Numerous bugs and suggestions

[kysmartman]

I've enjoyed the game with 1.3 as I had dabbled a little with 1.2 a few years ago. However, I've run into several bugs, and one of them is pretty severe so I thought I'd post them. This is with the real-world database in the game (haven't downloaded a mod yet) on Medium difficulty and been playing for just over 3 months in-game.

1. This is the big one. I signed my 19th artist (3 bands so 16th solo artist) and did a song writing session immediately for 10 days. Got 0 songs written (none showing up in the emails so just 0 were written). Tried again for 8 days with a mix of songwriters (she can't write herself) with 4 writers this time after 5 the first time. I'm almost done and have 0 songs. I just sent one of my existing artists to write a few more songs to get to the 10 song threshold for an album (See #2 for why I need it), and it has only been a few days but 0 songs written again with him writing with one or two others. So, I'm worried that I've run into that bug I swear I saw on here where songwriting just stops. I can buy songs just fine, and they're populating every week just fine. Really would hate for my game to come to a screeching halt as I finally have most people ready to release an album or EP. I didn't do anything radical. I'd already released at least one single, think it was out in a few regions, but hadn't scheduled a tour yet. I did back out on releasing an album since it automatically takes you into releasing it when you click approve just to figure out how much money I'd need to release it.

2. The reason I had to send the one artist back to do some songwriting is that when you pick songwriters then hit the real artists checkmark spot, that de-selects every writer you've selected. Which you don't realize when you're just using your artist so the cost remains 0. This produced 4 songs all below 35 quality as I didn't eat the cost just to see what would happen once I realized it.

3. When I manually tried to set the venues for a 50 show world tour, the game glitched twice when I selected the venue. It wouldn't show up on the list. The first time, it wasn't a big deal as it was like the 10th stop so I could just go back in and pick the venue again. However, when it did it again on the 50th spot, I couldn't fix the problem resulting in having to use the quite frankly terrible auto-picker. I'm also wondering if this somehow stripped out my 2 additional opening acts as the tour doesn't show up on either of their calandars. But the auto-scheduler needs a major overhaul as it needs to group continents together. I've got US-Ireland-US-Europe starting the tour. It starts to smooth out as it goes on, but basically I had to just set it to 2 days on both to smooth things out as it'll also slam like 2 weeks of tours together when it stays in the same continent on the default 1 day off which is too much imo.

4. I'll have dates on videos be all wrong despite them being shot correctly. So, I'll do one in early Sept. and it'll say it will start filming either in mid-October or Jan. of next year. It's a display glitch, but I have no idea why it'd pull those dates.

5. Since I can't find any help file or guide here or in the files, I have no idea if my staff is ludicrously low or what, but the suggested singles (and I suspect EPs but they haven't released yet) production total are ridiculous to the point that I don't know if Ariana Grande's first single is going to turn a profit. I severely cut the total by half for her 2nd album, and I still have more stock of the 1st single than the total for the 2nd one after it has been out for at least 3 weeks everywhere but S. America. And I likely could have cut it by 66% and been fine. Granted videos are pure cash cows so I've already made more off of the single video (didn't figure out lyric video first then regular video).

6. Speaking of which, I'm not sure if it let me make a 2nd Making of video for her first video or not, but I have 2 listings of it with different stats and money made. I am pretty sure I accidentally made both so it's likely a bug on letting me do 2.

7. I will add that I have cranked out a bunch of high-quality songs (90s across the board), and the total would be higher if the best producer didn't have a 66 for his melody stat as I have a bunch of 90s-80s-90s on top of the 10+ of straight 90s. Just throwing that out there since you've been fighting that for a while.

8. Are the weekly hype reports where they list all the media stops and how they did on them supposed to NOT include my artists? They haven't shown up on 3 straight weeks of them making them worthless though I doubt they matter much at all anyway. It'd be nice to see though.

 

Suggestions

1. Why do you have to go back to the artist list after assigning media shows? That is way too much clicking. I wish there was a way so you'd at least see the calandar while booking shows as that'd help the player remember what shows they've been on already. Granted, this doesn't actually matter as the AI will book a week or two's worth of the same show and 3 shows in a day doesn't seem to hurt.

2. No earthly idea how Halestorm or Pretty Reckless aren't in the real-world database.

3. Improve auditions to where you can sign at least 1 solo and 1 band. You're limited to 2 per year so being restricted to one signing per makes little sense. Also, what the heck is the point of sending the AR staff to regions? Europe somehow has 0 pop bands as I've sent them twice and gotten nothing, and all the North America one produced is all the artists you know about already. Is that the future stat that appears on their info page in the bottom right?

4. Basically try to figure out ways to reduce clicking where possible. This game requires too many clicks. Maybe it is mostly as streamlined as you can make it.

5. Song quality needs to be next to the song when you're on the produce single/ep. I shouldn't have to click on each (or scroll through with the up/down arrows on the keyboard) to find the top song.

[kysmartman]

I did think of one thing that was different with the artist that isn't getting any songs written. When I signed her, she went into the middle of the artist list instead of continuing to add to the bottom like every other artist that I'd recently signed. Also, the previous artist I had signed who I think just finished her initial writing session (without writing herself) spit out a ridiculous 14 songs. Not sure why that would trigger the 0 songs being written bug, but thought I'd add this. I'll go ahead and attach the files if you want to look at them.

SavedGame.db SavedGame.r2s

[kysmartman]

Just wanted to add an update to the void. I have finally gotten some songs written, but I had to sign John Legend to do it. I think the biggest mistake I made was I picked the largest sized database option when starting the game so I have a ton of artists in the game which might be making the game stutter a little since with no one starting with any songs or albums, everyone starts writing songs then releasing either albums or singles soon after. So the game can only produce X number of songs per day, and I was running up against that, or maybe it was a created artist bug. Note: All of the people writing songs include the artist as the one that didn't get a song written in either 10-day period as I bought a bunch of songs for her to record if she couldn't get any written for her, so I don't know if she's still bugged. Though John Legend did also slot into the middle of my artist list like she did so I don't know why that is happening.

 

Also, I think there is an issue with how phenomenal a few of the artists are at the start of the game. Not that they're not over-popular, but the fact that they're pretty much unsignable by anyone. I don't know what your Reputation has to be to sign the Rihannas, Swifts, or Beyonces of the world, but I've skyrocketed to like 95 or 98 (wonder if that's a bug as I started at 50 as that's the min. to sign anyone which I learned in my first game and it has only been a few months in the game; though starting with Arianna Grande helped as her 2 singles are dominating everything), and I keep getting the low reputation note when they turn me down. Those elite artists shouldn't be unsigned this late (started late July and now in early October) though they're also prohibitively expensive which might explain it.

[kysmartman]

Oops, guess you can't edit posts. Anyway, I made a serious error in the previous post. I was confusing your character's Judgement stat, which you also get a message saying the artist/band won't sign with you if it is below 50, no matter how non-famous they are so that stat has to have 50 allocated to it to start any game. The company's reputation is on a different screen, and I'm only at 30 across the country which is why the top artists aren't willing to sign with me which makes sense.

[kysmartman]

2 new suggestions

1) You really need to remove the 2 or 3 biggest sizes of database as the game just can't deal with the number of artists vs the behind-the-scenes people. Either that, or the AI is just terrible because

2)The AI is producing some truly terrible singles which drags album ratings down (since they're the average scores of all songs on the album which honestly it should be the top 75% of the songs as the last few songs don't matter as much). And these are for top artists (though some have really low pop for some reason). Nobody would release a 31-31-31 single or a 40-45-43 album. I think it is either because there are so many artists needing to write so many songs, record them, and produce albums that they're running out of quality people to do it or they're too broke to higher the top people and not trying to fix that. But I shouldn't be dominating the charts across the globe in late October in a game that started in late July as there are only 2 singles in the top 10 because they're high-quality songs. I think it should be programmed that an artist can't create a single lower in quality than their top pop in a region or less than 70 if it is over 70. At least for the first 2 stats as commercial needs to be variable so they can lose pop as some songs have historically failed from popular artists.

[kysmartman]

I thought about making a new thread titled "Was 1.2 this bad?" because I'd only played it a little bit of it, but this game has some just baffling bugs for it being in a 1.3 state. The AI is just bad as noted in my last post, but now, they can't even get tours to have artists make money or gain pop because it bugs and cancels the event as that's all I can think of when it is 0 attendance and 0 performance when the artists have over 60 rep in several regions. But the biggest scary thing is that the database is easily corrupted as per the post where artists just vanish, and now, the label screen is refusing to do the region breakdowns of the gold/platinum/diamond with any of them having diamond releases have 0 in gold and platinum. If you go into the artists, their individual certifications work properly, but clearly, the database is being corrupted as you play which is the first thing that should be prevented in a game using a database to store everything.

 

I really hope Mark can come back at some point soon and fix the game because it has major problems. Is 1.2 stable without these issues? I'd be willing to try it instead and suggest anyone else do it too.

[kysmartman]

I'll tack on one more glaring bug. I've checked the enable auto-stock option on every single album and single I've released until I tested to see if the toggle was set backwards (so checking it turned it off instead of enabling it), and every single one shows me the option in the single/album stock to click to enable it, which doesn't work. That means you have to micromanage yet another thing every week.

[kysmartman]

Since maybe Mark is getting back to a place where he wants to work on this game, I figured I'd add a few more bugs that have popped up in my game.

1)This is merely cosmetic, but if you go to make an album (the singles section displays properly) with some songs not recorded yet, when you get to the very last selection of mixer or sound production where there are three values, the last is supposed to say Trend Setting but copies the 2nd column's name for every single song you need to record. As I said, it's purely cosmetic as the stats are the same as for singles.

2)Movie soundtracks are completely bugged. I got an offer for a few of my artists to submit songs and submitted all of them. The day of, they all showed up under the tracklist with no sales data for the album. Simmed a single day, and there is no tracklist plus it looks like it has been out for weeks as there is now a this week and previous week sales. Either the artist should get something out of it (money, reputation, hype), or just remove it because it doesn't look like I got anything from my 3 artists being on that album.