As I posted this question before, there was no answer.
There won't be one now.
Quality is non-existent.
And we just swallow what they give us...
As for "feeling forced to release as soon as possible to keep players ingame":
The fact things only work half, or not at all, drives more folks away than the lack of said content.
They should take an example on RIFT, at least there they try to get rid of bugs, and there the Devs actually communicate with the posse.
They answered the question in the thread.
Your pain runs deep.
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
I am loving how the team came out to explain and shun some light on the bug process. Thank you all for doing so and thank you for the great episode. I played it and it was very well done!
Pretty Darn Snazzy isn't it
Jellico....Engineer ground.....Da'val Romulan space Sci
Saphire.. Science ground......Ko'el Romulan space Tac
Leva........Tactical ground.....Koj Romulan space Eng
JJ-Verse will never be Canon or considered Lore...It will always be JJ-Verse
Missions do get tested. However, there are only so many people here we can have run through the mission, so many times. There are thousands more of you, running through it thousands of more times in a very short amount of time. We might not ever see a bug that only shows up 1/1000 runs, but it would show up a bunch for players.
I don't know the specifics of this bug, nor this mission in general. But we do have a QA team, and they do run through new missions, many times.
Sir Taco, why not set up a test server, where people can test the releases for you?
Many others do, it saves you time, money and effort.
I for one would be happy to become a bug hunter.
And I bet many others with me.
I bet such a test server would improve the entire game, considering bugs are (hopefully) seen before release.
While some bugs are hard to reproduce, many bugs are not. Bridge officers still get removed from their stations on map transitions. That bug does not happen every time, but it is by no means difficult to reproduce.
What about bugs that are reported on Tribble, but make it live to Holodeck anyway? You can't claim that you don't know about those bugs, because players reported them during testing. What about bugs that are reported after going live to Holodeck, but remain unfixed for months or years? Most of these are not hard to reproduce. The company just isn't devoting the resources towards fixing them.
I'm waiting for an answer on this one myself!
Basically it'll come down to "we don't have the resources/time/in-house assets to devote to it." Which is corporate-speak for "we don't care because our paychecks are unaffected."
Not trying to be nasty here, but really Devs... you need to start caring and develop the tools to prevent these sorts of incidents.
Otherwise, the public image is "if it doesn't fit in a lockbox or in the C-store we just don't care."
I really sincerely hope that is not the case but man, it sure looks that way.
Again, I don't know the specifics on this one. But there are definitely bugs that ONLY show up once it goes to Holodeck. That's about as much as I can tell you.
What I would like to know is why what look like easy to fix bugs that get reported with 100% repeatable clear steps never get fixed. For example I am at level 20 projectile R&D yet still over 1 year later cannot craft and upgrade my own projectile Tactical Vulnerability Consoles. That was reported both in tribble, holo, and in the testing threads for R&D.
Another example that is worse due to the massive amount of time investment and game resource needed. Upgrading mines to max rarity level (gold) gives us a useless ACC mod that does absolutely nothing. 20+ hours down the drain!!! 2+months of refining Dilithium down the drain.
Another thing I spotted is many bugs get fixed on tribble but seem to get lost and never make it to live. Then a few patch's later are lost on tribble when a new large patch is added. I always guessed the bug is fixed in one branch then a new branch comes out without the bug fix and the bug is marked as fixed but lost.
Basically it'll come down to "we don't have the resources/time/in-house assets to devote to it." Which is corporate-speak for "we don't care because our paychecks are unaffected."
No, it's corporate-speak for "We have ten thousand things to do and it's prioritized lower than the OTHER bugs we're working on, or is a particularly difficult bug to fix." Which is generally what happens when reported bugs don't get fixed quickly.
No, it's corporate-speak for "We have ten thousand things to do and it's prioritized lower than the OTHER bugs we're working on, or is a particularly difficult bug to fix." Which is generally what happens when reported bugs don't get fixed quickly.
Yep, but the entitled whiners prefer to continue whining and insulting the developers instead of hearing logical reasoning such as this.
So the solution is to create a shard that simulates Holodeck that only the Dev Team can access, and then access it remotely from home or a bank of randomly configured PCs.
The errors in this episode could have been caught in a live build in a single walk-through. ******n progression was BROKEN. Art assets were MISSING. This give the customer the impression that you do not care at all, and this damages the STO brand.
You need to consider these implications, and the the long term big picture here. Every single episode you have release has had a major fault upon launch, SINCE THE BEGINNING. THIS is what gives us the impression that you do not care. The solution is dead-nuts simple, but five going on six years later here we are again.
Flogging a dead horse springs to mind, 5 to 6 years later as you say we're still in the same boat. I've grown so weary of these fubars my playtime is now non-existent, where once I would spend time and money on this one of my fave IP's, i've all but become reduced to hanging out in here.
What I wouldn't give for the early Stoked years, content drought or not. Where did it all go so pear shaped? The list is endless...
Our method to episode testing is both methodical and chaotic. We run rigorous test plans designed for the four main player types; those that speed through to get it done, those that play 'normally' as in reading everything and taking in the view, those who bumble through every nook and cranny of the mission, and then several text passes for all the different faction types. And then we do all of these teamed.
We do each of these a minimum of 4 times, which comes out to a bare minimum of 12 rigorous playthroughs in our QA environment, which is similar to Holodeck but without the thousands of players smashing into the mission simultaneously. That part's not something that can be simulated. Even giant publishers run into similar issues.
We normally don't put episodes on Tribble because hey, no spoilers man. So we do what we can with what we have. And even if we had 1000 testers and 6 months per episode, there'd still be some crazy random thing that would happen to 1% of the players once it went live.
This is not to excuse bugs. It's to explain why they show up. And all I ask is you bear with us as we continue to fix and fix as we grow and grow. It's a little like evolution, but with space ships.
Excuses or not the biggest problem isn't the testing or not its the fact that the problems go unsolved for years or are still existing today.
The other part of the problem and I'm usually against revamps but the whole faction thing does need a revamp. It really needs to just be one big alliance and depending on the character race and such would determine what it can and can't use so there isn't a teaming issue along the side of ships.
I'll give one example about ships because I don't expect for my KDF to get a brand new copy cat fed ship every ship spawning session in the c-store. What needs to be done with a revamp of this is making it where it most likely would be a fed ship but if you bought the ship possibly like say if it was a new fed ship that had an epic new second deflector that if we had like an intel bop that was science heavy that if it allowed if we owned the fed console that we could craft it to be used on a kdf intel bop for example. I say this because most star trek fans like myself are going to play cannon ships for the most part but on other hand you need to make your money so there needs to be a middle ground like this for it to happen. This relates to testing because of the fact that the faction system in its current form I highly doubt kdf or romulan republic ever get tested because the rush to put this content out there fed side rarely gets tested more than what you state it does and the bugs sometimes never ever get fixed so my suggestion would go along way in the testing process and enjoyment of the game itself imo.
Just my 2 cents on every issue I have wrapped up in one wall of text .
What I wouldn't give for the early Stoked years, content drought or not. Where did it all go so pear shaped? The list is endless...
When PWE started to seriously implement their buisiness model... where new content brings in the cash... but bug fixes dont... and to capitalize on the cash you HAVE to release new content every so often or people loose interest.
Bug fixes don't bring in cash... and there are enough new players and White Knights playing the game that those who leave the gave over a broken game isn't a huge hit to their cash flow.
Bug fixes don't bring in cash... and there are enough new players, White Knights playing the game that those who leave the gave over a broken game isn't a huge hit to their cash flow.
What about the self-entitled whiners who keep playing this game week in and week out threatening to quit but never do? Surely there's a place for them amongst the "White Knights" and "new players."
My Foundry Mission--Name: Falling Star | Mission ID: HQIH36HAW | Faction: FED
I repeat, How can a bugged mission be released without internal testing?
This is not a complain post, I am genuinely interested to know how this kind of problem arises, where everyone who plays the mission experiences the same bugs at the same place.
If the game is tested by devs why do they not see the same bugs as us? Are they using a different build of the game on an internal system?
Or is it the case that nobody at Cryptic actually played the entire mission all the way through? The latter being a scenario I can't honestly believe.
The mission was great, I'm looking forward to trying it again now it's fixed, if indeed it is, but the question remains and I think it would be of great interest to the community to receive an honest answer.
My guess is, they never died in it. ;P
I only re-spawned outside the door (needing to abort) when I died. I bet they just played it in god-mode. Either that, or they're just really good.
those that speed through to get it done, those that play 'normally' as in reading everything and taking in the view, those who bumble through every nook and cranny of the mission, and then several text passes for all the different faction types.
One tester and one single playthrough on ANY of these runs would have caught the disappearing Sela bug on the very first run.
Because that's how it works with program code. It could have been something that escaped testing. I love how everone rages about imperfect software when there is no such thing as it.
Defending The Galaxy By Breaking One Starfleet Regulation After The Next.
And therein lies the problem, we don't all see the same bugs at the same time, the loadout issue doesn't affect everyone for example and yet we are all on the same server. The devs are testing on a different server to us so is it surprising that they are not seeing the same bugs? Perhaps the solution is to release the missions a few days early without announcing it and having only a secret way to access it on holodeck, they can then do their testing in a 'real environment' first.
That may explain why this particular bug slipped through. But it doesn't explain why other bugs slip through. Many bugs do not depend specifically on the server environment or the client environment. Many bugs are reproducible every time. I've seen players report such bugs on Tribble. I've seen the same bugs make it live to Holodeck. I've even seen QA acknowledge some bugs as verified. Yet the bugs remain unfixed. The fundamental problem is that they create more bugs each release than they have time to fix, so we see a steady accumulation of bugs.
The other part of the problem and I'm usually against revamps but the whole faction thing does need a revamp. It really needs to just be one big alliance and depending on the character race and such would determine what it can and can't use so there isn't a teaming issue along the side of ships.
Cow dump, IMHO.
I think, but that's my opinion, the factions are OK.
The fact some bugs are there for nearly a frikken decade, is not.
They oughta stop making content, and fix the bloody bugs for once...
The lack of content is not the problem why folks leave.
Errors and constant revamping is.
One fella said it quite nicely: the game grew beyond him, for all the revamps.
You make a certain build, and the next week this is obsolete.
You buy a ship, not even a week later it can be moved into the scrap yard.
Note: hyperboles.
But it DOES say something.
Comments
They answered the question in the thread.
Let us explore it... together. Each man hides a secret pain. It must be exposed and reckoned with. It must be dragged from the darkness and forced into the light. Share your pain. Share your pain with me... and gain strength from the sharing.
Pretty Darn Snazzy isn't it
Saphire.. Science ground......Ko'el Romulan space Tac
Leva........Tactical ground.....Koj Romulan space Eng
JJ-Verse will never be Canon or considered Lore...It will always be JJ-Verse
Looking it up.
Thank you for telling me.
Many others do, it saves you time, money and effort.
I for one would be happy to become a bug hunter.
And I bet many others with me.
I bet such a test server would improve the entire game, considering bugs are (hopefully) seen before release.
I'm waiting for an answer on this one myself!
Basically it'll come down to "we don't have the resources/time/in-house assets to devote to it." Which is corporate-speak for "we don't care because our paychecks are unaffected."
Not trying to be nasty here, but really Devs... you need to start caring and develop the tools to prevent these sorts of incidents.
Otherwise, the public image is "if it doesn't fit in a lockbox or in the C-store we just don't care."
I really sincerely hope that is not the case but man, it sure looks that way.
Another example that is worse due to the massive amount of time investment and game resource needed. Upgrading mines to max rarity level (gold) gives us a useless ACC mod that does absolutely nothing. 20+ hours down the drain!!! 2+months of refining Dilithium down the drain.
Another thing I spotted is many bugs get fixed on tribble but seem to get lost and never make it to live. Then a few patch's later are lost on tribble when a new large patch is added. I always guessed the bug is fixed in one branch then a new branch comes out without the bug fix and the bug is marked as fixed but lost.
No, it's corporate-speak for "We have ten thousand things to do and it's prioritized lower than the OTHER bugs we're working on, or is a particularly difficult bug to fix." Which is generally what happens when reported bugs don't get fixed quickly.
Yep, but the entitled whiners prefer to continue whining and insulting the developers instead of hearing logical reasoning such as this.
Flogging a dead horse springs to mind, 5 to 6 years later as you say we're still in the same boat. I've grown so weary of these fubars my playtime is now non-existent, where once I would spend time and money on this one of my fave IP's, i've all but become reduced to hanging out in here.
What I wouldn't give for the early Stoked years, content drought or not. Where did it all go so pear shaped? The list is endless...
Excuses or not the biggest problem isn't the testing or not its the fact that the problems go unsolved for years or are still existing today.
The other part of the problem and I'm usually against revamps but the whole faction thing does need a revamp. It really needs to just be one big alliance and depending on the character race and such would determine what it can and can't use so there isn't a teaming issue along the side of ships.
I'll give one example about ships because I don't expect for my KDF to get a brand new copy cat fed ship every ship spawning session in the c-store. What needs to be done with a revamp of this is making it where it most likely would be a fed ship but if you bought the ship possibly like say if it was a new fed ship that had an epic new second deflector that if we had like an intel bop that was science heavy that if it allowed if we owned the fed console that we could craft it to be used on a kdf intel bop for example. I say this because most star trek fans like myself are going to play cannon ships for the most part but on other hand you need to make your money so there needs to be a middle ground like this for it to happen. This relates to testing because of the fact that the faction system in its current form I highly doubt kdf or romulan republic ever get tested because the rush to put this content out there fed side rarely gets tested more than what you state it does and the bugs sometimes never ever get fixed so my suggestion would go along way in the testing process and enjoyment of the game itself imo.
Just my 2 cents on every issue I have wrapped up in one wall of text
When PWE started to seriously implement their buisiness model... where new content brings in the cash... but bug fixes dont... and to capitalize on the cash you HAVE to release new content every so often or people loose interest.
Bug fixes don't bring in cash... and there are enough new players and White Knights playing the game that those who leave the gave over a broken game isn't a huge hit to their cash flow.
What about the self-entitled whiners who keep playing this game week in and week out threatening to quit but never do? Surely there's a place for them amongst the "White Knights" and "new players."
My guess is, they never died in it. ;P
I only re-spawned outside the door (needing to abort) when I died. I bet they just played it in god-mode. Either that, or they're just really good.
My character Tsin'xing
One tester and one single playthrough on ANY of these runs would have caught the disappearing Sela bug on the very first run.
No, you did not. 4 years later and Boldly They Rode is still bugged for teams. Especially the crashing Klingon BoP and the turbolift to DS9 Ops.
We can go all night. Don't throw out some BS and expect us to just swallow it without question.
Defending The Galaxy By Breaking One Starfleet Regulation After The Next.
That may explain why this particular bug slipped through. But it doesn't explain why other bugs slip through. Many bugs do not depend specifically on the server environment or the client environment. Many bugs are reproducible every time. I've seen players report such bugs on Tribble. I've seen the same bugs make it live to Holodeck. I've even seen QA acknowledge some bugs as verified. Yet the bugs remain unfixed. The fundamental problem is that they create more bugs each release than they have time to fix, so we see a steady accumulation of bugs.
This.... agree! Only those whom have ever had deadlines with a job, can truly understand.
I think, but that's my opinion, the factions are OK.
The fact some bugs are there for nearly a frikken decade, is not.
They oughta stop making content, and fix the bloody bugs for once...
The lack of content is not the problem why folks leave.
Errors and constant revamping is.
One fella said it quite nicely: the game grew beyond him, for all the revamps.
You make a certain build, and the next week this is obsolete.
You buy a ship, not even a week later it can be moved into the scrap yard.
Note: hyperboles.
But it DOES say something.
and I'm like serious now I have not noticed anything lika a bug during my playthrough of that mission (played it twice)
well....
maybe if we count the server going down on my first attempt of doing this mission then we have one :P