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PSA: The people who make ships are not the people who fix bugs/lag
illcadia
Member Posts: 1,412 Bug Hunter
Every fricking day I see people whining endlessly about how 'they shouldn't make ships, they should fix the bugs/lag/whatever'- and every day it's just so much ignorant drivel.
The people who make and release ships are not the people who fix the bugs or the lag. They're completely different jobs with either no or very little cross qualification.
The systems engineer is not a programmer. He's the guy who manages the systems, makes sure that the network is running. If the network is doing fine, he cannot be retasked to fix bugs or code or whatever, because those are not his skills.
Ditto for the animators, riggers, environmental artists, and some of the coders- because not all the coders have the same skills and a lot of them work in different areas of specialty.
Then you consider that bugs need to be tracked down and isolated before a developer who can actually fix the bug even looks at it- in a lot of cases while the bug is obvious to us as players, that's just the end state output. Looking at the debug console, seeing the code pulls and whatever- it can be very difficult to track down what is actually causing the interaction that results in a bug.
And there's a whole chain of effort that is being made for each bug that needs to be fixed.
You can't just sit an animator down in front of a wall of code and be like 'fix bugs please' because not only is he not remotely suited to doing so, nor can you just find most bugs by looking at a wall of code, but literally any change he makes has the chance to mess up the entire code branch were it to go live, because he is not a programmer.
The developers are not omnicompetent hypersavants skilled in literally everything. They are specialists who have been hired for, and work for the role they have trained in.
So please, enough with the constant 'they need to stop producing X, and instead fix Y', because the people who produce X are not the people who fix Y.
And frankly I'm tired of you guys making yourselves look like bigger idiots- and worse when you bring those attitudes and completely factually incorrect beliefs into any dialogue you have with the devs when they try to talk to us.
It ****s all over any actual effort we make, it ****s on them, and it makes the whole community toxic and worse as a whole.
The people who make and release ships are not the people who fix the bugs or the lag. They're completely different jobs with either no or very little cross qualification.
The systems engineer is not a programmer. He's the guy who manages the systems, makes sure that the network is running. If the network is doing fine, he cannot be retasked to fix bugs or code or whatever, because those are not his skills.
Ditto for the animators, riggers, environmental artists, and some of the coders- because not all the coders have the same skills and a lot of them work in different areas of specialty.
Then you consider that bugs need to be tracked down and isolated before a developer who can actually fix the bug even looks at it- in a lot of cases while the bug is obvious to us as players, that's just the end state output. Looking at the debug console, seeing the code pulls and whatever- it can be very difficult to track down what is actually causing the interaction that results in a bug.
And there's a whole chain of effort that is being made for each bug that needs to be fixed.
You can't just sit an animator down in front of a wall of code and be like 'fix bugs please' because not only is he not remotely suited to doing so, nor can you just find most bugs by looking at a wall of code, but literally any change he makes has the chance to mess up the entire code branch were it to go live, because he is not a programmer.
The developers are not omnicompetent hypersavants skilled in literally everything. They are specialists who have been hired for, and work for the role they have trained in.
So please, enough with the constant 'they need to stop producing X, and instead fix Y', because the people who produce X are not the people who fix Y.
And frankly I'm tired of you guys making yourselves look like bigger idiots- and worse when you bring those attitudes and completely factually incorrect beliefs into any dialogue you have with the devs when they try to talk to us.
It ****s all over any actual effort we make, it ****s on them, and it makes the whole community toxic and worse as a whole.
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"hey, lets release more cars! we have no tyres or streets or fuel but who cares? we are just designers and we do what we want"
you are right, yes, but still this is totally insane!
They were doing that. This has since changed, since they're actually making an honest attempt to fix the issues now with the change in department leads.
And what does it have to do with PvP anyway?
We all know PvP is all but canned. They put absolutely no effort in it, and they release PvP breaking thing after PvP breaking thing for quick buck.
They charade of releasing new ships and specializations and advertizing it as content drove 90% of even most hardcore fans out of the game.
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BUT
The persistent bugs in this game have gone on for years. If Cryptic was serious about fixing them they would have either hired more people for the specific purpose of fixing the game or replacing the current people if they weren't performing.
Cryptic cares only for profit, not the gaming experience. They're never going to wholeheartedly fix the game whilst people are prepared to pay for new shinies despite the bugs. Only when people stop spending money will they actually take note of anything that doesn't directly make them money.
I stopped spending ages ago. That's how I tell them that I'm not happy. And quite frankly, the direction the game has been taking has me not caring if they ever fix it.
Sure we often times suggest they are not very good at prioritization. PvP people often argue that Cryptic is wasting there money on the art guys. Either they have a few people to slow to upgrade employers in which case Cryptic really lucked out. Or the management they have in place is just really bad.
Its like taking a 1990 Chevy Cavalier full of rust, an interior riddled with cigarette burns, and a knocking engine in for a high end detail job.
Its like buying a gutted home with a sinking foundation, dry rot and a termite infestation. Slapping up a few thousand dollars worth of dry wall and paint, and trying to flip it on a sucker.
Its like throwing a party with fancy wines, cheeses and pricey call girls for potential investors. At this party they are shown some nice cooked up books that hide the real numbers underneath.
You get the idea. Cryptics art guys are great... they are not the problem. The problem is Cryptic using there services to try and hide the leaking foundation, the rust, a few termites and the cooked metrics... I mean numbers.
All I see is the cyclic "Release broken new stuff, wait a bit and then fix some of the stuff before other new stuff comes out"
They are in the "fix some of the stuff" phase of the cycle right now. I've not seen anything to show me different.
Trendy and SalamiInferno have been doing a lot of work in addition to the usual fix stuff, there've been some actual policy changes it seems, and I think they're going better.
Anyways I know everyone has an opinion about how they need to shuffle money around, or change design goals, and that's great you feel that way- we all do.
But this thread was specifically about the people who hang out here or in OPVP and ***** about how the animators should be bug fixing. Or the systems engineers. Or the riggers or guys writing the lore or whatever. I'm just tired of seeing such ignorant stupid drek when people could actually either shut up or talk about things that are actually happening.
Also releasing new ships with new abilities means someone had to program all those abilities. Thats propably not the ship designer himself.
And we still have art related bugs clipping issues and the like.
They release one ugly ship after another one stupid event and all in the same style as the last years. Adding time gated missions because we cant have ppl having fun with trying to win faster no never.
Adding missions like close portal here press button there oh and sometimes you may even shoot something but its not really important.
In short they just keep going in the same lame direction where we get more and more ships that noone whats and powers that make the game lag even more and missions boring as hell. New guy but no new direction taken really.
Yes, yes, the 3d modeler who makes the ship mesh, and the 2d artist who paints the pretty testures are not coders, this is true...
BUT, coders are needed to put in the code for the new ships awesom-sauce new ship power, and handling the new ship's amazing new boff specialisation post, and the new class of boffs to fill that post, and... Etc.
Crowbarring in endless new ships takes coders away from bug-hunting the code they crowbarred in for the last new ship, and the one before that, and the one before that.
As an old game-modder, I can tell you that making and texturing a new ship mesh is the quick and easy part of implementing a new ship with new abilities and features.
Getting all that new stuff into the game, testing it, and making sure it works is the hard part.
10 mins to make a low poly hitbox for a new ship, 10 hours to convert to game format, start a test game, get the new ship, launch, fly, pick a fight, see if the thing registers hits, find out why it doesn't, examine the code, and rigging, find the mesh maker, get him to check his hitbox doesn't have technical flaws, test it again, fix something, test it again, etc.
If adding new ships was just making a pretty model, droping it in a folder, and flying, we'd have almost any new ship players begged for, almost instantly, cross faction 9 packs every week.
Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life...</b></size></center>
Most of the difficulty in iterating the new powers isn't on a programming level, it's on a game balance/functionality level. The big issue is getting the animations and rigging done- they only have one animator, so he's the bottleneck for that new stuff.
Cryptic has built themselves a whole host of 'tech'- code solutions- that they can plug and play to make just about anything. It's actually something they've run into difficulty with lately, because while it works for simple stuff, anything that ends up doing a lot of calculations lags the server, and by using plug and play stuff internally, you might get a power that 'works', but has so many function calls or whatever that it craps everything out when actually used.
I'd rather have a playable game than a pretty lag fest.
exactly!
and nobody tests the new stuff. how can it be that many things just don't work right or even don't work at all? i don't think i'll ever see a working Overwhelming Force or working layouts just to name 2
maybe they should use artists for basic quality control when there is nothing to model/rig/skin. something cryptic ignores obviously.
you don't need coding knowledge for QC btw
Isn't it awesome that you have to repeatedly smash a key in hopes of the ability going off?
Isn't it awesome that when you hit a series of abilities in sequence, you look back at the tray and realize half of them didn't even go off?
Isn't it awesome that when you hit a command, it goes into immediate cooldown without it doing anything? Like I hit TS3, wait a second or two, then fire my torpedo, only to see a single unbuffed torp launch and the ability is on coodown...
It's been going like this ever since DR hit and has not gotten any better.
I've noticed ever since the new sector space roll-out, this lag has been a problem. Cryptic won't admit this, but it's my primary culprit. If I'm wrong about the servers, then it's the physics engine. Every game developer knows that the overhead for constant physics calculations does slow down any computer's processor.
TacoFangs if you're reading this, tell "ya boys", that they should use simple sphere colliders for everything instead of trying to use a customized mesh collider. It's more work for the designers/artists, but it'll help reduce this lag (or help narrow down the cause of it).
That's just my 2 cent.
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