This game and others are more fun to me now

[DieAlteHexe]

And This ^^^^

 

That sir est the red tears of poetry man.

 

Bean-counters. The battles I've fought with them. Got one (management AND bean counter) so riled he chucked a soda can at me.

 

It was a proud day.

 

Sadly, so many of 'em are horribly disconnected with gaming and are so busy ogling "the bottom line" they make really, really dumb decisions.

[Knorlac]

Preface this by saying I have over a decade on the job coding, and a large portion of that spend maintaining code I and other team members wrote.

 

There are really three elements here.

 

First is QA.

 

In order to do a solid QA job on a product, you have to have a solid idea of how the system works, how it was planned and how it changed during development, or updates. Coming in cold to QA a product can actually help in some ways because you are testing it with fresh eyes, but think of it like police work. You can't patrol a city effectively without knowing the neighborhoods, knowing the people and knowing the weak spots in the overall body politic.

 

In the early days we would send a product out the door fairly confidant it had gotten a good test. To use the Pixar motto, we 'sanded the bottom of the draws' and then we tested each one over and over with a variety of clothing and towels and anything we could think of. But frankly, as the years have progressed, there has been a creep of more and more laxed assignment of QA resources. As soon as you accept that some bugs will get through to launch, that starts being used to rationalize letting testing scenarios go unaddressed. We CAN'T catch EVERYTHING. And that drives relaxing assigning QA dollars. It sucks and I've sat almost huddled with QA colleagues as we've watched products go out the door that we KNOW aren't adequately tested.

 

Then there are the initial coders.

 

Now this may seen like a strange thing to say, but the more you go up the complexity scale with programming, the more your code and coding choices become akin to music and art. Now I don't mean that in terms of the quality per-say. We'd all like to think we are making beautiful code of course, but most of it is blasted out the hatch, adequate to the task by definition only, and not much more, though we all have exceptions. What I mean by 'art;' is more that there are a million permutations of how to code up a complex system, and your work becomes less a task of obvious construction, and more one of harmonizing all the bits to each other based on your own vision or gut.

 

Then their are the QA and Coder debuggers/fixers.

 

What that leads to is even for those coders who do a good job commenting their work, using sensible and solid practices with regard to code inclusions, file naming and folder structures, proper use of variable naming, application of objects and functions, and all manor of other choices, the end result is almost always very, very personal. Add in the pressure that modern coders are almost ALWAYS under today (being that their time is one of the most expensive bits of the process) and you end up with a very difficult brew for someone else to unwind and work through, searching for buggies to fix.

 

Thus, the point is that bringing in another outfit to debug is up to an order of magnitude (x10) less officiant that having the original authors fix their own stuff.

 

It's not entirely unrelated to the concept expressed in Brooks law, which states adding coders to the late stages of a project actually makes it later that if you just bite the bullet and play out the hand.

 

tl;dr their guys built it. They are really the only sensible crew to debug it.

 

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Two other things to say if I may:

 

1) When modern MMO code is updated, the factor of QA testers to users is very large. We are talking from around 10 people trying to play the game in such a way as to find all the 'oopsies', to in many cases MILLIONS of people playing a million slightly different scenarios, catching FAR more things, naturally!

 

2) One thing that I wonder about is if they are running the exact same server and DB software on QA and PRODUCTION. That is one way that a lot of outfits end up in release hell. God knows I've been in that special hell (:sigh)

 

Good post.

 

I think the biggest problem is that we as consumers just let them get away with pretty much anything when it comes to games. Obviously I'm guilty of this myself, but it's the reason I'm no longer able to enjoy this game together with my brother for example.

He is a man of principle you could say and does things I wouldn't dream of like driving all the way back to the local Buger King because they forgot to put in one portion of ketchup.

He played for about two weeks and decided that the quality of the game with all the very obvious bugs it had back then didn't warrant a monthly payment of 15$..

Edited May 3, 2016 by Knorlac

[ChakraFive]

I come from the distant past where keypunch was how things got "coded". It's still magical (FM technology ) to me so I suppose that colours my viewpoint as well. For those born into the world when computers were mundane, I can see where they wouldn't have the same appreciation (rather like me and radio, I guess).

 

When people try to sell me on "oh they're just in it for the money", they're showing a fair bit of ignorance. Sure there are "rock star coders" but, in the main, nobody gets rich in that area, many are salaried and not paid by the hour and trust me (preaching to the choir most likely) its out of desire to do it and not money when you realise you are making about 5 bucks an hour trying to find that bloody problem. You have to love what you're doing to pull those hours and stick to it when that blasted bug just will NOT show its face.

 

 

Ahhh keypunch days. When you could literally trip and spill your code all over the lab :-D

I seem recall in the mists, waiting all week for a compile time once. Now when web programming, ... I hit refresh!

 

yep, times have changes,...these here whipper-snappers don't know how good they got er, I tell yez!

 

....now get them kids on hoverboards offa my lawn!

[DieAlteHexe]

Good post.

 

I think the biggest problem is that we as consumers just let them get away with pretty much anything when it comes to games. Obviously I'm guilty of this myself, but it's the reason I'm no longer able to enjoy this game together with my brother for example.

He is a man of principle you could say and does things I wouldn't dream of like driving all the way back to the local Buger King because they forgot to put in one portion of ketchup.

He played for about two weeks and decided that the quality of the game with all the very obvious bugs it had back then didn't warrant a monthly payment of 15$..

 

That's sensible. Why pay for something you don't enjoy or didn't order etc.

 

Problem is, what "you" enjoy, I might not a vice versa. There's been a shift from the niche market that MMOs once resided in (long time ago, WoW busted that niche big time) to mainstream BIG business. With the amount of money (ungodly sums, millions upon millions) that go into these MMOs, they want a ROI and carefully watch the metrics to be as sure of that as possible.

 

And here we are. For those for whom the older paradigm was good, this is terrible. For those for whom it wasn't, this is bliss.

[DieAlteHexe]

Ahhh keypunch days. When you could literally trip and spill your code all over the lab :-D

I seem recall in the mists, waiting all week for a compile time once. Now when web programming, ... I hit refresh!

 

yep, times have changes,...these here whipper-snappers don't know how good they got er, I tell yez!

 

....now get them kids on hoverboards offa my lawn!

 

I will confess that the only reason I took Keypunch in high school was because the lab was air-conditioned. Funny how such a self-serving decision resulted in a life-long pursuit.

 

And remember, "640k ought to be enough for anybody."

 

Time for my Geritol.

[Knorlac]

That's sensible. Why pay for something you don't enjoy or didn't order etc.

 

Problem is, what "you" enjoy, I might not a vice versa. There's been a shift from the niche market that MMOs once resided in (long time ago, WoW busted that niche big time) to mainstream BIG business. With the amount of money (ungodly sums, millions upon millions) that go into these MMOs, they want a ROI and carefully watch the metrics to be as sure of that as possible.

 

And here we are. For those for whom the older paradigm was good, this is terrible. For those for whom it wasn't, this is bliss.

 

Well in the BK case, the cost of gas he used driving back there was much higher than the cost of the ketchup:D

 

I wasn't talking about enjoyment or a certain paradigm per se. He still enjoyed the game for the most part, but the bugs made him decide that the quality of the product was to low to continue paying for it (I might add that he is a programmer as well).

 

In my experience however there are very few customers out there who think this way when it comes to games. They'd be the first to return a damaged or otherwise faulty household appliance, but in the gaming business we've somehow just come to accept that there will even be showstopping bugs from time to time.

Sure, many players will throw a tantrum over them, but they won't in most cases, follow through with their threats of never buying a product of a given company again or even stop paying for or return the game in question.

[DieAlteHexe]

Well in the BK case, the cost of gas he used driving back there was much higher than the cost of the ketchup:D

 

I wasn't talking about enjoyment or a certain paradigm per se. He still enjoyed the game for the most part, but the bugs made him decide that the quality of the product was to low to continue paying for it (I might add that he is a programmer as well).

 

In my experience however there are very few customers out there who think this way when it comes to games. They'd be the first to return a damaged or otherwise faulty household appliance, but in the gaming business we've somehow just come to accept that there will even be showstopping bugs from time to time.

Sure, many players will throw a tantrum over them, but they won't in most cases, follow through with their threats of never buying a product of a given company again or even stop paying for or return the game in question.

 

I've left a few games for the same reasons, some at release because they just were too shoddy. I felt for the devs but wasn't prepared to "not play" but continue to pay whilst they got it sorted. One I eventually went back to and it was vastly improved and a couple of the others...well...no.

 

The thing that seems to me to be the key is that MMOs are (and need to be) constantly evolving. Whenever that code gets touched, potential for disasters. Now an offline game, I hold to a much higher standard as whilst there will often be add-ons and such, it's not as much a "living entity". I love that MMOs are constantly evolving and sometimes I hate that. Depends upon which end of the stick I have.