still hoping for one bugless issue

i dont care if issue 17 or Going Rogue im still hoping for one issue with no bugs specially after months of the close open etc beta
if they dont find at least one bug a day i say boot the bums out of close beta...

There is always bugs in games. It's pretty impossible to make a bugless game. Bugs occure due to ; drivers, player triggered, version of operative system, bad code, incompatible third party software... the list goes on with millions of examples. You can't simply write a application that's 100% compatible to every single system setup out there. It's different and more easier to scribble out the bugs when you write for a system with non dynamic specs, like a console for instance.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cien_Fuegos also if people are just lolly gagging around looking for exploits to farm ( like AE) i think boot them from close beta

eeeeh? if they want to farm then let them. They pay monthly subs just like you and they decide what they want to do with their time on CoX.

Way to lay down the law Mr Puppy.

An MMO is out of beta when they pull the plug. In other words, there are always going to be bugs no matter how much testing is done.

Bear in mind this is from launch time (ie 2004)

No matter how much beta testing you do to bug hunt, you still won't find them all, because you simply cannot replicate the wide variety of user platforms and behavior on a small scale. No release survives contact with it's users. This is a truism of software everywhere and always will be. There are simply too many variables to anticipate.

Quote:

Originally Posted by eltonio This is over the top mental slavery.

Hi. I'm a games programmer.

Fixing bugs takes time. Some industries do produce error-free code, such as the military. To do this, they take much longer, spec stuff out much more carefully, and employ many more people in testing. Thats a really good thing when lives depend on your software behaving correctly.

Applying this level of quality control to a game requires either much more money or time or probably both. As it is, every game studio I've seen relies to some degree on a bit of unpaid overtime from its staff. Asking for more of this would be kind of rude, so lets rule that option out.

Would you rather:

a) Have each issue take twice as long and pay maybe $45 per month for the privelege of a bug free game?

b) Leave things as they are and put up with the few bugs you have to deal with?

I'd choose b) myself.

And if you're asking people to cross every t and do every i, can you at least talk in proper sentences with capitals and punctuation?

Well, I can tell you this: you're never, ever going to get a bugless issue. It's not, technically speaking, impossible any more than, say, being hit by a meteor which has been hit by lightning while you're standing on a four leaf clover and holding the winning lotto ticket is necessarily impossible, but the likelihood of that happening is so statistically unlikely that it might as well be.

It's not because the devs aren't talented (they are), or because the issue isn't tested (it is), but because we're dealing with a codebase that's... what, 8 years old from the first line of code was written? By this point, there's going to be plenty of people who are familiar with this code fragment or that particular function, but they've left for other job opportunities (There may well be a good documentation process in place, but I promise you, even the best written document or commented code is no substitute for having the person who wrote the code originally immediately available to you), and even if they haven't, odds are they don't know/remember/haven't thought of how some script they wrote to handle any interaction with some new, likely completely unrelated addition.

I deal with this kind of problem every day in my line of work, and believe me, no matter how hard you plan or test, at the end of the day, it's always your ability to forecast potential problems compared against what ends up being your list of actual problems, and the latter is always slightly longer. Around the office, we call this a failure of imagination, but we try not to take it personally, and instead, focus our shame and guilt towards finding and fixing the problem as quickly as possible.

I could regale you with stories of code debugging that would turn your hair white (Well, actually, no, it wouldn't-- code debugging stories for non-code writing people is every bit as exciting as watching someone fill out a crossword puzzle written in a language you can't read) but trust me, I'm going to win the lottery standing on a four leaf clover and then be killed by a meteor struck by lightning long before you get a bugless issue.

That being said, if you want to avoid dealing with a bug in release, log in and start reporting them in beta.

Unpaid overtime, Cien, not completely unpaid.

People in this industry generally work pretty hard, and often contribute personal time in evenings or weekends for free. I doubt the CoH dev staff are any exception judging by the general high quality of their work.

As long as you don't think they're taking your $15 and buying gold back-scratchers and laughing about it, that's cool.
The current level of bugginess experienced with new issues IS you getting your money's worth.

Good, fast and cheap.

You can only pick two.

:P

WHAT THE!

I thought this was a serious thread! :P

I think there was an Australian TV show about programmers in the ealry 2000's. It revolved around a smart trendy software development start-up in Sydney? I can't remember the details.

Dramas would happen like they had a deadline, they lost all their code, didn't have any backups and had to stay up all night and rewrite it...

Needless to say, it was crap, and sank into obscurity.