I would like to know how this got broken in the first place. I don't recall seeing any adjustments being made to auto-docking in the last major update. So, what happened?
I saw someone say they heard that one of your devs accidentally shifted the whole galaxy to the right 10 meters. Is that true?
Also, I guess all of us with earned but unawarded ranks are just left out the cold this go around. At the rate things are going, I'll be getting a message congratulating me for just making demi-god by the time my rank bar says midshipman.
I see your post has already garnered a good number of replies from armchair programmers.
I'm not a programmer, but I have a good deal of professional experience in Project Management, so the following opinion is based on that experience managing a team of engineers/programmers.
Your point is well taken due to the simple fact that the DC was unrelated to ANY of the changes they had listed in the .03 update. The most annoying aspect of this broken DC thing was the fact that it made it into the release in the first place! Basic core features of a game should ALWAYS be internally tested for proper function after any major changes to a code base.
The fact that they missed this points back to my original point that the DC was unrelated to anything they were doing, and thus I must assume that they didn't expect it would get broken by whatever they were doing.
This would seem to indicate some issues with the way FD is currently managing the game's code base. And more specifically... legacy code. The DC kind of falls into that category at this point in time. Apologists can spin all the yarn they want about this and that, but the fact remains that this SHOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED. A simple test of the DC by someone at FD before the .03 patch was released would have caught this issue before it made it out into our game.
The Shifted Galaxy theory doesn't hold up due to the fact that the DC continued to dock normally at both Outposts and Planetary Bases within the Bubble. Had such a shift happened, it should have effected ALL docking activities using the DC and not just the larger Starports.
I'm glad to see it fixed though, but was hoping that the "Fire At Will" Turret bug which was also missed in internal testing remains unpatched in .04. That means we have to wait at least 10 days before any hope of seeing a fix, based on FD's current point update schedule.
Some want to give them a pass on all this. Thats fine. I expected more from their teams, and have been forced to lower the bar on what I will consider them capable of in future.
My advice to the project managers at FD would be to STEP UP YOUR GAME FOLKS!
