Dear Cryptic, please fire your QC department

adinosii

OK, OK, the title is a bit exaggerated - I don't actually recommend firing the entire QC department, but I wanted to draw attention to to the persistent issue of unacceptable quality of some of the content you release.

I am not saying all of your content is a buggy mess - sometimes we get stuff that works really well - the chicken event was just great (whoever came up with that idea deserves a raise), and I am fairly impressed with most of Mod 19 (your environment/graphics guys did a great job with Avernus).

However.....the "Rage of Bel" is a buggy mess from start to finish.

This content introduces one "must have" item so it would be reasonable to expect that the ways to obtain that had been sufficiently tested before it was released. I mean, everyone is focused on getting the 6 different rods you need for restoration - but the number of bugs and issues is just way, way beyond anything I have seen before for such a small addition.

1. Initially we had the problem where the Bel rage meter did not move at all
   
2. We also had a problem where the timing of Insurrections was unpredictable - sometimes there was a 1-hour downtime, sometimes not
   
3. We had the problem of certain classes having a really hard time getting their 20%, and a seriously flawed way for how credit was given (the "killstealing" issue)
   
4. The "Reinforced Metal rod" drop rate issue.
   
5. The "Broken Metal Rod" issue.
   
6. The "disappering Balanced Rod" issue.
   

You had issues with 3 out of 3 of the first rods....and guess what, there is also an issue with the 4th one. The whole insurgency event is really badly designed. At first, if you had the misfortune of not playing in an instance with "HDPS boss farmers", you probably would not get to see a boss at all, as your instance will fail to reach 100% before Bel is activated. Then, when that was fixed, it became clear the drop rate was pretty pathetic, and finally the instances started failing.

No boss means no chance of the Battle Worn rod dropping.

This is what I consider a bad design, but what worries me more is that there is just no way this content had been tested - You added ONE must-have item, and did not bother to verify that it was actually obtainable, and only managed to frustrate and annoy players.

Please try to avoid fiascos like this in the future - and that means actually testing things before release.

zyronax

Hear, hear Adinosii!

I'll add this: If I ever needed more game design confirmation that the devs *do not play their own game* then this Bel event is it! Who in the Nine Hells thought it was a good idea to create an event that literally handicaps *half of your DPS classes* (the non-ranged ones that have to be up-close-&-personal to do dmg)?! Has Cryptic even bothered fighting Bel as a non-ranged class? It's the epitome of un-fun, tedious, boring, atrocious game design. To any who object, go load up a GWF - I refuse to call it by it's current moniker - and see how much 'fun'/much-more-difficult it is to fight Bel and his tsunami of long-lasting, HP-pool-melting flame AoEs. I can and do solo Bel, but have yet to defeat him in a full party. Sure, the tool-tips do state the difficulty increases, and yet it is *not* commensurate with the at-best modest increase in loot/rewards for the time and effort.

By-the-by: is the mythic-grade rod drop from Bel bugged? I've run it between 5 to 20 times more than some alliance members who've had theirs drop, and nothing - if it's a case of RNG, it might be time to adjust that in the players' favor. Frankly, at this point I'm in a mood not to bother any more, and you know what else that annoyance has led to? You won't be getting a VIP renewal from me for this coming month. (Don't expect money for anything else either.) You don't respect my time and efforts = you don't deserve my money. Seems fair.

Other than that, Avernus is well done and I've enjoyed large parts of it, but this relatively modest addition to it has been a dumpster fire experience.

aelinaz

I do not think it is QC issue. QC is most likely not listened to. Again it is possible that all of this was desired?
zone chat is so nasty lately .. swearing, attacking each other, all because of the RNG and design of the rod gathering issues BEL with Non ranged DPS etc. It is becoming very depressing. So sad to see ppl leaving game because they have had enough . It would be helpful if a serious examination of this was performed.

adinosii

aelinaz said:

I do not think it is QC issue. QC is most likely not listened to. Again it is possible that all of this was desired?

No way....that would recuire excessive stupidity. No....ythis is just plain old-fashioned lack of competence and inadequate testing.

kalina311

They dont have enough people in their QC department to possibly simulate the full load on all the zones and stress test the instance and their related issue that occur with lack of treasure drops either .

6 7 random QC people that are all attacking mobs in an insurgence of coarse they will all fill thier meters regardless of class cause they are being courteous to each other and not sniping kills..and will reports it fills ok.. with plenty of time cause there is not a whole server zerging it /closing portals and hamster (and they did not have to do it chopped up and stretched over the coarse of 5 days (20% per day hamster stuff)etc) and they certainly did not have to wait 2 hours per attempt to get in to an insurance ..these are all artificial barriers created by the devs and not the QC team

a lot of stuff just does not get picked up cause they dont know how the mobs of players will react or what they will do / break/flood instances
maybe the bosses were not dropping upgrades rods at all for the QC testers and it was all the the store vendor initially who knows..and then the Devs wanted to stretch out the event ..we simply dont know

maybe the lore was not finished for bosses and there were none or less of them for QC to test /...maybe the bosses were borrowed from other content they never released etc who knows ..maybe thier difficulties were being tuned out and adjusted upwards due to more people yet the odds of were not adjusted for rods and still based on the small QC group //who knows

kronus

kalina311 said:

They dont have enough people in their QC department to possibly simulate the full load on all the zones and stress test the instance and their related issue that occur with lack of treasure drops either .

I can agree with you on the server load issue, but some of the other issues that have been brought out in this thread have nothing to do with server load. The drop issue could've been mathematically scaled to the group testing it because there are limits of people for each instance. It has to do with not fully testing the product eg: testing the box from start to finish the way most players would have done which is step by step, would've found the disappearing rod issue. Many of us that play this game can accept the occasional bug, but like was already stated, there have been way too many in this.