What bugs me about AE.....

is the bugs. I just posted in the tech forum about the latest bug to hit one of my missions, and it annoys the crap out of me you have to basically keep play testing your missions every week even after they are published just to make sure the latest patch hasn't screwed them up.

I've published two arcs. One was unplayable for weeks because the devs pulled a map without telling us and I had no way of knowing about it until a freind let me know. The other one fails you as soon as any hostages reaches the exits.

Great track record so far, eh?

As annoying as these things are, the "track record" is in fact pretty good considering how much actually works as intended compared to the relatively few bugs.

Every week? Hyperbole much?

Track record is entierly subjective. I'm sure some people don't have a 100% failure rate with their missions because of bugs. I do.

That's why the bugs in AE bug me so much.

[ QUOTE ]
is the bugs. I just posted in the tech forum about the latest bug to hit one of my missions, and it annoys the crap out of me you have to basically keep play testing your missions every week even after they are published just to make sure the latest patch hasn't screwed them up.

I've published two arcs. One was unplayable for weeks because the devs pulled a map without telling us and I had no way of knowing about it until a freind let me know. The other one fails you as soon as any hostages reaches the exits.

Great track record so far, eh?

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One would think you'd have the sense to occasionally check on your arcs.

[/ QUOTE ]One would think you'd have the sense to occasionally check on your arcs.

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Many more might expect the game to work well enough that one wouldn't have to check on an arc after it has been published. Sense has little to do with it. However reading patch notes for changes to the MA system does help. Such posts have been made by devs in the past. Those who keep up with the forums may also realize that the devs have been tweaking critters, objects, etc which could make an arc completely invalid. Knowing this, it IS probably a good idea to test your arcs periodically.

And yet, with all the bugs, this is one of the least buggy MMOs I've played and one of the few games I've seen that tries to fix things out of schedule rather than make us sit in game breaking code for an annual quarter. Some were games that didn't even do server maintenance unless there were major global issues which affected everyone at once.

I have a few pet bugs myself like the chat channels resetting and the mouse-over tips not appearing when viewing recipes, but they'll get to them eventually provided we /bug them into oblivion... and then wait more than we might like.

If any of you get into the closed beta for Issue 16, don't just play it. Test it early and often.

While I share your pain, I identified this as the biggest problem AE is going to have way back in the beginning. By giving us the ability to write our own missions, the devs have co-opted us as software developers.

We're essentially writing code for a "mission interpreter," which is pretty much the same as a basic interpreter or a Java Virtual Machine, only its primitive functions are the animation of a 3D MMORPG. And as software developers, every time the underlying code changes it has potential implications for the software (missions) that we've developed to run on the mission interpreter.

One thing software developers know is that you have to do regression testing whenever the system changes. This is just a fact of life.

And there's no easy solution. Right now there are a lot of bugs. When the devs fix them it may "break" your mission because the new, correct behavior may not be what you're expecting, and you'll need to adjust for that.

It will get better over time as the number of changes goes down and bugs are fixed. But if we get our wishes, that will be a long time off, because we've been asking for a whole lot of new features. And any changes in a running system can have ripple effects that have to be tested for.

The recent changes to test mode make this testing much, much easier. So the devs really are dedicated to giving us the best tools to do our testing. But we're always going to need to do that testing.

Not trying to bump this thread, but God Lord it happened to me yet again.

This week I learned that not only were the destructable objects tinkered with so they had to be reset but one of the objects I had selected was no longer available. This just happened to be in the same arc as the Crey Hero map they pulled and have never replaced. So once again in the same arc I have to change things around that don't really fit my story because of a dev decision and once again there were no patch notes letting us know about it.

Great job. I'm so glad I did not fork over the money for more slots. I'd be better off just making farming missions. No plot, just a big outdoor map full of Rikri communication officers and hamis.

The AE mission interface now tags invalid arcs, so you can tell at a glance that something's wrong. A lot better than having to try to run your missions every few days to make sure they're up.

I'm STILL shocked that such changes due to patches are not listed in the notes.

If authors are the serious type they probably read the patch notes every week.

And as someone has pointed out sometimes an arc WON'T have the invalid icon, but when you play it due to stealth changes by the devs or a patch there would be no way to tell at a glance.

Yeah, authors should play their arcs to make sure they work, HOWEVER, patch notes SHOULD list relevant AE changes that can directly affect author work.