As a professional developer, I understand the pressures involved in putting out a retail product and supporting it in the field. Please understand, this is not a criticism as you’re all doing an amazing job.
I’d just like to put out there a development suggestion…
many times we get wrapped up in deadlines and ‘the process’ of putting out the little daily fires lining up in jira. especially during hard crank times. As we push forward, many small things end up lower priority … but they tend to pile up. I’d like to suggest a 3+ day ‘play the game’ period for developers followed by a 3+ day period to play ‘whack-a-mole’ on trivial bugs. devs would be freed up for a week to play the game from the absolute beginning and level themselves up 8+ hours per day, living the game life of the typical users (no cheating w/ admin or godmode). Along the way, various little ‘nits’ well known to users will become apparent… and killed in the following ‘whack-a-mole’ stage.
basically, it’s like weeding the garden. but along the way, new ideas may present themselves while taking a nice leap forward in playability, performance, and stability.
either way, you all have been doing a great job and i look forward to see where this vision leads.
In principle, a good idea. But many of the bugs people complain about aren’t ever-present. Recently I’ve been actively trying to reproduce some of the commonly reported bugs without success. (I’ve accidentally found a couple of others.)
I could play a week, or many weeks, without encountering any of the commonly reported issues. Some of those are bugs even Funcom hasn’t been able to reproduce, and they are, I believe, professionals.
I’m not saying those bugs don’t exist. I know full well that the same program can work in different ways in different computers, even apparently identical ones (as proven on a daily basis by Office 365 on identical, factory standard Fujitsu laptops in our company). I also have no reason to doubt my fellow forumites’ reports on those bugs.
But tell me, as a professional developer - do you feel that your idea is actually realistic? That a few days’ playing would reliably bring any number of bugs into the light, let alone give the developers clue as to how to fix them? (I also have reason to believe that at least some of Funcom’s developers actually play the game already.)
My gut would say that good, consistent bug reports via this forum is more effective than your idea. After all, we can, and do, dedicate a lot more person-hours into the game than the devs ever could. We can, and should, provide them with solid data which can help them track those bugs. (True, we don’t get paid for that, unlike the developers, but there’s no reason to believe they’re not already dedicating 8+ hours a day to working on improving the game.)
it would depend on the size of the dev team and the atmosphere within the company. i’ve seen a few instances where companies will have certain bugs linger, even with verifiable steps to reproduce, and stay low priority for years.
i ran one company out of amsterdam and at the dev offices in tallinn, we would have a week long bug hunt during june (just before the week off ‘june days’ vacation). this allowed people to find and kill whatever bugs they could, without regard to priorities. it was also a time in which people were a bit more laid back, like the friday before a vacation week.
and yes, i realize there are bugs that would be tough to run into within a couple of days of play. those weren’t the ones i was talking about. the bugs of concern were the ones experience early in the game, thereby impacting new players more and tarnishing the overall experience for new players. ui bugs. control bugs. things of this nature is what i would focus on if i had that week to ‘free range’ over any bug i could find. of course, each dev would differ and may focus on different aspects … things that may have bothered them for a while, as players let’s say, but couldn’t get them addressed normally. for whatever reason.
a bit of freedom does most things a world of good.
It’s an interesting perspective, at least. I’m still not entirely convinced it would be effective, but at least I understand your logic behind the idea better.