I have a question that I often wonder
meatmachine
South England Join Date: 2013-01-06 Member: 177858Members, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Supporter
South England Join Date: 2013-01-06 Member: 177858Members, NS2 Playtester, NS2 Map Tester, Reinforced - Shadow, WC 2013 - Supporter
As much as I love NS2 and the new content patch and will forgive them and carry on playing once things have smoothed out so to speak, I really feel the need to have an answer for, like...
How were these glaring issues with performance not picked up during the testing for build 252/3?
Are all the testers working on PCs intimately tuned to run NS2 perfect regardless, or what?
Were the issues not picked up on or were they just ignored or deemed acceptable?
Trying to use as much of my empathy as possible to try and figure it out, and the best I can come up with is that UWE purposely released an unstable build so that new players bought in by the sale will get a first-hand experience of what it's like to have a game patched for free. Thats the best I got.
I just dont understand this one. Can anyone enlighten me here?
p.s. Please dont consider this a rant, as it's not. I just really want to know
How were these glaring issues with performance not picked up during the testing for build 252/3?
Are all the testers working on PCs intimately tuned to run NS2 perfect regardless, or what?
Were the issues not picked up on or were they just ignored or deemed acceptable?
Trying to use as much of my empathy as possible to try and figure it out, and the best I can come up with is that UWE purposely released an unstable build so that new players bought in by the sale will get a first-hand experience of what it's like to have a game patched for free. Thats the best I got.
I just dont understand this one. Can anyone enlighten me here?
p.s. Please dont consider this a rant, as it's not. I just really want to know
Comments
Instead of "shove out your yearly recycling product, give the players 1 patch (if at all) and repeat the zero innovation money making scheme ad nauseam, amen"
Everyone knows this, but UWE released a patch that was unplayable. The performance was broken to the point where nobody would want to experience this game.
Res I've emboldened the last part of your post to reference-
Why on earth would UWE decide to release it if a huge, elephant-in-the-room performance bug that made the game practically unplayable, had not been dealt with? That just reeks of awful development politics.
The PT's rigs range from ancient 2006 rigs to brand new super monster PC's that are overclocked to the max. So the devs get a wide range of information on a lot of different configurations from performance logs to see where the issues lie.
Just sayin'
(Also, the only map that gives me any performance issues at all is Biodome, I get some minor stutters here and there on in it. Everything else is smooth on max.)
I, on the other hand, have not volunteered to be a PT. I have given money to a game that advertises itself as being complete, and therefore I go into the experience expecting these issues to already be ironed out. It is perfectly within my rights to complain when the developers ship a broken patch and expect me (and the rest of the community) to serve as testers when we have not agreed to do so.
In my mind, "At least you don't have to deal with what we do" is not a valid excuse for UWE's poor implementation of this current build.
That's fair. That said, we can't find everything. There's a small number of us and we don't generally put in long hours because we're not paid employees. The last few weeks have been exceptional in how much time and effort the PTs have put in but as you've obviously noticed some stuff still made it into the live build.
It would be awesome if UWE could afford paying for professional QA testing... but most large publishers don't even pay for true professional QA anymore (at least not what I would consider good professional QA). We try to keep it as professional as possible nonetheless.
That said, I would bet an Onos badge that the developers who pour their heart into this game would be the first to admit it should not have gotten out the way it was because it reflects poorly on the quality we've come to expect from them and it did not serve the NS2 community.
Maybe that is harsh, but as someone who admires the work UWE is doing and has done there needs to be a commitment to quality and the community because games like this cannot survive with arbitrary deadlines as the bottom line. I think this last release was a small blemish on otherwise awesome relationship between UWE and their customers.
I was a PT for Day of Defeat: Source, and after one patch release, hundreds of players experienced crashes that were completely non-existent during our playtesting. But, when it got released, there was a bug in the patch that wasn't seen until it went through release.
I don't know if that's what happened here, but it happens.
OH well done is done and hopefully 255+ will see us pack to happyness...
this, uwe was constrained by a deadline of their own making. they but off more than they could chew, and in an effort to get the release to where it needed to be by the time the sale rolled around, they pushed an incomplete build to the widest audience they could.
it was handled badly, from start to finish, but shot happens. next time this happens, I hope they just push the as feature complete version they can, that does not have performance.issues. their focus appears to have been on those features, where, if you ask most people, the focus should be on performance.
new players probably wouldn't even notice dual railguns not being in the build, the core game has enough shinies for new eyes as it is. but they will notice frame drops, server lag, and input problems. female marine isn't really a draw to people who don't know that female marine was promised.
Why is the option to simply not release either patch not an option to you?
Frankly, the fact that they knew straight up their timeline yet released the game breaking patch anyways reeks of incompetence. UWE is blowing its chances every sale and free weekend. If there was even the slightest chance of serious technical problems, they should have just waited until after the free weekend. Total failure to understand basic marketing. Don't release a crappy product at a big marketing event.
Try this:
"We're having some technical issues with the patches and thus, in light of the free weekend and general gameplay the development team has decided to postpone reinforcement to provide the best possible gameplay for existing and new players. We'll be working hard to get reinforcement as smooth as humanly possible and out to the community as soon as we can."
Can anyone reasonable be offended by that? How is that worse than releasing a literal game breaking patch during the free weekend?
Let's start with something even more basic: the steam forums are full of people who for some reason cannot even load the game. That's pretty darn noticeable to everyone. Then there is a smaller set of players who are spending large amounts of time just waiting for things to load. Then there is the set of people who have crash to desktop often. Let's deal with the literal game breaking issues rather than performance first. If you cannot even get the game to load, that's a huge problem compared to bad FPS.
So, no, simply choosing to not release the patch was absolutely, unequivocally, NOT an option.
We killed ourselves to hit that deadline, our PTs killed themselves testing the game so that we could hit that deadline. We pulled the game together into what, from testing, seemed to be a pretty stable release state. We tested on the range of machines we had, with the people we had, and we did not see all the crashing and widespread performance issues that we saw when we finally released the patch. Sure, if we'd had the luxury of time, the patch could have benefited from another week or two of testing time. But most likely, there still would have been a wide assortment of issues that would only have revealed themselves when we released to the public. For example, it appears that some of the crashes and issues may be related to the fact that SLI driver profiles have been created for the previous version of the game, but with all the changes to the rendering, those are now incompatible, and will need to be addressed by the graphics card manufacturers.
We released a HUGE content update, and everyone involved put everything they had into getting it ready for release. And as draining as that process was, we still managed to fix, test and release multiple follow up patches to smooth things over. And, despite the accusations, and the second guessing, and the wild assumptions that have been taking over the forums, we remain pretty damn proud of what we accomplished. Many people have performance issues and we are working on fixing those up ASAP. But many people do not. The game ran like a dream at PAX. The game sold very well during the sale, despite all the doom and gloom around these parts about how harmful the free weekend was. Many old and new players are enjoying the patch and are having a blast, and despite the bumpiness of the rollout, Reinforced was a success. Now, instead of dwelling on what could and should have been done differently, can we please move on and look to the future?
Thanks for hearing me out
--Cory
These are exactly the kinds of bugs that are likely to get through the QA process we have and there's little to be done about it. We have only so many testers with only so many different hardware configurations. Both the company and the test leads like the numbers roughly where they are for organizational reasons and to ensure the quality of the testers we do recruit, so we're not going to mass recruit new testers just to fill hardware gaps. I suppose we should have been a bit more wary when we had so few crashes to fix last week when we probably should have expected many given the complexity of the changes to the engine, although I don't really know what we could have done about it other than putting up a dreamcatcher over the main build machine and lighting some incense. We were working on crashes the night we finished the trailer so all that incense might have put Hugh to bed before we had time to get done filming... probably not the best option there either.
As to the OP's issue, yeah, shit just gets through sometimes. As it turns out a lot got through this time. It sucks a lot and we're not happy about it at all. We are working extra extra hard now because of how annoyed we are at all this stupid junk that sneaked into the live build.
edit: goddammit, cory would be posting ahead of me while I write this gg
so, like, yeah, what he said!
I used the word "appears" to qualify that because I appreciate that I do not have an inside view. that being said, is it any wonder that that kind of statement gets repeated? we, as end users have exactly one point of reference currently to assess the priorities of the company. when you roll out a featureful but poorly optimized build, do you honestly feel surprise that you're being accused of focusing on features over performance? by the by, mouse for me works now, but I had to perform some odd voodoo settings magic to get it. please fix.
That's fine, but please try to be understanding we had a very strict deadline and a huge amount to be done. It's a gigantic step up from where it was. This is the best we could do in the amount of time we had because ready or not, it was coming.
We put in extremely long hours every day, all of us. It's not done and I can see why you'd be unhappy, it's a reasonable complaint, just try to bear with us that there just wasn't enough time and that work is still being done.
Why are drifters not invisible anymore? Instead of making them builders, revert them to invisible scouts/warning system. Also, blink should be reverted to being a sort-of-short burst of speed instead of the way it is now.
Also is it just me, or you cant shoot both railguns at the same time?
THEY ARE WORKING ON PERFORMANCE. THEY ARE FIXING THE MOUSE LAG. THEY ADD CONTENT IN ADDITION TO THAT, NOT INSTEAD.
Clear enough now? It's a main focus for the people who work on the engine. They have 2 or 3 of them. The rest does other stuff, such as content. It's a small company, they do their best and even reply quite frequently in the forums. What else can they do. People wanted linux support, they added linux support. Do you have any kind of sense for what amount of work this is? How many things can go wrong you don't even notice when you think you're done?
Please tell them how you fixed your mouse if you want to be of any help. Otherwise be patient. Or make your own game.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the team worked their ass off to get this build working before PAX. I have no doubt that it's miles better then it was during the testing phase. But you can't honestly tell me that the extra content and balance changes couldn't have been implemented without messing with the engine in such a significant manner.
You did just say that despite knowing you have such a small time frame to get things done, the team still chose to shake the beehive and hope only honey comes out.
While you, and anyone who had the opportunity to play the test builds see a vast improvement, and know how much work it took to get it there after the major changes to the engine ware made, you have to remember that the rest of us see the difference between the "stable" builds. The problem isn't in the amount of work you put in, its in the poor decision making and overall performance of the build that went public.
Several things some folks forget...
-Throwing more people at a problem doesn't always help. In fact past a certain point, it does nothing. I think every programmer aside from a few with a god complex understand how this works. The old quote "Nine women can't make a baby in a month" applies here.
-Not everyone is a programmer! UWE like pretty much every organization employs talented folks who are trained and skilled in different areas. I'm sure some of the coders are great artists and vice versa, but they usually have their assigned roles. This means that the artists aren't taking time away from the coders except for some implementation stuff at the end of the art cycle. Are folks gonna get pissy that the janitor is cleaning bathrooms and not helping optimize the engine too?
I can understand the comments on performance, but only given how big of an issue it's been in the past. That said, patches are ALWAYS kind of crap-shoots, no matter the game, the engine, or the content. Who can forget Skyrims legendary non-patches with dragons flying backwards and loads of shit just going bananas?
Also, the insane amount of work that UWE has no doubt put into balancing the game, which I feel is about even in importance with performance (if you don't have a more or less balanced game, players leave, if you have bad performance, players leave) seems to be ignored. I've only got 300+ hours in, starting from... I dont even remember, before 250 for sure, but now more than any time I've played, I feel that they've achieved an actual level of balance which keeps the game going regardless of single unkillable rambos or out of control higher lifeforms. I didn't think they could manage it, but the time I've spent playing reinforced and 253 has yielded some of the most balanced overall gameplay I've yet to see in this game. That alone is worth mentioning if you're going to talk about dev focus, resources, and the time spent by the team.
yes, and is it mine that I can't be bothered to read posts and main page announcements a year or so ago, about patches that im satisfied with? not everybody has 10 years of familiarity with the company, and a current problem requires a current explanation. if this has beenan ongoing problem, then it demands a current explanation even moreso.
as I said, im not privy to the circumstances of the company, and they should understand that the newer playerbase has valid concerns as well. I'm more familiar with the forums than most, but would you really jump down the throat of someone with 50 hours in the game, if they aren't familiar with what "Cory" has said about the topic a year ago? I didn't know who the hell Cory was until a week ago, and I've been on these forums for like a year.