your CM team out there and doing their thing, talking to people, building relationships and trust with the players.

Despite the games being different DTG need to take a step towards where Jagex have with Old school runescape, the communication between the Jagex teams and players is the best I've seen on any game. The game isn't perfect but the engagement there and the way Jagex are so transparent has just changed that whole game into something special. And DTG could benefit from the same thing.

Look at Medway valley, on paper it was nothing special but some forum members took things into their own hands, with some care and attention they made something special.

 

You probably mean Sam Bennett, a.k.a. 'DTG Protagonist' on these forums, a.k.a. 'Colonel Failure' on YouTube, now working at Urban Games (his dulcet tones can be heard on Transport Fever 3 promo videos). He was (and still is) a legend.

 

I suspect they’re actually meaning Dimitri.

 

Sorry, that's not what happened and you know that as you're constantly on this forum. The message was that DTG doesn't tolerate any kind of disrespectful statements towards their devs. And it's absolutely their right to shut down any thread that engages in personal attacks against developers. And I hope they close this thread as well as some people think it's decent to attack the CMs on a personal level. You guys should be ashamed of that behavior (cc Es4t).

 

I think that the fact that no CM's have been in this rather grown up (for these forums) thread and acknowledged it's existence and that they will speak to JD (he's the senior one isn't he?) about looking into all the concerns raised speaks volumes.

 

Having invested the best part of £3000 across Xbox and PC versions of this product and still having it full of bugs is kind of irksome to be honest.

I don't think anyone at DTG in this thread has been attacked or named personally as being the problems. Users have respectfully given feedback on the lack of community management considering the level of problems within the core engine and bottlenecked updates.

The only person to raise a concern about it content of the thread is yourself, might be worth looking in the mirror at your own tolerance levels.

 

Oops my bad. I wonder what happened to him?

 

I think he just left, I never got the impression he was too happy in his role to be honest.

 

he left in 2019/2020ish, presumably just his own career as there never seemed anything suspicious

 

precisely this. not to name names but some of them treat us as if we have unrealistic expectations and are too demanding. granted, there’s some people who need to have a word with themselves but a number of us have been told to quiet down for saying perfectly reasonable things

 

Whatever the issues are, scapegoating the public facing community team is not going to help. If you want less engagement then reducing their numbers would be the way to go. If you want the devs to see less of what we report it would be the way to go. If you want it to go back to how bad it was when there was one CM then that’s an odd thing to want, It was worse back then. It would be even worse now as there are just so many more community spaces to cover and part of that is an attempt to attract more players to make the game more profitable and that is good for us. People are barking up the wrong tree.

 

The issue with TSW was always
a) a project management issue
b) an architectural issue

Every route is handled like its own game.The loading of different assets from different DLCs, having the same loco installed 15 times because there is no synergy between DLCs (except for layers).

I mean its still called TS2 Prototype for a reason. From a quality and architectural standpoint it is just that, a rough prototype with huge issues.

 

If the CM team are not being allowed to engage with the people on the forums and talk to people particularly through events like this I think that is a very worrying thought indeed. But I don't want to speculate on that too much. Either way we need some engagement of some sort here. We've all spent so much money on this game and none of us have any clue about where things are heading.

Has anything been filtered down through the discord does anyone know?

 

How about DTG skipping TSW 7 for this year -- it is essentially just an update anyway, (postpone until next year)? Let's use this year for catching up all backlogs of outstanding and other fixes. Then TSW7 can be released in a clean state?

 

I think it's a good idea but I'm not sure DTG will go for it. They're so set on their new iterations of the game being so important to get players in.

 

It may well be dictated by Focus/Pullup too, though they haven’t gone down that road with other titles such as Snowrunner, which just gets updates and a Season Pass if you want a bit of overall discount on upcoming content.h

 

Your'e clearly just trying to defend DTG despite their questionable actions.

 

No, it wasn’t Sam. There was another guy…may have been called Dimitri or something?

 

Lol…less engagement than we have now?

 

Exactly my point.

 

I wonder if the community team gathers in a small Chatham beer garden overlooking the Medway on a Friday afternoon and have a good moan amongst themselves about what the dev team have had them defend this week.

 

things can only get worse for DTG (and TSW).... soon enough someone could take legal action against DTG.

every day DTG keeps destroying itself for no reason

 

ah, but you can be sure that's not the case
they certainly have legal backing from their legal department to continue screwing us over without risking being sued

 

The last true CMs where Sam & Nat. Since they left the role, it seems that the community managers role has become purely a mix of marketing, moderation and spewing company propaganda (and sometimes outright lies). You always had a sense Sam & Nat where on the players side, and Sam particularly would say straight up when things where below standard the community expected live on air. And with absolutely no disrespect to Harry, Jan, Alex etc they just don’t have that freedom in their role any more. They all seem (well the odd exception who will go unnamed)decent genuinely nice people doing a tough job with their hands cuffed behind them, but community managers they are not.

 

The legal action thing is a bit much, show me where in any of the agreements in TSWs EULA where it says they promise to provide a bug free product, folks are allowed to voice there concerns, but personal attacks against staff is uncalled-for and very childish considering the average age of TSWs player base, and blaming DTG is short-sighted at best, they have there bosses, and we are not privy to internal memos or corporate meetings, so yes be disappointed with the state of the game, but nobody should be laying blame till they have the facts to back it up.

We all should be keeping things civil, you get more bees with honey not vinegar.

 

the point here isn't a perfect, bug-free product
it's their practice of, for example, withholding updates (especially third-party dlcs) and things like that, which is deeply irritating
and not to mention new releases that haven't had a patch yet (ny-stamford)
or even content released as the basis for tsw6 where a feature that was supposed to be the selling point of tsw6 hasn't been working for (at least) 6 months (ALP-45DP announcements)

 

absolutely. watching the first 30 seconds of this back, (for context, this was following the dresden flughafen and meissen branches being cut from dresden-riesa for tsw2 rush hour) i suspect that if one of the CMs said anything of the sort nowadays it would probably be the last we see of them
https://www.youtube.com/live/eyQFkMmX1Ng?si=xvpwhegGKyrVfjJB

 

The GOAT. I want him back.

 

Last time i said the CMs should have a rebrand to Marketing Team I was banned for 3 days. Just saying.

 

stujoy with all due respect to you, you're talking a bit of waffle in your last few sentences here. The CM's are fighting fire with petrol with the current state of the game, we're seeing their efforts shot down when new players find the bugs that's shouldn't be there, they then leave and never come back.

The current level of community engagement outside of the streams (which aren't personally to everyone's liking), is non existent. They tried to move everyone across to Discord so that things would get forgotten when discussion died on the subject. TSC and TSW have always been forum based feedback and discussion threads due to the average age of players being of the forum generation, sadly the CM's are new generation, there's no old head on the shoulders within the CM team.

 

They banned people the stupidest stuff. You watch they will ban now for saying this.

 

This thread has been conducted in a sensible manner. I've noticed the regular attackers have started posting in this thread, and I'd ask them to refrain from bringing this thread down to threats towards individuals.

 

That was just what could happen, not some useless rant blasting at DTG about money-greediness and some other things.

and I'm not very sure if what I said there was a personal attack against staff or just blatantly crashing out at DTG.

please tell me where the so-called "personal attacks against staff/ and blaming DTG" is

 

To be honest it seems like even some 3rd parties are not being honest about this whole patch situation. I mean maybe we just need to start taking everything with a pinch of salt and stop buying content on release. MAC still hasn't had a patch, now we have to wait for a class 90 patch for a "wrong build" which clearly was a load of waffle at this point. Wrong builds in the past have almost always been corrected within 48 hours, maybe a week tops but here we are still waiting so really starting to think that the whole wrong build card has become an excuse or "get out of jail free card" for covering up for blatant neglicance from developers.

QA capacity might be tight which might be why some 3rd parties have now opted for their own beta teams but well lets see how that works out because well ATS have a beta team but have released 2 broken releases so far so parties having their own beta teams clearly isn't a guranteed win.

From DTGs side, well clearly they've bit off more than they can chew which ultimately is a senior management problem. There's clearly way too many third parties, so firstly cut that down, scale back releases so you don't have people fighting for release slots. Get professionlism from these 3rd parties too, too many times now have I seen people from 3rd parties either attack community members or just outright start blaming DTG publicly which surely isn't going to help.

Then all these new games, clearly they're not going to be big money makers like TSW so stop trying to expand and refocus on stablising your main source of income, once thats done then by all means expand. The idea of expanding when TSW is in such a sorry state seems like a very bizarre decision to make. To be clear though, this is not developers or community managers that are fault but upper management. I have seen some really nasty comments on both the forums and discord regarding how people deserved to get laid off or projects deserved to be cancelled and its just insensitive. However we as a community feel about the state of a game we have a lot of passion for, we should never resort to some of the questionable commentry that has been happening.

Going back to patches we are waiting on, absolutely there needs to be some more honest conversations happening and some priortizing to get patches out if they are actually indeed sitting there but again whos to say they are and its not just a scapegoat. At the point now that 3pp or not, actions speak louder than words. Surely theres meant to be agreements in place that both DTG and 3rd parties have to adhere to so if DTG are not holding up their end of the deal then start exploring options with how to deal with that. DTG, if 3rd parties are causing problems, get rid of them and just look at cutting back how many you have, especially UK wise.

 

Cutting down 3rd party developers will harm the long term life of the game.

The issue is the DTG content release process, as they insist on being the ones to release and patch the products. This is good in some respects and awful in others, but it's what we currently have and we are going to have to deal with that.

 

since when did I ever say that TSWs EULA promises a bug-free product?

Of course realistically games can have bugs and issues, but it's not about that. DTG is doing nothing about these bugs in the game, instead they're just focusing on new-releases that are even broken.

 

if they want to ban me for telling the truth in a none offensive way then that’s their prerogative but it won’t change the fact that the job role has changed and they are no longer true community managers in strict definition of the role and they certainly no longer build relationships with the community.

 

Not really? Look at the game right now. Look at where we were during TSW4. The game has progressively got worse, 3rd parties has grown massively in that time so clearly DTG can't handle the sheer volume of content and 3rd parties right now and considering the lay offs that appear to be happening, I don't see DTG expanding their teams to handle the volume of 3rd party content to keep it controlled and consistent so unfortunately it does need to be scaled back for at least some time until the game is under control and content coming out is properly tested with minimal bugs.

If we were just talking about the core game being the only problem then thats different but the matter is not a single release has come out without some form of issues, Medway was the closest to a perfect release with the exception of the audio issues on ps5 but that was much cleaner of a release than past content or content that has followed it.

 

You were also the same person who decided to make a thread going on a witch hunt after some QA person so really not a surprise you got a ban.

 

Didn’t DTG used to use a special tool that would identify inconsistencies on upcoming content? It would iron out bugs, fps etc. I’m guessing this tool was scraped as I’ve never heard DTG speak out about it on stream in a long time.

Personally no matter how much human intervention is involved, this game will never be in a state that we find acceptable.

 

Is he on an extended world cruise? Given the complaints about faults go back some considerable time, the radio silence must be because he’s stuck in the middle of an ocean somewhere…. Or maybe his ship is stuck in the ice like Endurance and they’re trekking to the Pole… maybe they’ve been eaten by polar bears? Maybe DTG can put us right.

 

Matt explained it before. He lives with his family in UK but his wife was from US, so they go visit her family a few weeks once a year.

 

Surely someone must step up and deputise in this situation?