lordrichter wrote: »

I can spend hours playing and not encounter more than the occasional glitch. The last big glitch was pretty cool, I went into the bank and the game forgot to draw the insides. A couple dozen people, along with objects, were just floating there in an open room with no walls. Unfortunately, the game would not allow me to take a screen capture. In time, it drew the room, but until then no way was I stepping off my flying carpet at the door for fear of falling back to Molag Bal.

The last actual game error that I found was in a quest that did not progress. This was last week and the quest has apparently been broken since beta. It has been a long long time since I found a bugged quest.

Most of the bugs that I see are minor inconveniences. A lot of the complaints I see in here are about things that I have not seen, so your mileage may vary.

I play a software developer on a popular soap opera. I also stayed at a Hampton Inn last night. As a well-rested professional actor, I can say that I do not agree with the way they do QA and the ability of their QA department to catch bugs. Many people moan about keeping it in PTS and making sure that the final version is on PTS before release, but honestly, it is not the job of the people playing PTS to find these bugs. That is the job of QA, with or without a PTS.

That said, and again as a well rested professional actor, the software that runs ESO is complicated and has a lot of parts. No one person understands it all and it is diverse enough where different groups will have different responsibilities. Each of these groups has the potential to make changes to the system that impact other groups, sometimes in wonderfully unexpected ways. Like when your favorite soap opera actor comes back from the dead.

So, while I do not have confidence that QA can catch everything, the reason for this is that there is no way the QA can catch everything. It is too complicated and too intricate to be able to test everything and make sure that no unintended breakages happened.

So, yes, on my soap opera we would have delivered ESO in the state it was in March when they rolled out Early Access. Bugs and all. When the director yells, "Action!" it is too late for the actors to say they aren't ready.

However, it became clear shortly after that rollout that something was going horribly amiss. Patches introduced bugs. Patches did not fix bugs. Emergency server updates were required. All things that were indications of a fundamental QA process problem.

The gaming industry is well known for squeezing their developers like oranges until nothing more comes out, then squeezing some more just to make sure. I have always thought, being a well-rested professional actor, that a large part of the issue with the game in the first 30 days was due to developers who were not well-rested trying to fix the game and making mistakes.

But, the silver lining is that it is getting better. Yeah, they flubbed up big time with the guild migration, but that seems to be resolved for the vast majority. Migration issues will always be a problem since that stuff is hard to completely test in advance.

NewBlacksmurf wrote: »

Royalroacho wrote: »

Sometimes these troll posts are hard to resist...this is a semi rhetorical half sarcastic question, but I wanted to know-are you a proffesionalsoftware developer, or ever dabbled in any kind of amatuer coding? It sounds snotty, but thats not my intention. I see these posts, and I wonder if theyre made by super genius programmers that have never been up all night scanning thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of lines of code again and again and again to find some interaction that causes a domino chain of sometimes unpredictable errors to show up. its not always an issue of competence, bugs happen.

Using the domino analogy, try to imagine setting up, like, a thousand chains of millions of dominoes, that fill up your entire town. Theyre supposed to fall and interact with eachother in a way that will display an animated moziac of like..I dunno...the Opening theme from futurama when viewed from the sky, in laterally moving frames. How could anyone possibly *** that up?
Its not a perfect metaphor, but I would imagine working on an mmo would probably be kinda like that. I dont think its realistic to expect there to not be bugs, but they Should be accountable for them

Im going to school for CS, so im probly kinda oversensitive to these kind of posts. also, Im pretty sure that if theres a hell, theres a whole plane where you're chained to a desk, forced to spend eternity debugging source code. In fact, I heard it was such successfully sanity peeling torture, that theyre converting that ring of hell where you're being eaten alive by giant flesh burrowing insect larvae while being forced to watch your significant other cheating on you to more desolate chambers of debugging.

Anyway. Its only been a day. Cut them some slack, dammit.

When you enter a field, criticism should be viewed by someone like yourself as opportunity. If its seen as negative and downgrading then you will burn out.

When companies decide to open up paths of communications where their customers can directly speak and give feedback, whether its negative, positive, helpful or in your terms "Trolling" its a result of the companies desire to hear the customer's voice.

The tone of any post is determined by its reader.
If you cant take things like this, I would suggest going into another field.

I'm in corporate sales and product development for over 42 states. The field is very different but the customer's voices are the same.

"Perspective"