A Rant About i16 (undocumented changes to TFs lead to bugs...big surprise)

It is possible though that the maps got deleted for another unrealated reason and that's why it went unnoticed. The developer who made the change could've been given bad information about it not being used anywhere else and they don't have a system in place to verify it.

Maybe the system picks the next closest match.

Even Castle speculated. It's what everyone's doing.

In the end no matter what the reason there's a process that can be improved here.

Fitz, ultimately it's your last sentence that's most important in this whole thread.

From the MotD on live just now:

So, after 181 posts we now have confirmation that they were both bugged.

So much of this thread could have been avoided if it was a simple "Hess and Katie TFs are bugged on live right now, here is what we encountered" post.

Instead we get a first post with a sarcastic attack title that is sure to get the forum PvPers worked up and on the defense. Then the first few posts from the people who were on said bugged TF constantly throwing out snide comments about lazy devs or undocumented changes just made the forum PvPers blood boil more.

You get more with sugar than with snark.

Yes, I read 10 pages of Zombie Man fighting with the original poster and friends over word choices and semantics.

Thank you for proving my point.

And you are?

You do get the irony that since BaBs has posted asking for a list of bugged missions to look at, all we've gotten are a handful of posts about the last mission of Numina and a lot of in-fighting attack posts, right? And that simply pointing out that a slight change of posting tone would have avoided about 8 pages of this thread that are completely useless to the playerbase is somehow a scornful offense?

Kind of shows that if you start a thread off on a combative foot, it stays on it.

Thank you for the posts in the topic. We appreciate all of the comments. It’s really not our intentions to try to slip changes past the players; we want to be as up front and transparent with you all as we can. We want to make sure that every change appears in the patch notes so you know what’s going on with the game.

Occasionally, we slip up, and that’s what happened with the Hess Task Force. As Positron has mentioned in the past, we are generally working an issue or two ahead of the current issue. This means we maintain multiple code and data branches, to make sure that stuff from the future issues doesn’t creep into the current issue (though that has happened from time to time.) Due to changes in our internal processes (to make this kind of error less likely in the future) a number of incomplete changes slipped through. Since this was not intentional they were pushed to live with no notice (and no testing). In short, we screwed up. For that, I apologize. We’re sweeping through the old data to make sure there isn’t anything else that fell between those same cracks. If there is, we’ll fix it and put it in the patch notes.

We also have a lot of processes in place to test what we’re doing before it gets out to PTS and to the live server. We want to make sure that what we’re giving you works, and our QA departments do their best to catch bugs before they become a problem on live. However, an MMORPG is a complex game, with lots of moving parts. We do not have the ability to test everything every issue. If we aren’t making changes to something, we have to assume it still functions. We do perform regression testing, but, as I said, we just can’t do regression on every item in the game. Not if we want to actually ship an issue. The bug to Katie’s ability to follow the heroes came about because of change to something else in the game. We didn’t run into any other problems with escort missions breaking and we didn’t come across the problem with Katie and the witches until you guys found it. We’re sorry it affected your game play and we’re working to find and fix the problem as quickly as possible. We’re adding the problem with the Katie TF to the known issues list and we’ll let you know – via the patch notes – when it is fixed.

Again, I’m really sorry this happened. It is really important to us that our patch notes are complete and describe all of the changes and fixes that are in the patch. We will do our best to make certain that this type of thing doesn’t happen again.

--Horatio

Which is all a reasonable person can really ask for Horatio. Thanks!

EDIT: First personal first post after Horatio! [I've tagged most of the Devs at some point]

Thanks, Horatio. While it's gratifying to see you guys be open about making a mistake, what I really like about the post is the mention of continuing efforts to improve the process. (Even if they did help this particular error happen! ) To me, that's the most important thing.

Best regards.