Development Cycle Archive
Thread: New Team Comments Lead Programmer Chris Mayer
That comment is the most disheartening. There was a lot of issues that just got swept under the carpt with the last publish. We have yet to hear an official word regarding the Jedi/BH missions and the increased saber decay. IF something breaks you guys seem to wait until the next publish or dungeon push to fix it now.
AnXdiety wrote:
"This is something we've gotten better with over time. Our major publishes have been deployed more efficiently with fewer fixes the day after"
That comment is the most disheartening. There was a lot of issues that just got swept under the carpt with the last publish. We have yet to hear an official word regarding the Jedi/BH missions and the increased saber decay. IF something breaks you guys seem to wait until the next publish or dungeon push to fix it now.
I'm reminded of the time they put in the 1-CS-ticket-per-person limit, and then proudly announced that the number of open CS tickets had gone way down.
p4Samwise wrote:
AnXdiety wrote:
"This is something we've gotten better with over time. Our major publishes have been deployed more efficiently with fewer fixes the day after"
That comment is the most disheartening. There was a lot of issues that just got swept under the carpt with the last publish. We have yet to hear an official word regarding the Jedi/BH missions and the increased saber decay. IF something breaks you guys seem to wait until the next publish or dungeon push to fix it now.
I'm reminded of the time they put in the 1-CS-ticket-per-person limit, and then proudly announced that the number of open CS tickets had gone way down.
kind of like Bush wanting to classify fast food jobs as manufacturing jobs. Hey, they make hamburgers, it is manufacturing, and janitors are really engineers.
I can say the last couple publishes did go out very quickly rather than all day like they use too.
AnXdiety wrote:
"This is something we've gotten better with over time. Our major publishes have been deployed more efficiently with fewer fixes the day after"
That comment is the most disheartening. There was a lot of issues that just got swept under the carpt with the last publish. We have yet to hear an official word regarding the Jedi/BH missions and the increased saber decay. IF something breaks you guys seem to wait until the next publish or dungeon push to fix it now.
Not trying to sound like a fanboi, but I personally give them more credit for getting better with patches. There is no doubt about it, they have improved it. For the most part publishes are coming out with fewer and fewer huge problems. Less and less changes are going in undocumenteted.
But to play the otherside of the fence... despite the progress made with improving patches there is a good divide yet to cross. It seems as though SOE seems to overall getting alot more streamlined with they're patches, but now things also seem rushed. Changes getting pushed in that probably should of had more thought or work put into them, I fear such changes are getting rolled into publishes a bit earlier than they should to give the better appearence of progress.
That was the Sienfeld of all Letters.
Its the message about...Nothing!
He's excited, he fixes bugs, he has nothing to do with the Space Expansion.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking the guy personally, but there was really no needto even read that really
JacenKeldroma wrote:
That was the Sienfeld of all Letters.
Its the message about...Nothing!
He's excited, he fixes bugs, he has nothing to do with the Space Expansion.
You are so right.
In the article Chris wrote:"These changes include things you don't directly see (like compiler upgrades and code re-factoring), things you see indirectly (like better CS tools, more technology for designers to use, faster servers, and a better vendor system), to things we expect you will see ..."
I find it interesting that the only reference to improving the developement process was "more technology" when I would hope that there had been a lot of process improvement work going on. The apparent lack of (internal to SOE) documentation of what changes are intended to do is visible to the outside in things like the embarassing claim by the BE correspondent that the new invalid pet rules was just a "leftover" in the release notes, and the difficulty in getting straight answers to "was this intended."
With a development process where the intent is known before the code is written, it is possible to evaluate the success of the individual developers, promptly identify bugs, and actually execute the organization's plans.
There have been major improvements in the direction of server and clientstability, and bugs that keep players from being able to function at all. This is good, but the of most players are (fortunately) not affected on that level, and theirconcerns are on a more detailed level of "will my pet survive the publish" and "will my playstyle continue to be functional." That detail level does not yet seem to be in control.
Hmmm....
"...and finally the excitement of finishing up the systems we wish we had launched with (namely player cities and vehicles)"
Even the lead programmer doesn't care about our mounts, no wonder they suck.