Prepatch "Doomsday" let's talk.

[eduwneso]

First of all, I don't support every change that Blizz makes and I hate some of them but there are a lot of people that is just plain unpolite and talk like they know how everything should be done. I'll only talk about what I know for certain, and I would like to have a friendly talk with people that really understand what happened here, and also learn from you guys, this will be long so I would understand a TL DR .

I see a lot of people talking about developers like they know everything about it, i'm a programmer and I certainly know that a bug, even a tiny one in some stupid 2000 line code can break havoc, now, how can we compare this to what happened in this prepatch. First take into account that this game has probably more than 4 millions of lines of coding. They have (i'm speculating here) code working below code and that code below that other one and a lot of those connected, they probably try to add more and connect everything every time the add something new or change something. Now, a lot of programmers and developers have changed over the course of the years in wow development and of course new ones have to adapt to everything they find and that takes time.

In this prepatch they changed not manually like they said they did in WOD, but with some tools they created some stuff that is working with old coding and systems. This "Tool" will be awesome for them once it's made better but it needs testing to see at what level it can affect the game changing old stuff with it, and let's be real, the mayority of the people in the PTR are there just to see the changes in their current main and not to test everything, the best time to do those tests and it's a hard pill to swallow, it's in live.

I did expect that these changes would break random stuff around the world, quite a lot of code changing and it's impossible to test every possibility, I have seen and I have laughed even to myself how sometimes you test everything (taking my case for example) in a application I made for 5 people where I work, seriusly guys, I fucking tested everything and made some of my co-workers try to find bugs and everything was perfect. But then, there comes someone to use it and manage to find something, it happens. What i'm trying to say, is that if it happens with a simple application and only 1 developing I can't imagine what can happen with millions of lines and dozens of people.

P.D: really sorry if my english is impossible to understand and would completely understand a TLR, if you have doubs and do not understand something I said, i'll try to explain myself to the best of my ability. Cheers!

[Deleted]

People wanted Beta access and now they got it. All of them

[WowIsDead64]

Problem is - there are PTR and Beta testing, that have been running for around half a year, and that emulate live servers. And there was at least one year of development. Simple thing: don't release product if it isn't ready.

[cparle87]

Problem is - there are PTR and Beta testing, that have been running for around half a year, and that emulate live servers. And there was at least one year of development. Simple thing: don't release product if it isn't ready.

Thing is many people play as if it's simply early access. They don't give feedback or advice.

http://darklegacycomics.com/631

This put it quite nicely.

[salate]

I hated only two things.
Every patch day my ISP goes crazy and all I get with Battle.net services = 2000 ms constantly
Or it aint ISP and Blizz servers go crazy, I have no idea.
w/e
The second thing we couldnt 3 man Tyrant in HFC. Thats all

Things change, code changes. Legion was smooth af, like really, magically smooth. If you remember how bad WoD was...
But well, prepatch stuff is understandable. I just hope 14 august wont show us some sad stuff. Because me and my gf took 3 days off to play DEE GAMEEE!


Oh, and they actually made bm hunters not that bad I expected them to be. thanks for that blizz

[WowIsDead64]

Thing is many people play as if it's simply early access. They don't give feedback or advice.

http://darklegacycomics.com/631

This put it quite nicely.

Even if only one player of 1000 reports some bug - it should be enough to fix it. I've played on both Alpha and Beta and I've reported every single bug and badly designed quest, I've encountered.

P.S. I'm programmer too and I clearly understand, what bugs are and how they should be fixed. Problem isn't with not encountering certain bugs on Beta servers - it's with lack of time to fix them.

[eduwneso]

Problem is - there are PTR and Beta testing, that have been running for around half a year, and that emulate live servers. And there was at least one year of development. Simple thing: don't release product if it isn't ready.

You are "right" in that Beta and PTR are there to solve problems. Won't talk about classes, but the playable part of the game itself, the problems that developers fix first are the ground breaking ones, meaning "I can't complete this quest" "I can't walk here". That's what Beta is for, but as @cparle87 said most of the people use it as early access, maybe i'm just speculating ofc but 70-80% of the people who play Beta and PTR don't do it to test and find problems. Now all the players from live will try quite a lot of things, and some of them, no matter the years of development it has will have problems if no tester could think of testing it. To do somw whiteknighting here haha, they are fixing every bug very fast.

[Sencha]

Programmers always find excuses.

The truth is they just don't want to test what they have done and let the users do their job and find the problems for them.

[eduwneso]

I hated only two things.
Every patch day my ISP goes crazy and all I get with Battle.net services = 2000 ms constantly
Or it aint ISP and Blizz servers go crazy, I have no idea.
w/e
The second thing we couldnt 3 man Tyrant in HFC. Thats all

Sorry it's happening to you, for now I have not seen one problem *with things I do*

Things change, code changes. Legion was smooth af, like really, magically smooth. If you remember how bad WoD was...
But well, prepatch stuff is understandable.

hahahaha I feel you, yeah legion launch was truly amazing, the prepatch also broke some things but not at this level, it also did not change this much to be fair with BFA prepatch

I just hope 14 august wont show us some sad stuff. Because me and my gf took 3 days off to play DEE GAMEEE!

OOOH YEAH hahahaha I took 1 week from work to play it and to travel with a friend *-*

Oh, and they actually made bm hunters not that bad I expected them to be. thanks for that blizz

Nice to hear this, I only used BM hunter to have the mage tower appareance because I loved it... and while it's the simplest and dumbest spec of all game, I don't know why but I actually liked it... lol

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Programmers always find excuses.

The truth is they just don't want to test what they have done and let the users do their job and find the problems for them.

If you are capable of saying this, then you don't know nothing about the development process of programming and the testing phases it has. Sometimes you are not able to think about something happening, then comes the user and do it, it happens, in small medium big companies, everytime.

[Time Sage]

Players always find excuses.

The truth is they just don't want to realize there's never enoughs tests to find everything and even when devs do their job and find the problems, more pop requiring players to tell them.

Fixed it for you

[eduwneso]

People wanted Beta access and now they got it. All of them

hahahaha yeah, it's a shame that this is how things are working. The best thing is for blizz to redo everything from scratch, but that would be something so big it would eat them. i'm ok with fixing bugs in the prepatch. And i'm sure in BFA there will be some more, the density of players is not the same and i'm sure they will fix them fast so nothing to be screaming about.

- - - Updated - - -

Fixed it for you

be niceee I want this thread to be the most positive it can be in MMO-C, but what you fixed in his comment is true that I must say.

[thilicen]

Programmers always find excuses.

The truth is they just don't want to test what they have done and let the users do their job and find the problems for them.

Spoken like a truly ignorant person.

[eduwneso]

Even if only one player of 1000 reports some bug - it should be enough to fix it. I've played on both Alpha and Beta and I've reported every single bug and badly designed quest, I've encountered.

P.S. I'm programmer too and I clearly understand, what bugs are and how they should be fixed. Problem isn't with not encountering certain bugs on Beta servers - it's with lack of time to fix them.

this is also true, but the fault also falls in the users, who want them to keep producing content for the expansion, less content
drought and also expect that the next expansion comes fast, they feel pressured to please them, and we all should have noticed this, this ofc things like everything breaking on prepatch happens, because no time.

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Spoken like a truly ignorant person.

there is some truth in it, because it certainly is time efficient. But they don't do it at the levels the doomsayers say, they try to ignore the less important bugs to fix the firsts weeks in live or the ones that can come up because it is better for them, and actually in the long run, better for us.

[Deleted]

Programmers always find excuses.

The truth is they just don't want to test what they have done and let the users do their job and find the problems for them.

Let me guess; you never saw how QA departments in IT firms work?

[eduwneso]

While I agree that this is often a problem, software quality is a real issue that we often ignore, because we can ignore it. In case of WoW, you might get couple of angry nerds posting in forums, but that's it. It's not a huge thing. Nothing compels you to do good testing or to keep high product quality standards.

I'm going to quote Dan Geer, from his "Cybersecurity as Realpolitik" talk given at 2014 Black Hat. It is a section that talks about software security, but it could as well apply to general software quality.


The whole talk can be found here: https://youtu.be/nT-TGvYOBpI?t=94

This is the world we live in. I'm hoping software won't escape product liability much longer, but I'm not quite as optimistic as Dan. it think it will be decades until we get there (if we ever get there) - and until then, events caused by quality defects in software will be part of our everyday lives.

Also - in the context of Blizzard/WoW it's a bit silly argument because it's a entertainment product - but on a higher level issues with software quality cause huge problems in our connected, digitalised societies - and to think that we're in many places actually dependant on critical infrastructure that runs on software, the lack of product liability is a huge risk.

learned a lot from this, and I agree 100%, thanks!!
"Also - in the context of Blizzard/WoW it's a bit silly argument because it's a entertainment product " do you mean what I wrote trying to justify part of the mistakes from blizz? hahahaha

[Kokolums]

Most of the problems stem from people using computers with an infinite spectrum of motherboards, GPUs, CPUs, internet connections, drivers, operating systems, and settings. Its quite an undertaking to release games for PC. A closed environment system like a console where you know everyone has the same specs is much easier to debug. If product liability had real teeth for computer software, that would probably instakill the PC and all developers would switch to console only. Blizzard would exit the PC market and WoW would be developed only for consoles. Because, who wants that liability? No-one.

[eduwneso]

No, I didn't - I meant my "very serious response" was a bit silly in this context, it's is only a game after all :-)

oh hahaha, sorry for not understanding. Again, learned a lot from what you said and linked and I agree 100%, thanks!

[babyback]

Even if only one player of 1000 reports some bug - it should be enough to fix it. I've played on both Alpha and Beta and I've reported every single bug and badly designed quest, I've encountered.

P.S. I'm programmer too and I clearly understand, what bugs are and how they should be fixed. Problem isn't with not encountering certain bugs on Beta servers - it's with lack of time to fix them.

Since you are a programmer you know how it is working towards a set deadline. In a perfect world all bug reports should be looked at. But that is impossible if you are working towards a deadline and some bugs will be ignored until that deadline is met.

There are thousands of bug reported to Blizzard during a beta and since they are both working on the acutal expansion at the same time as the beta is released it is impossible for them to address them all. You focus on direct game breaking bugs and then you have to clean up the rest when there is time.

[SirBeef]

Thing is many people play as if it's simply early access. They don't give feedback or advice.

http://darklegacycomics.com/631

This put it quite nicely.

Yup. Can't tell you how many people would bitch about something in the beta and when asked if they reported it, the answer would be no, someone else would do it, or that they were their checking out the fastest route to level when it goes live. Half of the feedback I gave was secondhand based off what issues non-reporters ran into.

[Sencha]

If you are capable of saying this, then you don't know nothing about the development process of programming and the testing phases it has. Sometimes you are not able to think about something happening, then comes the user and do it, it happens, in small medium big companies, everytime.

Fixed it for you

Spoken like a truly ignorant person.

Let me guess; you never saw how QA departments in IT firms work?

4 lazy programmers spotted.

So much easy to let the users find your mistakes.