When More Is Really Less

Recently I argued the case that we, as VIP players, are getting more than we were under the old business model. I hereby retract those statements. It is now apparent to me that, despite having a bunch of "new" things that work and "appear" to amount to more than I got before (which are also coincidentally being used to monetize the Freems), a bunch of "old" things that used to work now seem not to.

I'm talking about the dreaded Costume changes with invalid costume pieces bug. I'm also talking about how it utterly borked the Mission Architect.

How can a selectable costume piece be invalid?

This breaks MA, as possibly hundreds or even thousands of potential costumes for your aspiring custom mobs are broken before you even pick them.

When I realized that access to content I've paid for is broken on two major selling points of the game (Costume Creation and Mission Architect), I also realized that I (and every other VIP) was paying for content not received. This is supposed to be premium content. These are supposed to be priority matters to the developers. The MA could have been "temporarily" fixed, first update to I21, by simply eliminating the option to use the borked costume pieces until they were fixed. Voila, MA would then work seamlessly, as only valid costume selections would be available.

Instead, this premium content got put off for a total of six patches so far and the particular problems in question aren't even clearly enumerated on the "live" known issues page. In other words, not only are VIP's paying for bad code, they're paying for abysmal documentation of that code, as well.

That's less than we got before, no matter how you look at it. Prior functionality cannot be replaced by shiny fluff. Fix the costume pieces, fix the MA.

Less is not more.

1 - You assume the "Shiny fluff" producing people also have the ability to debug code. Hear that Tunnel rat? FX those fixes in for AE!

2 - We just had a major update (Issue 21) to the game. That can break things, it happens. For all we know, It's the coding for the contact coins somehow bizarrely interacting with the costume creator causing this (aka "the ghost in the machine" - complex code is complex, and possibly circular)

3 - I love paragon studios, but one could argue their Known Issues documentation has not always been the best.

Every time the developers add content to the system, they end up adding bugs as well. Most get squashed within a few weeks, but a few linger on. But by your logic, this means that got a lesser game than what we started with back in April 2004.

You fail to understand just how easy it is to introduce bugs into complex computer code and just how hard it can be to find and eliminate all of them.

Really the game code is approximately 10 years old. Every time they add or change stuff it can and often does break other things. At a guess the amount of coding needed to link the costume bits to the store broke something with costumes. ::Shrug:: it happens and in turn it will get fixed in 2, 3, 4, or 8+ months. it frankly isn't all that critical since it can generally be worked around. An annoyance? Yes, a critical must focus programming time on now to fix it issue? No.

Debugging is being given a mass of parts, more than you need, and being told to build something you've more than likely never seen. It's not simply "Spend X minutes" on an issue and it's fixed.

As for my #1 above, it was in response to how your post read to me.

Can you give us an example of what pieces are causing you errors?

So far I've only had the usual mishap with faces on some of my characters, standard head model. It seems every time they revamp the character creator it messes up some of the faces. Good thing I have like 50+ free costume tokens on those characters or I'll have to solo an hour to make up that Inf.

for all the people jumping on the OP about complex code and whatnot, how many of you actually write programs? it seems to me that the OP actually does understand that these things happen and fixes don't happen in a day or easily. what he's pointing out is a legit issue.

the devs are big boys (and girls) and they know their code base, no matter how complex it is. trotting out the, "it's so complex!", argument is, to my mind, an insult to the devs' abilities as developers. it says, "I think the devs are too incompetent, lazy, or stupid to fix problems in code they've been maintaining for years and/or they're above such trivial things as bug fixes or documenting known bugs."

I don't agree that MA problems mean there's now somehow "less" game, but don't discount the actual issue he's having for nonsensical reasons. it isn't unreasonable to expect the devs to be able to make a list of costume pieces that break the MA. it also isn't unreasonable to suggest that maybe those pieces should be fixed, or failing that removed as options in the MA custom character creator. that's a logical conclusion.

I will say that no one here knows how feasible that suggestion is, but that doesn't make it an unreasonable or bad suggestion. maybe the costume creators for MA and general character creation are inexorably linked and you can't change things in one without affecting the other, but that's not really our responsibility as players to know. he's giving his opinion and feedback in a generally reasonable way, which is something I can respect even thought I don't care at all about making custom MA arcs.

Maybe we could just relax and remember it's a game, a way to pass the time away from the real world and not obsess over pixels in the wrong place.

*shrug*

They don't give a crap about the AE. If its not Incarnate content, it can go jump in a lake.

Eco

Quote:

Originally Posted by Samuel_Tow [The Incarnate System is] Jack Emmert all over again, only this time it's not "1 hero = 3 white minions" it's "1 hero = 3 white rocks."

What exactly is the problem here?

Is it the fact that when the devs change around the costume parts it breaks existing costumes (which is annoying) or is it something worse than that?

This is what comes of giving players access to an editor tool when the entire game is written in UDS*.

MA was a nice idea, but like everything else in the game newer than the single-digit issues, it's built on a foundation that wasn't designed for anything of the sort. Hence, bugs. Lots of them. That much is inevitable.

But I agree with the OP about bug documentation. Fess up when there's a glitch in your system. Don't expect the playerbase to not notice when there's gaping holes in the program. I've seen online games implode over that.


* - Undocumented Drunken Spaghetti. The dev team has admitted as much more than once in the past.