I think every dev in the world use patches for enhancements or troubleshooting.
But cryptic use patches to adjust more BUGS ... thats so weird. Please test your patches before uploading!
All patches hit the public test server first. Where players can find, hunt down and report bugs they encounter. Quality Assurance is supposed to catch most of them yes, but those that slip through can be caught by players. This is probably where the failure is happening, players aren't reporting the bugs they are encountering.
just nature of the beast. *shrug* Still, we would like to see less of this.
This is only allowed because this an entertainment system. If these types of bugs happened in the production environment where I work, people WILL get fired. I've seen it happen. Quality standards should be a matter of pride for a company.
I think every dev in the world use patches for enhancements or troubleshooting.
But cryptic use patches to adjust more BUGS ... thats so weird. Please test your patches before uploading!
It would probably help them to if you mentioned some of the bugs you encountered.
All patches hit the public test server first. Where players can find, hunt down and report bugs they encounter. Quality Assurance is supposed to catch most of them yes, but those that slip through can be caught by players. This is probably where the failure is happening, players aren't reporting the bugs they are encountering.
Or maybe the players are becoming apathetic to the cut and paste responses for bug tickets and then nothing being done about them. We have a broken game mechanic in the decloaking bug Cryptic says they tried to fix, yet after 55 weeks it still exists. Then we can talk about explore missions where the NPC's spawn either on top of the buildings or underneath them making it all but impossible to complete. The latest fiasco in the field generator, where they pushed something onto holodeck without testing it in less than 48 hours, and are then amazed when it is borked. The same old excuses for shoddy workmanship on Cryptic's part no longer hold water, and people should expect better.
You're asuming that they have a QA team. From what I understand they had a pretty good size brain drain last year before PWE bought them out. They lost people and weren't able to replace them because of a hiring freeze.
All patches hit the public test server first. Where players can find, hunt down and report bugs they encounter. Quality Assurance is supposed to catch most of them yes, but those that slip through can be caught by players. This is probably where the failure is happening, players aren't reporting the bugs they are encountering.
While This is true they've done some remarkably short turn around from test phase to live, in one case, less than a day. When we do report bugs nothing happens, or we get excuses, or they break it worse. The cloaking issue is over a year old, the chat bug that still occurs, is months. Testing does little when they don't listen and or won't make efforts to have things tested longer.
The latest batch of TRIBBLE ups amaze me. Can't click level 3 & 4 boff powers, activating slipstream while not in sector space, the shield console frak up, and finally, breaking autofire. None of these things are hardly obscure bugs buried in some backwater exploration mission. Anyone halfway familiar with the game playing it for 15 minutes would know something is amiss, yet here we are.
I guess the excuse this week will be "sorry guys, we're gearing up for the next FE!" Honestly, if all they're doing is prepping for the next best thing while more bugs fall through the cracks, the final product will continue to decrease in quality.
Get with it guys, it's not like some of us are paying you for a product or anything...oh what's that? Not everyone went silver? Well darn...:rolleyes:
The latest batch of TRIBBLE ups amaze me. Can't click level 3 & 4 boff powers, activating slipstream while not in sector space, the shield console frak up, and finally, breaking autofire. None of these things are hardly obscure bugs buried in some backwater exploration mission. Anyone halfway familiar with the game playing it for 15 minutes would know something is amiss, yet here we are.
I guess the excuse this week will be "sorry guys, we're gearing up for the next FE!" Honestly, if all they're doing is prepping for the next best thing while more bugs fall through the cracks, the final product will continue to decrease in quality.
Get with it guys, it's not like some of us are paying you for a product or anything...oh what's that? Not everyone went silver? Well darn...:rolleyes:
Boff powers were fixed, slipstream was fixed, shield console was fixed, and autofire only broke in today's patch. And all the other bugs you mentioned were fixed within days, sometimes just one, and were only on the test server for about that long as well.
Considering the standard length of time it takes to get fixes pushed through into live patches for something as complex as a MMO, they're doing pretty well.
Boff powers were fixed, slipstream was fixed, shield console was fixed, and autofire only broke in today's patch. And all the other bugs you mentioned were fixed within days, sometimes just one, and were only on the test server for about that long as well.
Considering the standard length of time it takes to get fixes pushed through into live patches for something as complex as a MMO, they're doing pretty well.
Never mind that many of these bugs should have not been live, ever. Also this doesn't take in account for some long standing bugs and or issues in the game. They're not doing great on the QA side of things, Issues that have gone live in spite of a Large amount of notices and or bug reports.
A bug that shows on tribble should NEVER make it live, ever. Things like todays Auto fire, while highly annoying, if it didn't show before today, can't be forseen and are understandable, I'm more forgiving of that than some bugs or issues that have gone from tribble to live when they've been reported numerous times
Considering the standard length of time it takes to get fixes pushed through into live patches for something as complex as a MMO, they're doing pretty well.
On the other hand if they had done any kind of QA and posted the patch on tribble it would have taken about 5 minutes to figure out they had fixed one thing, broke another, and more work needed to be done before the patch was ready to go live.
I voluntarily played the F2P beta. I knew things would be screwed up, people would need to point them out, and Cryptic would fix it. That was on tribble.
There is no excuse for pushing game breaking bug infested code onto holodeck.
On the other hand if they had done any kind of QA and posted the patch on tribble it would have taken about 5 minutes to figure out they had fixed one thing, broke another, and more work needed to be done before the patch was ready to go live...
ROFL.... If you think things are this easy, you should try becoming a professional software developer yourself... This stuff is actually much much harder then it looks...
ROFL.... If you think things are this easy, you should try becoming a professional software developer yourself... This stuff is actually much much harder then it looks...
I don't think it's easy. I work and live with software engineers. As hard as it is, part of it has to include validation and QA testing BEFORE you release it in the live environment. F2P is not an excuse.
"Shut up you don't have to pay for it." is not an answer.
A bug that shows on tribble should NEVER make it live, ever.
Game software is very complex, if such a standard was put in place then we just wouldn't have games at all. Some bugs are just hard to track down even, just because you can see it happen, doesn't mean they can easily find the cause or fix it, or a fix might break other things, this is why long term bugs tend to hand around.
While early on STO was very buggy, I'd say the overall quality has improved, and it is certainly on par with other offerings in the MMO space.
Comments
Resistance is futile
A lot of truth to this.
just nature of the beast. *shrug* Still, we would like to see less of this.
This is only allowed because this an entertainment system. If these types of bugs happened in the production environment where I work, people WILL get fired. I've seen it happen. Quality standards should be a matter of pride for a company.
It would probably help them to if you mentioned some of the bugs you encountered.
Or maybe the players are becoming apathetic to the cut and paste responses for bug tickets and then nothing being done about them. We have a broken game mechanic in the decloaking bug Cryptic says they tried to fix, yet after 55 weeks it still exists. Then we can talk about explore missions where the NPC's spawn either on top of the buildings or underneath them making it all but impossible to complete. The latest fiasco in the field generator, where they pushed something onto holodeck without testing it in less than 48 hours, and are then amazed when it is borked. The same old excuses for shoddy workmanship on Cryptic's part no longer hold water, and people should expect better.
You're asuming that they have a QA team. From what I understand they had a pretty good size brain drain last year before PWE bought them out. They lost people and weren't able to replace them because of a hiring freeze.
I guess the excuse this week will be "sorry guys, we're gearing up for the next FE!" Honestly, if all they're doing is prepping for the next best thing while more bugs fall through the cracks, the final product will continue to decrease in quality.
Get with it guys, it's not like some of us are paying you for a product or anything...oh what's that? Not everyone went silver? Well darn...:rolleyes:
Boff powers were fixed, slipstream was fixed, shield console was fixed, and autofire only broke in today's patch. And all the other bugs you mentioned were fixed within days, sometimes just one, and were only on the test server for about that long as well.
Considering the standard length of time it takes to get fixes pushed through into live patches for something as complex as a MMO, they're doing pretty well.
Never mind that many of these bugs should have not been live, ever. Also this doesn't take in account for some long standing bugs and or issues in the game. They're not doing great on the QA side of things, Issues that have gone live in spite of a Large amount of notices and or bug reports.
A bug that shows on tribble should NEVER make it live, ever. Things like todays Auto fire, while highly annoying, if it didn't show before today, can't be forseen and are understandable, I'm more forgiving of that than some bugs or issues that have gone from tribble to live when they've been reported numerous times
On the other hand if they had done any kind of QA and posted the patch on tribble it would have taken about 5 minutes to figure out they had fixed one thing, broke another, and more work needed to be done before the patch was ready to go live.
I voluntarily played the F2P beta. I knew things would be screwed up, people would need to point them out, and Cryptic would fix it. That was on tribble.
There is no excuse for pushing game breaking bug infested code onto holodeck.
I don't think it's easy. I work and live with software engineers. As hard as it is, part of it has to include validation and QA testing BEFORE you release it in the live environment. F2P is not an excuse.
"Shut up you don't have to pay for it." is not an answer.
Game software is very complex, if such a standard was put in place then we just wouldn't have games at all. Some bugs are just hard to track down even, just because you can see it happen, doesn't mean they can easily find the cause or fix it, or a fix might break other things, this is why long term bugs tend to hand around.
While early on STO was very buggy, I'd say the overall quality has improved, and it is certainly on par with other offerings in the MMO space.