After a year of playing this game, I've come to a sharp conclusion that DBG is incredibly casual about this game with respect to testing the code they push to production. It seems that you guys use the first couple of weeks after a code push to production as your actual deeper testing phase. I even see developer comments on the bug tracking site 'this is fixed in a patch later this week or next' just whenever.. and balance changes are tested on production. Using this method of 'testing', if something is out of whack (which seems to happen with some regularity) it means that it is out of whack for potentially weeks on production until you pull enough data or whatever you're doing behind the scenes to realize that a balance change needs to be addressed. Ack. Which leads to frustrating gameplay for the customer. Maybe some like this approach in getting the latest and greatest as quick as possible. But I cannot say I'm one of them.. I'd rather have a more polished product to use even if you took a couple of weeks extra to test. I implore you, DBG, to relax your release times a little for the sake of bug squashing. I'm not expecting perfect code, however I don't want to play on releases that have a kazillion bugs that need to be stamped out over the next few weeks of play. That said, I like the concept of the events in the latest patch all in all... I just wish you would have tested on PTR longer and more thoroughly (they don't even grant the cert rewards among other issues). Maybe even could have had more events over there on PTR.. and rewards for testing...
You're just now figuring this out? IIRC I pointed this very thing out like 2 years ago. DBG don't care. All of their best people are gone. Replaced by people like Epstein and Wrel. It's game over man. It's too bad you didn't play this game back in 2014. It was GREAT! You should have seen it. Weapons worked great, we had awesome stuff like thermal optics, there was no server lag, no high-ping players from Asia infesting Connery, the graphics were absolutely beautiful on maxed settings (before they dialed them back to the equivalent of medium settings). Then the company underwent some huge changes and it was just all s*** rolling down hill. I have a feeling that Epstein or some other guy in DBG's upper management knows damn well what is going on but is instructing his forum staff to keep pretending they don't know what the problem is and giving players excuses as to why the game is lagging. I overheard several players talking about how they intentionally dialed back the server's network thoroughput due to low pop to save money and once pop went back up, they simply never dialed them back up again. I would not be the slightest surprised if this is what's happening, and as someone who's worked in the software engineering field for various less-than-ethical companies for a decade, I can tell you from experience that this type of dishonesty is not at all uncommon in the industry. Upper management routinely tell us engineers to lie to the customers about bugs like this and we have no choice but to do what they tell us or risk getting fired. I have a feeling this is what's happening to DBG/PS2 now.
I find the game is still fun... but it could be a lot better with some tweaks to the patch releases (in how they are handled) as well as balance control. In PS2, I arrived a month or two before CAI. In that time period I really clicked with lightning tank driving and specifically vehicle busting. After CAI they reduced Python AP direct damage to the floor (1000 dmg to 650 dmg) to the point Harassers were chewing me up left and right. After around a month (iirc) they finally scaled back Harasser armor a little to try to even it (3 shots to kill versus 4). It still isn't even but it is indeed better. That is just one example.. For the amount of time (roughly a month) that total imbalance was on production, it wasn't really fun (unless you were driving a Harasser). It could have easily been ironed out on test and never happened on prod. In the meantime I discovered HESH really is a better Round type for Lightnings. Now I mostly just shoot infantry... It was better pre-CAI imo where vehicles were geared to focus on attacking vehicles... and Armor Piercing rounds really pierced armor.. Now I see there is a patch to fix the patch being released on tuesday so we have deal with the big bugs until then.. It is just a game, I get that. But it is also a paid product too.. seems lackadaisical to me to let things linger until a predetermined patch day in the future. At least from this end users PoV. I am intrigued with your thoughts, dreyone, of behind the scenes. Perhaps it really is out of the dev's hands and management has structured the releases and subsequent patches in this manner. If so they really should read threads like this and the others commenting on how off-putting it is to the paying customer. As an aside, I sort of think one of the background, unspoken goals of micro-transactional or long-lifespan game development is to keep changing the changables to keep it 'fresh' while also giving you something to work on. Switch damage values, armor values, etc and play it for a few months to a year then have a new patch to switch them again. Kind of like large department stores continually move the location of items around. I find that stuff aggravating.
I think they're well aware of how off-putting it is. I'm sure they've seen the countless threads complaining about it, not to mention the countless tickets people opened on their bug tracker, the complaints on other discussion sites like Reddit, people complaining in-game in /yell chat, etc. It's just that they don't care. I know how these upper management types are. All they care about is money, and sometimes they'll do things to hurt their customers if it means cutting corners on their own budget (i.e scaling back the network throughput of the servers so they don't have to pay for the extra bandwidth) It's just the unfortunate reality of this industry. You see this happen all the time with other games. EA is a great example, they have systematically ruined so many games (like Need For Speed: World, which they just absolutely destroyed.) This tends to happen to Free-to-play titles the most, because the way they see it most of the players aren't paying them any money and are just adding load on their servers. If I were to venture a guess, they probably actually want people to leave to reduce the load on the servers, and what better way to force people to quit this game than by making it unplayable for them?
