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Cryptic, can we talk about this?
kenpojujitsu3
Posts: 1,320 Arc User
Cryptic, you've been trying to breathe some life into this game lately. It shows, and it's appreciated. However...yesterday was a fairly well-mitigated disaster on multiple levels. You folks were up to the task on getting it handled...but it appears to have been preventable in the first place. Perhaps I'm in error here.
Can we talk about this?
1) What actually happened? A running gag about Cryptic, in this game and others, is that there is no QA department. That joke has been around at least as long as I've been playing CO and later STO. Now, while we've been told this is not really the case, yesterday's events didn't exactly inspire any confidence in that. That veteran reward bug(s) was MAJOR and it was quite literally pointed out in under two minutes from several players as soon as the servers went live. How does this happen if you folks have "internal live testing"? I'm deadly serious here. The chain of events from my perspective was me seeing a message from a dev that the servers were up and in under two minutes from that message I got messages in the game chat and through Steam that several veteran rewards went missing...you know, the very thing you folks were changing and would therefore likely have someone looking directly at when testing it? Under. Two. Minutes. Also, some people are now reporting that while they can access some of the new features via commands such as /gotocharacterselect, the option is not present in their UI.
2) The stability after everything was assumed fixed. How did that disconnect "bug" that required another session of maintenance get through yet another round of "internal testing"? Was it an actual bug in the game resulting from the patch? Was it a server problem? I'm doubtful it was a server load problem because...look, we don't have that many of us playing the game anymore and several of the "old heads" around here have been around since we had over 80 MC instances. Last night wasn't anywhere in the same galaxy as that number. Also, unless the server allocation for CO was dropped post-takofanes event, last night's load wasn't all that uncommon and I'm assuming shouldn't have been that burdensome. Something was mentioned about there being too many people in MC Powerhouse so it was kicking people out. Do the powerhouses no longer have the ability to generate additional instances when needed as they could in the past?
3) The patch notes. You folks were on a pretty solid run with the patch notes but as of this writing...yesterdays patch notes are inadequate. The patch notes mention the Dodge/Avoid changes but don't mention the Crit and Offense changes. Yes, Crush mentions those in his preview blog that's linked in the notes but since it was directly omitted from the notes themselves people were guessing if it was in the game or not. Same thing with some powers showing up. Usually, the notes have a new powers section. Fluidity made it into the game. Notes don't mention it. Crush's blog mentions it but again, it's not in the notes so there was guess work. I just read on the PTS forum from Trailturtle that Earth Form went live last night. REALLY? Nowhere did this make it into the notes. Not in the notes, not in Crush's blog, nowhere. Please don't start reverting to the era of ghosting changes into the game without providing documentation. It makes things difficult on the playerbase from the casual to the dedicated and it makes it look like the whole thing was a rush job. Having incomplete notes in conjunction with bugs spotted in under. two. minutes. essentially screams rush job.
Can we talk about this?
1) What actually happened? A running gag about Cryptic, in this game and others, is that there is no QA department. That joke has been around at least as long as I've been playing CO and later STO. Now, while we've been told this is not really the case, yesterday's events didn't exactly inspire any confidence in that. That veteran reward bug(s) was MAJOR and it was quite literally pointed out in under two minutes from several players as soon as the servers went live. How does this happen if you folks have "internal live testing"? I'm deadly serious here. The chain of events from my perspective was me seeing a message from a dev that the servers were up and in under two minutes from that message I got messages in the game chat and through Steam that several veteran rewards went missing...you know, the very thing you folks were changing and would therefore likely have someone looking directly at when testing it? Under. Two. Minutes. Also, some people are now reporting that while they can access some of the new features via commands such as /gotocharacterselect, the option is not present in their UI.
2) The stability after everything was assumed fixed. How did that disconnect "bug" that required another session of maintenance get through yet another round of "internal testing"? Was it an actual bug in the game resulting from the patch? Was it a server problem? I'm doubtful it was a server load problem because...look, we don't have that many of us playing the game anymore and several of the "old heads" around here have been around since we had over 80 MC instances. Last night wasn't anywhere in the same galaxy as that number. Also, unless the server allocation for CO was dropped post-takofanes event, last night's load wasn't all that uncommon and I'm assuming shouldn't have been that burdensome. Something was mentioned about there being too many people in MC Powerhouse so it was kicking people out. Do the powerhouses no longer have the ability to generate additional instances when needed as they could in the past?
3) The patch notes. You folks were on a pretty solid run with the patch notes but as of this writing...yesterdays patch notes are inadequate. The patch notes mention the Dodge/Avoid changes but don't mention the Crit and Offense changes. Yes, Crush mentions those in his preview blog that's linked in the notes but since it was directly omitted from the notes themselves people were guessing if it was in the game or not. Same thing with some powers showing up. Usually, the notes have a new powers section. Fluidity made it into the game. Notes don't mention it. Crush's blog mentions it but again, it's not in the notes so there was guess work. I just read on the PTS forum from Trailturtle that Earth Form went live last night. REALLY? Nowhere did this make it into the notes. Not in the notes, not in Crush's blog, nowhere. Please don't start reverting to the era of ghosting changes into the game without providing documentation. It makes things difficult on the playerbase from the casual to the dedicated and it makes it look like the whole thing was a rush job. Having incomplete notes in conjunction with bugs spotted in under. two. minutes. essentially screams rush job.
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My Amazon author page
How to build a freeform character...the Kenpo way
Demon Keypo's Building Guide
Freeform Builds Directory (Last updated: 04/23/2016)
Serving since September, 2009 / 65 Characters, 63 Level 40's
My Amazon author page
How to build a freeform character...the Kenpo way
Demon Keypo's Building Guide
Freeform Builds Directory (Last updated: 04/23/2016)
Serving since September, 2009 / 65 Characters, 63 Level 40's
Post edited by kenpojujitsu3 on
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Looks like Cryptic North isn't going to be much different in that regard.
--Part 1: Spells and Coin (NW-DHM3XQVQK)
--Part 2: A Blind Eye (NW-DI3QTHZGJ)
--Part 3: Dodo's Dinner (NW-DHPA8O253)
-One Shots
--The Wizard of Eldeur (NW-DRKQNE4S7)
Recent notes, while still lacking things, were noticeably improved from before so I'll give credit where it's due. But yesterday's notes? I hope I never see anything like that again. There's just no good reason to fall that short on giving meaningful information.
My Amazon author page
How to build a freeform character...the Kenpo way
Demon Keypo's Building Guide
Freeform Builds Directory (Last updated: 04/23/2016)
Serving since September, 2009 / 65 Characters, 63 Level 40's
Notice that the patch was posted by dwightmc, who has all of three posts, and a signup date of last month.
He may be some rookie that got roped into doing it because the normal people (ie, TrailTurtle) weren't available that day.
@flamingbunnyman in game. Formerly @Roderick in City of Heroes.
Public Tests, Private Tests, Weeks of Trials, doesn't seem to matter. There always seems to be that "awww @#@#$@#" that slips through every major update. Why ? How ? The magic of Murphey ?
So, major update day .. that's take the day off playing and go watch funny videos day
If they have poor QA, it's take the week off.
Last year, I had gotten pulled in to helping a co-worker test out some software changes in our company, with us being the end-user. We would test out the program, compare the actual results to what we expected, and would give feedback on bugs we found. Once we were satisfied with the results, we would give approval to move to the next testing environment (Dev, Testing, QA, Live).
It would happen a few times that we would be satisfied with the program at one step, but as soon as it moved to the next step there would be bugs. There was even one issue where we couldn't get the program to work in one of the environments at all. Even going into Live, there was a small bug we didn't see in QA.
A lot of this (especially the one where the program wouldn't work in one of the environments) is due to the environments are all different because they all could be testing different programs at different stages in development. There are programs being added and removed on a regular basis, at different speeds. Yes, there would generally be a lock-down on when things could be moved up to different environments (generally, the lower ones would be every other weekend, I think, and Live updates would be monthly). Those differences could cause a program to behave differently.
I'm betting the same holds true to ANY software development, Cryptic MMOs included.
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The rest of it I can't really comment on... because.... well... I haven't been in-game. :redface:
I say stuff and I say things, sometimes together but only when I'm feeling adventurous.
I'm @blu8 in game!