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The most recent Manor Lords patch–a beta that’s entirely optional–is seemingly “punishing” players who had since become reliant on unintentional exploits and mechanics. Manor Lords‘ solo dev, Greg Styczeń, pushed out an update that tackled the following issues:
- The rate of Hildebolt’s claims
- The famous “None” people spawning in huge numbers and refusing to do any work
- The clogged Trading Posts
- The game being stuck at the summary screen after a victory / game over
- Very weak archer damage
- Inefficient sawpits which also triggered “generic storage full” problem banners
- Problems with optimizations in large cities (still some work to do here)
- Inefficient marketplace supply
- Problems with farming, like crops erasing in the winter & inefficient harvests
- Too harsh oversupply/undersupply systems
- People and/or livestock staying homeless even though there is living space in the settlement
- Overly high ale consumption
These were lifted from the Steam patch announcement, and a more comprehensive list of patch notes can be found in the original post. It should be noted that this patch will require some tinkering to align your save files, so bare that in mind.
When it comes to the issue of the patch that apparently “punishes” players, this is mostly thanks to the attention pointed towards exploits. What the update didn’t account for was, according to one player, the people who found the meta “too much” to focus on, and instead devised their own playstyle. “I’m getting like a ‘you’re playing it wrong’ kind of feeling,” the original poster says.
The sentiment is shared amongst the rest of the Manor Lords community, with another commenter stating that “development seems to be geared towards plugging random exploit holes,” which is quite contentious. One one hand, that’s exactly what Early Access periods are for, though conversely you’d also expect the Early Access period to be adorned often with new features that change the gameplay entirely.
So far, Manor Lords has had an extremely receptive launch. It’s smashed through the ceiling in terms of sales, and it’s player count remains steady between 30-40,000 users. In light of all of the negative stories you hear in the games industry at the moment, Manor Lords can likely step no foot wrong.
The fact that the player count is so high, alongside the fact that the community is so actively engaged too, likely muddies things. The ability to filter through thousands of notes of feedback is presumably quite overwhelming, and the reality is that there’s not going to be room for every fix, new feature, and update that the players want.
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