you can't "divert manpower" to bugfixes

Muttsmutt

in times like these, an egregiously large percentage of keyboard warriors gather round the forums with their flaming pitchworks, here around the ZOS virtual headquarters, all chanting the same battle hymn:

"put EVERY SINGLE man, woman, and child to work, and FIX THE BUGS!!!"

the kindest of them might realize that poor timmy, the 16 year old intern janitor, probably doesn't have the necessary skillset to contribute anything of use to the desperately needed fixes.
the smartest of them might realize that deborah from marketing isn't whipping the coders' backs raw so that they optimize every line of code that has to do with monetization.

and yet an even smaller percentage have the sensibility to realize that in practice, even if jonathan the senior coder could theoretically shove his hands in the server code spaghetti, there's already thomas and his team of veterans simultaneously playing jenga with the code in perfect synchrony. sure, they may be the same people who always have been responsible for that particular moving part of the dauntingly massive machine that is ESO, and the same people who oopsie'd the bugs into existence in the first place- but by god, would their entire jenga tower collapse were they to have to indoctrinate new team members into the way they wrangle the code; to teach them the mystic arts of "if(goingToCrashToDesktop) { dont(); }".

in reality, this is more or less how it works:

game developers have teams assigned to different aspects of the game. each team is a cohesive unit of people working together in a way in which their individual work can be brought together coherently and functionally. assigning one team's duties to another team will NOT speed up the process, because it isn't a straightforward additive equation of "the more people work on it the faster it gets done", it isn't working a field. it's working with a very complex system in which every single person has their own part to play, and multiple people will just get in each other's way.

they can, and do prioritize working on urgently needed fixes which are essential to the game working. they're working with all reasonable able-bodied, relevantly-skilled men, women, and others.
if those fixes aren't ready day 2, they haven't figured it out yet. just because the content pipeline does not come to a standstill when there are critical bugs does not mean they aren't using every single employee whose job is to address those bugs, to address those bugs. they don't pull their coders aside and tell them "hey, i know we're supposed to fix weaving, but we wanna make a new class for the next expansion, you should work on that today instead".
and those people working on fixing the bugs? they're not going to work faster if you metaphorically whip them. nothing will make them work faster except maybe coffee.

TL;DR:
you can't "divert manpower".
so let's all calm down and go shout at a PUG or something.
y'all need to stop acting with the same mental incompetence as a PUG's combat incompetence.

-
obligatory disclaimer:
this is not about "defending" zos. this is about instilling critical thinking, logic, and reasoning, in the place of frustrated "demands". this is about providing a more reasonable explanation for all this mess. for the sake of knowledge.
the current state of the game, or ZOS' buggy day one releases in general, are disrespectful towards their paying customers. they are beneath the quality they should provide. ZOS' developer teams, regardless of their appointed responsibilites, should fulfill those responsibilites better.
given the success of the game, they should have some of the best people in the industry.
maybe they do, maybe they don't- what's clear is that they mess up a lot more than is acceptable to do by their playerbase.
that doesn't mean they're not prioritizing properly. it just means they're bad at their job.
...or the game really is a hellish nightmare to code properly idk i'm not a dev.

mobicera

So hire more people for bug fixes.
Why even defend at all?
Its just disrespectful to release known broken patches and product.
I'm rather sure that they possess the needed resources to do this.

Muttsmutt

mobicera wrote: »

So hire more people for bug fixes.

Muttsmutt wrote: »

it isn't a straightforward additive equation of "the more people work on it the faster it gets done", it isn't working a field. it's working with a very complex system in which every single person has their own part to play, and multiple people will just get in each other's way.

[snip]

mobicera wrote: »

Its just disrespectful to release known broken patches and product.

true that though.

[Edited to remove Baiting]

mairwen85

Should have picked up on reports during PTS, shame they didn't--but fixes are ready to be deployed via a patch on 16th November (PC). I wont defend them either on the delay for that, but there is no requirement to divert manpower; maybe at most proper escalation of critical fixes so they can get round contract strangleholds with Stadia and consoles.

Even if setting more people to work, as OP states, it would be less oversight and people treading on each other's toes.

Ashenkin

Yes they can hotfix the crown store but not the combat... don't you recall that? it's a little bit far fetched to me that they can't urgently hotfix this bit

alanmatillab16_ESO

Actually I heard Deborah from marketing is a dab hand with a whip

mairwen85

Ashenkin wrote: »

Yes they can hotfix the crown store but not the combat... don't you recall that? it's a little bit far fetched to me that they can't urgently hotfix this bit

Hotfix is non-intrusive. server-side. The client side bugs require a patch download to be applied client-side. That's where it gets murky because Stadia restrictions, and likewise console.

Muttsmutt

mairwen85 wrote: »

Should have picked up on reports during PTS

do you legitimately believe they didn't? do you think that somehow, the dozens of reports of the bugs that were made while the patch was on the PTS did not reach the relevant team?
have you considered that perhaps, they did, and the relevant team did not manage to finalize relevant fixes before the disconnected management decide that they HAVE to ship to live so that they will not delay the DLC and risk profits?
come on, it even has a "zos is greedy" undetone to it! because it's true!

Ashenkin wrote: »

Yes they can hotfix the crown store but not the combat...

if you have had any smidge of tangency with coding & what goes into a system such as the crown store, versus what goes into a combat system in a game... well, you'd realize how different those aspects of a game's working innards are, and logically deduct that different teams work on these two different aspects.
to put it simply and directly- the people who keep the crown store in working order are NOT the same people who keep the combat in buggy order, and they can NOT fix the combat. just because those who are responsible for the combat are unable to fix their ***, doesn't mean those who are responsible for the crown store will stop their own work and not fix their own ***, if they are able to. they are a different team which does NOT work on or know how to work on the combat.

does that explain it to you? does it make more sense now than just explaining everything wrong with the game through "zos is a mythical beast whose only priority is money"?

EvilAutoTech

Y'all know who fixed most of the bugs in Morrowind?

The community.

Y'all know who fixed most of the bugs in Oblivion?

The community.

Y'all know who fixed most of the bugs in Skyrim?

The community.

Y'all know who doesn't have access to fixing bugs in ESO?

Ashenkin

Muttsmutt wrote: »

mairwen85 wrote: »

Should have picked up on reports during PTS

do you legitimately believe they didn't? do you think that somehow, the dozens of reports of the bugs that were made while the patch was on the PTS did not reach the relevant team?
have you considered that perhaps, they did, and the relevant team did not manage to finalize relevant fixes before the disconnected management decide that they HAVE to ship to live so that they will not delay the DLC and risk profits?
come on, it even has a "zos is greedy" undetone to it! because it's true!

Ashenkin wrote: »

Yes they can hotfix the crown store but not the combat...

if you have had any smidge of tangency with coding & what goes into a system such as the crown store, versus what goes into a combat system in a game... well, you'd realize how different those aspects of a game's working innards are, and logically deduct that different teams work on these two different aspects.
to put it simply and directly- the people who keep the crown store in working order are NOT the same people who keep the combat in buggy order, and they can NOT fix the combat. just because those who are responsible for the combat are unable to fix their ***, doesn't mean those who are responsible for the crown store will stop their own work and not fix their own ***, if they are able to. they are a different team which does NOT work on or know how to work on the combat.

does that explain it to you? does it make more sense now than just explaining everything wrong with the game through "zos is a mythical beast whose only priority is money"?

so we can't have a hotfix patch for combat ever? I mean... ever?

hakan

i dont know how can you even defend the bugs/performance issues thats still present today. like.. most of them range between 2-5 years lol.

Muttsmutt

EvilAutoTech wrote: »

Y'all know who fixed most of the bugs in [singleplayer bethesda games]?

The community.

Y'all know who doesn't have access to fixing bugs in ESO?

hah! yeah, that's a point to make. addons can only do so much.
but unfortunately it is completely un-implementable, whether for "logistical" (data synchronization) issues, or legal/bureaucratic issues- a modding system akin to singleplayer bethesda games.
though were that to be a thing, my my, would that be quite a game to see! modded ESO!

Ashenkin wrote: »

so we can't have a hotfix patch for combat ever? I mean... ever?

almost certainly not. not because they don't want to, but because of technical aspects.
as mairwen85 had explained, due to the nature of the vast majority of combat issues, fixing them requires forcing an update upon every single player (as let's not forget, this is an MMO- everybody's client must be identical), which would mean people would have to update much more often than twice a month (or whatever ZOS' patch schedule is).
due to the nature of an MMO, and particularly ESO's gargantuan size, it is an unavoidable sacrifice- that they can only truly fix bugs through incremental patches adhering to a clear schedule.

this is not done out of ZOS' malice or incompetence or what have you. it is done due to technological reasons.

Cadbury

Obviously, the solution is to buy more crowns, silly gooses

Vevvev

As someone who does some coding you would be amazed how similar coding a game and coding a business application are. Same basic principals apply, but what makes gaming a completely different beast is all the things business applications don't have to deal with like balance, physics, and player behavior.... well maybe customer behavior so the customers are not pinging your support team trying find the submit button you stuck on the left side of the page...

I do agree with you a little bit OP in that you can't divert manpower, but sometimes you can take a programmer who has never made a video game before in their life, sit them down in front of the code, and they might actually start finding solutions to the bugs. Its not guaranteed as not every programmer is a wizard, but I've seen it happen where they had run into similar issues in the past and found a way to fix it.

Now whether the game can survive the fix is a different story as the song goes...

32 little bugs in the code! 32 little bugs!!!
Take one down, patch it around, 64,512 little bugs in the code!!!

Muttsmutt

Vevvev wrote: »

you can take a programmer who has never made a video game before in their life, sit them down in front of the code, and they might actually start finding solutions to the bugs

that's true, could be a good practice for more elusive and troublesome bugs.
perhaps something like a cross-feedback system where non-assigned teams have a portion of their time re-assigned to a difficult bug which the relevant team is unable to successfully address- specifically for this reason- that perhaps somebody could at least suggest a different approach. though not forcefully, and not excessively- if an employee says they can't help, they can't help, and they get back to their own tasks.
that would be the closest thing to "diverting manpower" which could, actually, be useful. good idea!

zvavi

Muttsmutt wrote: »

do you legitimately believe they didn't? do you think that somehow, the dozens of reports of the bugs that were made while the patch was on the PTS did not reach the relevant team?

It doesn't matter if they reached the team or not. The past shows easily that they don't fix a lot of the reported bugs. And that's the issue. That not all bugs are fixed. Some stay in as "features". I don't care how you sugar coat it. The policy for bug fixes that actually go live (reminding, they said they have a fix for the major bugs, just won't release them until the 16th!!!) is mind boggling.

Raideen

It's been 6 years. We still can not get mail from a guild trader unless we zone or relog.

That says mountains about what is going on with this game.

FrancisCrawford

mobicera wrote: »

So hire more people for bug fixes.
Why even defend at all?
Its just disrespectful to release known broken patches and product.
I'm rather sure that they possess the needed resources to do this.

In a software truism old enough that the whiff of sexism was just normal for the era it was first coined:

It takes 9 months to make a baby, no matter how many women you assign to the task.

That said, the truism doesn't rule out speeding things up at two extremes:

• Hiring more people to ensure that a huge fraction of the bugs are at least properly diagnosed.
• Hiring more people to entirely rewrite certain subsystems in which bug- and/or performance-fixing seem hopelessly slow.

Guyle

I dunno man, the last time I checked, the more ppl you have trying to put out a dumpster fire, the better the chances its gonna get put out.

fced

Muttsmutt wrote: »

in times like these, an egregiously large percentage of keyboard warriors gather round the forums with their flaming pitchworks, here around the ZOS virtual headquarters, all chanting the same battle hymn:

"put EVERY SINGLE man, woman, and child to work, and FIX THE BUGS!!!"

the kindest of them might realize that poor timmy, the 16 year old intern janitor, probably doesn't have the necessary skillset to contribute anything of use to the desperately needed fixes.
the smartest of them might realize that deborah from marketing isn't whipping the coders' backs raw so that they optimize every line of code that has to do with monetization.

and yet an even smaller percentage have the sensibility to realize that in practice, even if jonathan the senior coder could theoretically shove his hands in the server code spaghetti, there's already thomas and his team of veterans simultaneously playing jenga with the code in perfect synchrony. sure, they may be the same people who always have been responsible for that particular moving part of the dauntingly massive machine that is ESO, and the same people who oopsie'd the bugs into existence in the first place- but by god, would their entire jenga tower collapse were they to have to indoctrinate new team members into the way they wrangle the code; to teach them the mystic arts of "if(goingToCrashToDesktop) { dont(); }".

in reality, this is more or less how it works:

game developers have teams assigned to different aspects of the game. each team is a cohesive unit of people working together in a way in which their individual work can be brought together coherently and functionally. assigning one team's duties to another team will NOT speed up the process, because it isn't a straightforward additive equation of "the more people work on it the faster it gets done", it isn't working a field. it's working with a very complex system in which every single person has their own part to play, and multiple people will just get in each other's way.

they can, and do prioritize working on urgently needed fixes which are essential to the game working. they're working with all reasonable able-bodied, relevantly-skilled men, women, and others.
if those fixes aren't ready day 2, they haven't figured it out yet. just because the content pipeline does not come to a standstill when there are critical bugs does not mean they aren't using every single employee whose job is to address those bugs, to address those bugs. they don't pull their coders aside and tell them "hey, i know we're supposed to fix weaving, but we wanna make a new class for the next expansion, you should work on that today instead".
and those people working on fixing the bugs? they're not going to work faster if you metaphorically whip them. nothing will make them work faster except maybe coffee.

TL;DR:
you can't "divert manpower".
so let's all calm down and go shout at a PUG or something.
y'all need to stop acting with the same mental incompetence as a PUG's combat incompetence.

-
obligatory disclaimer:
this is not about "defending" zos. this is about instilling critical thinking, logic, and reasoning, in the place of frustrated "demands". this is about providing a more reasonable explanation for all this mess. for the sake of knowledge.
the current state of the game, or ZOS' buggy day one releases in general, are disrespectful towards their paying customers. they are beneath the quality they should provide. ZOS' developer teams, regardless of their appointed responsibilites, should fulfill those responsibilites better.
given the success of the game, they should have some of the best people in the industry.
maybe they do, maybe they don't- what's clear is that they mess up a lot more than is acceptable to do by their playerbase.
that doesn't mean they're not prioritizing properly. it just means they're bad at their job.
...or the game really is a hellish nightmare to code properly idk i'm not a dev.

I entirely agree with you.
In time like this, don't wait two weeks to do your patch or maintenance... ALL HANDS ON DECK MOVE YOUR .... HANDS and fix those bugs...
We pay game, we pay dlcs, we pay ESO + you OWE US A BETTER QUALITY OF SERVICE, A BETTER QUALITY, it is a shame, when i started to play Fallout 3 Bethesda had a good reputation, NOW YOU ARE CALLED BUGTHESDA, and i am sad for you, because i love your games (except FALLOUT 76 the biggest error in the game history)...

Sephyr

fced wrote: »

Muttsmutt wrote: »

in times like these, an egregiously large percentage of keyboard warriors gather round the forums with their flaming pitchworks, here around the ZOS virtual headquarters, all chanting the same battle hymn:

"put EVERY SINGLE man, woman, and child to work, and FIX THE BUGS!!!"

the kindest of them might realize that poor timmy, the 16 year old intern janitor, probably doesn't have the necessary skillset to contribute anything of use to the desperately needed fixes.
the smartest of them might realize that deborah from marketing isn't whipping the coders' backs raw so that they optimize every line of code that has to do with monetization.

and yet an even smaller percentage have the sensibility to realize that in practice, even if jonathan the senior coder could theoretically shove his hands in the server code spaghetti, there's already thomas and his team of veterans simultaneously playing jenga with the code in perfect synchrony. sure, they may be the same people who always have been responsible for that particular moving part of the dauntingly massive machine that is ESO, and the same people who oopsie'd the bugs into existence in the first place- but by god, would their entire jenga tower collapse were they to have to indoctrinate new team members into the way they wrangle the code; to teach them the mystic arts of "if(goingToCrashToDesktop) { dont(); }".

in reality, this is more or less how it works:

game developers have teams assigned to different aspects of the game. each team is a cohesive unit of people working together in a way in which their individual work can be brought together coherently and functionally. assigning one team's duties to another team will NOT speed up the process, because it isn't a straightforward additive equation of "the more people work on it the faster it gets done", it isn't working a field. it's working with a very complex system in which every single person has their own part to play, and multiple people will just get in each other's way.

they can, and do prioritize working on urgently needed fixes which are essential to the game working. they're working with all reasonable able-bodied, relevantly-skilled men, women, and others.
if those fixes aren't ready day 2, they haven't figured it out yet. just because the content pipeline does not come to a standstill when there are critical bugs does not mean they aren't using every single employee whose job is to address those bugs, to address those bugs. they don't pull their coders aside and tell them "hey, i know we're supposed to fix weaving, but we wanna make a new class for the next expansion, you should work on that today instead".
and those people working on fixing the bugs? they're not going to work faster if you metaphorically whip them. nothing will make them work faster except maybe coffee.

TL;DR:
you can't "divert manpower".
so let's all calm down and go shout at a PUG or something.
y'all need to stop acting with the same mental incompetence as a PUG's combat incompetence.

-
obligatory disclaimer:
this is not about "defending" zos. this is about instilling critical thinking, logic, and reasoning, in the place of frustrated "demands". this is about providing a more reasonable explanation for all this mess. for the sake of knowledge.
the current state of the game, or ZOS' buggy day one releases in general, are disrespectful towards their paying customers. they are beneath the quality they should provide. ZOS' developer teams, regardless of their appointed responsibilites, should fulfill those responsibilites better.
given the success of the game, they should have some of the best people in the industry.
maybe they do, maybe they don't- what's clear is that they mess up a lot more than is acceptable to do by their playerbase.
that doesn't mean they're not prioritizing properly. it just means they're bad at their job.
...or the game really is a hellish nightmare to code properly idk i'm not a dev.

I entirely agree with you.
In time like this, don't wait two weeks to do your patch or maintenance... ALL HANDS ON DECK MOVE YOUR .... HANDS and fix those bugs...
We pay game, we pay dlcs, we pay ESO + you OWE US A BETTER QUALITY OF SERVICE, A BETTER QUALITY, it is a shame, when i started to play Fallout 3 Bethesda had a good reputation, NOW YOU ARE CALLED BUGTHESDA, and i am sad for you, because i love your games (except FALLOUT 76 the biggest error in the game history)...

For clarification purposes, it should be noted here that ZOS doesn't necessarily mean Bethesda. Bethesda doesn't have too many hands in this pie, so to speak. Pete Hines along with a handful of others have come over to talk about lore and what not, but they've not developed anything for the game as far as any of us are aware. While Bethesda is in their credits down below, it's because Bethesda.net gives the websites some features along with article publishing on their site. Aside from that, Bethesda has always appeared to be hands-off when it comes to ESO, so who we have to blame is directly on ZOS.

I don't disagree with the Bugthesda comment though. Trying to fix the bugs of every Bethesda game since Morrowind was quite challenging back in those singleplayer games' heyday.

Danikat

I don't understand how people don't realise this, because the same is true for every job I've ever done. Even when I was working retail in places whose idea of training was watching a video on lifting with your knees, 2 minutes being shown basic functions on the till and then being stood next to someone who could show you the rest as and when it came up there's a limit to how many people could be added to the team quickly and how much more work would get done as a result.

I've also had the misfortune to work in places that didn't realise that and would take on so many Christmas temps they had to have other temps "training" them and we wasted so much time trying to support people who were new and didn't know how anything worked or even where things were that it actually slowed down getting the job done.

I've often said to people imagine if you arrived in work one day and your boss told you all the staff in a totally different department were going to stop doing their work and do yours instead, you just need to show them what to do. How do you imagine that would go?

I can't think of a single job where that would work for more than very basic one-off tasks. Maybe if you need a bunch of people stuffing envelopes for a mail-out or need stuff moved into a different room it could work, but not for a whole job and especially not something as specialist as fixing bugs in computer code.

Having said that I do agree with the people saying they should have picked up on bug reports on the PTS and addressed them before release. I don't think adding more people would help, but I think they should give the people they've got the time they need to do the job properly before it's released instead of adamantly sticking to a schedule even if it doesn't work.

Muttsmutt wrote: »

assigning one team's duties to another team will NOT speed up the process, because it isn't a straightforward additive equation of "the more people work on it the faster it gets done", it isn't working a field. it's working with a very complex system in which every single person has their own part to play, and multiple people will just get in each other's way.

That's true even if you are working on a literal field. Some jobs can be done faster if you've got more people doing them, but others end up in exactly the same situation - you need to split people into dedicated teams and have people to oversee and coordinate them and some jobs can only be done by the person or people who have had appropriate training and experience to do them correctly. Fields can be surprisingly complex systems, especially if managed appropriately. (This is actually my current job - volunteer coordinator for a wildlife conservation charity.)

x48rph

See the problem is that while you might not be able to assign one teams duties to another, you still need to put the brakes on the rest. It's obvious that whatever coders and developers they have are overwhelmed with bugs and performance fixes which is why despite the 'year long' performance improvement plan, performance has never been worse and the bug pile keeps growing. Allowing the other teams to keep piling on new broken content while breaking even more of the old content in the process is not going to help fix it when your team can't even keep up with what they have now.

Mythreindeer

FrancisCrawford wrote: »

mobicera wrote: »

So hire more people for bug fixes.
Why even defend at all?
Its just disrespectful to release known broken patches and product.
I'm rather sure that they possess the needed resources to do this.

In a software truism old enough that the whiff of sexism was just normal for the era it was first coined:

It takes 9 months to make a baby, no matter how many women you assign to the task.

That said, the truism doesn't rule out speeding things up at two extremes:

• Hiring more people to ensure that a huge fraction of the bugs are at least properly diagnosed.
• Hiring more people to entirely rewrite certain subsystems in which bug- and/or performance-fixing seem hopelessly slow.

This indeed.

To be honest, and yet not meaning to offend the ESO community, the ESO community, here on the boards at least, seems pretty insular. The problems in this game and the direction it's been heading, are the same issues that crop up on every MMO/RPG out there. It's endemic to large-scale software projects but the industry knows it doesn't have to spend on additional coders than the bare minimum because players, many of whom are hopelessly addicted to their game, will continue to play and spend money on whatever they put in front of them.

Having recently left two games where each had controlling interest purchased by outside companies, my experience is that is a bad sign. Almost immediately the games went from above average to bugged out, content pushing, loot box selling, MTX ***, noncommunicative butt wipe. We'll see what happens with Microsoft but I'm not expecting miracles. If there is, I'll gladly eat this post.

fced

I have also heard from a lot of peoples, NA server on PS4 is far less buggy than EU server... Never tried myself but as it is said no smoke without fire...

I was a bit angry against de dev team after the last maintenance on PS4 (following the patch release), they took 12 hours more on EU than on NA server, ok they improved bank, and daily crafting quests, but all this could have been done 5 years ago... Anyway, may be i have been a bit hard with Bethesda specially if they are not in charge of the development, but the fact remain, Eso is a draft... they added content, many content since its release, but sadly they didn't improved the player experience or the stability.
For a 5 years old game, it is weird to have old content which crash frequently... I think to the blue screen on PS4 which happen frequently (I am on PS4 Pro), or also the disconnection from server because of chat (i wasn't even speaking), or during dungeon or trials for example when a player is dead on the ground it take time to find his position exactly (they could improve this easily with a glowing effect, or a beam starting from the ground to the sky on the friend body) ...

In any case, i really hope they will fix this mess asap, because the game is hardly playable...

etchedpixels

Muttsmutt wrote: »

you can't "divert manpower".

Oh yes you can, and I imagine they do when it makes sense.

(as an aside your janitor or any other random is a superb help for stuck bug hunters. Making them explain to a student, document writer, manager or secretary why and how their code works tends to produce 'and this does that because of .. oh... ' moments)

given the success of the game, they should have some of the best people in the industry.
maybe they do, maybe they don't- what's clear is that they mess up a lot more than is acceptable to do by their playerbase.
that doesn't mean they're not prioritizing properly. it just means they're bad at their job.
...or the game really is a hellish nightmare to code properly idk i'm not a dev.

So as someone who ran very large distributed projects (like an entire mainstream OS for two stable releases) it's a lot more complicated than you make out IMHO

- Poor resource assignment is not usually a function of developers but of financials, management and other constraints. Many of those constraints are invisible to outsiders but important. If ZOS goes bust we don't have a game. If a bug is in a third party component that can't be changed internally then fixing it becomes a managerial political problem.

- Losing bug reports and mishandling them is usually a process problem not a dev problem, and often caused by poor resourcing and bad tooling. Nobody ever spends enough on their bug/fault tooling and few management teams when knee deep in the brown and sticky actually look beyond the now to see how to work smarter not harder.

- You can prioritize bug fixing and pull people off projects but there are costs - including delays or the risk that you make the next project/fix buggier because you shifted the focus and then have to rush something else.

- It's generally in fact considered good practice to make the people who create the buggy code fix it because a) they wrote it , b) it reminds them to be more careful next time and c) it avoids perverse incentives particularly amongst middle managers

- Shipping buggy stuff is (for all but very modern software) more a failure of QA not so much development. For proper very modern code it's a failure of formal validation and continuous automated testing. If I were at ZOS I'd be asking QA a lot of hard questions not so much the developers themselves.

- Adding people to a late project infamously often makes it later (see The Mythical Man Month)

--

IOW most failures are process and it's often a vicious circle - you are deluged in bug reports due to poor QA/process, which in turn means you can't see the bugs you need to which means you have to pull people off projects so those projects get rushed and buggier which makes QA fall apart and on it goes increasingly sucking in more people and making it ever harder to see the bigger picture in the deluge of overwork.

The number of truly useless software developers I've met is really quite low. Most of those quickly move on - usually successfully - to other related careers. The number of catastrophic process failures I've seen is .. well it's been a fair part of my career dealing with and where possible helping fix them.

There are btw not that many truly great programmers who stay in the gaming world - fintech and banking companies pay vastly higher salaries to those kind of people and expect them to work normal hours and often even have policies limiting/forbidding long overtime (it leads to bugs and errors, and those are *bad* in finance!). Like music if your name is not on the top of the album you can earn vastly more and far better pay and conditions by not pursuing the illusion of possible fame.

I can understand fixes being slow. I can understand on such an old (in software terms) codebase how fixes can be hard or even too risky versus leaving bugs in but I'm amazed how bad the QA is - how can you miss daily quests giving bogus tickets, double drops being turned on wrongly, an event where the event merchant doesn't show up, a group finder for dungeons that can't correctly compare a players level with the dungeon proposed, and a specific arena level that crashes for at least one group member every damn time you run it ?

Hopefully Microsoft in time will do something about helping them before the whole lot collapses in a heap.

As a customer I'm currently underwhelmed and somewhat worried about the long term future of the game.

Mettaricana

Muttsmutt wrote: »

in times like these, an egregiously large percentage of keyboard warriors gather round the forums with their flaming pitchworks, here around the ZOS virtual headquarters, all chanting the same battle hymn:

"put EVERY SINGLE man, woman, and child to work, and FIX THE BUGS!!!"

the kindest of them might realize that poor timmy, the 16 year old intern janitor, probably doesn't have the necessary skillset to contribute anything of use to the desperately needed fixes.
the smartest of them might realize that deborah from marketing isn't whipping the coders' backs raw so that they optimize every line of code that has to do with monetization.

and yet an even smaller percentage have the sensibility to realize that in practice, even if jonathan the senior coder could theoretically shove his hands in the server code spaghetti, there's already thomas and his team of veterans simultaneously playing jenga with the code in perfect synchrony. sure, they may be the same people who always have been responsible for that particular moving part of the dauntingly massive machine that is ESO, and the same people who oopsie'd the bugs into existence in the first place- but by god, would their entire jenga tower collapse were they to have to indoctrinate new team members into the way they wrangle the code; to teach them the mystic arts of "if(goingToCrashToDesktop) { dont(); }".

in reality, this is more or less how it works:

game developers have teams assigned to different aspects of the game. each team is a cohesive unit of people working together in a way in which their individual work can be brought together coherently and functionally. assigning one team's duties to another team will NOT speed up the process, because it isn't a straightforward additive equation of "the more people work on it the faster it gets done", it isn't working a field. it's working with a very complex system in which every single person has their own part to play, and multiple people will just get in each other's way.

they can, and do prioritize working on urgently needed fixes which are essential to the game working. they're working with all reasonable able-bodied, relevantly-skilled men, women, and others.
if those fixes aren't ready day 2, they haven't figured it out yet. just because the content pipeline does not come to a standstill when there are critical bugs does not mean they aren't using every single employee whose job is to address those bugs, to address those bugs. they don't pull their coders aside and tell them "hey, i know we're supposed to fix weaving, but we wanna make a new class for the next expansion, you should work on that today instead".
and those people working on fixing the bugs? they're not going to work faster if you metaphorically whip them. nothing will make them work faster except maybe coffee.

TL;DR:
you can't "divert manpower".
so let's all calm down and go shout at a PUG or something.
y'all need to stop acting with the same mental incompetence as a PUG's combat incompetence.

-
obligatory disclaimer:
this is not about "defending" zos. this is about instilling critical thinking, logic, and reasoning, in the place of frustrated "demands". this is about providing a more reasonable explanation for all this mess. for the sake of knowledge.
the current state of the game, or ZOS' buggy day one releases in general, are disrespectful towards their paying customers. they are beneath the quality they should provide. ZOS' developer teams, regardless of their appointed responsibilites, should fulfill those responsibilites better.
given the success of the game, they should have some of the best people in the industry.
maybe they do, maybe they don't- what's clear is that they mess up a lot more than is acceptable to do by their playerbase.
that doesn't mean they're not prioritizing properly. it just means they're bad at their job.
...or the game really is a hellish nightmare to code properly idk i'm not a dev.

While i get what you're saying kinda messed up how multi million dollar company seemingly has more problems with eso than any other mmo out there. Some mmos have ups and downs but eso is in a perma state of downs it hasn't really ever had an up just a kinda tolerable middle ground. Its mind blowing that they can't or wont hire anyone or additional help to squash bugs glitches and issues. [Snip]. Just my two cents

[Edited for bashing]

GreenhaloX

I don't know.. with US currently in the state that it is, I doubt they have the manpower available. Peeps are probably at home with the "bugs."

zvavi

Danikat wrote: »

I've often said to people imagine if you arrived in work one day and your boss told you all the staff in a totally different department were going to stop doing their work and do yours instead, you just need to show them what to do. How do you imagine that would go?

And in such a big game, where bugs are everywhere, every patch, it ain't one day. It is a policy of not having enough hands on deck to begin with. It is not about "all hands on deck fix bugs now." It is about "we don't have enough people in this department to fix all the bugs that were reported in the PTS again and again and again.

DMuehlhausen

Ashenkin wrote: »

Yes they can hotfix the crown store but not the combat... don't you recall that? it's a little bit far fetched to me that they can't urgently hotfix this bit

Because you don't Hotfix major systems like Combat. You Hotfix something like that and you are going to break it even more. Hotfixes are done with minimal testing.

The fact that people think you can just hire more people, or easily fix the bugs. You literally have billions of lines of code, interacting with 100ks of sub systems. Designed to run on Millions of different PC configs and people are surprised with bugs happen....

Get a grip. Game design is almost as fragile as the world economy. You ever want to see a scary situation look at how poorly designed that system is. Based on ships, trains, planes, or trucks all set to make things happen at certain times. Interrupt any part of that system and it starts to collapse. It's the same with game design. Change a line of code to fix LA bugginess and it could break something in crafting.

Just today with WGT being a pledge. The enemies that create Molag Kena's shield don't disappear when killed. That fight has worked since it came out in like 2015. Yet after this last patch something, somewhere broke it, or can cause it to bug. Yet keyboard warriors COME ON ZOS IT ISN'T HARD TO FIX. Like they could just fix it in a few minutes on their computer. Then do it...go and make your own game designed to run in X languages as well.

twev

DMuehlhausen wrote: »

Ashenkin wrote: »

Yes they can hotfix the crown store but not the combat... don't you recall that? it's a little bit far fetched to me that they can't urgently hotfix this bit

Because you don't Hotfix major systems like Combat. You Hotfix something like that and you are going to break it even more. Hotfixes are done with minimal testing.

The fact that people think you can just hire more people, or easily fix the bugs. You literally have billions of lines of code, interacting with 100ks of sub systems. Designed to run on Millions of different PC configs and people are surprised with bugs happen....

Get a grip. Game design is almost as fragile as the world economy. You ever want to see a scary situation look at how poorly designed that system is. Based on ships, trains, planes, or trucks all set to make things happen at certain times. Interrupt any part of that system and it starts to collapse. It's the same with game design. Change a line of code to fix LA bugginess and it could break something in crafting.

Just today with WGT being a pledge. The enemies that create Molag Kena's shield don't disappear when killed. That fight has worked since it came out in like 2015. Yet after this last patch something, somewhere broke it, or can cause it to bug. Yet keyboard warriors COME ON ZOS IT ISN'T HARD TO FIX. Like they could just fix it in a few minutes on their computer. Then do it...go and make your own game designed to run in X languages as well.

They could easily hire LOTS of extra people to read the volumes of bugreports that have already been reported, analyze and categorize the bugs, PLAYTEST the game for QA on the game fixes, and report info to the devs with more specific info than assuming that the playerbase will always fill in the reports with every bit of data needed every time.
They *might* be doing some/all of the above to some extent, but clearly they're failing to do enough, or do it well enough.

Players are busy trying to play the game and get passed the issues as quickly as possible while maintaining the flow. We're not supposed to be unpaid betatesters and analysts. The playerbase isn't supposed to be expected to be trained to accurately report all the pertinent information to fix the game. That's the job of the company itself. Players can *help*, but putting the burden on us is just wrong on so many levels.
A lot of us pay ESO+ fees to (among other things) play a *working* game.