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[DEVS please asnwer] Why???
r9xchaos
Posts: 533
Cryptic / PWE is a Company and i think they have experienced Programmers...
They have also a test server... HOW and WHY we get a patch that breaks so many things?
They earn money , they can test things on their own server and they can test things on PTS...
How you guys manange to apply so many bugs with only 1 patch?
I mean HOW???, And how you think you will solve all that problems?...
its so much that i almost think the game will close soon...because almost everything is broke... it seems like fixing the bugs wil require more work than anything else now..
I thought there are Mature Programmers with enough knowledge to make backups and to test things before releasing... but right now it FEELS like this game is run by programming students who are actually trying to figure out the Cryptic Game engine.
I really ask myself if it is really worth it to play batman when that patch broke everything else...
Nemcon ( nemesis Q-Box rewardnot dropping at specific power sets ) Random CclienCrashes ( wich i have not experienced before batman patch ) , Object targeting ( cant target objects / consoles in resistance that are more than 50 feet away ), Missions getting reseted so i need to do them again..., and so on.... its so much more but i would never stop when i continue...
I would like to hear some statement of the Dev Team About this
They have also a test server... HOW and WHY we get a patch that breaks so many things?
They earn money , they can test things on their own server and they can test things on PTS...
How you guys manange to apply so many bugs with only 1 patch?
I mean HOW???, And how you think you will solve all that problems?...
its so much that i almost think the game will close soon...because almost everything is broke... it seems like fixing the bugs wil require more work than anything else now..
I thought there are Mature Programmers with enough knowledge to make backups and to test things before releasing... but right now it FEELS like this game is run by programming students who are actually trying to figure out the Cryptic Game engine.
I really ask myself if it is really worth it to play batman when that patch broke everything else...
Nemcon ( nemesis Q-Box rewardnot dropping at specific power sets ) Random CclienCrashes ( wich i have not experienced before batman patch ) , Object targeting ( cant target objects / consoles in resistance that are more than 50 feet away ), Missions getting reseted so i need to do them again..., and so on.... its so much more but i would never stop when i continue...
I would like to hear some statement of the Dev Team About this
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they can't be students, students learn from their mistakes, cryptic doesn't.
Why the rush, calm down take your time a bit things would be a bit more epic and a lot of players would be much more happy
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
There's also the fact that it seems most of the senior devs get ported over to work on STO, so that's just great.
Lots of testing should get rid of all the bugs, right? :rolleyes:
Reality is, many bugs will STILL slip through. Many times we won't see a bug in the earlier environments, yet it happens in production.
It's just how computers roll.
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There is also a testing method that ensures an agreed-upon # of "high / medium / low" severity bugs never make it to production. The number of bugs that have slipped into live due to this patch means either (1) none of those bugs merit importance, or (2) Cryptic never found them in the first place. The volume and severity of the bugs from an end-user's perspective makes me (and apparently many others) question Cryptic's intents and capabilities.
And yes, there are also the usual environment-specific bugs when you're migrating from one server to another, but really, this patch's bugs go way beyond my acceptable limits even accounting for that. Less of this silent-treatment, buggy update BS should be tolerated.
@sturmhaven
And you find it acceptable that this number of bugs made it in, in every corner of the game, invalidating a massive portion of the experience?
:rolleyes:
There is a gradient of tolerance here. A few bugs, big deal, fix them in a week, business as usual. THIS is too much, especially for this kind of update.
Reality is, people will make lots of excuses for incompetence and be as lazy as they can get away with. The lower they can reduce the effort required in balance to the perception/tolerance of their superior's paradigm of 'the best possible', the easier their life is.
Reality is, those at the top will use as few resources to attain the highest profit possible, certainly at the expense of quality, certainly at the expense of the old stuff to make way for the new.
We don't know the whole story of why, but effed up is effed up. If it's 'business as usual', then so is massive outrage and frustration. What the net actual loss is chasing fool's gold, but it can't be good overall. Consistency, reliability, customer service, all that stuff makes money too.
And no one would be complaining if they didn't want to play the game. They'd leave. The compliment to potential is inherent to complaint about 'details'. In this case 'details' is a gigantic chunk of the entire game.
This error went undiscovered until the program went live because the particular condition that triggered it never came up in the test database.
Lesson: Sometimes, errors slip through. Programmers can't anticipate all the ways end users can mess them up, and not every subsystem can be tested against the new module before it's used. The key is to look for the errors and fix them when they're found.
Now, there is one thing Cryptic could do to help here - stop releasing new patches on Friday!! You know you're going home for the weekend. If you just held off until Monday, you could find the errors more quickly, and get them repaired in a more timely fashion.
- David Brin, "Those Eyes"
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"Without data, you're just another person with an opinion." -- W. Edwards Deming
You wanna know what the reality really is? An in-house QA team can't hope to catch all the bugs, not in a few weeks, not in a few months. There's a reason why there's a PTS. A team of 10 QA guys is not even comparable to a team of 100 regular guys.
The times I've been on PTS, there's only a handful of people there. Not enough to even queue for an alert. Who'd have known that Nemesis alerts got borked, if there was no one to test them? Why would QA test them, if nothing there was supposed to be changed?
Cryptic can't just tell the QA team "Hey guys, check everything in the game in a week, before the patch goes live. Every mission, every perk, the auction house, buying vault tabs, every costume piece, everything." That's impossible. And again, that's what the PTS is for.
Even when the Devs bribe their customers with Action Figures, people will log in, test the stuff that needs to be tested, and call it a day after their hour is done. Did they hop into alerts? Probably not. Did anyone fight their nemesis? Probably not.
Now, I know that some bugs do get found by the players and not all of them can be fixed before the patch goes live, but, when the big man says the patch goes live on Friday, you take care of priority issues first, then get to what you can afterward, and then the patch goes live on Friday.
Honestly, the people who feel very strongly about this should hop into PTS regularly.
And, before you start talking about "Cryptic doesn't pay me to test their game!" sorry but this is an MMO. No MMO company does all their own QA. Closed Beta, Open Beta, Beta Weekends aren't just for you to get a taste of the game, it's for stress testing, finding bugs, that sort of thing.
So really, the people here who feel very strongly about this, how about jumping on PTS and trying to find some issues? Bugs can't be fixed if they're not found.
Some very good points here.
It is hard, though, to muster the enthusiasm to test vigorously when it seems that the vast majority of the bugs you report will go live anyway.
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
Yeah, I can imagine. I know that lots of bugs that were "high priority" for players have gone through anyway, but some of these big issues we've been seeing lately, I don't think they would have gone through had they been noticed.
Im inclined to agree.
We dont know how many behind the scenes bugs were caught and fixed. I am not sufficiently knowledgeable to comment on MMO programming. Honestly I am not sufficiently knowledgeable to comment on any form of programming.
I am quite a bit more knowledgeable about human motivation.
I think it would do Cryptic a great deal of good to codify a rewards system for the PTS. A solid, consistent, reward system can be used to direct efforts in a fashion that would produce better overall results.
'Caine, miss you bud. Fly high.
That's actually a really good idea.
I've also reported plenty of bugs WEEKS in advance that still go through to Live too. It makes me wonder why I'm reporting them in the first place.
Razira's Primus Database Page
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Despite how we disagree on other topics, I think this is a -fantastic- idea. I go on the PTS to tinker around with new powers, but most of the time it's emptier than an Ethiopian dinner plate. I see what does what, test it out, log out, and then go play on live with my friends. If they offered SOMETHING to us for testing it (A costume piece, a few Zennies, at least a damned title), I'd be more motivated to play around on it.
Also, it'd help a lot if they let us view costumes and test them, instead of eliminating the Z-store because people found a way to 'predict' the gamble bags.
What we do have a problem with is going through the effort, reporting the bugs.
And then they go live anyway.
It makes us feel as if no one is listening, or doesn't care... ...Or what Ashen Said
| ME | A "Guide" Book" | | I, have a "DREAM! | ( Member since Feb 2008 ) ... ?
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Well, I had to reinstall from scratch, apparently because I upgraded to the Aug 25 patch without downloading the Aug 23 patch first. So now, Live is just crashing on launch instead of giving me invalid file errors.
But that's Live. We're talking PTS here.
Except I can't even re-download PTS because the launcher crashes as soon as it starts streaming files.
So all these in-game bugs? This panoply of bad scripts and buggy powers and miscalculated text metrics? Ain't seen a bit of it because I can't launch the game. On either server.
Please recall that my Step 1 was "Re-install the game from scratch."
I'd love to know what process completely broke last week. Was there no package testing to ensure that a bare install worked? Even a basic regression test should have found some of these errors. Based on the current state of the game, I'd suspect that the wrong tag was pulled from source control, and they somehow pushed a mid-development nightly build to production.
And Smackwell, I appreciate your position in this, but right now, you're the only one talking. Not a single Cryptic employee has popped in to so much as say "Yep, it's busted. We're working on it."
That silence frightens me more than anything else from this entire weekend.
It's obvious by now that Champions Online is the absolute bottom of Cryptic's to-do list, somewhere below remodeling the main conference room and hiring a sushi chef for the cafeteria. I've stated before that STO and Neverwinter will always get higher priority because CBS and WotC are looking over their shoulders, protecting their investments.
I've always held on to a little faith that Cryptic's own self-interest in the Champions pen-and-paper IP would keep CO moving forward. That faith is almost gone.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
You have to keep in mind, though, that they're not just sitting on their hands, saying "Eh, I don't want to fix that bug."
Yes, it's annoying when a bug gets found and is reported and goes unfixed, but someone's making the decision that "It's not a high enough priority to fix right now." And that decision's not being made because of laziness or uncaring, it's made because, maybe internal testing found something that's REAL broke, and it's gotta be fixed. I just don't think that Cryptic's MO is to leave bugs in to bother the players.
When I was QA, this type of thing happened a lot. People would find bugs, and when the developers reduced your bug priority to low, or just flat-out said "This bug is going into the final version," people would get up in arms, "I can't believe they'd let this go! They're so lazy!" Turns out, fixing that bug might be a long-time endeavor that they're not staffed for or would delay launch. Pulling off people from their tasks to work on this one bug would delay everything else, and you really don't want to tell your publisher that you're going to delay the game a month. A deadline's a deadline.
Sometimes it just can't be helped. Manpower, budget, timelines, they all constrain what everyone wants to get done.
I doubt anyone over there has an "I don't care" attitude about fixing the game.
'All the bugs'? The bugs were so prevalent and widespread you might as well say 'can't catch the burning Hindenburg crashing into their office'.
It's an epic failure, and probably emblematic of a major key error say, in the wrong build even importing from the PTS. I don't really know but...
Honestly my entire experience with the PTS is that it is permanently broken. My personal experience has always been that the entire build does not import, and that the PTS just has all the bugs all the time in spite of Live. Speaking of the larger bulk of my experience being 6+ months ago.
And that numerous peeps have already said they've pointed things out that don't get fixed speaks for itself. It isn't the playerbase's fault if they're poorly and/or understaffed. And regardless of what individuals are to 'blame' the company itself cannot ever be free of the blame as a whole. Hence, the ridicule. If they wanted to break down all the reasons for us, so be it, but they won't so we can only point the finger at the entire machine. Which is probably best all around anyway.
Again, if the 'reality' is this dynamic frequently breaks the game, i.e. the Powers That Be force it down everyone's throat due to deadlines, it isn't any less the company's massive failure.
In principle I agree with your general call to motivate peeps to the PTS...
However, everyone has their reasons for not, and those reasons, as a paying customer, are not invalid or undue or irrelevant. Some peeps are just real casual players, or have too little time. Some people are in a Silver model and cannot access the PTS. Some cannot get into the server but can into Live. Some have personal experiences with not getting their bug report's dealt with. Some may just have had a bad couple weeks or a month.
Ultimately its all an 'if I can' kinda thing. Aside from those who really do say 'F U and yer PTS' despite playing the game fanatically 14 hours a day or whatever.
Basically, you're not going to get but a small percentage of the population to do it, and if they count on more than what they get, from the playerbase, that's just more fail on their part as a company.
And I'm all for further incentives. An AF is...hit or miss. Need more variety than that, and certainly more frequency.
I do however agree that patches would be better left until a Monday. I would even go as far as saying release a patch a fortnight using the week in between to fix any bugs and if none appear use the time to fix existing known bugs.
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Likening bug testing or the lack thereof to the Titanic may be prophetic though.
Stuffy on the old CO forums. PWE ate my username.
Devs are there on the weekend still fixing bugs.
I've run into them a time or two when they talked on their private chat channels.
The thing those guys on the weekend shift wont do is spend 45 minutes building a build, shipping
it to live on the weekend and then getting their rears fired. Unless its an emergency like free
questionite from talking to Defender or something.
Totally agree with that , we can live with a small amount of bugs.. noone would really complain.. but as wacky99 said...just read forums..
also if you sit in millenium city watching zone you will see peopel asking "why this is not working anymore?" and so on...
Then the question is why we still have bugs that are live since months...
Aha , private channels ? why would you have access there?
The only thing I can say is:
Cryptic is very lucky to have you guys as customers. Other dev studios would be massacred (lose most of their PLAYERBASE) for such behavior.
Champions is unique, that's why I believe people is willing to either forgive the bad or put up with it.
I used to play MegaTen, which was also unique. We played for years a game that had much less content than Champions has (MUCH less content) just because the combat system was delightful (It was a very tactical system entirely based on timing and player skill, to the point a skilled newbie could solo the same places high level players' parties were wiped out using nothing but the basic equipment and low level abilities), the customization was great (it had less "flavour" customization than Champions has, but it had more mechanical customization), and Aeria was keeping a really close relationship with the players and using what little they had to make the game involving and the community tight (using GM tools to create custom events all the time, contests left and right, etc). We forgave a monetization scheme that makes Perfect World look like charity, we forgave the most shameless P2W to ever (dis)grace mankind, we forgave years of barely any new content and promises either broken or eternally delayed, we forgave changes that were basically aimed at nothing but screwing the players that did not want to spend a fortune on grab bags, etc. We even forgave a skill system that had nothing but empty placeholders for about a third of the available skill trees, all because the game was truly unique and the community was excellent. And we flamed anyone who ever questioned our gloriously broken game, too.
Champions is also like that, I believe. It is quite a shame Cryptic is not as willing to be really close to the community as Aeria was, as even as little as having a bunch of underpaid GMs playing the game with you, paying attention to bad behaviour and abuses, and improvising events and contests using GM tools and what content is already here can go a long way.
There are scores of other mmos
its not even unique as a super hero mmo!
But more importantly, I think it's a waste of energy to get all stressed and fired up over a game.
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Bugs are usually given priorities, and the date they're discovered usually doesn't have anything to do with the priority. A bug found on day 1, if minor enough, and there are more, larger bugs that need to be dealt with, can be low priority forever.
Players make their own private channels, and often invite some of the developers to join in the chat. It's nothing very exclusive.
An excellent response.
Does it break the game?
Will it take hours, minutes, days or weeks to fix at $150 an hour.
Does fixing the bug derail production of new material?
Is there time available for the one QA guy to test the bug fix in his list of other things he needs to test?
These things are all very involved.
If Shev was still around she could tell you all about game dev. she's an expert. Lol.
But seriously. Try programming just once. Maybe some HTML5 and Javascript or
something light and friendly like the LOVE game engine or murgalua.
Try just four hours of design/coding.
See how many bugs you make and fix, then have someone test your program
and see how many they find for you. Then have someone else test and wow,
more bugs you and the first guy didn't see.
Your only five hours in, code for another three.
Then go back in and try to fix bugs past your bloodshot eyes and numb brain.
Thats just a play experiment. You want real experience?
Download some source code from an open source project.
Load up their bug tracker.
Go find and fix the bugs maybe half a dozen other people made, months ago.
Thats much more like what a Cryptic dev goes through and he doesn't have free reign
over what bugs he should fix, he has a list that says "Fix this, code that, do the monkey dance in that cute pink thing"
Oh I should also add that bug fixing is a soul killer.
Nothing sucks the life and love out of a project like going over the same old code, trying to
find the problem in it, making an adjustment, recompiling, going through the game to get to the bug,
finding some other thing that needs fixing along the way, fixing the original bug for at least one instance of its occurance, changing builds or variables, and finding the bug remains...repeat until you leave game dev and become a math teacher or hobo or a hobo that teaches math.
1. Always do a Scotty when giving time estimates (make the estimate then multiply it by 4 before giving it to the boss). That way if it works first time you're good, if it fails you have time to fix it before the deadline you gave.
2. Never assume something will work first time.
3. If something does work first time, chances are it broke something else.
4.Never assume it's working even if it compiles correctly.
5.Something that works perfectly in Alpha testing will fail miserably for at least half of your closed beta users.
6.Something that works in Closed Beta will fail when moved to Open Beta.
7.No matter how much testing is done bugs will appear in the live build.
8.Fixing one bug will inevitably cause 5 more to pop up.
9.Never assume code in one part of the program won't affect another seemingly unconnected part of the program.
10.The only feedback you will receive will be complaints about the amount of bugs in the finished code.
Nepht and Dr Deflecto on primus
They all thought I was out of the game....But I'm holding all the lockboxes now..
I'll......FOAM FINGER YOUR BACK!
Nobody will remember if you ship a good product a little bit late. Nobody will let you forget if you ship $#!? on time.
They're not there in the beginning, but when your story ends / Gonna last with you longer than your friends
I'm a totally fan of that one, also if other people often don't like that behaviour and think
i don't want to do that, i really always start to explain how complicated things could be
and that it may take quite some time. And afterwarts normally everyone is happy if i
just needed a week instead of some months
I also never understand programmers, like an old collegue in South Africa, who always said :
oh .. all no problem .. will be ready tomorrow, and after 3 months you still have nothing
heared from him again.
But on meetings of course .. bosses mostly liked his style more than mine :rolleyes:
i mean at some point players will leave..or just stop paying... bad business model then..
It's people expressing themselves, if referring to the forums. As for feelings of frustration from the game, people can rarely control what they feel.
Unless a person just abandons the game, frustration is going to happen from a game for most people. To Zen Masters out there, I applaud your nonchalance and control. I'm really sorry I haven't achieved your level yet. :rolleyes:
But in all actuality I've spent no more energy than anyone else posting in these forums despite being annoyed/disgusted with what's happened recently. All I see are differing opinions, not 'together people' and YOU'RE TEARING ME APART, LISA!!
*goes to practice Zen*
Champions Online: Now with MORE technical difficulties.
Or perhaps
Champions Online: Take a short break while we fix all this.
I might be a bit jaded, but this batch of bugs actually doesn't seem so bad compared to kitchen sink 2. Remember when the entire chat server died for like a week? This is nothing compared to that.
RIP Caine
I know, i'm just having fun. Sure there are serious problems like broken nems seriously hurting my Q farming empire (insert evil laugh here)
Its really a ton of annoyance with a few, legit show stoppers. The big ones, like not being able to use the new AT got fixed pretty quick.
I expect most of the current problems will be fixed Thursday when they do the next patch. Sure it will add a few more NEW bugs, but they gota keep things exciting, right? :biggrin:
I wonder if now's the time to post all the longstanding bugs that we players have come to accept for "Working as designed".. like Psychic Vortex's advantage does not actually stun anyone, yet grants hold resistance to targets.
Dammit.. now i gotta go round all my CC related bugs up in one post.
CC is going to be tricky to get fixed, here's how the conversation will probably go...
PWE Rep - Why have you got people assigned to fixing Crowd Control abilities when those abilities are the least picked?
Programmer - Because no one picks them because they're broken.
PWE Rep - Get them off that and working on something else, it's no use pandering to a small portion of the playerbase.
Programmer - But if we fix them, it won't be a small portion of the playerbase using them, it'll be a large portion.
PWE Rep - Right now hardly anyone uses them so it's low priority, get back on it when more people use crowd control.
Programmer - But people won't use crowd control until we fix it...
| ME | A "Guide" Book" | | I, have a "DREAM! | ( Member since Feb 2008 ) ... ?
[SIGPIC]http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b132/AngelOfCaine/STILLS/Misc/CO-Sig_01e.png[/SIGPIC]
for quite some time there have been many many outstanding bugs within this game
now most of the community have and has posted these issues up via the several systems that have beens use over the years
and when they got around to it, cryptic have tried their best to fix them
now lets jump to recent times
since the selling of cryptic products to PW, PW of course want to
amalgamate them into their systems, have made use of the staff from cryptic with their other products and want to turn a profit asap with the minimum outlay
The above is not really in any set order but guessing profit is first ^^
the first effect of this is they moved staff who were familier with cryptic, its engine etc,
disabled most of the reporting system as it probably was not compataible with PW system.
Pushed for development of additonal content that will help turn a fast profit
disabled part of the test server as it may be a way to leak out the actual drop rate of grab bags, or how actual travel powers may work
this ofc would of impacted profit
finally forced people into merging thier accounts cause this now is the only way you can report a fault, bug etc via their website support ticket system and ofc turn a profit by exposing them to thier other products
then place generic workforce onto that support system, where they can only handle the basic day to day errors, with the emphasis that its a user problem and not their product.
we are now approching the singlarity point in regards to bugs and this we can see when a product is soley focued on turning aprofit at the expense of everything else
now I don't blame cryptic staff, cause they now work for this organisation,
This problem lies soley with those who don't understand what they are managing but want to see returns
so we then get patches like the one that just gone in
Now if I was cryptic staff working under such circumstances and trying to inform these so called managers that this cannot be done, I would allow a singlarity to happen as this is the only way they may feel for them to be heard and therefore vindicated
I hope this is now is happening and that some of the issues can now be addressed
to recap
adding more content with out proper time to test = more bugs on top of the bugss that already exists
therefore something is going to have to give or product is down and no profit from it at all cause its broken
hope this helps all
and please support them to help fix things before anything new is now added
thanks