Commando Archive
Thread: After reading the post on tomorrows Update, I had enough.. e' finito
Holocron wrote:
People simply dont want to play on TC because of the low population and also because they dont want to waste time into advancing on a test platform. To increase the population, you should consider boosts, maybe in form of XP terminals.
There's also the barrier to entry to getting to TC (a separate install and such).
If we do boosts on TC, we're a bit worried that we won't get accurate testing. It's clear though that something needs to be done to make TC more appealing.
Allow us to "clone" (not move) our main character from another server, including race, gender, appearance, skills, and experience, and you'll get a flock of people who join TC just to try things out with their already-boosted characters.
This would provide an enormous benefit to both the players and the devs. Players get to sandbox with their character, devs get to have well-developed characters testing the code.
I can understand a lot of things would not be copyable, such as owned items, houses, pets, etc. But if you let us copy our basic characters with the skills and experience we have spent many weeks developing, you would get a nice surge in your TC population.
The biggest fear with TC is that we would lose any and all effort we put into it if a wipe became necessary.
Allowing us to clone a character from another server would eliminate that fear.
Lol, steppencat you work in QA? No wonder you hate the developers.
You can't blame Holo for going to press metting and marketing. It is his job and it is not immorral or unethical, like your citings of enron and whatever the hell else you listed. Besides it is not like he is the only developer that is working on bugs and crap. Lol, that would be funny though. Holo goes off to do his JOB, so no bugs ever get fixed because he is the only one working on anything. Wake up dumb a$$ (by the way I thought long and hard about itbefore I called you that)there is probably a whole team of developers, and they were all to busy fixing the bugs and maybe holo was off doing whatever but like that even matters. Holo could spend more time working on bugs and stuff if he didn't waste his time trying to reply to your lame posts.
And they did do QA before they released it, called beta testing, and it truely was ready to release. But you know what that is a very small scale. You have maybe 1000 people playing a game that is meant to house hundreds of thousands. Now that is a bit of an increase in the scale. Youwould think that when 100 times more people start playing they are all going to start finding a lot more problems then just the original 1000. Come on Mr. QA, you can't tell me that you would garuntee anything 100% after you were done with it and assured the quality or whatever it is you do. Give the developers a break, they are trying, and they want the system working just as much as all of us, if for nothing else so they don't have to listen to your lame a$$ bashing them.
Holocron wrote:The process we've put in place is to go through all the correspondent reports, and prioritize all the issues overall, and tackle things in priority order. To any one profession, this is going to look unacceptable, I'm guessing, but it is the best we can do.
So does the fact that your Commando correspondent cancelled his account make you reconsider the thought your put into your prioritization? Not a flame. Serious question. For all I know, he could have simply been a whiner who didn't get his way. But the whole idea of correspondents, as your team stated themselved, was that you had selected them because of their integrity and that you felt they would be valuable representatives to the community. I think it leans more to the fact that Commandos have been slighted to the point beyond frustration. Then again, this is all bystander observation here. Either way, this doesn't bode well for the correspondent concept.
Novafluxx wrote: I would love to play on the trest server, but it crashed ever time I try to start the game in test center mode. I ge tthe launcher fine, but the client crashes. I don't know what to do, I've uninstalled/reinstalled already, twice.
Yes, the same is happening to me as well. I am hoping that it won't happen tomorrow when the patch goes live.
Ihn
You want testers, then hire us to test. Take applications. Get mature dedicated people to provide x number of hours of testing per week like a part time job. Create a private testing forums. Have representatives from all servers. Pay for part or all of our monthly SWG fee. I would test. I don't have the time to advance a character on the TC. Watch it get wiped, and then try to start over. I'll never reach master anything on a test server. Hire me or others to test as a job, and I bet you see testing results.
Something to think about.
This would make me play on test, couple times a week. Mostly I know about the bugs/issues/way things work for my chosen profession. It's really no fun to rise up a similar tree on test as my main. I started a char on test but haven't spen more than an hour there.
Another whiner who takes the easy way out. Instead of staying and helping make this a better game
COWARD!
"And they did do QA before they released it, called beta testing, and it truely (sic)was ready to release."
Congratulations! We have a new nominee for the "What in the sam **edit** are YOU on?" Award.
MarshMallo, your opinion does not seem to be shared by the people who were actually in beta, and I agree with them.
Hear hear, Steppencat! Down with the 30-foot Stay-Puft Mar...on second thought, never mind. 
Of course my opinion is not shared by the people in beta. But I wonder why? The people in beta didn't have to pay for***edit***. Of course they wanted to prolong it for as long as they could because they knew that as soon as it was released they would have to pay every month. Way to go pointing out the odvious genius.
Perhaps, you did not read the rest of the message either. Way to go getting the whole gist of the message genius. I admit the game has it flaws, and they are vast. But that does not make it necessary to flame the developers, and that is basically all I was saying.
Holocron wrote:
We identify that players have a concern
- We figure out where in the priority list addressing that concern falls
- We figure out how hard it is to address the concern (is it quick? does the solution offered by the correspondent or the boards work, or is it not viable for reasons of which they are unaware? does it not jibe with something else already in progress? there's lots of factors here)
- Sometimes the priority is "urgent." That means it gets fixed that day. This is very rare. On average, we see only 10-20 items like this in a week out of literally hundreds of possible candidates. In this case, it becomes a hotfix candidate.
- That doesn't mean that it makes it out immediately. You have to implement it. You have to make sure that it doesn't overlap with some other piece of code that you don't want pushed out yet. You have to see whether the list of hotfixes for that day or week already have so much risk that we're not willing to incur more. It is not unsuual for even these "urgent" items to get pushed off by as much as a week.
- Otherwise, it gets rolled into the monthly updates.
So that's your answer for "when." Unless it's truly urgent, it's done on a monthly basis. Now, monthly just happens to be how often we are scheduling updates right now. In the future, it might be slower, it might be faster, I don't know. There are significant tradeoffs to going each direction. We have to branch the code when we work on an update, and once we start committing to an update, it's difficult to extract just one fix out and move it over to a hotfix. Multiple times in the last month, we have moved fixes we've already made from the "next update" column to the "push this to Live right now" column, and it's never trivial. A few times, we've wanted to move stuff to the hotfixes, and have been unable to do sobecause they were simply changes that were too large to safely integrate.
I'll admit, I am not fully caught up on all the issues (you may have noticed that I've been kinda absent from the boards recently--I've been traveling--a press thing here, a multiple-day meeting there, that sort of thing. No time off, sadly!). I will say this: "completely broken professions" do qualify for hotfixes, and we have made such hotfixes in the past. That doesn't mean that they have the same priority as say, the server crashing.
Holo,
So you said that if a class is completely broken they get a hot fix. Does that mean that in your or your teams opinion that commando is not "completely" broken. There have been no hot fixes for any of the issues that have been raised by commando. The most pressing being the broken weapon certs that you admit would have been fairly easy to fix. As there are no fixes in store for the monthly when can we expect at least some? Based on what is being said here we are looking at the next monthly at best. That is another whole month with a completely broken class. Or at least one that we see as being completely broken. Granted that the weapon certs are suppose to be fixed in this monthly update. So we get two weapon certs to work the way they should have and would have been easy to fix. A month or so after release. Are we looking at another month or two before the class is playable? There are other major issues besides the weapon certs. Just reread the letters from Garibaldi or the boards. The issues seem to be the same. I know there are a lot of us getting frutrated about this. We've waited this long on the theory that there would be some changes. But as far as I can tell from the notes on this one we get the weapon certs and our specials are a bit better. That's it? Are we suppose to wait another four to six weeks for more? Since there were no hotfixes for the simple issue am I wrong in thinking that we won't be seeing any for awhile. Yes there was a bit of an exploit with the Biz Natch. But what it did was allowed people to gain XP and money. How is this more of a priority than a hotfix to atl least make an advertised class semi-playable? I would think that playability issues were a bit more importnat than a minor exploit. Especially in this regard. If your priorties are more about minor exploits than playability will someone please let us know? Cuz if that is the cause we may be wasting our time with this class and should move to another. Some of us are casual gamers. We don't play all the time. It could easily take them a month to get to commando just to find out it's unplayable. Can you understand some of the frustration in working that long to find that out? Do any of your developers actually play commando? Or are they all playing classes that actually work?
Sorry to lose such a fine champion. As many have stated, and many more will: "You went above and beyond with your support and veracity, but in the end the only thing that mattered to SOE was bilking thousands out of their hard-earned pay."
It is disheartening to see you go; I fear I am not far behind you. Many more will leave this game that should be the best MMORPG ever, but is currently the worst. I left EQ after 2 yrs b/c there was nothing new. Unfortunately with this game there is just nothing.
Farewell good Sir Garibaldi. I /salute you.