Why do you guys have a PTR, if you’re going to just continuously release untested patches to the live servers? The whole point of that PTR is to test the patches before shipping them live.
It doesn’t matter if you’re changing Thorpe’s name from Thorpe to Thrope, or if you’re completely restructuring a class. If a change is made, it belongs on the PTR first.
Do you guys not have memories of the last time you did this, and broke it? Or the time before that? or the time before that? or literally every single patch you guys have released that wasn’t put on the PTR first?
Talk to us, we’re listening. Why are you guys avoiding your own tools so hard, that you think it’s okay to release completely broken, untested patches time and time again?
Not rolling PTR into production breaks time tested software development rules. It is insulting to us they don’t follow normal software development cycles. Why there are so many bugs.
Whats truly insulting is that AGS continues to release untested patches when they have the tools at their disposal to prevent this stuff from happening, they opt to not use those tools though.
That said, I am not actually throwing insults around like you think I am. I am simply stating the facts of what has happened before, and what just happened again.
I would say it would be understandable if AGS had a track record of being able to implement hotfixes without consistently breaking things, doesn’t seem the case though
Yup. Every day, I get more curious as to how the game ended up this way. Who came up with the Gypsum System? The Umbral System? The timegates?
They are running the game like they run a social media platform like Facebook. Facebook has very good metrics on engagement and do their best to maximize that number.
It feels like the NW team is doing the same thing, not realizing a game has to be fun as well.
I just farmed a crapload of starmetal and wyrdwood for my wife, that I was going to refine and give to her tonite to help level her Furnishing crafting…my warehouses are jammed with mats…
Not to mention that last night in OPR I experienced some kind of wierd collision everywhere bug that made it impossible for me to move, unless I hopped…never saw that before.
Have you worked at a gaming company before? There is usually not unit and integration testing in the same style you would see at other types of software development. There is lots of manual testing and reporting that happens from QA teams.
No, it isn’t my industry, but there has to be some sort of regression testing going on. Do videogames completely rely on QA teams, and the devs testing their own work? That sounds like a recipe for disaster.
In theory that’s what a PTR is for, BUT they have a release schedule to maintain. So it’ll go out ready or not with whatever cobbled together fixes (barely tested) that they can throw together.
They might be capable of better releases but the way they talk about their code, it sounds bloated and excessively complicated and that any real fix of core mechanics is basically a redo of the entire game.
Automated testing is done at some studios but not others in my experience. Many large companies and AAA gaming studies I have worked have moved to CI based solutions without unit testing and have staffed up large groups of cheap labor QA people for manual testing the game. They are very poorly paid, usually younger, and worked very hard. They write up reports which are then given to a QA manager who forwards them over to engineering for fixes. Most games are built on 3rd party engines, so at most you can test the calls to these engines without having leaky tests, but the game itself lives in the UI. Why would they pay engineers who salary is 200K+ to write indeterministic automated tests when you have a younger kid making minimum wage who can manually test it for you every time. Many of the types of bugs you see in games are collision based or UI based. Remember video games are not like most software development where at least 50% of the people making a product are engineers, its more like 15-20%, and problems can exist from any of their output including artwork. Most things are not deterministic in this environment. All in all the games with tons of bugs like this are usually due to poor leadership, poor structure and process, and just a sign of dysfunction, not necessarily inept or bad engineers.
The leads, that’s who. Someone, I don’t know which one but there is at least one predominant lead who’s appeared in dev videos, is digging their heels in on the time gating and orbs system. That was reflected in the very poorly thought out response by one CM in particular.
New World credits list. If this is accurate, and the credit list for the Designers is accurate, then only one designer was involved in designing anything even remotely successful (GW2 and GW2:HoT). The rest are either new at game design, or have a history with games that were not what you would call “good”.
