As anticipated, the Age of Can It Be Worse then Age of War is a cluster.
What makes it such a cluster? The same bug I and many others reported around 90 minutes after beta dropped, placed thralls literally disappearing, then being system deleted.
This was reported and not resolved in Beta. Live came around and, oh my goodness, the same error we had seen all through beta was in live.
What a shock.
Who could have foreseen not fixing a bug would mean it went into the live system? Seriously, how did such a thing come to pass? What magic is used in other games that bug reports are reviewed, documented, solutioned, and resolved?
There could be many reasons for this, unfortunately we can only speculate.
My personal guess is that maybe 2-3 people are still working on Conan and they are completely overwhelmed with the game and its spaghetti code. If you now also add a management team that doesn’t give a damn about Conan anymore, then the result is obvious.
The fact that we can only speculate seems like a problem to me. Honest communication is important. IMHO, when a company or team messes up like that, they should clearly articulate what happened to allow the issue and explain what steps they are taking to prevent it from happening in the future.
My speculation is that there are more than 2-3 devs working on the game. Otherwise, they would probably just move to bug fix mode. And most devs will want to improve the process when things go wrong.
But I agree unrealistic management deadlines are probably a big part of the issue. But management should also want to improve the process to prevent this in the future.
Improperly refactored spaghetti code is also probably accurate. I’d be really interested to look at the code. If it were open sourced, there are many bugs I’d take a stab at fixing.
I’m also betting there is a break down in communication between the devs and the forum admins which significantly dilutes the quality of the info we get. I think changing the cadence of chapters is a sign they acknowledge the problem but really doesn’t speak to all the other QA and beta changes needed.
Maybe it is just me but I have a very hard time finding, searching, and filtering bugs in this forum. I’m use to systems like Jira where you get organized dashboards with advanced filters and queries, statuses, and workflows. I don’t know how anyone is supposed to get a full list of everything. If you have advice, I’m open.
I say this also because they may just have a really bad system for communication and things might get missed in addition to being ignored.
Or maybe it was ignored but they thought it was only going to affect a small number of people.
I’ve also seen people say that they did try to fix it but that fix wasn’t tested.
But with this fragmented formatting of the information I can’t be sure what is really going on.
There’s quite a few. And there’s been additions in the last two years.
Some of this you can see in the devkit that you can download for free and without a PC licenese (just can’t upload mods I think without one, or maybe you can as I haven’t tried with an alt steam account). If you snoop around in there you can sometimes find a bug or mistype. This is especially true when thralls have stats that seem weird. There’s hundreds of thrall entries and so when making a new on they frequently copy and paste a similar one and adjust. Sometimes those adjustments get values that don’t fit. The Unreal dev environment is very picky about inputs sometimes and its very easy to get values in that you don’t mean to and not see it when your working with a ton of entries. I’ve done it, many of the better modders have done it, and its no surprise given the magnitude of those tables that FC would do it. Thankfully these are the easiest errors to fix but sometimes get triaged out due to their low impact. Sometimes logic in blueprints is off or the implemented thing does things you don’t expect depending on how complex its made. And you won’t see the consequences until a few hundred people use it and see the anomalies.
QA team is about 2 dozen people. Then you have around 30 closed beta testers, sometimes less especially when the content creators don’t get in. And then the final testing of open beta usually only gets around 60-80 at most.
Nope, they’re pretty chatty in the mediums they use. But they don’t need to talk about bug reports since there’s devs looking at those directly. Andy and Carrol kinda just pipe in as a voice to let people know some of the more urgent things.
The issue isn’t exactly communication. Well there kinda is. Its the fact that the devs don’t seem to be the ones deciding the time tables. They don’t get the decision to say, “Well this isn’t ready yet, we can’t ship it.” They get told, “make that pass certification, and ship it.” And those people I suspect don’t read the forums (likely don’t have forum accounts), don’t read the bug reports, and don’t even know anything about the game since they don’t directly work on it (and they are Norwegian and/or American, so its not Tencent, its Funcom peeps). The issue isn’t a lack of communication, but that its one way. They appear to be too high up for the CMs to give feedback too, and devs aren’t in the business of not doing as they are instructed.
I don’t believe its the people actually working on the game that makes it crap, but the ones not letting them finish their work before shipping it. And getting that feedback to those people is relatively tricky.
Since lively villages broke almost immediately for me I didn’t have an issue losing thralls. What hit live was that fixed.
Oh I so want to use that “basic logic” comment, but…
Yes the bug wasn’t addressed, but there is a reason. Good or bad.
“The dam failed.
Well why did it fail?
Because it did”
Basic logic does not offer up a cause to find a solution for.
In your opinion. Just because it wasn’t addressed, or was and it failed, does not mean it was ignored.
But that just begs the question of why do we keep getting the same crap?
Yes, because as a devoted Conan player, what the community manager thinks of pineapple on pizza is just so important to me.
They got more time this time and we still got schlock. Just how much more time do they need?
Bugs are found in the QA, bugs are found in the closed betas, bugs are found in the public beta. They are reported, and a good number are fixed. A good number aren’t. Simply because they don’t have enough time.
If these devs could sit on something until its done and not ship it out before its ready, it would be a much better live experience for everyone. But there’s a time table. When they said they would extend the time between chapters, they only extended the time by a set amount. They didn’t take up a stance of working on it till its done.
I think the best thing for the community to do in this case is to really really push the point home that we don’t want more time being spent, we want ALL the time to be spent. Not an extra month, not a quarter, but a year, 2 years even if that’s what it takes.
And I mean really communicate that point home without sarcasm or flippant responses. And then really pressure each other when we have players who complain about no new content coming for months on end. If it takes months, let it take months. No new content is better than buggy new content.
I don’t pretend to know what goes in in Funcom, but in my world we tend to follow agile development practices where the teams own a couple of areas of functionality, like inventory management, have a road map for those areas, and decide what they can accomplish with quality for the next release. That way, you get small iterations delivered consistently but the team has say in the scope of the work that they can commit to. It’s not perfect. Sometimes people leave the team unexpected, or unexpected things come up, or something takes longer than expected, but as long as the team gets to decide what they are comfortable releasing and supporting given a release date, there should be a good middle path between time and scope. If someone is up on high dictating scope of releases and time with a fixed set of devs, they are breaking the iron triangle and working against the laws of reality. When that happens, it is usually because those people refuse to accept reality and the only fix for that is new people.
See Taemien’s explanation above. Sure, it’s (probably) speculation, but at this point we have enough empirical data to see patterns from which to draw conclusions. The developer/bug fixer teams don’t have enough time to make sure things work properly. New content needs to be pushed out at a pace that keeps devs and bug fixers busy, because the corporate idea is that only new things are worth paying for. Fixing old things are not, because people already paid for them.
We know some Funcom staffers have been working on features and fixes in their free time because they want to make the best possible product. But that’s not something we (or their employer) should demand from them. And considering the amount of crap the community spews at the devs, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve lost their motivation to work overtime for a bunch of rude ingrates.