Actually I completely disagree with your thoughts on Draigoch. We dont know what went on in the instance during internal testing so we dont know if they ever saw the bug. I am also not aware if it got seen in whatever beta testing that has been done. So I have no knowledge that the devs ever saw a bug before it went live. Testing cannot ever hope to replace the live experience. Even a massive test really means that you are using something like 1% of the final end user count.
It very well could be that they didn't find the bug in the design phase or beta testing. But it's been a YEAR of people complaining about it. That is stretching credibility and suspension of disbelief a bit far, IMO. They put out a very shoddy product and haven't made it good yet. And that leads to this:
Originally Posted by Qwyxzl
And there are least two industries that I can think of that are at least as bad if not worse, the auto industry and pharma. In those industries a mistake costs people lives and yet they still make them.
In these industries, bad products get recalled, and millions of dollars are paid in damage settlements. They also get known for a bad reputation. As far as I'm concerned, Turbine is in that bad reputation category.
To many people, free will is a license to rebel not against what is unjust or hard in life but against what is best for them and true.
It very well could be that they didn't find the bug in the design phase or beta testing. But it's been a YEAR of people complaining about it. That is stretching credibility and suspension of disbelief a bit far, IMO. They put out a very shoddy product and haven't made it good yet. And that leads to this:
In these industries, bad products get recalled, and millions of dollars are paid in damage settlements. They also get known for a bad reputation. As far as I'm concerned, Turbine is in that bad reputation category.
About the stretching of credibility, I ask you this question: What causes the bug? Given hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people running through that instance and no one has posted a reproduceable method of making it bug. If that number of people do not know how to make it happen, you find it hard to believe that a handful (likely 2) people cannot find it either?
All of the major auto and pharma companies have done things that have led to people's deaths. People still buy from them. Yes they may have bad reputations but they still keep on plugging away. Why, because the next big new shiny comes along and makes people forget. Software is no different.
I actually agree that Turbine should have something in place for this. There are plenty of things that I can think of that could have made the situation better. What bothers me is that people think that debugging complex software is something that just takes a couple of hours or just a little bit of effort. Sometimes it is a massive undertaking and I am certain that for as much as people have said that they want it, that if Turbine put all of the devs on this to solve it and pushed Rohan back potentially more months, they would be decrying that as well. It is also possible that the error has been found but the root cause is so deep in the code that it would require a near rewrite of the whole instance. Is it worth the dev time to do that for a problem that occurs in what is likely a small percentage of cases?
The take away from this? Turbine could and should do a better job on this from a customer service standpoint and I wish they would. However it is naive and uniformed to think that this is a simple matter of throwing a little dev time at it will solve the problem.
Actually I completely disagree with your thoughts on Draigoch. We dont know what went on in the instance during internal testing so we dont know if they ever saw the bug. I am also not aware if it got seen in whatever beta testing that has been done. So I have no knowledge that the devs ever saw a bug before it went live. Testing cannot ever hope to replace the live experience. Even a massive test really means that you are using something like 1% of the final end user count.
And there are least two industries that I can think of that are at least as bad if not worse, the auto industry and pharma. In those industries a mistake costs people lives and yet they still make them.
Originally Posted by Qwyxzl
About the stretching of credibility, I ask you this question: What causes the bug? Given hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people running through that instance and no one has posted a reproduceable method of making it bug. If that number of people do not know how to make it happen, you find it hard to believe that a handful (likely 2) people cannot find it either?
All of the major auto and pharma companies have done things that have led to people's deaths. People still buy from them. Yes they may have bad reputations but they still keep on plugging away. Why, because the next big new shiny comes along and makes people forget. Software is no different.
I actually agree that Turbine should have something in place for this. There are plenty of things that I can think of that could have made the situation better. What bothers me is that people think that debugging complex software is something that just takes a couple of hours or just a little bit of effort. Sometimes it is a massive undertaking and I am certain that for as much as people have said that they want it, that if Turbine put all of the devs on this to solve it and pushed Rohan back potentially more months, they would be decrying that as well. It is also possible that the error has been found but the root cause is so deep in the code that it would require a near rewrite of the whole instance. Is it worth the dev time to do that for a problem that occurs in what is likely a small percentage of cases?
The take away from this? Turbine could and should do a better job on this from a customer service standpoint and I wish they would. However it is naive and uniformed to think that this is a simple matter of throwing a little dev time at it will solve the problem.
Glad my first post timed out as I was running around doing things. However, I think from your 2nd post that you jumped to a conclusion. I don't feel a little dev time would solve the problem. I believe the bugfest that was Isengard was the result of Administration putting too much pressure on the development team and a product was rushed out probably a month or maybe even 2 months before being fully ready for release. That's what I feel -- and what i mean by undertested. I totally understand that testing won't catch everything but the bug infested expansion of Isengard would have been more polished with more time and testing pre launch. Would Draigoch's issues specifically have been resolved? No idea -- but Draigoch frustrates me only because it's only one of countless issues in raid instances, open world content, lag issues and functionality bug issues (mailbox bug, camera bug -- the one that causes your camera to spin around uncontrollably and you can't lock it back (even if you press 'x') until you relog. I really hate that one.). So in response to both your posts -- I don't totally disagree with you but there's a context here.
Couple of other points -- Pharma industry. Really? I've got lots of health issues and I"ve bought a TON of medication in my life. I've never had a prescription filled incorrectly and I've never purchased medication that didn't do exactly what the package stated. I won't say the industry is flawless -- but compared to the bug infested expansion of Isengard? It's pretty accurate.
Car industry --- yah...it sucks. No argument there. But just because one other industry has issues doesn't refute my point that the vast majority of industries wouldn't turn a profit with the sheer number of issues Isengard has had. Frankly if a car was released with the number of issues Isengard had no one would be able to drive it off the lot.
Ok now that I've sounded horribly doom and gloom here. Turbine's decision to delay Rohan won a ton of respect from me. My biggest issue with Isengard was that it was released before it was done IMO - it was rushed out and not polished. Delaying Rohan communicates to me that they don't intend to make the same mistake. I hope they follow the same protocol with the instances in Rohan and everything. There's a lot of new tech I believe in this expansion so any extra effort to avoid problems is appreciated and respected. I would MUCH rather multiple delays on a product launch than a launched product that had the issues Isengard had.
I hope this makes more sense -- we'll see what Rohan brings, but I don't think it's wrong to believe that releasing an instance (actually 2 instances) with an expansion that never worked properly for the entire year of that expansion is unacceptable quality control.
Glad my first post timed out as I was running around doing things. However, I think from your 2nd post that you jumped to a conclusion. I don't feel a little dev time would solve the problem. I believe the bugfest that was Isengard was the result of Administration putting too much pressure on the development team and a product was rushed out probably a month or maybe even 2 months before being fully ready for release. That's what I feel -- and what i mean by undertested. I totally understand that testing won't catch everything but the bug infested expansion of Isengard would have been more polished with more time and testing pre launch. Would Draigoch's issues specifically have been resolved? No idea -- but Draigoch frustrates me only because it's only one of countless issues in raid instances, open world content, lag issues and functionality bug issues (mailbox bug, camera bug -- the one that causes your camera to spin around uncontrollably and you can't lock it back (even if you press 'x') until you relog. I really hate that one.). So in response to both your posts -- I don't totally disagree with you but there's a context here.
I am a software engineer so I can agree that many times administration and or marketing make horrible decisions that have detrimental impacts on software. And yes buggy software irks me! However in some cases there are other things to consider. In complex systems, even seemingly minute and isolated changes can have unintended impacts. So, a risk assessment has to be done on bug fixing. It is possible that some of the long standing bugs fit into this category. I am not sure if any do, but I would bet at least some do.
Originally Posted by musicman2000
Couple of other points -- Pharma industry. Really? I've got lots of health issues and I"ve bought a TON of medication in my life. I've never had a prescription filled incorrectly and I've never purchased medication that didn't do exactly what the package stated. I won't say the industry is flawless -- but compared to the bug infested expansion of Isengard? It's pretty accurate.
Actually I was not thinking of prescription filling. I was thinking of things like thalidimyde, fen-phen, Nsaids, and a few other things that made it to market and then it was revealed that they cause massive birth defects or serious heart conditions.
Originally Posted by musicman2000
Car industry --- yah...it sucks. No argument there. But just because one other industry has issues doesn't refute my point that the vast majority of industries wouldn't turn a profit with the sheer number of issues Isengard has had. Frankly if a car was released with the number of issues Isengard had no one would be able to drive it off the lot.
Not quite true, given that many people have been and do still play the game I think that it would be safer to say that it would be a car that is constantly in the shop.
Originally Posted by musicman2000
Ok now that I've sounded horribly doom and gloom here. Turbine's decision to delay Rohan won a ton of respect from me. My biggest issue with Isengard was that it was released before it was done IMO - it was rushed out and not polished. Delaying Rohan communicates to me that they don't intend to make the same mistake. I hope they follow the same protocol with the instances in Rohan and everything. There's a lot of new tech I believe in this expansion so any extra effort to avoid problems is appreciated and respected. I would MUCH rather multiple delays on a product launch than a launched product that had the issues Isengard had.
I hope this makes more sense -- we'll see what Rohan brings, but I don't think it's wrong to believe that releasing an instance (actually 2 instances) with an expansion that never worked properly for the entire year of that expansion is unacceptable quality control.
I dont think that we are actually that far apart in our opinions. I just see so many posts about how easy it is to just fix a little code that I get a little touchy Like I said, I think that there are MANY customer service things that Turbine could/should have done that would go a long way to improving the community attitude. They are seeing with their current delay that proper communication goes a long way with us. I really do hope that RoI constitutes the bottom of what they can do and that their current mindset goes forward and leads to better expansions.
A year after this raid came out and 3 updates to address the issue and this is still happening? To quote a GM response we received one time "if you knew it was broken why did you run the raid?". Seriously the time for one more patch is long past. The fix is the following: dragon blows up, submit a ticket, GM confirms draig is broken, GM spawns chests, raid loots, players are rewarded for their efforts and leave happy! Period. Done. End of story. Problem fixed!
I started keeping track and it's looking like a shutout with Chuck - 3 : That Guy - 0.
About the stretching of credibility, I ask you this question: What causes the bug? Given hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people running through that instance and no one has posted a reproduceable method of making it bug. If that number of people do not know how to make it happen, you find it hard to believe that a handful (likely 2) people cannot find it either?
...
The take away from this? Turbine could and should do a better job on this from a customer service standpoint and I wish they would. However it is naive and uniformed to think that this is a simple matter of throwing a little dev time at it will solve the problem.
Millions, possibly, of people have encountered the bug that can't be reproduced. That number of people, however, have no idea (and neither do you) of the code behind the scenes. Those handful, likely 2, do know the code, wrote it, and implemented it. And I do agree, it was probably a rush job to meet a deadline set by folks you may term naive about software development. Those 2 people should be able to identify their own mistake. If they can't, chances are good they don't belong in the profession.
I don't think, am not so "naive and un(in)formed", it is a simple matter of a little dev time. A year, though, whether or not you want to admit it against your own arguments, is a very long time in software, and if they can't fix it, it should probably be pulled, "recalled", from the game.
To many people, free will is a license to rebel not against what is unjust or hard in life but against what is best for them and true.
@Qwyzxl -- thanks for the well written reply. + rep to you.
Originally Posted by voalkrynn2
A year after this raid came out and 3 updates to address the issue and this is still happening? To quote a GM response we received one time "if you knew it was broken why did you run the raid?". Seriously the time for one more patch is long past. The fix is the following: dragon blows up, submit a ticket, GM confirms draig is broken, GM spawns chests, raid loots, players are rewarded for their efforts and leave happy! Period. Done. End of story. Problem fixed!
THIS is my biggest pet peeve in game. I have never understood why GM's won't spawn chests for raids when the instance bugs out -- Draigoch is just one example, but in Orthanc and OD there were many many documented cases where a challenge quest just didn't spawn even though challenge was completed according to the deed log. I don't blame GM's because obviously since none of them will do this it's a company mandate. I have seen the odd GM restore an item that was sold to a vender or (very rarely and not recent) correct a mistakenly chosen quest reward -- so why can't they reward a raid that was unable to complete an instance because Turbine's software bugged out???? I've never seen a satisfactory answer given -- I think many would even be happy with a chest on a random loot table so they got SOMETHING for their time -- but it's not even worth reporting these things anymore because the standard answer is they can't do it. Though for a GM to reply that way is beyond bad customer service.
Millions, possibly, of people have encountered the bug that can't be reproduced. That number of people, however, have no idea (and neither do you) of the code behind the scenes. Those handful, likely 2, do know the code, wrote it, and implemented it. And I do agree, it was probably a rush job to meet a deadline set by folks you may term naive about software development. Those 2 people should be able to identify their own mistake. If they can't, chances are good they don't belong in the profession.
I don't think, am not so "naive and un(in)formed", it is a simple matter of a little dev time. A year, though, whether or not you want to admit it against your own arguments, is a very long time in software, and if they can't fix it, it should probably be pulled, "recalled", from the game.
This is precisely what I was talking about. Yes a small number of people were in on the development of draigoch. It was actually very likely several small teams of 2 that wrote it. The problem would be in which part of the code the error occurs. There is also the possibility that the error is actually in old code that was not exposed until the particular use case of draigoch.
Bug fixing is not as simple a matter of looking through the code and finding the line that is broke. Even if it were there might be a million lines of code to look through. I am willing to bet that the root cause of this is a strange interaction with multiple sections of code that only get put together under a very strict set of circumstances that are not immediately obvious. The inability to find a bug that cannot be reliably reproduced in a massively complex system is in no way an indication that someone should not be in the profession. I will give you an analogy. Any doctor that cannot diagnose a rare disease that has symptoms that mimic many others should not be a doctor. Then my guess is that we would not have too many doctors left.
At this point the best option (in my opinion) in terms of time and money for Turbine is the customer service one. Below a certain morale threshold (publicly announced) they award the win. Above that and they do something slightly different. Maybe just some gold and a relic or rune? This way the community gets some satisfaction and they are not continuing down the rabbit hole.
@Qwyzxl -- thanks for the well written reply. + rep to you.
Thank you sir! You got some rep too
Originally Posted by musicman2000
THIS is my biggest pet peeve in game. I have never understood why GM's won't spawn chests for raids when the instance bugs out -- Draigoch is just one example, but in Orthanc and OD there were many many documented cases where a challenge quest just didn't spawn even though challenge was completed according to the deed log. I don't blame GM's because obviously since none of them will do this it's a company mandate. I have seen the odd GM restore an item that was sold to a vender or (very rarely and not recent) correct a mistakenly chosen quest reward -- so why can't they reward a raid that was unable to complete an instance because Turbine's software bugged out???? I've never seen a satisfactory answer given -- I think many would even be happy with a chest on a random loot table so they got SOMETHING for their time -- but it's not even worth reporting these things anymore because the standard answer is they can't do it. Though for a GM to reply that way is beyond bad customer service.
I really don't understand the GMs. I am not sure what tools they have and what directions they have been given. But it is pretty clear from the anecdotes on the forums that there is a major issue. What the community expects from a GM is not being delivered. This is an area that definitely needs a ton of work.
I have been encouraged by the level of communication that has been coming from Turbine lately. I hope that this is an indication that they have learned that proper interaction with their player base is incredibly important.
I really don't understand the GMs. I am not sure what tools they have and what directions they have been given.
The part I emphasized, IMHO, is the key. I've had nothing but glowing interactions with GM's in game. If I had to guess... and that is all any of us can really do, I'd say there are policies in place that don't allow them to spawn loot. Likely, those policies are there for good reason as well.
As for the draigoch issue, I think the fight should simply be, Kill 4 paws, work the body, phase 2 automatically starts. Kill 4 paws, work the body, phase 3 automatically starts. Kill 4 paws, work the body, end of fight. Get rid of the morale. Make the CJ deed count across fights (so you build it up over time). there are multiple solutions, but this is mine since the entirety of the fight is the same thing over and over. Reduce the repetition and you run a good chance of reducing the bugs All of complications in this fight are either grouping or phase transitions... which would still be in tact.
As for the whole "programmers" issue others are discussing... I fully agree there is a finite humanity issue behind the scenes. Real people wrote the code and they have real human limitations. For that matter, any complaint on the forums or in game has a chance to hurt their feelings... But we are also real humans who paid real money for a promised product. Its very one sided to claim that debugging is difficult. The money I earned was difficult too, but I would have lost my job if I didn't perform. I'm not interested in seeing anyone lose their job, but other companies are able to offer software in a more stable environment. So I'm not saying, mistakes can't happen... I'm saying, why is this one company struggling where others are succeeding? (in fixing issues in a timely manner).
The part I emphasized, IMHO, is the key. I've had nothing but glowing interactions with GM's in game. If I had to guess... and that is all any of us can really do, I'd say there are policies in place that don't allow them to spawn loot. Likely, those policies are there for good reason as well.
I have read many good things about the GMs and many bad things about them. And while I am sure that there are some bad GMs out there, I would guess that most of the bad interactions have to do with internal policies that we never see. Turbine has some very serious customer service issues that they need to resolve on their end in my opinion.
Originally Posted by hucklebarry
As for the draigoch issue, I think the fight should simply be, Kill 4 paws, work the body, phase 2 automatically starts. Kill 4 paws, work the body, phase 3 automatically starts. Kill 4 paws, work the body, end of fight. Get rid of the morale. Make the CJ deed count across fights (so you build it up over time). there are multiple solutions, but this is mine since the entirety of the fight is the same thing over and over. Reduce the repetition and you run a good chance of reducing the bugs All of complications in this fight are either grouping or phase transitions... which would still be in tact.
As for the whole "programmers" issue others are discussing... I fully agree there is a finite humanity issue behind the scenes. Real people wrote the code and they have real human limitations. For that matter, any complaint on the forums or in game has a chance to hurt their feelings... But we are also real humans who paid real money for a promised product. Its very one sided to claim that debugging is difficult. The money I earned was difficult too, but I would have lost my job if I didn't perform. I'm not interested in seeing anyone lose their job, but other companies are able to offer software in a more stable environment. So I'm not saying, mistakes can't happen... I'm saying, why is this one company struggling where others are succeeding? (in fixing issues in a timely manner).
I never said and most certainly do not believe that turbine should do nothing. We don't know how much time and resources the programmers have been given. At some point they should find the error. But even if they do that does not make it fixable. We dont know the cause and it might be the case that to fix it would break other areas of the game. Or even more importantly have the potential to break other parts. What would happen if in fixing Draigoch they flipped the problem so that regular landscape mobs went braindead every ten thousandth time? Given the fact that they have not fixed it, I think it far better use of dev time and money to craft a customer service solution. Empower the GMs to do something, even if that something is restart the phase that you are on with the dragon and players in appropriate places. Or just let the GMs give out rewards based on how much morale draigoch has left. Turbine should fix this but there are many ways to do so.
I really don't understand the GMs. I am not sure what tools they have and what directions they have been given. But it is pretty clear from the anecdotes on the forums that there is a major issue.
They can't do much at all. And this is most likely because of players complaining that GMs weren't consistent. Ie, their friends got help from a GM in an instance but they didn't get help, so they headed to forums and complained bitterly about it, complained about favoritism, etc. So as a solution the GMs are given a strict set of guidelines about what they can and can't do, and while it seems they can't do much anymore at least they are consistent.
After a year, bugs should be fixed. Period. Another thing that should have been fixed in the month or so of the summer festival was the dwarf races. When there is a title that can only be earned once a year, it's absolutely unacceptable to just leave it broken for the duration of a festival. I understand this game isn't pulling in a ton of money, but they still have a responsibility to fix these things. No fanboy argument is going to change that.
I'm tired of opening a ticket, only to have it closed stating you need to post it this way. Okay, I post it that way only to get it closed and told I need to post it the way I originally did, that is if I even get a response prior to TURBINE closing it.
After a year, bugs should be fixed. Period. Another thing that should have been fixed in the month or so of the summer festival was the dwarf races. When there is a title that can only be earned once a year, it's absolutely unacceptable to just leave it broken for the duration of a festival. I understand this game isn't pulling in a ton of money, but they still have a responsibility to fix these things. No fanboy argument is going to change that.
Why is it a certainty that it should be fixed after a year? After a year it should be that the community is able to determine exactly what causes the bug and yet they cant. The player base outnumbers the devs on this by many orders of magnitude.
If you are calling me a fanboy then you are sadly mistaken. What I am is a software engineer that works on games and actually has an understanding of how complex they are and the realities of companies allocation of resources. There might not even be a fix for this problem on a software end. Let me posit a scenario to you. What if they found the errors in draigoch. We know that they have released multiple fixes that have not really solved the problem. But what if they have also determined that the real error is one that is in the underlying game architecture that was only exposed in the specific example of draigoch? So that to fix the problem they would need to spend most a year redeveloping core game systems and no new content could be delivered. Would you still then be calling for it to be fixed? I stand by my statement that at this point the most effective thing that Turbine can do is actually put in place systems that allow the gm to do something about it. That would be a far better way of fixing this in my opinion.
I'm tired of opening a ticket, only to have it closed stating you need to post it this way. Okay, I post it that way only to get it closed and told I need to post it the way I originally did, that is if I even get a response prior to TURBINE closing it.
It is my understanding that the GMs either cannot or have been told to not do anything in this situation. This is the part that Turbine can and should fix immediately.
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Originally Posted by Qwyxzl
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Like I said, I think that there are MANY customer service things that Turbine could/should have done that would go a long way to improving the community attitude. They are seeing with their current delay that proper communication goes a long way with us. I really do hope that RoI constitutes the bottom of what they can do and that their current mindset goes forward and leads to better expansions.
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