Elite Dangerous needs its own "Operation Health"
- Thread starter K-Rose
- Start date
The timing of its release does not change the way ED works internally, or any software for that matter. Bugs are buggy and often only manifest in very particular conditions which can take literally months to recreate or solve in the confines of the devs chair. While it may please you to imagine FD as some kind of machiavellian mastermind, deliberately leaving bugs in or releasing with bugs on purpose that is not even close to how it works. If you really believe in a world where FD do not release the best product they can in the best condition they can then I don't really know what to tell you other than maybe talking to some people who work with software might help your persepctive
Your views of instancing restrictions (you can get more than 32 people in an instance just so you know) and gameplay complexity are nothing to do with the complexity of the software under the hood.
There is a difference between deliberate and malicious. I do not believe that the 2.3 release was malicious, but it absolutely was a fully informed deliberate decision. There were very serious known, reported, and acknowledged bugs and issues that existed in the beta for nearly two months. A conscious decision was made to green light the release and OK the date on which it was released.
I would be up for this, I guess the main question would be how doable it is from a business standpoind. Are people willing to pay for it and if not can you afford doing something nobody is gonna pay for? Don't really know the answer to each of these question and of course first and formoest FD would need to want to do it, which I too don't know.
Also, please let combat be just a tiny little side part of it. Sure combat can need improvments too but other parts would need it much more if you ask me.
Also, please let combat be just a tiny little side part of it. Sure combat can need improvments too but other parts would need it much more if you ask me.
Who knows, for all you know their internal build was great then broke upon being released into the wild. I've only ever written very simple software and that can be cray cray to debug. Something of the size and complexity of Elite would be a mammoth task especially if you cannot reproduce the bug in your nice clean dev environment.
On the other hand maybe the devs had all been in crunch for months and were just given some downtime - they are not robots that only exist to code
.You are happy to read it as a deliberate move to drop a buggy release, if you are so happy to accept that (which is somewhat of a stretch, but who knows) you should be able to entertain the idea that the opposite could be true; that in their small environment things were not as buggy as they were when released into the wild.
It may have been the case that they NEEDED to let us get our hands on it in order to try and figure out some of these problems. Ultimately even if they gave it to us chugging, who cares? They can't fix it any faster than they are doing so I am happy to accept that and play what we have while they patch it up rather than be several iterations behind where we are now and still have them fixing it, the end result is the same and playing it as we are now may well be helping them do it faster
It's very easy for a community who knows very little of what goes on under the hood to pole vault to all kinds of assumptions. If you want an idea of how hard it is to make games like this step back and look at the dev path of this and (I know I should never say it's name) SC. Both are mammoth, complex tasks that are behind schedule because it is super hard to make and debug something like this. CIG even say publicly bugs can take months to identify and resolve. It's not as easy as saying to the devs "get inthat room and fix this".
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Who knows, for all you know their internal build was great then broke upon being released into the wild. I've only ever written very simple software and that can be cray cray to debug. Something of the size and complexity of Elite would be a mammoth task especially if you cannot reproduce the bug in your nice clean dev environment.
On the other hand maybe the devs had all been in crunch for months and were just given some downtime - they are not robots that only exist to code
You are happy to read it as a deliberate move to drop a buggy release, if you are so happy to accept that (which is somewhat of a stretch, but who knows) you should be able to entertain the idea that the opposite could be true; that in their small environment things were not as buggy as they were when released into the wild.
It may have been the case that they NEEDED to let us get our hands on it in order to try and figure out some of these problems. Ultimately even if they gave it to us chugging, who cares? They can't fix it any faster than they are doing so I am happy to accept that and play what we have while they patch it up rather than be several iterations behind where we are now and still have them fixing it, the end result is the same and playing it as we are now may well be helping them do it faster
It's very easy for a community who knows very little of what goes on under the hood to pole vault to all kinds of assumptions. If you want an idea of how hard it is to make games like this step back and look at the dev path of this and (I know I should never say it's name) SC. Both are mammoth, complex tasks that are behind schedule because it is super hard to make and debug something like this. CIG even say publicly bugs can take months to identify and resolve. It's not as easy as saying to the devs "get inthat room and fix this".
These are all well and good points, but for the fact that they sold players so called "beta" access to test tings, find issues, report issues, and that is exactly what was done on the test environment many players paid to access. If that test environment does not accurately reflect the live environment...If what you are describing about internal test environment is anywhere close to accurate, then I am afraid we have even bigger problems moving forward. It shows that Frontier has a completely inadequate internal testing methodology, that they sold early access to players under the guise of testing,, and simply did not take the feedback into account.
Every game that releases to a large playerbase multiplayer environment comes with bugs, the more complex the patch the more bugs, it's simply how it works. The only way you can simluate the effect the entire player base will have on something they add, is to let the entire player base get at it. Sometimes if you are lucky stuff might show up in a small beta but there is no gurantee that a fix that resolves issues for 1,000 players will do the same job when 10,000 players are online.
If this helps manage your expectations no release in this games iteration (or any game like this for that matter) is going to be bug free no matter what kind of testing is done, unless the devs do the equivalent of rolling all sixes on hundreds of dice at once. Some stuff is always going to not work and has to be fixed the hard way.
Lastly try not to see "not taking feedback into account" and not being able to find the root cause of a bug or a fix that sticks as the same thing.
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Nice theory, but i know where the people are coming from. Already early in the beta, we found a number of issues which were exploitable to get the ship owner into trouble. (For amusements sake, just look at one of the lifestreams a few weeks ago, where even one of the games developers did just that... he first got the Anaconda where he joined into trouble by careless shooting, then prevented it to run by redeploying hardpoints. )
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A number of these problems, along with solutions, were reported during the beta. (Some more was found later, but that's another story. ) Frontier in their unlimited optimism concluded that their playerbase is so great, nobody would ever abuse these flaws to do harm to other players. So of course, they were abused and exploited for griefing and people don't open their ships for MC any more.
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But despite all of this, i dare to say that the last expansion is of significally higher quality than what we formerly got. It would've been nice if the most obvious flaws (gunners being able to waste a commanders ammo, to overheat their ships, to deploy weapons whenever they like and get them killed by shooting ships inside a station, etc.) would've been addressed before the expansion was rolled out.
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I guess there still somewhere is a manager who gets incentives based on "rolled out on time", which needs to be addressed. But still things got better and i don't think that a complete halt of expansions in favour of lots of rework would help the game too much. (After all, even if everything we have now would be reworked, what would happen with the next expansion? )
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So i rather have new expansions (at slower pace and higher quality), which also include reworks and upgrades to currently weak or flawed systems.
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I don't like to agree with this but here I am. I've felt for awhile now that fdev has built up so much technical and design debt that it's going to be quite the job to dig out of it.
Sure they were, I report bugs in beta myself. But issues need to be triaged and again, sometimes you HAVE to release software to your userbase to see exactly what the issue is before you can fix it. It's a lose lose for FD becasue if they had stopped issues like gunners having access to trollable equipment pre-release the player base would be crying saying why have FD restricted the gameplay so much. It is always easier to critisise events rather then understand them so accordingly I'm not trying to tell you what to think, just sprinkling a little "other side of the fence" on this. Otherwise a discussion becomes myopic as the hate train releases the breaks.
I've been playing this game since release and put over 800 hours into it, and I've only experienced a handful of bugs. That's pretty remarkable when you consider the complexity of this game, so I'm quite happy with the way Frontier is handling the game development. Sure, I wish that landing on atmospheric planets and space legs were already here, but there's been a lot of great stuff that I hadn't expected, like the megaships, the lost generation ships, alien archaeology, the Salome event etc. So personally, I appreciated the adding of new content as that is more likely to get more people buying the game, and therefore more money to develop the game further.
Blackcompany
Banned
The timing of its release does not change the way ED works internally, or any software for that matter. Bugs are buggy and often only manifest in very particular conditions which can take literally months to recreate or solve in the confines of the devs chair. While it may please you to imagine FD as some kind of machiavellian mastermind, deliberately leaving bugs in or releasing with bugs on purpose that is not even close to how it works. If you really believe in a world where FD do not release the best product they can in the best condition they can then I don't really know what to tell you other than maybe talking to some people who work with software might help your persepctive
Your views of instancing restrictions (you can get more than 32 people in an instance just so you know) and gameplay complexity are nothing to do with the complexity of the software under the hood.
They knowingly chose to release a broken mess full of bugs they'd already been made aware of right before a holiday weekend.
What part of CHOSE TO and ALREADY REPORTED BUGS did you fail to understand?
And I hope to dear god that Frontier just massively dropped the ball all around on this one, and that it's not the best they can do, because if this is their best...
Blackcompany
Banned
You keep offering this non argument. Based on your (erroneous) belief that the bugs did not manifest until go-live.
That is factually incorrect. It's also, in this context, a strawman.
The bugs were many. They were severe. They were reported IN THE BETA.
As such, the update SHOULD MOT HAVE BEEN RELEASED IN THAT STATE. PERIOD.
No that is not what I have said at all.
I guess it is easier to claim fallacy rather than read everything I have written. I even said I reported bugs which invalidates everything you are accusing me of. I won't try and convince you to think a different way I'm just being reasonable and illuminating something you may not know, or want to know. Think what you will, it is a forum after all
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So you actually happy with content and features that we currently have?
You don`t wanna new mechanics, new missions scenarios, story based missions, new SRV, NPC SRV, rework of CZ (imho they must be removed completely and be changed by scenarios, like distress call, but much more complex), completely rework of exploration mechanics, material market etc. etc?
I can agree that we don`t need new features like PP CQC, but to concentrate only at fixing bugs? What bugs? I don`t see any of game-braking bugs lately.
What we really need is radical expansion of all existing features, mechanics and QoL updates.
You don`t wanna new mechanics, new missions scenarios, story based missions, new SRV, NPC SRV, rework of CZ (imho they must be removed completely and be changed by scenarios, like distress call, but much more complex), completely rework of exploration mechanics, material market etc. etc?
I can agree that we don`t need new features like PP CQC, but to concentrate only at fixing bugs? What bugs? I don`t see any of game-braking bugs lately.
What we really need is radical expansion of all existing features, mechanics and QoL updates.
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Blackcompany
Banned
No that is not what I have said at all.
Multiple times in this thread you alleged that the bugs didn't or probably didn't hit until LIVE. Despite video evidence on the web testifying otherwise.
Now your defense is "I didn't say that..."
Wow...
And there are a lot of us who do understand that some things don't show up until it hits live, and we accept that as a reality of programming, but yeah, that is an entirely different scenario than we are talking about here. To me, while the unfixed bugs that were allowed into live were pretty crippling to me to the point of making the game unplayable, I think what concerns me far more, and I suspect many other players who are actually really supportive, but at the same time objective, what worries us more than the bugs is the decision making process that led to the decision to release, and release when they did in the first place.
That type of decision making, if allowed to continue does not bode well for the future of the game, and for those of us who absolutely love this game, that is a very troubling thought. It is difficult to have confidence and faith in decisions made by proven poor decision makers.
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Except the parts where I said things like "no gurantee a fix that resolves issues for 1,000 players will do the same job when 10,000 players are online" and where I gave several different ways this could have occured ranging from them releasing it buggy to having temp fixes that dont work on a large scale to being unable to find the fix without a larger release.
Of course if you want to read all those words in my prev posts as just saying "defo were not there till live" or you don't understand the implications of what I'm saying then thats on you
I can't really be more varied or wider in the things I have said without writing a small dissertation (which I'm not doing on my phone) which is needless. If you want to ignore everything else I said and try and substantiate that you can, its a forum - I'm not going to try and make you think anything or agree to anything all I'll do is just ask you to re-read and try to step beyond what you want to think to examine the whole thing or not, it's your call
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