With the number and severity of the remaining and introduced bugs present on Testlive, this will be a disaster to the casual game player.
As we know, those who frequent the boards make up a rather small portion of your userbase. Blindsiding those players will have very undesirable effects, alienating quite a few of them.
The increased population of Testlive was due to the invigoration of the feeling that we could have an effect on gameplay and reduce potential bugs and went quite well when introduced. Then, however, the team addressed the problems and released one, if not more, Testlive updates that addressed the most serious.
The process has changed. A Testlive release now seems to be garnering feedback to work on patches while technically meeting the live release targeted date. I contend the team is not meeting the date by releasing a substandard product.
I seriously doubt the team is proud of this release and are not making the decision to release as-is.
I retain my faith in the team. My perspective of management decisions is now wavering.
i agree completely with everything you have said. i berely started and am seeing the bugs that have been reported… if they release this update without fixing a lot of these issues i may unfortunately have to side with many of the population that have given up on a wonderful game because it seems getting the patches out is more important than actually fixing the issues…
I am also in complete agreement - pushing this patch live without serious revision would be a terrible idea.
I will also add that, in my opinion, it is not just the bugs that are an issue, but also many of the intended changes (see elsewhere for my opinions on the new combat system, I won’t hijack the thread with that) - there are good ideas among them, and some that might work if better executed, but overall this is the first patch I have experienced that I believe will be truly negative for the game, even if the bugs are fixed.
Given the sheer level of opposition and push back, and the many usually positive voices turned critical, I hope that Funcom will seriously consider re-working this patch, from the ground up if necessary. But at the very least, it cannot be allowed to progress with the bugs intact.
I don’t think they will roll out with problems if they know about them, and the problem is major.
From personal experience, in EA on testlive I found a major problem.
Funcom announced updating Live, I said what about such & such to one of the community managers.
The update was delayed for weeks and the old steam forum went mad.
But the problem didn’t go to live.