Merry Gorgemas, Build 277 Returns! - Natural Selection 2
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Join Date: 2013-01-29 Member: 182599Members, Super Administrators, Reinforced - Diamond
Join Date: 2013-01-29 Member: 182599Members, Super Administrators, Reinforced - Diamond
Merry Gorgemas, Build 277 Returns! - Natural Selection 2
First off, thank you all for your quick feedback and communications pertaining to Build 278. I guess Krampus was ready for some good ole tricks? You will notice your client...
Comments
Haha it will come back.
The work in 288 won't be forgotten though, just needs some extra cooking time...
Here's the down side...if you switch, you won't be able to play on 277 servers. Sorry, I wish I had a better answer for you.
He isn't retired from these posts and I want to make sure people understand that Build 278 was not a failure by the CDT or UWE. It was a build that had been worked on for the last month and we thought it was ready to go, but a few gnarly bugs showed up that were missed and we all thought it was better to pull it back rather than hold for a few days to make a hotfix.
I think that a vast majority of players actually reading any of the posts can agree on two things:
1. The patch was unfortunate, but not anyone's fault. The right call on rollback is more than satisfactory for now. Obviously the hitreg wasn't like that in the final playtest, something happened in the build who knows.
2. That blog post was insulting to a group of people who the community cares for far more than the author of the blog post.
So for someone who the community doesn't like to say what he did, he should come out and say he's sorry and explain why he did it. It was clearly him panicing that he was going to be misrepresented, but he wound up representing himself in the exact severely negative way we all feel about him already.
It's a PR mess by the PR guy. If anybody else did what he did, their PR rep would force a public apology. If he's going to be the face of Ns2 that nobody wants, he should learn to talk more frankly. It's only more insulting to the CDT that he tried to hide his blaming them and failed.
@Wasabi Ultimately someone fucked up, that happens, it has happened before, it will happen again. That doesn't mean that @Hugh should be able to come along and throw CDT under the bus, after coming back to NS2 and claiming that he's going to be transparent and get this game thousands of concurrent players one week, to shitting on the development team that kept it going for months.
Somehow more than he already has, @Mendasp still appears to have had no contact, regardless of if you hire him or not outright ignoring the guy and not acknowledging his work is pathetic and the community will side with Mendasp over Hugh because one of them has actually done a hell of a lot more to keep this game going.
As @mattji104 said, the way he handles the PR side of things poorly would be a serious understatement. I would say I eagerly await the work Hugh will do to improve NS2, but the majority of this community has seen it before, heard the way things have been handled in PT when he has been lead before and honestly, it's a mockery that he was even considered to lead it again.
In regards to Hugh and this community At least not currently.
An apology is the first of many things he should have on a list of "to do's".
Never seen that before...
BTW gimp is pure shit.
It's not even a big deal that the patch had to be rolled back. What is a big deal is the lack of achnowledgement that "Hey, we fucked up". That's what companies do.
I'm getting major deja-vu reading this comment. Did you just copy and paste it from an earlier thread?
This is called Steam going down. Happens all the time.
This also means that the testing methods are wrong somewhere. This Reg problem is a big issue like an elephant in the room. It is rather illogical that the PT don't see the bug before release while all remaining players see it as soon as the patch is out.
Again, the PT should test it, not playing it. In fact doing things with proper methods and planning will save more time for everybody instead of playing the game just for playing the game as a quality test / bug fixing.
L2MSpaint nubcaek
Or Paint.Net...
Bloody hell. Its like you're all in on a joke and left the community out. Here is the thing. SOMEONE or SOME DEV TEAM is at fault.
Be it the CDT or 'UWE' iust admit you fucked up. Stop dragging your feet and someone accept responsibility, this is a professional company with paid developers that are acting like children avoiding the blame. "No they did it, no he did it, no we didnt do it"
It just makes the wbole thing look like a god damned joke. Game development is difficult stuff goes wrong, but people know that, don't treat us like idiots. So admit the fuck up, apologise and move on.
Maybe then this community will show some respect to this new dev team. However the way they get treated and information is handled and no one can accept responsibility? You're just digging a deeper and deeper hole.
I don't know how you can say we are or aren't doing something right if you aren't a playtester and don't know how playtests are ran, or what we do every playtest
And I'm sorry you feel that way crazy, but if it makes you feel better, it's my fault for not showing up to more playtests. The one I did show up to there seemed to be no issues. If you don't believe me, that's on you. There are times where it is the PT team's fault, and times UWE's fault in the past, but after a month of testing, I don't care who does it, how it gets done, where you do it, who you play with, what server it's on, if we didn't find the bug after 2 months of testing, we weren't likely to find it after 3 months, or even 4.
PS I'm not even on that new dev team so why would I be trying to cover for them, if anything you would think I would be trying to make them look worse
9 Reindeers vs 7 Babblers, take that Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen and Rudolph!!!
We should name SantaGorge's Babblers!
We test a lot of features / mechanics / implementations individually and one of the last things we do in a test cycle is actually play typical games.
It's easy to say "Well if something slipped past you guys then you messed up" .. because well technically it's true.
But the reality is that testing every single condition is just not always possible, regardless of the amount of people or the time put in or the processes utilized. That's just a fact.
I've been play testing for five years now, over multiple games, and I can tell you with confidence that the true nature of software development lends to what we call "edge case scenarios".. where regardless of the effort or time put in you simply CANNOT account for every single little possible scenario or combination of elements.
For instance there was once a crash that would occur when one hive was killed while a 2nd hive was being built and received a healspray on the same exact server tick, while a drifter was also using enzyme near the first hive.
Guess how long it took us to figure out how to reproduce that??
You just cannot account for the trillions of possibilities, it's an unfortunate fact.
In the case of 278, some 40 individuals did not notice any difference in hitreg, save for one PT who mentioned it once, and was told it must've been a fluke because none of us noticed anything for months. In fact the network conditions between three different testing servers never reproduced these new symptoms in that time. The day the patch was released I immediately could tell the difference on a public server and was shocked by how bad it was.... whatever conditions brought it about were not present in our testing at any point. (despite it being fixed internally as of today, we still aren't sure what causes it!!)
Even attempting to reproduce it internally after the fact, we were unable to reproduce it on some users... meaning only certain users were able to reproduce this issue for others, and even then those same users could not reproduce it for others when shot? *Shrug*
We've recognized this and have decided to do more "cross testing" (where EU plays with NA more) in order to attempt to catch more bugs that may be created by these scenarios... but frankly... as I said before, it is a practical impossibility to account for every single edge case scenario, we can only do so much with an all volunteer team.
That being said we're always in need of another pair of eyes so you are welcome to apply to play test and suggest changes where you see room for improvement - after you are familiar with our processes.
I like the irony. In the mean time you describe it as a 'edge case scenario'. Such a thing would be something happening only to specific people, in specific condition / situation. I think we can agree on that.
When a majority (for what's left of us) :
- see it like the nose on the face as soon as it is updated,
- feel compelled to post about it in this forum (they may not be the one who often post) and ask to revert back to the previous build (never seen before),
- AND the devs DO SO practically right away.
I'm afraid to say it is NOT an edge case scenario.From my personal experience, I only used b278 for testing my map with robots. I did noticed something was wrong but couldn't confirm that; as the robots aren't real persons. But you get used to the robots and you know how they should behave even if they changed lately. My first thoughts about it were: 'i hope nothing is broken', 'What to expect? we'll see saturday".
Back on the topic:
- December 3 : B278 is out.
- December 4 : B277 is back.
Sooo this elephant did hide for months during the tests (40 persons = 20% players base) and couldn't be spotted, while it took only 1 day (or less) for the whole community (as players) to see it.Do you really think anybody can believe that ? I'm afraid to say i don't. Nice try by the way.
I'm not blaming any particular individual. I'm saying devs should start to have better protocols to ensure the game moves forward. Every single build had its problems. I understand quite clearly that modifying a system (code, map etc) always is accompanied by 'surprises'. But understand that NS2 is full of big surprises all along the story. I can't find a game that had that kind of problem magnitude before. It's a clear sign. Did the PT even tested this build ? A question that can be asked after all.
So when I hear that there is a monthly update. I'm not quite confident on the game future regarding the topic at hand and the long list of events before it. Maybe NOT every month would be safer.
if no one notice anything maybe they're not fit for the task at hand. Or maybe they have config that can't help them find that kind of bug (which is still hard to swallow even if I try to make it look better). Meaning they aren't related to the regular players anymore. Maybe they should reset their NS2 installation and use it more like regular people...
I did apply for PT one day. I had time at the moment. But soon after I had some info from the inside. Even if somebody would ask me to enroll : thank you but no thank you. I don't want to loose my time with fanboys who only want to see the latest development of the game before anyone else. Or people full of themselves. I think I was right considering the result we see now.
All this is included in the usual PT tactic. It's not me, it's not us, it's nobody's fault, nobody could see it, there's no problem etc... All this look pathetic to say the least. Because we see all officials and CDT included trying to extinguish the fires all other the place. Not to mention the internal disputes brought to light lately.
One can really be concerned with what the future will reveal. If UWE decide to be back at developing the game in hope of getting more players (old and new), this means change. But ultimately it raises many more questions than answers, I'm afraid.
I have been collecting, documenting and reporting various hit reg issues for the better part of a year now and can spot / reproduce them on demand.
As a result I now see them more than most players I know. There is no issue with being "fit for the task". Like I said the moment I joined a public server on the live build I immediately could tell the difference.
The heightened degree of issues were not present in our testing. Again... even after we knew there was a problem, reproducing those symptoms required certain individuals because it is not present on everyone, and it is not present in every network condition.
You can test this yourself - 278 is still on the Beta branch, fire up a vanilla server and fill it with at least 12. You'll notice you can reproduce it on some people but not others. Latency and packet loss seem to impact it in some way, but from our testing I can tell you that high latency vs high latency, or low vs low makes no difference. Conversely, high versus low will show NO ISSUES for the high latency player, but the low latency player will experience them.
That's what we call edge case, something that is not apparent through our previously typical means of testing.
Again... as a result we've adjusted our testing procedures to try to account for future bugs that may be reproduced the same way. So yes, again, it is true that we messed up and this slipped by.. I have no qualms with blame being taken (I dont think anyone does?) but it was a new parameter for us to account for that we've never had to before!
If you have magic powers and can predict every single future parameter and scenario that should be tested- while still completing everything in a reasonable time - please by all means, we would love to have a psychic on board our team, it would save us a lot of head aches
As for the rest of your post, you just seem like you're looking to incite.
I've explained everything twice now, so unless you have something to say other than insulting those who give their free time to improve something that you enjoy, I am done with this conversation and will ask that if you wish to resume it we can do so in private messages. Thanks