Development Cycle Archive
Thread: New Team Comments Lead Programmer Chris Mayer
IgescaStorm wrote:
Guys, why you have to make down every poor programmer, who was happy to tell a bit about himself and how he is excited about his job?
He does not make the game, just code it.
I am verry happy to see faces and read feelings from the PEOPLE, who are working on this game.
Sure, i rant enough and have problems with the game, but it is not his fault.
Don't get me wrong, It is nice to see the faces behind the scene's. Chris is most likely a nice average person, doing a nice average job, but what players really want is solid communication between Developers and themselves.
This letter to the community could have been done on the forums, but like most of them, when the forums were closed to the public, it's showing how Excited the team is about changes, yet they the coders, can't even fix bugs that have been around since beta!
It's a white wash letter to fool the casual observer of the site, into thinking this is a vibrant site with a caring developement and customer support site, when in fact, we moan, they ignore! We suggest, and they ignore.
The fact that we can post so easily also makes it harder to know if suggestions, comments, etc are actually getting read by developers because there is so many posts and when they do get read by Developers and commented on, it often leads to hundreds of other posts asking for clarification, which often never comes.
Endeva wrote:
It's a white wash letter to fool the casual observer of the site, into thinking this is a vibrant site with a caring developement and customer support site, when in fact, we moan, they ignore! We suggest, and they ignore.
IgescaStorm wrote:
Endeva wrote:
It's a white wash letter to fool the casual observer of the site, into thinking this is a vibrant site with a caring developement and customer support site, when in fact, we moan, they ignore! We suggest, and they ignore.
That is not correct anymore!
Since days everybody can read the forums, not just us, who bought the game and registered!
Try it without logging in! You will be able to read all of our rants :-)
Dont get me wrong, i am not a fanboy. Rather the opposite, but i think, it is just not fine to rant everywhere, a redname shows up.
You should know the right time and right place for ranting and whining.
Think you quoted the incorrect passage, but I know what you mean. The forum is open to the public now and they can read posts but not post until they register the game. I also know it's not possible to please everyone, but my point in all this, that I thought I had got across, is that the communication between Devs and Players is still not what it should be.
Haruspex77 wrote:
SpoonCatcher wrote:
What would be nice would be a little schedule, saying "Hey, we know about the problem with (insert problem here). It will be fixed by this coming tuesday. We know it's annoying you to no end, and we're doing our best to fix it"
The trouble with bug fixes is that they can't usually be scheduled until completed. Itoften takes a long time to finda misplaced semicolon, and seconds to correct it. Then all that remains is the final test and rollout.
The best they can dotoward fixing themis assign good people to work the problem, and support them with good tools.
When software really has to work right, the reliability has to be designed into the development process. That is mostly a matter of documenting in discouraging detail what all the parts are going to do and how they will work together and designing tests for thatbefore they are coded, code walkthroughs, and as many hours spent in testing as in development. Without that kind of process you won't be able to trust your life or your bank account to the software.
This really needs to be set up before the first line of code gets written, but there are ways to get existing code on track eventually if it is fundamentaly sound. If not, you are stuck rewriting. That's a really discouraging process because you put in a lot of work, but get little new out of it except reliability and maintainability.
I disagree to some extent. It may not be realistic to say it will be fixed by next Tuesday, but it could be acknowleged as a problem, which isn't happening. Second, you should expend more resources on fixing bugs that have existed for more than six months. Many of these are design errors, not syntax errors. Many are duplicatable 100% of the time; there's no excuse why those haven't been tackled. The objects, methods, and resulting events are clearly evident. That's not a matter of process.
I'm happy to to see Chris is excited by his work. I think that's an important element. What's sad is that SOE makes such a big deal out of a fluff document. They make it seem like it's a policy statement on the game!
IgescaStorm wrote:
Guys, why you have to make down every poor programmer, who was happy to tell a bit about himself and how he is excited about his job?
He does not make the game, just code it.
I am verry happy to see faces and read feelings from the PEOPLE, who are working on this game.
Sure, i rant enough and have problems with the game, but it is not his fault.
Because he's an idiot. No one else is excited about this stuff, namely because SOE is doing a **edit**ty job of developing this game. It's losing lots of customers due to the fact that this game hasn't gotten any better in 9 months. They have never lived up to any of our expectations. As a paying customer, I DEMAND that SOE fix this game and surpass our expectations.
So, in essence, while the random Devs may be "excited" about what's coming. The majority of the player base is disillusioned. SOE has screwed up more than it's fixed. The game is a shell of what it could be--which is why most folks are leaving for WoW and EQ2.
Mark my words, in a year, SWG will have less than 50,000 subscribers. Probably a lot fewer than that.
"We have made a decision to address major combat issues only and not do the full combat balance at this time. After the Crafting Experimentation experience, we realized that we need to spend more time than a single publish to truly accomplish our goal, which is to make combat fun and engaging. To have the depth to combat that I think everyone wants in the system we want get much more player feedback and balance on these types of things. We will be developing the Combat Balance separately in a Sandbox over a long period of time, with plenty of Test Center and correspondent participation. We will release this one when it is ready... and not before."
I couldn't edit this in, but wanted to reference the section I was commenting on.
fantoq wrote:
I disagree to some extent. It may not be realistic to say it will be fixed by next Tuesday, but it could be acknowleged as a problem, which isn't happening. Second, you should expend more resources on fixing bugs that have existed for more than six months. Many of these are design errors, not syntax errors. Many are duplicatable 100% of the time; there's no excuse why those haven't been tackled. The objects, methods, and resulting events are clearly evident. That's not a matter of process.
SOE isn't at all likely to publish a bug list prior to releasing fixes, because too many bugs can be exploited. Moreover, their view of bugs is different than ours. Look at the store problem when vehicles were released, it looked to players like one obvious bug, but as the fix progressed the SOE reports made it clear that there were really many special cases that were bugged which had to be tracked down one at a time. Their internal view of a bug may be something like " Invalid argument type for ItemLocon call to StoreButton:destroyVehicle when called from TatMEnR2" not "Vehicles can't bestored in front of the Mos Entha Starport." Tracing those internal bugs back to user effects may well not be feasible, or in some cases not even possible if the effects that caused it to be found are not actually related to the internal bug found.
To your second point, the oldest bugs don't seem to me to be likely candidates for priority. Obviously, they don't keep the game from being playable as some new ones do. And, as you mention, they are likely to be design problems that can take a lot of work to fix instead of just a few second correction. Look at commercial software, there are really obvious bugs in MS Outlook for example (hidden modal dialogs can render all visible windows non-responsive) that have survived several publishes -- and MS makes users pay for those new releases.
They have made statements about working on some bugs thatwere close to game breaking, like vendor problems. They do plan major re-writes on components with lots of old and design related bugs, but the re-write often includes new features as well so it doesn't look like a bug fix activity.
I expect, for example, that the badly bugged catagorization on the Bazaar and Vendor interface (which burries common catagories but leaves lots of empty top level ones) will get fixed as part of a major Vendor/Bazaar rewrite. The talk will be about the new features, but the bugs from fairly early in beta will finallybe gone as well.