Just curious, How does stuff get released in testlive, seem to work decently, and then when we get it, stuff is all messed up and broken? Is funcom changing stuff right before they release it to the rest of us? Funcom get ur stuff straight before releasing a patch.S*** happens. If you need to delay a release by a week due to stuff being messed up then delay it. Post a notice on here of whats going on. Stop releaseing patches and then havin to release a hotfix for said patch a day or two later. Make sure what you end up with on testlive is what you want released. We all know you have deadlines and such. But if you polish a terd…its still a terd. Love the game and most of the ideas. Just askin u to make sure stuff is working correctly before u release it.
Some of it is clearly reported. And sadly doesn’t always get adjusted.
Consoles react abit differently. there gonna be stuff that gets thru. (they mention before they do not have Dev kits, thats a issue in its own right… and budget to get one)
Depending on size of player base on testlive… stuff is gonna go unnoticed. Both do to “play it 1st” and those who test and report.
Take that small sample size of player with certain PC rigs. Then go to Live, with a huge sample size of PC rigs. Stuff is gonna show up.
Well…i’ve seen mythbusters… and a Polished terd looks damn good.
Again, stuff is always gonna sneak thru. And if there team isn’t allowed large test team to cover all bases… its gonna happen.
This speaks for alot of game makers. points at Bethesda who does next to no outside testing, but does only in house… and look at mess they do. =/
AC-Unity no faces at day 1, or all server days 1 that can’t handle load… **** happens. XD Not always prepable. (cause budget, time and staff…and more budget issues)
So sounds to me they need to make a ps4 test server and an xbox test server. Dont get me wrong. i have like most of there ideas, i would just like for stuff to work properly, So if i understand ur reply, they only test on pc?
Publicly, they only test on pc. They do test on consoles in-house I assume.
There are technical reasons iirc.
Of course PS4 & Xbox are different from PC, but - what the Thread Owner described is the same feeling I got also, but never wrote it down until now, because of respect how others make their work.
It is FCs responsibility how they handle their release management. But from my experience also: What is tested on the test servers should go life. If you read carefully through the releases in announcements & testlife section, this happens never. Something is tested and before this goes life, some changes are also brought in without testing. And very often these are features or fixings that change complete different things additionally. That manner allways has the risk of breaking things. When we release new software, it is be tested & then in a next circle the found bugs get fixed. And it is rolled out and then tested again. Not additional features in this phase. What happens here (in Conan Exiles) is that in this we allways get software that was not tested completely. More dangerous is, that I am not sure how a correct branching can be handled so. That means, old bugs make it back into the game.
But as I said, it is not my intention to tell people how they have to do their job. I do not have the right, and do not want to do this, as I also expect respectful communication.
Nevertheless, the way how releases come to us seem a bit surprising sometimes.
cheers 
Non existing QA department. Probably because only 2-3 devs work on the product.
They push it out on testlive in the hopes players test it for free. Then they get specific release dates from management that they do not want to stretch for some reason. This leads to poorly planned testing + fixing cycles and some of the bugfixes get shipped untested instead of doing another test + fix cycle.
That’s the problem with „public and cheap testing“. They simply can’t plan the tests done with testlive because they don’t know how long it will take for the users to find bugs. If they would have an own QA team, they would know the product more thoroughly and they can do more accurate tests. (Common issues that show up after changes, test plans, better time and cost estimates etc.) Professional Software Tester have specific methods to chase down bugs and Secure a good quality of the product. But those are expensive…
You may be misremembering it. The triangle bug was identified in the LIVE version, patched and then reappeared on TestLive during a subsequent Combat improvement. Too late to patch into Live, the team made an appeal to players to protect their goods. Players like me put out as much word as possible.
The problem in this exact case, and in most of these current issues, is that the volunteer density is so vastly decreased there is simply no way to simulate many problems that will only arise under conditions of heavy player/build/placeable load. In other words, as an OG TestLive player (75-90 players on all TL servers) I can say the numbers dropped the instant the TL servers were renamed Combat (8-10 players online), and continued to diminish through Launch (3-5 players online), and finally to the levels we see today, 0 to 2 players online on average, per day.
How about real QA? Real testers? Funcom has to pay someone for that and not move the testing to the playerbase.
How about that?
They do have QA, I’ve seen them playing, and I have (conditionally) played alongside a couple during Early Access, when thralls gained their inventories. The problem is exactly what I enumerated above: they are dedicated to testing and eliminating – or proving – Bug Reports as they are prioritized by the team. These folks are in no way numerous enough to satisfy the density requirements that many exploits or glitches require.
Furthermore, and I’ve said this before elsewhere, I use a Plague simulator in order to test the virulence of certain glitches or bugs. Once they reach a level of criticality, you can expect them to have a direct erosive effect on the playerbase. I don’t know that Funcom uses such blunt tools as Plague, Inc scenarios, but it seems they have the considerations about the playerbase in mind, just the same.
Maybe they had one back in the EA phase… As CE has a new lead designer NOW, you can see that FC shifts it workers to other projects and probably the testers too.
Lets have the blackblood tools as an example.
- FC forgot 1 completely
- FC put one tool in the wrong harvesting table/rate.
At least the 1 point was addressed in a dev stream, but there was never said if it will come (again the bad communicating FC has).
So then we got finally this patch with the DLC. Most were thinking, FC had fixed the blackblood tools… But what suprise, NO they didnt.
They didnt even know that the skinning kinfe has 1 less harvesting rate (good testers you have there!)
And they didnt say a word about the butcher knife in patch notes…
At least I opened a bug ticket… Lets see when the skinning knife will be fixed (thats 1 entry in a database – woohoo the workload!!)
And we will probably never get the butcher knife: Blackblood skinning knife & butcher knife
Myself, personally, I stopped testing the testlive versions simply because they changed it over to its own separate client. It’s one thing to just update to test and then rollback if you want the live version, but sometimes disk space is at a premium and I’d rather use it to work on my own games than go and double CE’s footprint for a day or two of testing.
Consider, is it a gamebreaking bug? Can it be exploited?
There is many small things like this and they don’t have high priority, but this doesn’t mean they won’t fix it at some point.
Take a look at the Trello board, you’ll find a selection of more or less high priority issues. Also, if you didn’t know, you can vote on which ones you want to have fixed.
I look once a week at the trello board and it makes things only worse, when you see which strange tickets are in work or even exist in the first place…
Some examplas in Prio column:
Dead enemies get stuck in a T Pose… wow.
Blood stain doesnt go away…
Doors dont save auto close…
Woow. So game breaking…
When I look at the Trello Board and then on the bug forums, it feels like 2 different games…
What happens with all the bug reports we make?
Don’t be sorry. I’m sad to see Oscar absent from the Lead position, but I’m also extremely happy about Alex. He is gifted, he is communicative, accountable, and most importantly a Gamer.
Last night I took out my old set of Darfari gear, all stone, and went after some cannibal villages. Shifting through all weapons but daggers (forgot to pack them), although I got smacked a bunch, it actually looked and felt some kind of epic. This combat looks good, and there are actual penalties when you go for the killing strike. There’s an awful lot to love.
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