House Keeping Update

Suggestions
1

Howdy, long time TU player here. Been here since 2017.

Since I started playing, the game has evolved tremendously. I’d say in nearly every way, the game has improved drastically since 2017, except in one way: bugs. In 2024, bugs plague nearly every aspect of Tower, and I could not imagine that if I was a new player and saw the state of things that I’d want to stick around. It really feels like quality control has gone down the toilet in the past two years or so, no offense.

Condos and Workshop SDK are great, but you essentially need a PHD on all the bugs and issues they have to be able to actually create something functional. The plaza is an awesome place to hang out with friends, but performance is just dreadful if the server is actually populated. Gameworlds are really fun, but can be extremely frustrating when inconsistent behavior or bugs make them feel unplayable (looking at you, SDNL).

Stuff like this has genuinely killed a lot of my interest in Tower. I don’t want to create something for the workshop if desync bugs are just going to make it unplayable for 99% of people. I don’t want to PLAY workshop content, again, because of said bugs. Building in condos is a pain, again, because of bugs. Hanging out in the plaza is fun, but you bet my performance is going to tank and I’m going to get randomly stuck somehow at least twice per play session.

My proposed solution to this? Just stop making new content for a small while. Focus on fixing what we already have. I know we get hot fixes, and I know bug fixes happen in major updates, but there are so many long standing bugs and so many issues with newer content that just get ignored because the next new thing is being worked on.

Please, just focus on fixing things for one or two updates. Encourage people to submit bug reports on the main menu, hell, integrate a bug reporter straight into the game to lower the barrier of entry, something. I just want to be able to focus on Tower again, and not how to circumvent bugs in Tower.

2

We’ve been addressing major bugs in every update, along with performance concerns. Our content output does not get in the way of our bug fixes. Our programmers have been primarily focused on bug fixes and performance. Our artists work on artwork separately from that, and if they need programming we tackle it in a structured way while still focus on bug issues.

I understand bugs are annoying. There’s some bugs that are much harder to fix than other bugs, such as the Billiards networking bug which just got resolved in the latest update after we had a break through on where it was (it was deep in Unreal’s networking systems). Previous updates we’ve been focused on Arcade bugs and performance.

We have some more upcoming announcements that will give a better understanding on our priorities.

6 Likes
4

You’d probably know that the team regularly works on fixing bugs if you looked at the countless resources pixeltail has completely public that detail what everyone works on. You can’t just take an artist and throw them in front of a computer and say “OPTIMIZE THE PLAZA”, and they don’t exactly have infinite employees to throw at every problem, and even then, they regularly fix bugs- Like, workshop maps literally just got added and they’ve steadily gotten less buggy.

It really bums me out when people act like pixeltail isn’t paying attention to something when, like, we get direct progress reports on a weekly basis and you can see them solving bugs in real time. The game just isn’t going to be in a perfectly pristine condition because the game is under active development, that isn’t from a lack of attention on housekeeping, that’s just how game development works. I have literally never run into a bug that hasn’t been addressed in some way in the next update, namely because when I run into a bug I report it instead of assuming pixeltail are omnipotent mindreaders who should be solving all of my problems but just aren’t because they’re lazy.

2 Likes
5

Yes that’s… Why the suggestion is to set aside time specifically for bugs for an update. The games been under active development for like eight years.

I never suggested that they were lazy or incompetent. You’re putting words in my mouth.

2 Likes