FDEV Community Managers - are your holidays over yet?

Bunkerkind Anni

Bunkerkind Anni
StarLightPL said:
As a developer, I salute you :) In all fairness though, letting through blockers like what happened with BGS (everything looks like signs reversed) shows that either it's not covered enough or they can't test it toroughly for some reason. It's not like an obscure edge case of faction failing elections when the moon is full and planets are in alignment, it's a case the entire bgs went batpoo crazy. Not mentioning that these states, transitions, influences etc. should have some automated tests coverage. Something is flawed here.

OR

there is a separate "new era" branch of the code where most of the current systems will be obsoleted so they won't invest in it now... [one can dream]
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aren't we in a new era now,
that the mission generation was moved onto ONE dedicated server for all modes,
just to fix board flipping exploit
to have a better control over what is happening?
 

VR StarLightPL

VR StarLightPL
Bunkerkind Anni said:
aren't we in a new era now,
that the mission generation was moved onto ONE dedicated server for all modes,
just to fix board flipping exploit
to have a better control over what is happening?
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Actually the dev response on moving onto one was pretty clear and well argumented from a programming standpoint. "Fixing" board flipping (not that it needed fixing, yes I'm the 2.8%) was only a side effect. And the stability was key. Something went wrong in deployment / migration / whatever. Poo happens all the time in IT. The trick is to clean it before it hits the fan, and then the client's face.
 

Bunkerkind Anni

Bunkerkind Anni
StarLightPL said:
Actually the dev response on moving onto one was pretty clear and well argumented from a programming standpoint. "Fixing" board flipping (not that it needed fixing, yes I'm the 2.8%) was only a side effect. And the stability was key. Something went wrong in deployment / migration / whatever. Poo happens all the time in IT. The trick is to clean it before it hits the fan, and then the client's face.
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actually, from my amateurish point of view, i think the thing that went wrong, was the integration of thargoids into the BGS and the dedicated mission server at the same time, while under the time constraint that the client patch (since it affects all clients) had to go through the verification process from microsoft and sony before christmas holidays...
 

StuartGT

StuartGT
Bunkerkind Anni said:
actually, from my amateurish point of view, i think the thing that went wrong, was the integration of thargoids into the BGS and the dedicated mission server at the same time, while under the time constraint that the client patch (since it affects all clients) had to go through the verification process from microsoft and sony before christmas holidays...
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Agreed, and coupled with no community beta of the PS4/Xbox clients meant no large-scale testing of those major, cross-platform changes.
 

Riverside

Riverside
Bunkerkind Anni said:
actually, from my amateurish point of view, i think the thing that went wrong, was the integration of thargoids into the BGS and the dedicated mission server at the same time, while under the time constraint that the client patch (since it affects all clients) had to go through the verification process from microsoft and sony before christmas holidays...
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This is the kind of thing it would be interesting to read about in a Dev update. The pros & cons, the reasoning behind the change. Similarly the topic of peer to peer vs client/server network architecture comes up regularly, it would be interesting to read the Devs view on the choices made. Cost, latency etc.

It probably isn't going to stop people second-guessing those decisions but it would help make any future community debate a better informed one.
 

Ralph Vargr

Ralph Vargr
Brett C said:
Going towards your examples given....

The BGS issues are being investigated, https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ctions-since-the-update?p=7365647#post7365647

Unrepairable stations: checked around on the forums as well as JIRA, didn't come up with anything solid that is recent. Happen to have recent bug reports on this issue?

Wing Mission Exploits: if you're able to reproduce the bug/exploit - or what you feel is a bug/exploit, email us at community@frontier.co.uk or contact our support team via the ticketing system ( https://support.frontier.co.uk ).

Multicrew being completely unreliable: Please expand on this issue. "being completely unreliable" is quite ambiguous.

factions paying you to kill them: This sounds related to the ongoing BGS issues, no?

assassination/massacre mission targets being AWOL: Please explain this one a little bit. The game has many types of missions, locking it down to which missions exactly other than a generalization of assassination/massacre missions would be appreciated.

a good selection of materials being unobtainable: Which materials and when did said materials become notably of an issue?

the servers going down every time: This is an issue that sometimes cannot be avoided, even when our dev team work to ensure the servers can handle unexpected (and expected) load-spikes... be it general user spikes, special event spikes, community event spikes. It's like having 100,000 people hitting amazon.com at the same time, their servers will simply overload for a short while as things catch up - be it manual intervention or automatic scaling to get things back running. The same happened with our Elite Dangerous servers and the Distant Worlds II event kicking off. Having thousands of commanders hit the server with actions all at the same time, made the server CPU's go from low to max in mere seconds. It's something that I know our development team has been working on to minimise for quite some time.
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It would have been nice to say this on the 25th of December... :)
 

Whitehair

W
Bunkerkind Anni said:
@Whitehair - since you work in QA:
Are you the one that has to communicate with the customer directly that got the incomplete, partially faulty product that your team signed off as "good enough to deliver",
or do you have someone different for negotiations and keeping the customer up2date about the after-release corrections.
or does your company deliver and then keep radio-silence afterwards?
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Loaded questions.......

Lets answer each part:
incomplete
When working in an agile manner, it is axiomatic that the product is incomplete. Incomplete also means different things to the customer, the IT department, the business.

partially faulty product
every (software) product ever produced has bugs. No exceptions. Not even NASA can release bug free software. I read somewhere last week that the average aeroplane software contains in the region of 36,000 bugs.....

signed off as "good enough to deliver"
If all the agreed pre-defined tests on specified components have passed, then there is no reason for QA to hold the release back. As I previously wrote, it is not up to the QA department to make decisions about whether to release a product or not. QA gives an advice about the 'quality' of the product they test. How that 'quality' is defined varies from project to project and company to company.

For my team, we have a change to test. We first look to see that it runs. Then we look to see that it does what the design says it should do. Thats a simple line on the end report, essentially, Yes or No. Then we look to see how the change works with other elements of the application(s) to see if those interactions still function as expected. But somewhere along the line the time has been used up and the test findings (Yes it works, but there are x bugs and issues that have been identified and not yet resolved) form the basis of the advice/report QA gives.

QA does not communicate directly with the customer in a traditional project environment.
Within teams that use the Scrum framework for example, there are opportunities to communicate directly with the customer, but in principle that is task for the Product Owner, not expressly a QA team member as the team needs to focus on development, not managing the customers expectations. There is intensive collaboration within teams between the QA, design and porgrammers, because without that it is very difficult to improve the quality by identifying whether a finding is a bug or not, and whether it 'needs' to be resolved before release. Those decisions are not QA's to make.
 
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Deadlock-3000

D
Brett C said:
Going towards your examples given....

The BGS issues are being investigated, https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ctions-since-the-update?p=7365647#post7365647
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OK ... "being investigated" ... for six weeks ... but fine, that's news of a kind.

Unrepairable stations: checked around on the forums as well as JIRA, didn't come up with anything solid that is recent. Happen to have recent bug reports on this issue?
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No, but apparently you fixed it in 3.3.03, according to the patch notes. There's a related issue of stations being under repair for a literal year now, and people reporting that their deliveries aren't being counted, but do I really have to track down your own bug reports for you?

Wing Mission Exploits: if you're able to reproduce the bug/exploit - or what you feel is a bug/exploit, email us at community@frontier.co.uk or contact our support team via the ticketing system ( https://support.frontier.co.uk ).
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No need, it's not like it's any kind of secret, I've been gassing on about it for weeks now, and other people have brought it up repeatedly over the last year - it just got even worse since 3.3 because you buffed mission payouts after you removed board-flipping. You can earn more from winging up and taking missions, per hour, than you can from void opals, but the latter is apparently more newsworthy.

Multicrew being completely unreliable: Please expand on this issue. "being completely unreliable" is quite ambiguous.
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Erm, it doesn't work? You get disconnected when the host drops out of supercruise, or high wakes, or low wakes. Other times, you get an ENORMOUS menu in your face that needs a soft reset to get out of. Or you get disconnected when you try to pilot the host's fighter but it's secretly already being piloted by someone else and you don't know which is empty. These are all in the bug report forum.

factions paying you to kill them: This sounds related to the ongoing BGS issues, no?
Click to expand...

I don't know, mate, it's not my game! You tell us?

assassination/massacre mission targets being AWOL: Please explain this one a little bit. The game has many types of missions, locking it down to which missions exactly other than a generalization of assassination/massacre missions would be appreciated.
Click to expand...

Wow ... the assassination and massacre missions? The ones called "Assassinate Bloke X"? The ones called "Masscre X ships from Y faction"? There are two similar but I think different issues: targets never appearing at all, or only appearing in supercruise and then not being present in the instance when you follow them and target their wake or interdict them; and then targets who are the right faction (or in the case of assassinations, the right name and the right faction) but are not marked as Mission Target and don't count towards the mission.

a good selection of materials being unobtainable: Which materials and when did said materials become notably of an issue?
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Since 3.3. I assume it's all of the manufactured materials that are related to specific system states which aren't ever occurring since you reset the BGS and make it go a bit ga-ga. The two I know personally to be a problem are polymer capacitors and pharmaceutical isolators. There may be others but, incredibly, I have some vestigial remnant of my own actual life to pursue, so I haven't been able to test your own game for you quite as thoroughly as you seem to need me to.

the servers going down every time: This is an issue that sometimes cannot be avoided, even when our dev team work to ensure the servers can handle unexpected (and expected) load-spikes... be it general user spikes, special event spikes, community event spikes. It's like having 100,000 people hitting amazon.com at the same time, their servers will simply overload for a short while as things catch up - be it manual intervention or automatic scaling to get things back running. The same happened with our Elite Dangerous servers and the Distant Worlds II event kicking off. Having thousands of commanders hit the server with actions all at the same time, made the server CPU's go from low to max in mere seconds. It's something that I know our development team has been working on to minimise for quite some time.
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Actually I think Amazon could probably cope with 100k people logging on at once, and I don't think 20 groups of 20 people trying to do a mass jump together is remotely comparable. But I suppose it's something to hear that it's being looked at. Shame we all had to ask over and over and over, no?
 

Ralph Vargr

Ralph Vargr
Deadlock-3000 said:
OK ... "being investigated" ... for six weeks ... but fine, that's news of a kind.

(snip)

Actually I think Amazon could probably cope with 100k people logging on at once, and I don't think 20 groups of 20 people trying to do a mass jump together is remotely comparable. But I suppose it's something to hear that it's being looked at. Shame we all had to ask over and over and over, no?
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From Brett C himself:

Brett C said:
Going towards your examples given....

The BGS issues are being investigated, https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ctions-since-the-update?p=7365647#post7365647

Unrepairable stations: checked around on the forums as well as JIRA, didn't come up with anything solid that is recent. Happen to have recent bug reports on this issue?

Wing Mission Exploits: if you're able to reproduce the bug/exploit - or what you feel is a bug/exploit, email us at community@frontier.co.uk or contact our support team via the ticketing system ( https://support.frontier.co.uk ).

Multicrew being completely unreliable: Please expand on this issue. "being completely unreliable" is quite ambiguous.

factions paying you to kill them: This sounds related to the ongoing BGS issues, no?

assassination/massacre mission targets being AWOL: Please explain this one a little bit. The game has many types of missions, locking it down to which missions exactly other than a generalization of assassination/massacre missions would be appreciated.

a good selection of materials being unobtainable: Which materials and when did said materials become notably of an issue?

the servers going down every time: This is an issue that sometimes cannot be avoided, even when our dev team work to ensure the servers can handle unexpected (and expected) load-spikes... be it general user spikes, special event spikes, community event spikes. It's like having 100,000 people hitting amazon.com at the same time, their servers will simply overload for a short while as things catch up - be it manual intervention or automatic scaling to get things back running. The same happened with our Elite Dangerous servers and the Distant Worlds II event kicking off. Having thousands of commanders hit the server with actions all at the same time, made the server CPU's go from low to max in mere seconds. It's something that I know our development team has been working on to minimise for quite some time.
Click to expand...
 

VR StarLightPL

VR StarLightPL
Last I've checked, BrettC was mainly in charge of the forum coding, so you're kinda "barking up the wrong tree" Deadlock-3000. Also cut the guy some slack, he often answers in ungodly hours when he should be miles off the forum, resting or spending time with family :)
 
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Sir.Tj

The Moderator who shall not be Blamed....
Volunteer Moderator
Sir.Tj
Brett is the forum manager and is pretty much permanently tweaking and tinkering with the forum in the background doing his best from stopping it from falling over, crashing and generally exploding on an hour by hour basis.

I suspect he's not slept in 5 years as he's always online and muttering under his breath about sqls, nodes yada yada yada I have no idea what he's waffling on about etc etc, only stopping to verbally abuse me for breaking something.

The fact he's also helping to answer questions should be appreciated as he's not part of the development or support team so to speak..

Do not tell him I've been nice about him I'll never hear the end of it.

He also really and I mean REALLY likes BBQ sauce.... and terrible trance music.....

EDIT: He is now abusing my eardrums with something that sounds like someone kicking a bumble bee to death while playing a kazoo with the hiccups....
 
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through the hole backwards

T
Sir.Tj said:
Brett is the forum manager and is pretty much permanently tweaking and tinkering with the forum in the background doing his best from stopping it from falling over, crashing and generally exploding on an hour by hour basis.

I suspect he's not slept in 5 years as he's always online and muttering under his breath about sqls, nodes yada yada yada I have no idea what he's waffling on about etc etc, only stopping to verbally abuse me for breaking something.

The fact he's also helping to answer questions should be appreciated as he's not part of the development or support team so to speak..

Do not tell him I've been nice about him I'll never hear the end of it.

He also really and I mean REALLY likes BBQ sauce.... and terrible trance music.....

EDIT: He is now abusing my eardrums with something that sounds like someone kicking a bumble bee to death while playing a kazoo with the hiccups....
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I will just say to Deadlock-3000, your tone stinks. But TJ if this isn't down to Brett C , then is it your fault ? ;)
 

Bunkerkind Anni

Bunkerkind Anni
Sir.Tj said:
Brett is the forum manager and is pretty much permanently tweaking and tinkering with the forum in the background doing his best from stopping it from falling over, crashing and generally exploding on an hour by hour basis.

I suspect he's not slept in 5 years as he's always online and muttering under his breath about sqls, nodes yada yada yada I have no idea what he's waffling on about etc etc, only stopping to verbally abuse me for breaking something.

The fact he's also helping to answer questions should be appreciated as he's not part of the development or support team so to speak..

Do not tell him I've been nice about him I'll never hear the end of it.

He also really and I mean REALLY likes BBQ sauce.... and terrible trance music.....
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trance music can be bad?

looking at the dev tracker, it still feels like most CMs are in hibernation mode
 

Diagbar

D
Brett C said:
It is winter, afterall. ;)
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So let's probably get out of hibernation already;)
Tell us about the frontier expo 2019, season 4 of the elite, or finally how you will take the MCV avards on March 7 and what will be interesting there.
Wake up already, it's time :)
 

Deadlock-3000

D
I'm so sorry about my "tone" earlier in the thread.

Next time I'm asked to retype 18 months worth of bug reports for someone else's benefit I promise I will be all sweetness and light about it.
 
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