A little insight on why some incredibly minor fixes are going in before major ones.

[Smackybear]

Lets ignore the fact that they also are not implementing:

 

Correct tags to sounds.

 

Force stances for pets (can have multiples).

 

Level restricting the zones they dont want players in or the loot.

 

or... Heck heres a threat http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=89111 have fun noting the small fixes they could make that are significantly more intresting then emotes on SEGWAYS.

 

What does this have to do with anything? I don't even understand half the issues you listed. Some of them don't seem like bugs. You expect them to zero in on a vague list in a random forum post and start fixing those bugs?

[Sohtaraz]

What does this have to do with anything? I don't even understand half the issues you listed. Some of them don't seem like bugs. You expect them to zero in on a vague list in a random forum post and start fixing those bugs?

 

 

Ones like :

 

random dialogs of NPCs or other player's companions popping out of nowhere

blue "quest" objects with an error message "not eligible for conversation"

Mako's healing leave green glowing that never fades

talking to NPC while mounted dismounts you, but doesn't insta-summon the companion, so you can't gain companion affection points. You have to dismount manually and then start conversation

 

nodes showing on minimap if they are activated by other player and not looted (can't be used by anyone else)

 

'enchanted tooltips' actually does not tell how much x rating gives in relic effects, or relic cooldowns for that matter

the flight missions are daily quests duable twice on first gain of the flight missions. Not sure if ment to be, but a bit silly if it is.

ranged AOE spells marking doesn't represent actual area of coverage

 

Enemies keep channeling even if channel is interrupted.

 

I can go on and on about actual important bugs listed in that thread wich are quite self evident if you look trough them, some of them are very minor cosmetical fixes that can be done rather quickly that are far more gamebreaking then using emotes on mounts.

 

 

And yes I expect them to read forum threads about bugs. If they don't thats their problem, I'm not a paid tester so I'm not going to take spam from them receiving everyone of my bugs. If QA ignores the thread for what ever reason thats their problem, it still means that they had the information somewhere but chose to ignore it.

[asuffield]

(Also a professional software engineer)

 

Why are there major bugs still in this game that were reported months ago in the beta?

 

Limited manpower. They were fixing the really major bugs during those months.

 

And why did Bioware release this game and take our money without fixing those huge bugs that were reported months before release by beta testers?

 

Because Christmas could not be delayed three months while they fixed every known bug. The release schedule here was driven by the holidays. This was a financial decision: they did the estimates and concluded that releasing in time for Christmas shopping would bring in more money than releasing in Q1 with more bugs fixed.

 

Whoever was working on fixing the darth title could have been working with another team to fix a more important issue.

 

People are not interchangeable. They have different skill sets and knowledge of the product. Complex software issues are the worst: even in a company the size of BioWare, there will be a tiny handful of people who have the expertise to figure them out.

 

there shouldnt be any teams working on emotes right now

 

You realise that emotes are created by the artists? Do you really believe that the art team can fix software bugs? There will be a few people whose entire job is "creating animations". They spend five days a week animating. It's a highly specialized job. The only prioritization possible in what they do is to animate something different.

 

Not to mention the code for MMOs are incredibly complex. if you change one thing, you could break 20 other things.

 

That's just the superficial problem. The production issue is that many changes mean you have to test 20 other things. So one "easy" fix that takes a developer an hour to make, might also require two weeks of QA work before it could be released - while a different fix to a cosmetic issue might require no substantial QA work and be released immediately. So cosmetic fixes can come out first, even if it was the last thing the developer did on that day.

 

Generally, changes to critical gameplay features like powers will need extensive testing, while text changes and bugged item rewards are fairly easy to test.

[Satpolpp]

Regardless of all things being said here, one thing stands out :

 

The reason why we are all speculating on how good BW programmers are or how efficiently they distribute workload or address issues, is because there is 0 (zero) communication from the devs.

 

What are they doing? Are they acknowledging our concerns? Which issues are being prioritized? What can we expect to be fixed in the next minor patch? What are the fixes being worked on?

 

Perhaps not a full blown detailed explanations but really just a blue (or in this case, orange) post that says generic things will be better than nothing at all.

 

Where are the community managers? Arent their job solely to MANAGE the COMMUNITY?

[wrmrstacrdwower]

I just wanted to shed a little light on something for all those that seem perplexed as to why some trivial fixes are going into the patches before some of the bigger issues are being worked out.

 

I work at a game developer and sometimes an engineer or gameplay programmer will notice an issue, know exactly what the problem is, and quickly fix the one line of code causing the issue. This can take as little as 60 seconds. They usually go ahead and do this because of the speed and low risk factor involved rather than waiting to fix it until other longer fixes are done. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're prioritizing those little things over the bigger ones.

 

If the current patch notes are any indication they aren't prioritizing anything. What they are fixing is very scattered and the fact that they have class adjustments shows that they are aware of issues that have been prevalent since the last beta builds. The majority of what they are fixing is cosmetic.

[Gerandar]

You really don't know how to listen to reason and think Logically do you?

 

They don't have 1 person looking at major bugs. They have whole teams.

 

however, do you want some random college intern from UT-Austin attempting to fix your framerate issues? I don't think so

.

 

considering the "experts" screwed it up from last beta to release I would give the intern a try, I mean it can't make it anymore unplayable

[Ahl-Vinn]

Because minor ones are easier to fix?

 

[asuffield]

What are they doing? Are they acknowledging our concerns? Which issues are being prioritized? What can we expect to be fixed in the next minor patch? What are the fixes being worked on?

 

The behavior of players, especially on forums like these, makes game developers extremely unwilling to comment on changes that are not yet ready for release. This is because schedules slip, other priorities appear, bugs turn out to be more complex than expected, and changes get bumped back to a later release at the last minute. When this happens, the forums erupt in conspiracy theories about how this is all part of some grand plan to sell players as slaves to Tibetan yak farmers.

 

Game developers find it much easier and less antagonistic to simply say nothing until the patch is ready for release - the low level grumbling about silence is preferable to the screaming when players get to see what's happening inside the sausage factory. So that's what they do.

 

Perhaps not a full blown detailed explanations but really just a blue (or in this case, orange) post that says generic things will be better than nothing at all.

 

This, you might get - but not frequently.

 

Where are the community managers? Arent their job solely to MANAGE the COMMUNITY?

 

Ridiculously overworked. A lot of their time gets burned on reading through inane forum threads, sifting out the one paragraph of actual bug report, and sending it in. If they had to actually post about these things then it would take much longer.

[ryathal]

major bugs aren't getting fixed because they are in code that was written by someone who hasn't worked for BW in two years and no one has the time to dig into that code and fix the issue because there are so many other issues.

[xsmspiffs]

Try actually doing some programming work.

 

I can speak to this, I've worked on a team that is roughly the size of the SWTOR team and another one that far eclipsed its size. I've also worked on far smaller teams.

 

An issue with something like the Kira bug requires going over every line of code it touches, 2 people going over the code does the work twice as fast by splitting the workload.

 

Now go grab a copy of The Mythical Man Month and read it to see why that isn't true. It is only true of both people are familiar with the code, that may still not be the case. It also isn't true because of the potential for interactions with different parts of the code - you read 50% of the lines, I read the other 50% of them, unfortunately the bug actually shows itself when code from both halves is read by the same person.

 

 

Whoever was working on fixing the darth title could have been working with another team to fix a more important issue.

 

So, you want to take someone who isn't familiar with that part of the code base and take the time to have them get up to speed on it rather than fix bugs in an area that they are familiar with? Not the best idea to get things done quickly.

 

 

There are too many major issues to have anyone working on something that is a vanity and there shouldnt be any teams working on emotes right now, put their manhours to GOOD use until the major issues are fixed THEN work on the vanities.

 

So, developer X knows how to solve emote issues, as well as some other things. You would rather they train up on all the code to do with, say, /follow and get that fixed. Or have the developer who knows how /follow should work track it down when they get time to do it based on the other bugs they are working on.

[LogSpoon]

I remember when Cataclysm came out, and there was a MAJOR BUG, involving players not being able to gain experience from turning in quests.

 

Major bug, hotfixed in less than 10 minutes.

[wrmrstacrdwower]

I can speak to this, I've worked on a team that is roughly the size of the SWTOR team and another one that far eclipsed its size. I've also worked on far smaller teams.

 

 

 

Now go grab a copy of The Mythical Man Month and read it to see why that isn't true. It is only true of both people are familiar with the code, that may still not be the case. It also isn't true because of the potential for interactions with different parts of the code - you read 50% of the lines, I read the other 50% of them, unfortunately the bug actually shows itself when code from both halves is read by the same person.

 

 

 

 

So, you want to take someone who isn't familiar with that part of the code base and take the time to have them get up to speed on it rather than fix bugs in an area that they are familiar with? Not the best idea to get things done quickly.

 

 

 

 

So, developer X knows how to solve emote issues, as well as some other things. You would rather they train up on all the code to do with, say, /follow and get that fixed. Or have the developer who knows how /follow should work track it down when they get time to do it based on the other bugs they are working on.

Bottom line is this. The current project leads aren't doing a good enough job on managing the bug fixes or game adjustments. When their is as many complaints about core mechanics issues as is being said about SWTOR atm they do not seem to be on top of it. So if it takes having inexperienced guy add some lines of code in a specific place that then needs to be fixed later because it triggered another issue, or if it takes on the job training to look at something through all the code to find it at this point in needs to be done.

 

It's not just the SWTOR website that the complaints of the game are showing up on. Other gaming sites have them too and the unabashed ability to say whatever they like without the white knight defender showing up to tell them how wrong they are.

 

Like what happened in AoC. Bioware has less then 3 months to pull it together.

[WereMops]

We dont care, more than a few of those major bugs were in beta for MONTHS and are NOT NEW.

 

We dont want excuses, we want fixes. This is not a single player game where a company gets to take months to fix bugs that is making their game partially unplayable, this is an MMORPG and there should be a very large amount of programmers working on the issues.

 

NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON SHOULD BE WORKING ON FIXING BEING ABLE TO EMOTE ON A MOUNT WHEN SOME PEOPLE CANNOT CONTINUE THEIR CLASS STORYLINE OR COMPANION QUESTLINE.

 

NOT ONE PERSON SHOULD BE WORKING ON FIXING A TITLE LIKE DARTH WHEN NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON PLAYING THIS GAME CAN /FOLLOW FOR MORE THAN 6 SECONDS.

 

Prioritizing also means understanding that some things should not be on the damn list until the important things NO LONGER ARE. Yes I am pissed as any sane paying customer should be, Bioware is not even bothering to tell us that they even KNOW about most issues being complained about let alone giving us an ETA on when they may be fixed, if at all.

 

I sincerely hope you are not an employer or in a position of power of some kind.

 

Yes, prioratizing is important, but putting everyone on the same tasks is not the answer, having multiple people/departments working on different problems is faster than putting everyone on the same things, especially when working with coding, will only make fixing all the problems/glitches/bugs take a longer time in total.

 

Giving an ETA on coding fixes is like predicting the weather six months in advance, not a good idea, especially considering that a big enough part of the "community" has repeatedly shown that they aren't mature enough to handle information, even when the information is an estimate or disclaimed as being subject of change.

[xsmspiffs]

Bottom line is this. The current project leads aren't doing a good enough job on managing the bug fixes or game adjustments. When their is as many complaints about core mechanics issues as is being said about SWTOR atm they do not seem to be on top of it. So if it takes having inexperienced guy add some lines of code in a specific place that then needs to be fixed later because it triggered another issue, or if it takes on the job training to look at something through all the code to find it at this point in needs to be done.

 

Sure, but realize that that is not going to get the fixes in quicker in the short term. People seem to think that throwing more bodies at the specific issues would have had them fixed by now. It would (probably) not have (and from experience it would not have).

 

The game was released right before a major holiday. It is now the first working day after the end of a major holiday. People worked on the program for the last few months, probably without a break, 2 weeks of down time is not unreasonable. Two patches have already been released (likely with most of those things having been worked on during beta, but just now making it in).

 

And, yes, I am looking at that from the development team perspective not the customer perspective since the thing I replied to was based on development.

 

Should customers expect to have fixes in a timely manner? Yes. However, and I am a paying customer, given the timing (major holiday season) I don't expect to see anything big for a couple of weeks yet.

[rainingcrazy]

I have a lot of sympathy for the development side of the house, since, I've been on that side of the house, albeit, on a massively smaller scale. So, I get why things take time. I get bugs and I especially what a bunch of "special little snowflakes" inhabit these games. I have to admit that my experience has been decent although there are several annoying minor bugs that I'd like to see fixed, especially, my camera resetting it's distance going in and out of war zones.

 

However, I also recognize another problem here. A couple of years ago my company decided, against the advice of the vendor, to implement a product in 3 months that they recommended we do in 9 to 18. The reason for 9 to 18 is that you can go slow, find the problems, when they are little rather than big, and get them fixed without doing too much damage. We created a nightmare for ourselves because not only did we do that in 3 months we did 4 other things and it just wrecked havoc (yeah, did that intentionally). We'd have been much better off going slow.

 

When I heard that Bioware was going to release in December I had no doubt that this would be an unfinished game. It almost certainly needed another few months but Bioware choose to release on Xmas and get the numbers in for the year end. So, I also don't feel too much sympathy for the problems that they are at least somewhat responsible for.

 

I'll keep chugging along, though, there's nothing game-breaking for me and it's a pretty solid game all things considered.

[asuffield]

When I heard that Bioware was going to release in December I had no doubt that this would be an unfinished game.

 

If you dig into the business side, on software companies of any size, you'll find this is intentional. As far as the business people are concerned, the first version of any new product must be released in an unfinished state - they consider that anything else would be waiting too long to go to market. They know all about the "honeymoon period" and the impact of early reviews, and it is their considered position, as experts in turning software into money, that after considering all these factors, early releases are more profitable in the long run.

 

As an engineer I don't really agree with this principle. Nor do I trust them very much; they don't appear to have error bars on their graphs and I don't think they've done a controlled trial of these ideas. But I accept that they probably still know how to do their jobs better than I would.

[Senatsu]

We dont care, more than a few of those major bugs were in beta for MONTHS and are NOT NEW.

 

We dont want excuses, we want fixes. This is not a single player game where a company gets to take months to fix bugs that is making their game partially unplayable, this is an MMORPG and there should be a very large amount of programmers working on the issues.

 

NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON SHOULD BE WORKING ON FIXING BEING ABLE TO EMOTE ON A MOUNT WHEN SOME PEOPLE CANNOT CONTINUE THEIR CLASS STORYLINE OR COMPANION QUESTLINE.

 

NOT ONE PERSON SHOULD BE WORKING ON FIXING A TITLE LIKE DARTH WHEN NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON PLAYING THIS GAME CAN /FOLLOW FOR MORE THAN 6 SECONDS.

 

Prioritizing also means understanding that some things should not be on the damn list until the important things NO LONGER ARE. Yes I am pissed as any sane paying customer should be, Bioware is not even bothering to tell us that they even KNOW about most issues being complained about let alone giving us an ETA on when they may be fixed, if at all.

 

Half of the bugs in WoW has been there since it's beta 8 years ago, still I see no one complain as much as the people here do.

[Mirura]

..... Edited February 13, 2018 by Mirura

[CygnusMX]

some of you must realize that fixing a major bug is not alwasy that simple. First, what could seem like an easy fix actually causes other bugs.

 

Exactly It could cause other problems.

 

You dont chop your head off to get rid of a headache,or saw your foot off to remedy an ingrown toenail, besides if you have no head how you gonna see where to saw your foot off?

[Revanx]

Thank god you work at a game developer. Can you please shed some light on this subject for me?

 

Why are there major bugs still in this game that were reported months ago in the beta? And why did Bioware release this game and take our money without fixing those huge bugs that were reported months before release by beta testers?

 

Mate it's very simple, at some point to match the release date they had to say "Stop", this is the version we will use at release, every other chance who can lead to other issue, remember we talk about a software with milions of line of code, will be postponed to the next major version of the client where all changed can be tested before go online.

 

When u are working on project of this magnitude u must plan even the smaller change very carefull because every change can potetial lead to a bigger problem.

[Senadin]

Thank god you work at a game developer. Can you please shed some light on this subject for me?

 

Why are there major bugs still in this game that were reported months ago in the beta? And why did Bioware release this game and take our money without fixing those huge bugs that were reported months before release by beta testers?

 

Because of course, beta these days is not about fixing things.

 

it's about creating hype for your game and testing the servers at best!

[Dianoia]

If you dig into the business side, on software companies of any size, you'll find this is intentional. As far as the business people are concerned, the first version of any new product must be released in an unfinished state - they consider that anything else would be waiting too long to go to market. They know all about the "honeymoon period" and the impact of early reviews, and it is their considered position, as experts in turning software into money, that after considering all these factors, early releases are more profitable in the long run.

 

As an engineer I don't really agree with this principle. Nor do I trust them very much; they don't appear to have error bars on their graphs and I don't think they've done a controlled trial of these ideas. But I accept that they probably still know how to do their jobs better than I would.

 

It's really just an assessment of risk vs. reward. Trimming out rapid-consumption customers (which are your least profitable & most demanding players), you can get a fair estimate from beta what percentage of your customer base will consume content at an average speed. Then, you get an estimation of how long bug fixes will take and your time frame of launching hew content. When the duration of times match up, you launch.

 

Launching a 100% "finished", bug-free product is unrealistic, unprofitable, and would ultimately hurt the game in the long run. Without an endless pocketbook to dip in, you would have to wait for funds to be able to launch new content, which would mean a greater loss in subscriptions than your rapid-consumption customers with outlandishly high expectations.

[Mirura]

..... Edited February 13, 2018 by Mirura

[Kabloosh]

I just wanted to shed a little light on something for all those that seem perplexed as to why some trivial fixes are going into the patches before some of the bigger issues are being worked out.

 

I work at a game developer and sometimes an engineer or gameplay programmer will notice an issue, know exactly what the problem is, and quickly fix the one line of code causing the issue. This can take as little as 60 seconds. They usually go ahead and do this because of the speed and low risk factor involved rather than waiting to fix it until other longer fixes are done. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're prioritizing those little things over the bigger ones.

 

Its fine and dandy to fix the tail light but when my transmission is making that awful noise I'd prefer to get that fixed right away.

[Smackybear]

Its fine and dandy to fix the tail light but when my transmission is making that awful noise I'd prefer to get that fixed right away.

The bugs i'm talking about are more akin to flicking a leaf off your mirror on the way from the driver's seat to the hood of the car.