The future

Docmandu

So each and every patch, stuff gets broken.. some of it is unavoidable and anyone working in the IT industry is well aware of this... but.. the amount of issues with each patch is reaching staggering numbers and I'm wondering if ZOS is working on improving their testing.

From the outside, it really looks like there is very little automated testing done. There's a bunch of issues that seemingly would be caught if they had any form of unit testing on their code. Makes you wonder that time pressure during initial development caused them to skip a few corners, which left them with technical debt.

Somehow I get the impression that instead of things improving, it's getting worse..

Maybe something for an ESO Live episode.. a look behind the scenes on testing (and I don't mean QA play testing)

Turelus

Docmandu wrote: »

Maybe something for an ESO Live episode.. a look behind the scenes on testing (and I don't mean QA play testing)

ZOS are really against any kind of behind the scenes look at their company or structure, what little we get is just from interviews with the developers during ESO Live episodes.

Sadly there is little more I can comment on because making recommendation on how to better structure things would all be conjecture as no one but ZOS knows how they do things.

SlayerTheDragon

They need to give some incentive for more players to help with PTS testing - like my Beta monkey.

Cazzy

They do test things before launch but said it's easy to miss things. That's all I know tbh. I've asked before

Turelus

SlayerTheDragon wrote: »

They need to give some incentive for more players to help with PTS testing - like my Beta monkey.

I've always been against intensives for player testing, mostly because then you have people who "test" to get their item then stop.

There are a large number of players who do go on the PTS and test thing even submitting bug reports to ZOS, some get fixed some don't. The other issue is the weird outline issues which get broken and no one tried testing because it wasn't part of the new features.

WeaselGod

Cazzy wrote: »

They do test things before launch but said it's easy to miss things. That's all I know tbh. I've asked before

Easy to miss things? They have an entire forum dedicated to beta testing and bug reports, but they ignore almost every thread in it. They aren't even bothering to check.

Cazzy

WeaselGod wrote: »

Cazzy wrote: »

They do test things before launch but said it's easy to miss things. That's all I know tbh. I've asked before

Easy to miss things? They have an entire forum dedicated to beta testing and bug reports, but they ignore almost every thread in it. They aren't even bothering to check.

I quite agree. If people are reporting these bugs but they're putting the DLC out anyway that isn't good. Maybe they just need to get it out because of deadlines and promised release date? I have no idea...

khele23eb17_ESO

I'm pretty sure the quarterly schedule makes them rush things.

hitman46_2

Maybe the eso team is to small for content creating and fixing stuff. Think now the creaters are also the fixers?

Yngve_Nik

I'm convinced this game is currently being developed and supported by 4-6 people who are expected to the do the work of a team ten times that size. Good ideas but everything is so half-baked and poorly implemented; obvious problems pointed out on the PTR are never addressed; game-breaking bugs take forever to get fixed if at all.

dtm_samuraib16_ESO

Docmandu wrote: »

So each and every patch, stuff gets broken.. some of it is unavoidable and anyone working in the IT industry is well aware of this... but.. the amount of issues with each patch is reaching staggering numbers and I'm wondering if ZOS is working on improving their testing.

From the outside, it really looks like there is very little automated testing done. There's a bunch of issues that seemingly would be caught if they had any form of unit testing on their code. Makes you wonder that time pressure during initial development caused them to skip a few corners, which left them with technical debt.

Somehow I get the impression that instead of things improving, it's getting worse..

Maybe something for an ESO Live episode.. a look behind the scenes on testing (and I don't mean QA play testing)

I said this as well, a GOOD company would first get rid of as many as possible bugs, THEN start on DLC's.
Here, and in a LOT of other cases, they ignore half the issues, and make new DLC, making things worse.

They use a logic, that I can't grasp...
In the end, this will come back biting you in a bad way.

mtwiggz

Unfortunately I believe ZoS really needs to sit down and look through their code a bit more. With every DLC comes more and more bugs and performance issues. I would much rather see the next DLC pushed back inlou of an entire patch of fixes and optimization.

As for the PTS testing, it's horrendous. A lot of players play it and post very good feedback. Most of which seems to fall on deaf ears. Many of the bugs that made it to live were presented before ZoS within days of PTS going live. Giving them plenty of time to research said issues and come up with a fix. I understand that coding is a difficult task, especially on a scale this large. Yet a lot of these bugs seem like they can be nipped in the bud with some extra time spent on them.

I hope to see a lot of these issues resolved before the end of the year. I thoroughly enjoy ESO, but the constant battle with performance and bugs is becoming a very large setback.

dtm_samuraib16_ESO

Maybe,,, we should all make a RL money deposit, on a specific account, and we offer the whole of ZoS some hearing aids?

Merely thinking out here....

thomas1970b16_ESO

I don't worry about the future. It will be here soon enough.

Garldeen

At times it seems the PTS is more there so streamers (often promoted and retweeted doing so by ESO on twitter) can use it to hype the DLC on their channels ahead of launch than it is to actually test or fix bugs. Look at ESO Live, used to be a regular thing but now is just a marketing event a couple of weeks before the DLC comes out. Wonder how many we will get before the next DLC is ready to be hyped?

I guess the problem of announcing the launch date before it goes of PTS is that you are working toward a fixed data. Anything which isn't life or death and looks like it will take a lot of the man hours to do gets put to one side.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the game (although an increase in difficulty would be nice) it is just annoying to go through the same issues every time a DLC comes out

Drakoleon

Whats the point for longer PTS ? zeni is deaf they just do their thing no matter what! They should have fixed most bugs, stabilize skills/classes/ races, infrastructure (lag packet loss etc) and THEN introduce new "stuff"

Drops, loot, rewards, RNG whatever is that, its such a crap! There are 100s of posts and complains for those matters ! They dont give a damn.

Looks like that zeni guys dont even play their own game otherways they would have fixed it long ago!

After 2,5 years the game is like BETA with crazy issues. Bugs and conflicts that you dont even see in close beta games.

Am sorry to say but this masterpiece is in wrong hands and therefor am not that optimistic for the future.

dtm_samuraib16_ESO

Drakoleon wrote: »

Whats the point for longer PTS ? zeni is deaf they just do their thing no matter what! They should have fixed most bugs, stabilize skills/classes/ races, infrastructure (lag packet loss etc) and THEN introduce new "stuff"

Drops, loot, rewards, RNG whatever is that, its such a crap! There are 100s of posts and complains for those matters ! They dont give a damn.

Looks like that zeni guys dont even play their own game otherways they would have fixed it long ago!

After 2,5 years the game is like BETA with crazy issues. Bugs and conflicts that you dont even see in close beta games.

Am sorry to say but this masterpiece is in wrong hands and therefor am not that optimistic for the future.

Well DUUUUH!
They don't have time.
They play STO. XD

Docmandu

Cazzy wrote: »

They do test things before launch but said it's easy to miss things. That's all I know tbh. I've asked before

That's why you write automated tests (unit tests, functional tests, integration tests, ...), so that you don't keep running in the same issues over and over.

For example, when they bumped the range of toppling charge, they forgot to increase it on all levels of the skill. Level 3 I think didn't have the range adjusted. That's something that could very easily be caught with a generic test that compares each level of a skill and tests that the higher level one has at least the same number or better numbers than the one before it.

Things like that would prevent mistakes like that in the future and is generic enough to apply to all the skills.


Same with the fat finger entry of a skill effect.. around IC release they entered a value totally out of range, again something that a generic test could catch.

emily3989

All I know is other games had more robust, better working features than this game over 10 years ago. (group finder tool as an example).