I do not understand why there is so many problems, bugs, etc … in fews hours after each update with some weeks on testlive testing.
You must really play the game to test. Level up a character, build a base, get thralls, farm, fight, raid another base, explore dungeons, etc … and not do some little test in admin god mode.
I also suggest to releases updates on monday, then you have the complete week to solve the problems. And not on thursday, because everyone is with a broken game the complete week end.
Sorry to post this, but there is a problem somewhere.
It’s just a lot of users do not quite understand how the software development process works. Usually when you launch a test (test server or whatever) you have a cheklist of features that you need to test. If they work, if they stable, etc. And if during the test you found and issue that is not in the testing checklist, this issue goes to the next development round.
Have the devs acknowledged that horse is way too close to the player? Absolutely. But they will fix this issue during the next development round. Testing if the horse follows the player correctly was not in the checklist. But this will be included during for the next test.
It’s juts impossible to test the WHOLE game (or any other software) everytime.
How do you know that the follower’s distance was not on the testing checklist? If they had tested the new features a bit more, they would have seen that their new changes break existing things. When you just add features that way, you’ll end up with more and more broken stuff. The new follower update has been pushed to live, but made having certain animal followers useless, because they constantly clip into your character.
Maybe he has, maybe he hasn’t. He simply stated how funcom could attempt testing their updates and when to push it to live. People criticized funcom before, regarding how little time they spend on testlive with their updates, and guess what: funcom listened and it was a step in the right direction. It’s not perfect, but it’s way better than before.
And stating that updates could be released during the beginning of a week is perfectly fine too. I don’t know how the immense complexity of software development doesn’t allow that.
This is how software development works basically. I run an online educational platform for living, and every time after we release a new feature, there is something on the other side of the web app that breaks. Every damn time regardless of amount of testing of the new features. This is not because we are lazy or bad programmers, no. That’s because it’s impossible to test the whole application at once. You change something here, other thing changes there automatically. And this is only one web application. Funcom is making a huge video game. But the process is always the same:
Develop a new feature
Test the new feature
Find more new issues
Release the new feature
Fix new issues
Test the fix for new issues
Find more new issues
Release the fix for new issues
Fix more new issues
…
See? You MUST release something at some point, otherwise your development process will end up like this:
This is what I do every time that I go on TestLive; it’s still not going to find all of the issues though.
Because I did it that way, as @jot29 pointed out in another thread, there are lots of functions that I didn’t get to test. You need a mix, and if Funcom had 20 times as many people they would still miss some things. With the best will in the world they are only going to be able to test for show-stopping bugs and edge cases.
Yeah, no company/human will ever find all bugs in any software.
But if there would be a checklist for the Funcom QA, some bugs wouldnt be there.
If people would play the game in a normal way, some other bugs would also have been found.
If Funcom would stop using admin mode all the time in their streams, they would have probably fixed the crafting menu long time ago
I was planning on revisiting the game, after a break of a few months.
I was very disappointed when I came to the forums, and read that there are game-breaking bugs with the latest patch.
It seems like there needs to be some review of how these patches are tested before being implemented.
While I grant that some things will inevitably slip through, some of the issues players are reporting currently relate to basic game functions, and should not have been missed by a rigorous testing/review.
I think the reason for such player dissatisfaction, is that game updates for Conan are consistently laden with issues that significantly effect gameplay. Its the frequency and severity of issues encountered with each game update that is frustrating.
New features and options that enhance the gaming experience are always appreciated, but not at the cost of current features and general playability of the game.
The problem is that if it was reported as it should have been and not fixed before update was pushed to live, that in itself makes no sense, they were aware of the issues but still pushed out the update, why, was there some sort of internal deadline that made it ok to push out an update they knew was broken in many ways.
Why test on test live if the issues do not get fixed just left till a patch down the road a month ) yes I know we had two little patches that fixed very few of the issues ) and in the mean time people lose thralls and bases and many things and grow frustrated. They admitted on their live stream it would need a hot patch it makes no sense at all to put out a know broken update that messes with people long term work and breaks things people have worked hard for, its a slap in the face to players.
I only do the SP on test live when i get a chance. On the actual servers what are the rates? I would suggest that test live have some sort of feature to allow players to level at 10x , and have all default (not the ones you need to find, harvest from library, etc.) be unlocked as well. this would allow players to get straight to the meat and potatoes, combat, building, dungeon running etc. Also have thrall breaking and pet breaking at 25% of the normal time. Again the idea is not to slow play the grind, but get as many assets in the hands of testers so they can try and break them.
There is a concept of weight on the issues being reported.
If thousands of hours of work are being lost due to a reported bug, or the player is unable to move or interact with the world because he’s stuck in a horse that followed too closely, this is what is known as a blocker.
Blockers are issues which should prevent the update from being deployed until they are fixed. They are purely weighted on whether or not the player’s time is being wasted, or the experience is being destroyed.
This isn’t the “sometimes using ‘E’ causes unexpected results” bugs. These are the ones which kill a thrall a player has spent 50 hours of game time leveling to disappear without any explanation. The reproduction on many of these issues is a key point. Many of these were able to be reproduced reliably by players, but the patch went live.
That’s what needs to be addressed in the dev process. Letting a blocker issue like that go live “to patch later” isn’t acceptable in any software industry.
There was no urge to release it just now. Effectively it didn’t fix anything, some things are still broken and the new mechanics aren’t properly tested. Might as well just have left it on TestLive and work with it until the issues are gone.
I guess it was just released because of the DLC and the anniversary.
I have noticed that this buggy release patch cycle heavily coincides with the free weekends. I’m positive that has a factor on them pushing a patch live with insufficient attention to the blockers.
This is very counter-intuitive, however, as a percentage of the players then playing in the Free weekend experience these issues and consider it not worth the cost to purchase with the issues encountered.
I’m also positive the delivery team (development team) have no veto power on when a patch goes live under this type of timeline, because every single one of the free weekends after a major update has been a complete hot mess.
@3Lion
Senior software dev here.
No, you can’t test everything, but there are a lot of bugs that should have been detected after just 10 minutes playing the game.
I think the test plans are just not up to spec, or the dev’s don’t get enough time to test, or there is too much pressure on them to deliver. Or they know the bugs and don’t have (or get) the time to fix them.
Anyhow, the level of quality is a lot lower than it used to be, there is no denying that.
