Why not use the community rather than breaking things?

Speaking from someone that has to help keep this balance all the time in their own job, often times it is not that QA is simply slacking or dropping the ball. More often than not, the higher ups in the business have set hard deadlines to get things out the door and those deadlines must be met regardless of the actual state of the product. I don't agree with the mentality and think it really turns off customers, in fact I left my previous job because I understood how upset our customers were. Our business owner refused to budge on unrealistic dates that had no driving factor beyond his own greed. We were all making good money, but the owner wanted more. I wasn't willing to work in an environment that was driven by corporate greed over customer satisfaction. I look back after many years and the company is littered with tons of 1 and 2 star reviews. I know I made the right decision.

Anyway, TL;DR; don't just throw QA under the bus. Often times they're understaffed, overworked and along with the rest of the dev team they're given unrealistic deadlines that the people with the final say aren't willing to adjust to have a clean deliverable.

Thank you for the post as it needs to be said from time to time. Folks need to hear it though it will fall on deaf ears for some.

Now if you could find out why the decision to heavily nerf grind exp a couple of expansions ago I would be very interested to hear about it.

Your inability to comprehend math is not a consequence of a decision to do anything.

Kill exp is the same as it has always been, PERIOD.

The amount of experience needed to level from 111 to 120 is much higher than prior levels. That's it.

Be happy they give big % chunks of exp from collections, overseer, and progression 1 time rewards. At this point, rather than a flat amount of exp equal to what it was 10-20 levels ago. I hope they nerf ALL of those out of spite, to be honest, after all the whining and disingenuous comments from people that know better.

Wow you're so cool

I suppose the argument could be made that the only reason they made the achievement rewards give out huge chunks of xp is BECAUSE they chose to increase the "size" of the levels. It basically became a self-fulfilling prophecy: we have to give big xp rewards because the amount of xp per level was increased, and we had to increase the amount of xp needed in each level because everything now gives huge chunks of xp.

All they have to do is go back to the leveling curve we had for 110 levels, and all of this goes away. Everybody's happy. I don't understand their resistance to do that, and they have yet to explain why they did it.

we did not have that leveling curve for 110 levels. that's poppycock, it's been thoroughly debunked.

lol

True. However, it from the outside appears that there is no QA is what I am communicating, because we do not receive anything close to a quality product or service. There are clearly issues with their company structure/strategy that willingly puts the customers' experience in jeopardy. Narrowing down exactly where is what's in question and releasing broken and further breaking patches every month would be as like you said, or a lack of adequate QA. But just as likely as my scenario, is yours.

Fix your issues Darkpaw, they are glaring and embarrassing the company and studio.

I hope these are very generic descriptions of more specific and niche issues ("A zone crash caused by x type pet that had a buff from y spell line" or something). Otherwise, these seem like things that could have been internally tested before the "one week until Live" Test server period began.

I understand patches can have bugs.

There have been so many months when the patch notes for test are announced and the community instantly brings up issues with the proposed changes, then it hits test and the issues exist, then a week later it's on live and we're waiting for the fix. These issues also over shadow the good changes and improvements being made, hopefully we will see more coming for the group game as most zones are nearly empty in ToL.

Would it be so bad if big game changes sat on test for a month and had a chance to be fully fixed before hitting live?

From a customer point of view seeing a bug/issue reported during beta then being addressed 6 months after launch is frustrating. Sadly the only people reading this probably don't have any control of the process that is causing this cycle of frustrated customers.

1st thing the players will say

During the Ann time period is it really the best time to make large changes to the game?
Please rethink that in future years.
Fix the the Ann quests sure. Fix the bugs posted sure, fix the raids sure.

2nd have you thought of adding a step in the process
Test
single live server*
All severs

*a single push to a single live server that you can get more peeps to test for bugs and make sure the changes are not adding more issues?

That live server would become another test server as you need a separate patcher for each server you want running different code. Heck even switching from the live server with the patch and the rest of them without it would require players to patch each time unless they have a different install for it.

It doesn't matter how it is achieved. The person you are replying to simply wants reliable, quality patches that address more issues than it creates. Right now, whoever is in charge of "testing", is a fraud in my eyes.

All ideas are welcomed. Unfortunately, any and all ideas will fall on deaf ears at the company. We are all just being "had".

This x1000

I get it, devs aren't going to hold patches hostage over a minor inconvenience. Bugs happen. Patch cycle needs to keep moving, sometimes in an "all or nothing" fashion where we just need to ride one out. And at the end of the day, it's better this way.

I've been involved in countless deployment/cutover/upgrade/outage/etc windows where you think you have a plan until everything goes sideways and someone has to make the hard choice between backing out the changes vs pushing through a quick+dirty fix to make it work. And sometimes there are a lot of factors that go into that decision beyond the chance of a better outcome than pushing the reset button.

This time it isn't some bug, however. This was a problem with procedure. Certain changes are controversial enough to need player community engagement well before a coder even thinks about working on it.

Body types, pickpocket changes, magic weapons. Any one of these should have spurred that conversation. Dropping all three of these on the playerbase in a test patch notes thread a week before they go live demonstrates an insulting level of disregard that is only compounded by a "we care about the customer" formletter a week after the changes go live.

So, sometimes you screw up and have to face the music. Well, chin up. I'm not looking to see heads roll here, but someone up the food chain needs to understand that this one isn't on whoever it is writing the code. It's on the one okaying the changes.

(Insert deity here) help us all if that's the same person.

That's been a question I've had for a long time...who holds these devs accountable for the decisions, and ultimately the screw ups, they make? Because the same issues (pushing unwanted changes, pushing broken code to Test and then Live, etc.) keep happening.

Sure, we need to find ways to make the testing process better but in order to do that people first need to understand the process and want to take part in it. There is always time for people to test stuff on the test server to help catch things that the devs and EQ miss but that doesn't happen often.

Bugs happen in development. Devs go through their own cycle of code something, try it, fix bugs, try again. Then they pass what they think is clean code to a QA and then QA tests, either finds bugs or doesn't. If they find bugs it goes back to the developer to fix. This is normal SDLC.

If people are really looking for someone to toss into the fire, it shouldn't be the devs or QA doing their normal SDLC. They aren't the ones saying this must go to Prod now so they are not to blame (unless QA is not in any way active on these forums and Test feedback loop, which I find very unlikely). It should be the higher up release manager or product owner that says, "Ok we're done with this build regardless of its current state in Test, release it to Prod now however it is."

That's what I'm asking...who is that person (or persons)? Who is the person that should be going to the devs and saying "You screwed up...don't do it again" or "This is a bad decision...don't do this anymore." Who holds everyone else accountable?

Leadership starts at the top.

The leadership that sets the release cadence and schedules?