Are the Dev's playtesting anything?

merik1999 · May 2019

These Bugs and Awful math skills are glaringly obvious. There is Absolutely no way the Dev team is play testing anything. I am a software engineer and I would be fired, and have fired people for making such mistakes continuously without listening to anyone's complaints nor play-testing their codes. Also, there is little to no acknowledgement of game bugs.

aratech · May 2019

It's been a long established fact that the Dev's spend as many nanoseconds playtesting this game as a flat-earther spends in the plane of existence known as "reality."

motu999 · May 2019

No, they are obviously not playtesting and if they say so, they are dreaming themselves blindfolded through the dungeons.

They recently requested our help in order to tweak the "few" things that are not WAI.
I guess the tweaking works in the same way as in preview:
- wait 6-8 weeks until reacting to a report. It might go away all by itself.
- randomly adjust some slider for some random amount in the direction indicated by the report, ignoring all changes made to the game during the wait time
- tell the community once in a while how "excited" the team is about the new content, that 90% of the players like it and that practically everything is WAI and the team is "aware" of the "few" remaining issues, but no ETA to fix them. This gets them a few thankyou's from forum users, that don't know that they have been told about the issues 8 weeks ago and did not care to fix them within these 8 weeks. No ETA actually means "very low on our list or priorities"

I guess we have to accept that the following things are "working as intended":
- the lower the IL level of a dungeon gets, the more geared to the teeth you need to be (near bis) in order to have a chance to complete it with just a couple of deaths. Malabog, Lostmauth not doable for a team with an average IL of 16k. Dont even think to run RIQ with the minimum IL of 12k
- CN (formerly the most difficult dungeon in RIQ) is now one of the most easy ones (still takes 30 min with crappy rewards)
- Manycoins skirmish: people immediately abandon when it comes up on RIQ. No use even trying. No fix so far, no ETA
- Tiamat: still not completable after the patch that claimed to address the issue (except maybe for a team of 25 players with an IL of 20k+)
- Kessel's: one of the lowest IL dungeons in RIQ, still only doable for a group of players with 20k+ IL

WHY are the low IL dungeon so hard? Probably an "unforeseen" consequence of reducing the effectiveness of stats from 500 per 1% to 1000 per 1%. The low IL dungeon might have been (barely) balanced when stats were more effective. But now a player with IL close to the entry IL of RIQ does not even have a chance to come close to cap his stats. The thing is:
- in order to cap your stats for level 80 content you require ~55-60k per stat,
- in order to cap your stats for level 70 content (as level 80 toon) you require around 90-100k per stat
WAI? Well, if we still had 500 stats per 1% the low IL players would come closer to cap in level 70 content, assuming they completed the UM campaign are wearing the gear they got during the campaign. But after the change 500->1000 things changed so much under the hood, that the feedback from the playtesters before this change is worthless.

Unknown · May 2019

This content has been removed.

tribbulater · May 2019

I get the feeling that, every couple months, Cryptic lets another programmer go, and instead hires another accountant, middle manager, or 'game designer' who flunked math and got C's in English, but passed a course in creative writing. After all, programmers are expensive!

I understand that the budget isn't always there, most companies make do with less staff than they really need etc. But when you have designers that can't design, coders that can't code, community managers that never seem to manage anything in the community, QA testers that miss every flaw even the most obvious... well it's pretty clear that any money we put into the game isn't being used to maintain the quality of the game.

But there's some happy accountants, middle managers and game 'designers' out there, I guess.

aratech · May 2019

tribbulater said:
I get the feeling that, every couple months, Cryptic lets another programmer go, and instead hires another accountant, middle manager, or 'game designer' who flunked math and got C's in English, but passed a course in creative writing. After all, programmers are expensive!

I understand that the budget isn't always there, most companies make do with less staff than they really need etc. But when you have designers that can't design, coders that can't code, community managers that never seem to manage anything in the community, QA testers that miss every flaw even the most obvious... well it's pretty clear that any money we put into the game isn't being used to maintain the quality of the game.

But there's some happy accountants, middle managers and game 'designers' out there, I guess.

Sir, as someone that passed numerous creative writing classes, I take offense at this. Because while I might not be able to code anymore, I have more self awareness than a gerbil and can tell that things have gone pear shaped here.

merik1999 · May 2019

aratech said:

tribbulater said:
I get the feeling that, every couple months, Cryptic lets another programmer go, and instead hires another accountant, middle manager, or 'game designer' who flunked math and got C's in English, but passed a course in creative writing. After all, programmers are expensive!

I understand that the budget isn't always there, most companies make do with less staff than they really need etc. But when you have designers that can't design, coders that can't code, community managers that never seem to manage anything in the community, QA testers that miss every flaw even the most obvious... well it's pretty clear that any money we put into the game isn't being used to maintain the quality of the game.

But there's some happy accountants, middle managers and game 'designers' out there, I guess.
Sir, as someone that passed numerous creative writing classes, I take offense at this. Because while I might not be able to code anymore, I have more self awareness than a gerbil and can tell that things have gone pear shaped here.

That is because you are a gamer. The programmers they currently have are not gamers and are not testing their codes because they don't like games. I work with good programmers who hate Games. And they have worked for companies like EA. They said they write the code and test it with their program or code checkers to make sure the code works as designed. But they don't test the game so they have no idea how the product plays. That is for the QA team. The QA team is the least paid team in the company and typically all they do is rerun the Code checking software and for games, look at the overall designs and artwork. So no one tests. and we get this garbage. As stated above they are just moving sliders around and guessing without even logging in to play.

mentinmindmaker · May 2019

No, they obviously are not testing much

If you look at the big picture, what I see is:
* Solo content is somewhat tested and does not have that many glaring bugs
* Group content seems to be not tested at all
* Performance issues seems to be not tested at all. But I'll admit it is very difficult to test performance issues except on loaded servers, which means in production. Stress-testing such a system outside production is too complicated and expensive, and that is usually only done on new systems before launch.

What I think happens is:
NW team is so reduced they only got 1-2 people on QA. They can do an OK job on testing solo content.
However, how do you properly test group content with only 1-2 people?

I think the organisational structure at Cryptic now makes it very difficult to test group content properly.

aratech · May 2019

merik1999 said:

aratech said:

tribbulater said:
I get the feeling that, every couple months, Cryptic lets another programmer go, and instead hires another accountant, middle manager, or 'game designer' who flunked math and got C's in English, but passed a course in creative writing. After all, programmers are expensive!

I understand that the budget isn't always there, most companies make do with less staff than they really need etc. But when you have designers that can't design, coders that can't code, community managers that never seem to manage anything in the community, QA testers that miss every flaw even the most obvious... well it's pretty clear that any money we put into the game isn't being used to maintain the quality of the game.

But there's some happy accountants, middle managers and game 'designers' out there, I guess.
Sir, as someone that passed numerous creative writing classes, I take offense at this. Because while I might not be able to code anymore, I have more self awareness than a gerbil and can tell that things have gone pear shaped here.

That is because you are a gamer. The programmers they currently have are not gamers and are not testing their codes because they don't like games. I work with good programmers who hate Games. And they have worked for companies like EA. They said they write the code and test it with their program or code checkers to make sure the code works as designed. But they don't test the game so they have no idea how the product plays. That is for the QA team. The QA team is the least paid team in the company and typically all they do is rerun the Code checking software and for games, look at the overall designs and artwork. So no one tests. and we get this garbage. As stated above they are just moving sliders around and guessing without even logging in to play.

Wow.

There's....there's an awwwwwwwwffful lot that just started to make sense here. Not just in this game. But industry wide. Thank you.

merik1999 · May 2019

When they make statements like "that SHOULD" or "you SHOULD see", means they are using sliders or adjusting formulas. But they won't read this or take it serious...just us venting...

wisper2048 · May 2019

motu999#9953 said:

- Manycoins skirmish: people immediately abandon when it comes up on RIQ. No use even trying. No fix so far, no ETA

Not completely true. We managed to complete it when we got it on RIQ yesterday: 2 heals (DC and SW(me)), 1 tank, and 2 dps. I guess this is meta for heist. We have barely made bronze on second attempt, first attempt failed because tank did not understand ball mechanics.

elsunga · May 2019

wisper2048 said:

motu999#9953 said:

- Manycoins skirmish: people immediately abandon when it comes up on RIQ. No use even trying. No fix so far, no ETA
Not completely true. We managed to complete it when we got it on RIQ yesterday: 2 heals (DC and SW(me)), 1 tank, and 2 dps. I guess this is meta for heist. We have barely made bronze on second attempt, first attempt failed because tank did not understand ball mechanics.

What is the point of a intermediate dungeon/skirmish which can be barelly completed by a meta team only? If it would be a master mode I would somehow understand it, but this?

wisper2048 · May 2019

elsunga said:

wisper2048 said:

motu999#9953 said:

- Manycoins skirmish: people immediately abandon when it comes up on RIQ. No use even trying. No fix so far, no ETA
Not completely true. We managed to complete it when we got it on RIQ yesterday: 2 heals (DC and SW(me)), 1 tank, and 2 dps. I guess this is meta for heist. We have barely made bronze on second attempt, first attempt failed because tank did not understand ball mechanics.

What is the point of a intermediate dungeon/skirmish which can be barelly completed by a meta team only? If it would be a master mode I would somehow understand it, but this?

A bit of sarcasm was lost I guess. However, notethat when someone say that heist is completely unplayable, developer's will check statistics and they will see that some groups complete it (like ours). So they will say it is WAI or "learn to play", and they will close the issue.

cabar1 · May 2019

I was told they do play the game, but maybe GOD MODE makes it easy for them, and they are not concerned about the 'little people' who play!

Are the Dev's playtesting anything?

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