Taramayne Posted February 28, 2016 Share Posted February 28, 2016 It's also a good idea to test your changes before committing them. If the developers don't have a closed environment where they can spawn items at will and verify that they work correctly, they should get one. The green gifts appear from alliance crates at such frequency that opening 20 crates would surely have been enough to discover that the change was incorrect. . ..so much this. ^ Seriously, get an admin test server, put a character on it, and.. you know.. TEST. Recognizing this particular error would've taken only a few minutes in that environment. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dashtardly Posted February 28, 2016 Share Posted February 28, 2016 I see the same. Among the changes i have seen from alliance crates are: very very few rank 6 gifts, mostly green gifts armor now consists of like 95% belts, bracers and gloves...an occasional drop of boots. Been a long time since any other armor pieces came from crates for me. ^^^ This. Experience before patch for turn in rewards is VERY different from now. Someone else said something about "holding on to crates". That's not a bad idea, I think I will do that too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rhagthar Posted February 28, 2016 Share Posted February 28, 2016 (edited) There is some pretty embarrassing stuff like this. Maybe they fixed it by now, but last time I checked the blue versatile stim for grade 9 also still gave the stats for the defensive one for example. Single modders from various game modding communities put in more effort and fix simple things like this faster than the SWTOR team - and many of them have regular jobs and do it in their off time. Edited February 28, 2016 by Rhagthar Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JeKoCZ Posted February 28, 2016 Share Posted February 28, 2016 No, but you likely have a naming convention for the different items in the game so that you can tell quickly without the need for an image. Furthermore, if they have a good IDE this should show links between various pieces of code like functions, objects, or variables. Better yet since all of the items are likely simply listed in a database, it would be a matter of changing the key value pairs appropriately. You still don't take in account the human factor and the fact that humans can and indeed do make mistakes. That's what this whole screw up is all about. A simple human mistake. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Karellan Posted February 28, 2016 Share Posted February 28, 2016 (edited) You still don't take in account the human factor and the fact that humans can and indeed do make mistakes. That's what this whole screw up is all about. A simple human mistake. Hate to state the obvious, but that's precisely why you have quality analyst (WA) folks to test this stuff beforehand. Precisely because of human error. I just didn't figure I had to walk everyone through the whole software development life cycle to get my point across... Edited February 28, 2016 by Karellan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Karellan Posted February 28, 2016 Share Posted February 28, 2016 ..so much this. ^ Seriously, get an admin test server, put a character on it, and.. you know.. TEST. Recognizing this particular error would've taken only a few minutes in that environment. Yep. All it would have taken is one or two simple user stories (test cases) to find this issue before it went live. It's actually a simple test case as compared to something more complex like parsing numbers to make sure that this or that ability is performing correctly in game. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Karellan Posted February 28, 2016 Share Posted February 28, 2016 ^ This guy knows what's up. Too bad they're apparently not anal like me, commenting everything, or it may have been even easier to pick up... Of course, you've also got the programmers whose variables are named such descriptive things as 'i'. Unless that programmer is performing a loop and the "i" represents temporary data being iterated over, I'd light a fire under any of my developers for naming a variable something so ambiguous. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Karellan Posted February 28, 2016 Share Posted February 28, 2016 (edited) It's also a good idea to test your changes before committing them. If the developers don't have a closed environment where they can spawn items at will and verify that they work correctly, they should get one. The green gifts appear from alliance crates at such frequency that opening 20 crates would surely have been enough to discover that the change was incorrect. The letters i and j are customary as loop counters. I've used k and even l in deeply nested loops, although at that point I usually try to refactor the code into smaller units. Other acceptable single-letter variables are x, y and z for coordinates. Amen and Amen on a developer testing environment! I would be horrified if the developers at a place like Bioware don't have a means for testing their code before pushing it up the chain. Of course, if the many problems we see when they do updates are any indication, I have to wonder if they have any sort of quality analysis (or even peer reviews of code) before deploying code. I definitely wholeheartedly agree with you said that developers should test their changes before committing them. Unless -- and I hope this isn't the case -- they don't use any sort of source control! Let's just assume that's not the case! lol Have you ever inherited bad code? I'm not even talking spaghetti code necessarily. Unfortunately, I've gotten code before that had mistakes like that in them. You know how it goes, you're in a rush to get something out to staging or production and in your haste you forget to rename a variable. I would hope this is a case of a loop, but having seen it done before it's possible for developers to leave in their test code and forgot all about it. Nonetheless, even if it's a deeply nested loop, you should: (1) try to comment that code so a developer doesn't have to read the whole process and (2) try to avoid nesting loops like that as they are confusing later and code lead to regression errors. Edited February 28, 2016 by Karellan Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mirandel Posted February 28, 2016 Share Posted February 28, 2016 Yep. All it would have taken is one or two simple user stories (test cases) to find this issue before it went live. It's actually a simple test case as compared to something more complex like parsing numbers to make sure that this or that ability is performing correctly in game. I suspect it was considered too simple of a change for testing. Really, how can you get it wrong "remove greens, enhance purples"? Apparently, colors got mixed up Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DataBeaver Posted February 28, 2016 Share Posted February 28, 2016 You still don't take in account the human factor and the fact that humans can and indeed do make mistakes. That's what this whole screw up is all about. A simple human mistake. The human errors keep happening though, and they're often really simple stuff. And then they take months to fix. There are many possible causes, but they all indicate that something is wrong with the development pipeline. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DayneDrak Posted February 29, 2016 Share Posted February 29, 2016 No, but you likely have a naming convention for the different items in the game so that you can tell quickly without the need for an image. Furthermore, if they have a good IDE this should show links between various pieces of code like functions, objects, or variables. Better yet since all of the items are likely simply listed in a database, it would be a matter of changing the key value pairs appropriately. I seriously doubt the random generator for box drops has a list of all valid items, likely item quality and item types. It's not terribly surprising that the bug happened, it's the simple kind of typo that devs are famous for. It's really embarrassing that it made it past QA. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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