Frontier's Annual Results have been published (June 2018 to May 2019), showing a record year and Elite passing 3 million basegame sales

Sylow

Sylow
znôrt said:
i'm thinking nobody here is blaming the particular people working in qa at frontier. if a ton of bugs hit release we will never know if that was qa folks getting sloppy or product management overriding and releasing anyway. whether it's qa not working properly or the company not taking it seriously that's still dysfunctional qa. not acceptable.

[...]

one thing they seem to be doing right: gauging which level of "quality" is barely enough to keep the arxes flowing with minimal effort. judging for how common replies like yours are, qualifying this as 'acceptable', they have nailed the sweet spot.
Click to expand...

You're contradicting yourself here. Would they not find and evaluate bugs, the second part would not be possible. And of course i do agree that more quality always is preferable. But i stick to my point of view: bugs apparently are found and evaluated, and mostly the highest priority ones are fixed.

I also agree that each patch has a number of unfixed bugs. But considering the size of the game and that they -usually- are bugs of comparatively low impact, i don't see them as such a big deal. Also yes, more time for the coders probably would help here a lot.

But in case of doubt, at least in my eyes, the game does "well enough" in terms of finding and curing bugs. If more time can be made available, i'd rather want it to be invested on the design and implementation side. That's where i personally see the game lacking: initial design and implementation often falls short of what it could be. Implementing the "full size" feature would've taken more time, so they opted to go for a simpler solution instead.
 

VR jefranklin18

VR jefranklin18
Feeling the need to get involved in this for some reason..

sollisb said:
not what I claimed at all mate. I expect the bugs to be fixed as a matter of priority before! any new stuff is added. And just to add some weight to this.. The bug with the G5 materials for G1 materials was known about in beta! I had but unfortunately lost a screen shot of the actual report of it. (believe if you will) There are many bugs, outstanding for over a year. And Im bet they'll be outstanding after the Sept release. And we'll find more bugs in that release too if their form is anything to go by.

Just because something is complex, does not in any way infer a right of passage to let it lack QA. But what annoys me here is players, consumers are just willing to accept any old piece of stuff. Maybe I just expect more professionalism.

I accept your low/high impact assessments readily. However, what happens at frontier is that they continue on blindly with whatever they're doing and leave bugs sit for months or longer. Unless of course that bug allows players to earn credits too easily in which case, they're all over it with immediate attention. Look at VolleyBoom? fixed with some 7 days? Then of course they release mining which makes volley boom look like childs play credits. Talk about the tail wagging the dog.
Click to expand...
I am sure bugs are traiged based on their severity and how reproducible they are and prioritised accordingly. However, regular new content also keeps players invested and (potentially) new players coming. Going several quarters without new content and fixing faulty meshes smacks of a game not under active investment.

What I have claimed to be a failure, and I have not gone back on it, is that Frontier have spent months if not years, creating an environment (a superb environment), which basically has no great 'gaming' content. They have rewritten missions, they have rewritten exploration, they have rewritten engineers. And where are we? None of it brought any amazing new benefit to the game.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, the Beyond rewrites were completely necessary as exploration exploration mechanics were very poor previously and people did not like the total RNG of the first iteration of engineers. Are the designers to blame? I would say not, they operated within their brief (and you only have to look at the DDA to see what the designers actually envisaged, compared to what we got). I have no evidence for this other what has been installed on my hard-disk, but I believe a lot compromises and short-cuts were taken in the first year or two of Elite Dangerous and Beyond had to effectively unwind them (they did say several times there would be changes happening under the hood that would not be visible to the end user). I have said multiple times before, the game's executive are at fault (not Adam Woods as things appear to be improving under him) as they were the ones making those decisions. However, all that is in the past and all we can hope is that they have taken the lessons on board and will not make compromises plus of course throw stones at Dev and QA (because that will really motivate them).

That to me is the failure, and like before, as I will now, stress... This is my opinion. NMS, like it or hate it, has done so much more with 20 devs than frontier have done with 100+. I don't expect anyone to agree with my opinion. But that does not make me a bad person or an uneducated person. I do expect the opinion to be debated and not my credentials, good or bad as they may be.
Click to expand...
I have not played NMS since the initial launch, but as everyone has said it is a different style of game with no real attempt at astronomical accuracy. That is fine if you like that thing, but for me the pleasure in Elite is landing on a planet in some far off system knowing that it is possible/probable that such a planet does exist close to that location with similar conditions out there in the actual galaxy (and I do not want to start a debate on how Stellar Forge is not carrying the 1 correctly or whatever).
 

sollisb

Banned
S
Sylow said:
On the G1/G5 problem: Yea, FD didn't show great performance there. When it was actually found, no idea. Maybe people already spotted and reported it that early. But I completely agree that they handled things badly there. Yet at the statement that bugs have to be fixed before new stuff is added: that's a theoretical ideal, but not how things happen according to my experience. I work on software which has some lowest priority problems in since years. But each and any development cycle, the customer puts these bugs on lower priority than new functionality, so they are not fixed.

And that's also how i see things in games: of course, people always complain about bugs, no matter their significance. But in the end, no big patch of oh-so-many bugfixes ever resulted in a huge increase of a games playerbase. It's new content which does that. So I find it more astonishing that FD actually gave in on us gamers demands about two years ago, and actually invested quite some time fixing and reworking broken systems. (Which undeniably happened. I still am not happy with engineers for example, but they at least went from terribly bad to kind of acceptable. )




But if you are honest: none which were gamebreaking since quite a while. Which is all my point: yes, some bugs make it through. They always do. Even if spotted, there's always the question if they are severe enough to delay a rollout. And in my eyes, bugs which justified delaying a rollout indeed did not happen since several years.



I am not arguing many of these things. I agree that the games -DESIGN- is lacking in many aspects. That it in a number of areas shows that keeping the timeline was more important that proper design. (For engineers Michal Brooke even openly made a posting at some time: they first had a much better design on their mind. But they realized that they could not implement that within the given time, so they switched to what we got. )

There's a number of design things which i am not too fond of. (Luckily the base game is enough fun to compensate for that. ) But nothing of that is a problem of QA. This is where this line of discussion comes from. Your claim that quality control here is shoddy. That's all i am arguing: their QA department, according to all i see, is geneally doing a reasonably good job. [While i agree that they show the signs that they are understaffed for the task they have to do. ] The problems we experience come from further up, management decissions and sacrificing quality (especially design quality) in favour of earlier delivery. And even there i have to say that it seems like things have changed. The time when we got frequent updates at low quality seem to be over. Of course, we currently do get less updates with less content. But that's basically what the community even demanded, when we voted that quality matters more than volume of content.

But yea. Based on what you write, perhaps this is the big point why we disagree: all i wrote here was not a judgement of game design. I thought i made that clear several times, but apparently it was not clear enough, so i repeat: i agree that FD did a number of game design decissions, which i find, hmm, not according to my liking. But i don't see much failing on the side of their quality control department. Neither of us is inside the company and can see what they actually do, but based on what i see from the outside, i would say that they generally do a much better job than their counterparts in any other games. While a good number of bugs do end up in the game at each big patch, they usually are of comparatively minor impact. Which means that the real gamebreaking bugs were found and reported on time, the developers fixed those, and the minor things were rolled out as the rollout date came around and there was no time left to fix the minor problems.




Matter of taste. I find NMS stale, while ED is more interesting and more fun. NMS is nice the first few hours, then just everything is the same in different colors. (NMS at launch, mind you. I haven't returned there, can't speak about the current status. )

And on credentials: sorry on that. I didn't want to dig into it. I just so often when people critizise the games quality have the feeling that they have no idea what they are talking about.
Click to expand...

We're all good o7
 

StuartGT

StuartGT
Rob At Work said:
That is not a Steam Chart and therefore raises immediate suspicion as to its authenticity
Click to expand...
Good point. I hope this helps:
vyLSyID.png
 

sollisb

Banned
S
Max Factor said:
And that would be a waste of time. What would all the other developers do, the 3D artists, the gameplay designers, the sound people, and so on do. Just sit there twiddling their thumbs while a group of people spend a year to fix most of the bugs, only to have aload more come along after the next update. It's not feaseable.


Nobody said that it lacked QA. It seems to have a reasonable QA department. From what I can gather you expect the impossible.


Thats a game balancing issue and nothing to do with QA.


Yes every release has had bugs. Do you play any other modern day computer games? I have not come across an update for a computer game that does not contain bugs. It is standard these days. It's either we put up with it or never play any computer games. The choice is yours.


And that is your subjective opinion.


That is just stuff you pesonally don't like. As to NMS it is nothing compared to ED. I really struggle how you can compare the two, NMS is a bland game, still full of forced grind ,very basic textures, ships made up of 10 polygons, tiny planets, no real solar systems, the PG is as basic as it gets. Yes its been made by 20 people and it seriously shows.

I mean its a fine game for people who like that kind of gameplay (not for me), but it is nothing compared to ED in the technical department.

NMS has had its own share of game breaking bugs too.
Click to expand...

I agree my subjective opinion. And probably a lot of frustration thrown in too :)

Not going to get into a NMS debate, can't be bottomed :)

Let's leave the horse in peace.

o7
 

znôrt

znôrt
Sylow said:
You're contradicting yourself here.
Click to expand...

not really a contradiction, just a different standard.

i can't help but see games as software. the artistic and fun component isn't at odds with good practices and quality. it's just the industry rushing it and the market absorbing it without even blinking, because reasons.

i understand there are many different contexts and expectations. mine is just that i've been delivering software for a living for the major part of my life, and i would be ashamed. oh, and i would hardly consider frontier as a potential contractor (not that they are for hire anymore).

(and that doesn't mean either that i can't have a blast in the game anyway. i'm just talking software quality)
 

-VR- Max Factor

-VR- Max Factor
Obsidian Ant said:
Steam Charts indicate a "trend". Whilst they don't show the total number of players, they do point out when player numbers are up or down. Just as you pointed out yourself.

Average active players on Steam Charts right on is around 4100 for the past 30 days. As you point out, this doesn't include players that launch outside of Steam. It also doesn't count Oculus, Humble Bundle, PS4 and Xbox players. The Steam Chars then show that there is a minimum of 4100 average players during the past 30 days, and that is pretty much a fact. Whether that is good or bad is subjective and relative to the specific game.

For comparison, EVE Online has an average active players of around 37k over the past five years:
<img>
https://imgur.com/XuUFCcR
Source: https://i.imgur.com/XuUFCcR.jpg
</img>
Click to expand...
Hi Mr Ant. The steam charts are for concurrent players. That will be an average of people playing at any one time. The amount of actual players would be substantially more as players don't tend to play for 24 hours a day every day of the week. Lets say people play an average of two hours a day, a 24 hours by two (makes 12) and then times the average concurrent players by that figure (roughly 48000) and you have an idea of how many people on average play a day, and that is assuming that everyone plays every day (which we all know isn't the case). It is likely that the amount of active players is likely over the 100,000 mark if you include all the other sources on PC and the consoles (active players being people that play at least once every two weeks).

I think my maths is roughly okay there. Could be complete bunk though, it was never my strong point.

As to EVE stats, I am unsure if they mean concurrent players or the total amount of people that have played. It looks like concurrent to me, but I could be wrong.
 

Obsidian Ant

Obsidian Ant
Max Factor said:
Hi Mr Ant. The steam charts are for concurrent players. That will be an average of people playing at any one time. The amount of actual players would be substantially more as players don't tend to play for 24 hours a day every day of the week. Lets say people play an average of two hours a day, a 24 hours by two (makes 12) and then times the average concurrent players by that figure (roughly 48000) and you have an idea of how many people on average play a day, and that is assuming that everyone plays every day (which we all know isn't the case). It is likely that the amount of active players is likely over the 100,000 mark if you include all the other sources on PC and the consoles (active players being people that play at least once every two weeks).

I think my maths is roughly okay there. Could be complete bunk though, it was never my strong point.

As to EVE stats, I am unsure if they mean concurrent players or the total amount of people that have played. It looks like concurrent to me, but I could be wrong.
Click to expand...

When I said "active players" I meant "Players who are currently / actively playing the game". Or yes, as you (and Steam) refer to it "concurrent players". Guess I should have used the correct terminology. :D

EVE stats are also showing concurrent players.
 

Viajero

Volunteer Moderator
Viajero
Obsidian Ant said:
When I said "active players" I meant "Players who are currently / actively playing the game". Or yes, as you (and Steam) refer to it "concurrent players". Guess I should have used the correct terminology. :D

EVE stats are also showing concurrent players.
Click to expand...

Yes, active players is different from concurrent ones. That metric used to be publicly tracked in the old SteamSpy site though (part of it is now behind a patreon paywall). If I remember correctly an "active player" was simply defined there as a player that had logged in to the game within the last 2 weeks (we dont all play at the same time).

From what I remember when those metrics were public Elite had an "active player" population (measured as in % of total owners) that was quite healthy and very comparable to other similar games.
 
Last edited:

DeletedUser191218

D
StuartGT said:
I admire your patience on the topic, although I think the CMDR is intentionally evading after realising they've blundered in similar facepalm-fashion to this thread of theirs:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/threads/i-was-right-you-were-wrong.512882/
Click to expand...

I fail to see how me incorrectly predicting that carriers wouldn't be introduced invalidates the work of investment analysts. However, this fully reinforces the 'white knight' contention. These topics are unrelated. I am citing analyst work on FDev's financials - not even my own. Yet, you seem to think the two are in any way connected? Is it perhaps "criticism of FDev must be attacked"? This is a very poor effort of attacking me and not the very real fact that all analysts cite reduced recenues forecast as a cause of the share price decline. Whether I was correct or wrong about carriers has literally nothing to do with this. To reduce the discussion to that level is low, very low. I trust the moderator in the discussion will moderate this accordingly...
 

DeletedUser191218

D
Viajero said:
Can you at least please link to analysts stating, as you said, that
Click to expand...

Pretty busy just now but i'm sure Peel Hunt (broker) reduced it's price target from 1400 to 1200 (from memory). They still give it a buy rating but obviously not as strong as it was earlier this year. I'm looking after my daughter so can't dig out other reports tonight.

Nor do I see the point...you'd just strawman onto something else. Being obsessed with the sequence of events is, as I have said, missing the point.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom