We had to cancel our backflagging raid on Tuesday because of the patch. Oh well, stuff happens. Then today, we had to again cancel the backflagging raid. Thank you sir, may we have another?
Sorry to hear about the scheduling conflicts. But why exactly would you schedule raid events during a previously communicated expansion relaase day...and then rescheule later in the week during US daytime when patches to fix new content typically happen?
i would say the 2 weeks following an expansion launch may be the worst time to plan anything in eq. theres ALWAYS an issue of some kind
This as opposed to all the other downtimes, rolling reboots, broken chat, etc. At some point one just has to make plans and hope for the best.
I’m glad they are bringing servers down and fixing many of the things that are bugged as opposed to leaving it broken for the holiday break?
mh.. the whole beta was not long enough to correct issues... like usual... a couple of quests are still not working properly... quality of software development was never DGBs strength.. hopefully the bugs are gone with this update...
You need to look further back grasshopper. They could have just delayed release until it was ready to be released. But it's possible, maybe even likely, that they need to release it by the end of the year to book some revenue for 2022.
I feel like you might not understand how beta works. Beta opens and everyone in beta starts providing feedback on bugs, events, grammar, raids, quests, trade skills... anything you can think of. The devs then begin trying to fix those things that are being caught. Sometimes, when a fix happens it can break things in unforeseen ways. Then the devs get more feed back and they go back to the drawing board. For months this back and forth happens. Then towards the end of beta there is are soft and hard design locks. Hard design lock sounds exactly like what it is, they can't make any real changes to the game once this happens. So take the case of mean streets, a change happened that unfortunately changed some other things just before hard design lock. They have known since hard design lock that something is wrong but they have not been able to patch it until now. If they are even patching that. They might not have a fix for that yet, I am just saying that not everything can get fixed before launch.
I have never seen a game company that truly understood or enforced the concepts of alpha and beta. What Fawn describes to me sounds lik an Alpha, or early Beta at best. Unfortunately most game companies, and quite a few non game companies, determine alpha and beta by calendar dates, not by watching bug reports increase or decrease.
Yep, why? Because all are used for decades this way of paying for a beta to beta test a product for which I am used in my professional area that the company is responsible for this. Normally a company should PAY for people removing the bugs so that THEY can earn futhermore their money. In that example: beta testing for free or get paid and after beta is over everybody decides if that new xpac is worth the money. But the psychology behind that shows the stupidification of human beings. Let them be part of the project and give them the feeling of being part of the bugs, then you can let them pay and work for you for free and bind them to the product. One of the principles I am always again surprised that this strat works so extremely well. The human psyche is sometimes an astounding machine which is astoundingly easy to program.But if some have studied in the IT-Area then everybody knows that code lines above 6000 are destined to be bugged - tools and the way, people work, do not make it much better. Even in the hardware industry (Verilog, VHDL) the computers testing via testbench the software are not powerful enough to test them completely and C++ horribly is more and more used in chipdesign too. The bugs are accordingly akin to the ones in the software industry. And testbenches are surely not the typical testing gear in the software area, especially in gaming development of 20 year old games. But it would make things more easy and less buggy. I am looking forward that a couple of quests now work. Combining the shar vahl progression quests didn't worked at all. But how is it said: "hope dies last"...
Cool, so everyone who worked hard in the Beta, not for money but because they genuinely care about the success of the game that some of them have been playing for decades are, in your estimation, stupid. Good to know. I hope you enjoy all the stuff that those people got fixed for you.
I agree with Fawn here, those of us who beta test, and do so for free, it is because we want a cleaner release. I look at all the bugs I personally reported and think about, ya, sure, they may have gotten fixed eventually, but if I had decided to go do something else, there'd be at least 30 more bugs to deal with at launch.
mh... wrong translation... if you find another english word for twisting the mind then do so. Exchange stupification with "twisting of the mind" if you are more comfortable with it. Perhaps you find another "one-word-description" for that. English is not my native and translate.google.de does not give proper ideas. And if somebody is insulted instead looking what I have written instead of judging good/bad things - then you will see - you think exactly the same - and I did it for years too. So we are all in the same boat of addicted people who want a working game and do what should not be. I for myself would like to pay for a product which is working instead of working additionally for a product which is not working properly. And Alpha/Beta state at the release date is nothing I like to pay for. But I did it like you and many others.. thats life today... I miss the good old times of perfectionism which seems sometimes only present in old traditional cultural arts.
More to the point, I think that "beta" needs to be revisited. There isn't truly enough time for players to beta test thoroughly. I didn't even manage to get in on beta, due to holidays and new xpac unlock on TLP. I'm not sure that pre-order for expansion x should grant beta for expansion x, but rather for expansion y. (So everyone who was entitled to the NoS beta ought to, instead, have access to the next expansion's beta) This would allow them to open up a few things sooner and "focus" some beta testing a bit more. One of the biggest pushes in an expansion "beta" is raid testing. That takes a lot of time and a lot of attention from the developer(s) involved. With a longer, more focused beta, they could have the opportunity to get better sample rates on much more content. Every beta, I've ever participated in, has always had things slip through the gaps. There just isn't a way to compare 100-200 "active" beta testers, to the number of combinations tested by players when something goes live. Sometimes it's silly things like.. who would have thought that having lev + a mount + be shrunk + have a specific stat food + running backwards + chatting in theives' chant would somehow cause a server crash? Probably no dev or anyone testing... but you know someone, somewhere would randomly do something and BOOM. Now the absurd example, I provided, likely wouldn't get caught, even with a focused beta... but the ToL Overseer issues? Easy enough. Quests not giving xp/faction/coin? Sure would. Mobs using incorrect abilities? Yep! But as a tester.. I have no real idea if something is how it is supposed to be. Posting o the forums is a hit-or-miss. Dev time is scarce and they might just not see it as important as something else.. or make note of it and forget. There's a lot that goes on there. If they did it in chunks of this and that.. only providing access to a couple of zones, with a daily/weekly request for specific feedback types, it would go much smoother. The biggest thing, is having enough time leftover to address any issues found. That doesn't really happen with the current open beta schedule and such a small staff.
Schedule large projects at work during the week of the expansion launch so you can't play at all. By the time you are ready to play the game is fixed.
The reason we scheduled backflagging is because after the recent Extra Life bonuses we have a LOT of unflagged toons that need to get upgrades. So if we don't do backflagging we don't do raiding with those toons. And many of our mains are already nearly BIS.
