Bugs after Patches are Unavoidable

Yes. They are.
No amount of testing can prevent this.

I'm just going to quote myself from another thread:

What do you mean they can't test for this?
Merging two (or more) big blocks of code is bound to generate errors no matter what. They may run perfectly on their own in stable testing environments, but that is nowhere near the same as putting the two together. In the same way a single block of code being run for the first time is bound to have something wrong with it (except for maybe printf("Hello, world!")), putting Tab A into Slot B is going to cause problems too.

But what about the test server?
The test server is fundamentally different from the live servers. One of the biggest differences is the need for a completely different client to run it. Something built for the test server can't just be copypasted to the live ones. Going back to the tab-slot reference, Tab A might go into Slot C without issue, but it might not work for Slot B.

Then why do they let the servers run if they're filled with errors?
This is more speculation on my part than anything, but I think it's because it's the cheapest and, more importantly, fastest way for errors to be spotted.
This game has a lot of facets and details, many of which have multiple variables that depend events and other things. Poring over every single one of them under every circumstance with designated playtesters would take a lot of time and expensive to boot.
By letting the servers go live, in only hours players can and will do all sorts of things, encountering many more bugs and glitches than any dedicated group of playtesters can do in a day. You can see it as crowdsourcing the debugging process. Is it cheap for them to be getting free labor out of the players? Yeah, kinda. Is it faster and better? Most certainly. Those hotfixes come out within days of a content patch.
If this really rustles your jimmies, think of it like this: your player input is directly helping making this game better. At least, that's how I see it.


So there you have it. Bugs will happen every patch without fail, and nothing can stop it.
I'll be sitting here with my 40+ fps, waiting on the next hotfix to stifle these complaints.

stop being an apologist.

it's pretty clear to many that SoE's source control policies are pretty lackluster.

The bugs are hilarious. Why would you even want them gone?

What about the bugs that were reported on the test server and yet still made it to the live servers?

Absolute lies, on the highest scale.

So since you've 'dabbled' in coding, and failed to patch something without a ***********, that's all professionals who've got centuries of combined experience and millions of dollars of combined salaries are capable of too?

When's the last time you saw Google bug out? It's patched anything from monthly to several times in a day. Those weekly patches to stock market participation software frequently cause millions in losses - I particularly like when they make bright lights flash across my screen just when I'm trying to sell so I can't see for several seconds at a time... I also have no idea how doctors cope when each time they patch the NHS database it collapses under the weight of all the changes...



You are 100% wrong about the PTS, also. Whilst, yes, it currently runs a completely different build and can't be ported in pieces, they could just as easily run two PTS, or change its roles. They could -very- easily have put this patch up on the PTS in -EXACTLY- the same condition that it is in on live. It's just 1's and 0's, there's no reason they couldn't. It's also exactly why we asked for the PTS. It was -not- so we could test ideas and give feedback, it was so that we could actually test patches before they went live because it was ruining the continuity of the game when each patch would switch off turrets, or cause Prowler projectiles to hitscan.

I'm getting old and the world has changed alot

When I was younger , patches were made to fix the bugs.

Seriously, there's no possible apology. Since GU14 I cannot play anymore big battles without stuttering and lag and I lost about 5 nominal fps. I say "nominal" because even if the game shows me 20-22 fps, I have a lot of problems with the response of the keyboard and my cloak starts 3 seconds later I press F. My hit registration is messed up even in small fights, so I have 7 shotguns and they are nearly useless.

Lol did you check out the PPA?

You don't have a party going on at your Warpgate at the moment do you?

Phazaar just beat the **** out of the OPs message.

Anyone that has worked programs that REQUIRE stability understands that the **** people here accept as unavoidable is 99% avoidable. You'll always be able to find something that's a little off, but it's very sad to me that we (the customers) accept this level of ineptitude in software development.

No amount of testing can notice that splash damage on infantry no longer happens?

OK.

I've played a few online games & they've all had new bugs after an update. It's definitely something that just is an unavoidable fact. I wonder if its worse with ps2 because of the size & scale of the game. There's a lot can go wrong.

It's natural then for people to be upset when a bug ruins game play for them. And proper bugs are complained about.

I think what annoys me is that I perceive soe to not be that bothered. They'll fix it when they fix it. When turbine had a problem with lotro I also got the feeling from their communications that they were working flat out 24/7 to fix it. There was a sense of urgency that I just don't feel from soe. That urgency made me happy at least I knew someone was trying to fix the game.

No other game has bugs as major as the ones PS2 has after an update.

It's not like these are small overlooked things that are easy to miss.

Sorry, as others have said, this was absolutely avoidable. I work with huge teams on multiple projects across the globe and we never, EVER, get into such a sorry mess with any deployments.

You know why? Because we have proper dev testing. We have proper QA. Then we have proper live integration. Simply dropping what a team claims to be "the build" onto the server and hoping for the best is not a practice I'd expect University students to be doing, let alone a company as acclaimed as SOE. Granted, I'm sure they carried out internal tests on that build but I can say with great confidence that next to no regression testing was performed and as horrible as it is to say, it would appear nobody who has actually played the game worth a damn has cast their eye on it either.

As I say, it was avoidable because they have a DAMN TEST SERVER sat there with half finished crap on it hardly getting used. People login for a few moments to see what is new and then log out. Tear that content down and use the server as the test area for the actual game patches - that is what people wanted it for in the first place (due to the patch -> bugs -> hotfix -> more bugs -> final hotfix cycle for each rollout) - but somewhere along the line the use got bastardised into the waste of resource that it is today.

I back SOE 100% with my cold, hard cash to support this game but there simply is no excuse for the quality rolled out today.

They constantly reintroduce bugs that were previously fixed, then tout fixing them again. They need someone to manage their game versions and actually integrate code.

Well that throws most of my argument out of the water. I was under the assumption that PTS was "new things to look forward to"-land, not the "this better not make it into live" testbed. At least, that's what I deduced from the various announcements and discussions in the test server subsections.

I don't mean that condescendingly, I really thought the test server was just for the new things that were to be added to the game sometime later (not including bugfixes), basically a replacement for the long-outdated Roadmap. Plus, didn't the PTS receive the same patch that hit the live servers just today? (As a side note, I haven't really run into too many bugs today, aside from the splash damage removal and the Magrider suncannons.)

Now that I think about it, I'm beginning to question my stance defending a company whose loss of massive amounts of unencrypted personal data 2 years ago was the subject of a presentation I helped make just this spring.

Really appreciate the understanding here. We definitely did not INTEND for bugs, especially on this scale, to appear in this hotfix. We're working quickly to fix them!

oh can we keep the PPA bug please? It's awesome

Perhaps not the right thread, but I just want to say thanks to the SOE folks, after the 40mb mini patch (after the big one) today the game is running great! Keep up the good work. Pizza is on me.

Lol. Which are greater than lies of the regular scale. You really think the OP is trying to lie just to defend the devs? You are naive to think all bugs are avoidable. I cannot think of one game I've spent more than 15 hours+ where I havent experienced SOME form of bug. Humans do human things like makes mistakes when introducing huge amounts of new code to go alongside existing code.

Isn't this the first successful mmofps to handle anything like this on this scale? Its an immensely taxing thing for a computer and neither you nor I could understand that fully. I mean the engineered the entire engine, and you're comparing a search engine around for god knows how many years based off the same technology based off how ever many years before that to a basically revolutionary mmofps game with brand new code like this? You're being very unrealistic.

You can nerd rage all you want about how much you think you know about testing, bugs happen, OP is right.