Merchant Archive
Thread: Quality Control of Merchant Changes
Fast forward to the present. The merchant class as been changed again. As a mster merchant, I wanted to avail myself of an additional vendor, bringing my total upto 6 (the old cap). The game wouldn't let me place a new vendor, saying I had reached my cap. Now I can't even place new items up for sale, with an error message saying something to the effect that I have more vendors up than I can manage.
I won't belabor the point more than is necessary, as I am a professional engineer, and I know stuff happens. However, after a year of experience making changes to this game after it was released, the development and QA teams at SOE don't seem to have gotten any better about making clean releases. All I can say is: when World of Warcraft is released (Blizzard thinks class balancing is actually part of game development), I won't be sending my money to SOE.
I like SWG as a whole, and I still have fun playing it, but it is unfortunate that SOE has executed so poorly.
-Asdaria, Master Merchant, Radiant
Message Edited by Moepple on 09-02-2004 02:08 AM
Moepple wrote:
First, why do you think they are looking for a QA-guy? Beeing in QA of Mission Critical Sever-Applications myself since 10 years now, I can tell you, I did not thought a single second about applying for this job.
The reason is quite simple, the QA of a nuclear powerplant software is much more easy than the QA of a game like this. Thats no excuse for bad Quality, but its not only a QA issue they have, from point of view.
The core problem seems to be, that even perfect changes are merged into a bug when they go live, which looks like bad communications (as we saw in the patchnotes many times) and coordination between several teams.
As you sure know, you can only find bugs you test for, and some of the cases we have on live-servers may not appear on the test-centers, thats why they try to copy live-servers for testing, but obviously it did not work that way. Because the bugs seem to spread randomly, its hard to find the source of those bugs, and to find a way to exclude such bugs in the future due to QA.
I agree with some of the issues mentioned, especially balancing, and more than that, information policy, especially communication to the community. But I doubt that other companies will do it better. The gras is always greener on the other side.
QA of Onlinegames is almost impossible to do, and the QA-guy is the one who is guilty everytime something will not work, no matterif he is responsible or not :-)
Then, one thing you should not forget, they seem to have huge pressure to get things done. The rules of a software project (defined by myself *big grin*) are quite simple, you either spent time, money or quality, if you want to be faster. If they would simply continue with the mini-patches and patch only the things they are sure they work, the game would run much more stable. Focus on big stuff means focus on big problems. Before or after patch......
As a customer, I share your opinion that a lot of things went wrong in the past, not only in QA, I have a real problem with their Customer Support Policy. If the company I worked for the last 10 years would offer such a lousy support, they would not still be the second of their business in the world.
However, they constantly worked on the issues they have, just CS went worse compared to the start. Lets hope they will get better, and we may have more good patches than buged patches in the future.
To only get whats mentioned in the patchnotes, and also not less, would be a great start :-)
Read ya.
Message Edited by Moepple on 09-02-2004 02:08 AM
*grin* I'm in QA myself for8 years running now, commercial of course. Not making fun of you but I found it ironic that your post containsspelling errors and grammatical mistakes.
Apologies if English is not your first language - and it's in all honesty just a light hearted poke 
Well, that might just work. Quality does matter.
-Asdaria, Master Merchant, Radiant
First problem we had was trying to get an overhaul out of a profession at same time they were extremely focused on Jedi stuff. I think they took on too much in too short a time. However, I think if anything it should show all of us the necessity to perhaps get more involved in test center? If not creating a character there - staying up on the test center bug reports. I personally am going to create a player over there. Quite frankly there were thread after thread of jedi stuff and 1 thread of merchant bug items.
I am in charge of a team of people where I work and its all too easy to point a finger at QA and say you screwed up. Yes its a game - we pay for it and we want it working but every MMPROG I have ever played is a beta game - always - its never finished and it will always have bugs - because no matter how much you try test staging centers and live staging centers are 2 different beasts - little things and sometimes big things will get through.
asdaria wrote:
If the grass looks greener on the other side, well, it is. The Dark Age of Camelot test server is more stable than any SWG server. The quality of World of Warcraft is already higher than SWG or Everquest, and it hasn't been released yet. Having played on the Everquest test server for almost 2 years, I can say that the difference between the quality of the code changes between Mythic for DAoC and SOE for EQ is stunning. Mythic almost never broke their test server, where I lost characters, items, and just about everything else on the EQ test server at some point. We would log in the night before a major release and think... they are really going to release this in this state? And behold, the next day was patching of the patches. Some companies in the game business feel that quality is more important than money. I'm not suggesting that SWG hasn't improved. Quite the contrary, the quality of this game has increased greatly, and is, finally, at release quality. Most of the problems the game has had have been due to the early release, and as a consequence a lot of thrash was needed to get it right. That process in itself introduces lots of risk, risk that should have been taken during beta. These differences are managerial: SOE feels that it is the big boy on the block, so they can go for money at the expensive of quality, push the releases out as fast as possible and let the player base expose the problems, whereas less players have to aim higher to attract business.
Well, that might just work. Quality does matter.
-Asdaria, Master Merchant, Radiant
The differences in these aren't necessarily the bugs - but what is DONE about the bugs - and whether it's done in a timely fashion.
I don't mind human error - as long as it's quickly - and I mean QUICKLY addressed. I can't think of a single 'revamp' that didn't produce bugs that are still in the game and there is still a considerable list since beta. Take a wack at it - hit the high spots, move on and don't look back for a year seems to be the motto - it's past getting old.
Ever hire a carpenter to do some remodeling - only to find out after the contract was signed he is also working on 10 other houses and your job that should take one week ends up being six months because he only stops by to slap up a coat of paint 2 hours out of the week? And oh, BTW - you still haven't got any trim up because he never quite got to the 'punch list'.
Kershakk wrote:
*grin* I'm in QA myself for8 years running now, commercial of course. Not making fun of you but I found it ironic that your post containsspelling errors and grammatical mistakes.
Apologies if English is not your first language - and it's in all honesty just a light hearted poke
asdaria wrote:
If the grass looks greener on the other side, well, it is. The Dark Age of Camelot test server is more stable than any SWG server. The quality of World of Warcraft is already higher than SWG or Everquest, and it hasn't been released yet. Having played on the Everquest test server for almost 2 years, I can say that the difference between the quality of the code changes between Mythic for DAoC and SOE for EQ is stunning. Mythic almost never broke their test server, where I lost characters, items, and just about everything else on the EQ test server at some point.
Well, that might just work. Quality does matter.
-Asdaria, Master Merchant, Radiant
Hi again,
and just a note to my native-english friend, I had no coffee yet, just woke up :-)
There is always one important factor you have to keep in mind - Complexity. The SWG System is really complex and some of the game-mechanics were really a break-through (do you guys call it that way too?) for the industry. A lot of the bugs we have seen happened due to changing internal mechanisms that were never inteded to be changed that way.
The conclusion for me, regarding SWG and some of the bugs, is simply that they did not expect such big changes, and that the core engine as well as the database was not made to handle the game as it is now. This, together with the already mentioned problems in communications and coordination, is the package that does not work.
There are a lot of things I dont understand regarding SOE and the Dev-Team, espeicially the communication to the Customers, I saw that work much better, in EvE, for example. But, I cant say they do a crappy job, they just have the problems every company has, and its hard to change such things, especially if you dont have people who are able to change it (which is not just a knowledge problem).
The thing I dont agree is that Mythic offers better quality. I, as european customer, know Mythic as one of the worst and most ignorant Developer in the Business. in the first year of DAoC in europe, almost no publish worked. They were responsible for translation and for the publish, and not even the release version was running stable. And it was almost impossible to understand the language DAoC was talking to me :-) I dont know who made the translation, but he invented new words :-) We had downtimes for Publishes up to 48h and rollbacks. I experienced a really bad running DAoC the first few months.
WoW may seem to run fine now, but other games I beta-tested did that too. But MMORPGs change, and what is important is how they run it. No matter how good the release-version is, they will need to make changes for balancing and to fix exploits. And they may experience flaws in the concept, and need to change even that. Blizzar, which was sold a few months ago, may be able to complete WoW as intended, but if they change the team right after release, who tells you that it will be a stable game in 6 months?
A lot of games hit the shells this year, and they all have to deal with the same problems, and the business is quite new. The few people who have experience cant grant you anything, cause every game is a proprietary product. When I look at the design-bugs in SWG, they would have been able to avoid them, if they would have taken care of the rules for such a concept.
I havent played WoW yet, and I will not, cause I have to pay the Megabytes when I download it :-), but I doubt it canfullfill the expectations of the customers, cause expectations are too high.
Message Edited by Moepple on 09-03-2004 01:31 AM