I say this in all kindness, and with great respect for what you’ve done with the next version: for the love of all the outer gods, just ship the damned thing this week, even if it has to be the version that’s on testlive right now.
I get that you feel burned by the feedback after the 500 Bug Patch, but I think the pendulum has swung too far the other direction. Yes, there are still bugs in the version on testlive. There’s even one design decision that part of me wishes you would rethink. But you have taken way, way too long to ship this content and I would rather those things got fixed afterwards than that we wait any longer for it. None of the bugs that I know of on testlive are game-breaking.
Please seriously look at your own internal metrics or at the graphs on BattleMetrics: nobody is testing any more on testlive. There’s nothing left to gain by leaving it on testlive. We ran out of things that can be tested by low populations on recently-wiped servers. If there are any game-breaking bugs left in the testlive version? Neither us volunteer testers nor your QA department are going to find them until they get beat on by large numbers of people on fully-developed servers.
And in the meantime you’re repeating the problem that killed The Secret World and Age of Conan, taking way way too long between content releases, so people move on to other games once they’ve run out of stuff to do. Honestly, as much as I’d love to see what comes next? You could really stand to do what ArenaNet did after the disastrous first six months of Guild Wars 2, and that’s take a hard look at what the roadblocks are in your production queue, and spend 3-6 months improving your content production tools. Because if you can’t ship something new to do in this game every couple of months, the decline in player count and player hours is just going to continue.
(Maybe you’re counting on PvP to keep the game alive, on the fact that we tear each others’ stuff down to give us something to do every couple of weeks. I have a whole separate rant about why that isn’t working, but it’s irrelevant to the condition of the testlive build.)
Seriously, just ship the thing. And while the coding team is working on it, start teasing the Halloween event. This week. While there’s still time.
Test Server is getting abandoned. The only other gaming coming out that will compete for the new Conan content, for me (let’s not argue that ok?), will be Fallout76 that drops in November. So there’s some time, but not a lot, to capture folks attention with the new Conan content.
I’m enjoying the pets. But some of the other bugs popping up (multi-mob spawns and chests not repopulating for starters, some pen placement issues) will likely create a flood of complaints and bad press if they aren’t also addressed with the new content release.
I’ll be obsessed with the new Fallout, like a tonne of folks, come November.
Yeah, the most players in our community are waiting for the new content! And some other players stopped playing, because they want the new system for their own playstyle. So i think it would be nice to have this, this week! <3
It was getting extremely hard to find any new (pet system) bugs with the latest patch, and I was burning out from constantly regrinding, so took a week to step away.
The ‘accidental’ instant crafting/decay bug, chests not resetting, multiple animal/thrall spawns, and the micro lag are the only things that really stood out to me. I’d say, if those things are present in Live, then it’s definitely ready to ship out. People are getting antsy and it’d be nice to push forward some of the much needed AI work and bow overhaul.
Well one thing i do remember was that they were going to try and release the patch for all three platforms at the same time so it could be possible they are trying to sort out a date with Sony and Microsoft. Though i am admitting that i am excited for the work that will be done to the AI as i know the developers will need a lot of feedback from the player base for it in my opinion.
True. Which is actually one of the problems for this game in general: The fatigue factor on buggy content is way higher than it is on functional content. I’m not talking about TestLive here, bugs there are okay and to be expected.
As long as you folks are there to defend Funcom when the haters swarm in and tear Funcom apart for the bugs, then sure, they ought to release the patch.
I felt like I owed Funcom a big thank you for releasing the 500 patch over the vacations, but you all know what happened…
I felt like Leonidas and the 300 when the haters came.
Well, true enough, but presumably there are still bugs that have been reported but not yet fixed?
TestLive isn’t (or shouldn’t be) the sole QA process involved before releasing a major patch (or any patch, but particularly a major one).
Yeah that’s a good move for sure. Though for the record it’s already possible today (albeit slightly clunky) to have both clients installed at the same time.
Can anyone currently running testlive confirm whether spotted leopards give heads when harvested now? This was an old bug that resurfaced after the game went live, and I’ve noticed several people asking it to be fixed…
Absolutely agreed. I’ve been running an active server on PS4 since the game shipped. That is a 5 month old server that has stayed standing while other servers went under. I’m not sure how much longer I can keep players interested in your game.
I’ve been creating unique content for my server to keep this game interesting, because frankly, people are bored. We don’t have the luxury that PC players have with modding this game, no, we are left to our own devices to make things as interesting as possible - and even then, the admin abilities are absolutely lack luster.
I like this game. I’ve got a lot of players who like this game too. Give us some love. We really deserve it. We are working overtime for free as your marketers, advertizers, writers, designers, and developers. Maybe we can be interviewed in “Meet the devs” next week? This week’s and last week’s newsletter was unnacceptable. Please Funcom, don’t do us like this.
To be fair, there’s not much of an incentive to do the testing: It’s a pain in the butt to install the client, particularly if you have slow internet (this is being made easier though, but not yet), and while you’re testing, your live server bases succumb to offline raids, purges and decay… and that’s before you take the lag and other issues on TestLive into account…
Granted, some of this is unavoidable - but I can’t fault anyone for not wanting to do the TestLive stuff. I tried myself, just couldn’t justify the time investment.
I do appreciate the gesture of a free DLC pack, but it doesn’t matter to me compared to the rest.