Quality is Job One

checkmatein3

The old tag line from Ford commercials still resonates today. In some form or fashion, companies trumpet the quality of their product(s). The reason quality is focused on is because there is a relationship between trust in a product's useful longevity and the willingness of persons to spend money. In short, quality and earnings are directly proportional.

In contradistinction to quality, which takes time, testing, transfer, and back end processes for fixing, root-cause analysis, etc., there is the first-to-market approach. Usually, this approach passes over quality or the quality process because the short term release based on whatever slick advertising methods results in a momentary gain, but on the back end, it clogs the pipeline of company products with defects, that are merely glossed over by another first-to-market campaign. This kind of approach to income eventually defeats itself, because the internal processes of the company (resources of personnel and time) cannot unclog the backlog of defects. The trust in quality disappears, and the customer base, who before listened and waited for new product releases, have moved on to other options that are unknown. In short, first-to-market undermines any historical currency of quality a company might have had.

The releases of mod 15 along with the remakes of events has shown that Cryptic is following a first-to-market strategy. However, the recent, painfully game breaking bugs that are right on the surface, undermine the long term trust in the game to deliver on more quality. I am sure company resources that should be moving on to Mod 16 or 17, are now being cycled back to fix these bugs.

As a professor of mine once said, "If you don't have time to do it right the first time, do you have time to do it again?"

Please, for the sake of the game, player trust, and longevity, focus on Quality.

Cheers!

nunya

"At Cryptic, our motto is 'Quality Is Job None'!"

yperkeimenos

checkmatein3 said:

However, the recent, painfully game breaking bugs that are right on the surface, undermine the long term trust in the game to deliver on more quality.

Long term trust in the game to deliver more quality?.........!!!!!! What? I've lost all faith in quality ever since they introduced the level 70 cap, in the most sloppy manner possible and drove away half the playerbase. The game suffered from various issues when i left it 4 years ago and upon returning , some 5 months ago, guess what......... the same issues, great quality control. In my view they're just milking the D&D franchise without offering any real quality content other than the combat system. Repetition, bugs, content imbalances and recycling, no new classes, dead pvp , lack of communication with the playerbase, lockboxes that are akin to gambling,pay to win content, broken economy especially with the Zen backlog, planned obsolescence on player equipment and so on are just some of the problems that have been pointed out many times by a lot of people but to no avail. Lets face it, PWE/Cryptic are in it just for the money grab with no real intent of providing a quality product. It's no coincidence that steam statistics have shown a steady decline in the number of players over the years. Neverwinter started with 14822 peak players in 2014 and now,due to mismanagement, they barely have 4000, whereas other games, such as warframe and path of exile, that started in 2013 with 19000 peak players, now have over 100000.

pitmonster

I don't mind a rapid release methodology but they have a public facing test environment and willing customers who will beta test for free (alpha testing being done in house). And even when they get feedback denoting issues, they release anyway???

The example of the CTA event where they addressed right away if fine, I actually think that was a good responses. But allowing known bugs to exist for years... that is pretty bad.