The biggest clue to the scepticism is that analysts/so called experts/professionals all managed to agree on something.
Frontier's Annual Results have been published (June 2018 to May 2019), showing a record year and Elite passing 3 million basegame sales
- Thread starter StuartGT
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DeletedUser191218
D
Ah the "we've had enough of experts" attitude that has worked out so well for us all. Analysts/experts quite frequently agree on things. Medical professionals agree on a diagnosis so a person can receive appropriate treatment. Mechanics agree on the cause of engine failure so it can be remedied. Investment analysts agree on reduced revenue forecasts and advise on trades accordingly. It's very common.
I realise to a 'certain kind' of individual, holding expertise and knowledge in disdain is popular right now. However, you can have a go at treating your own health, fixing your own car and investing your money in direct dcontradiction of expert views. Please report back and let us all know how you get on.
Ah... The switch from specifics to generalizations and back again to keep the argument alive type of individual, appears to be equally as popular right now.
Like I said before.. I play only because it's VR and most of my time is spent writing interface to and from Elite. A quick roundup.. An automated faction/system resolver. needed because someone felt it was a great idea to deparate the combat rewards.. A Mac based webserver to read the journal file and display the selected items of interest on whichever client connects. A series of guages to display lat/long/height when landing on planets. Another set to automate the landing. yes it sends ketstrokes from the webserver to which ever client is connected which then sends them to ED. Another tool to read the current position and then search for the nearest best price on a given commidity. An Engiinering module to show what materials are needed to allow a given module upgrade. Another module to store and auto plan a trip to a remembered Point Of Interest.
I am fluent/proficient in Cobol, Pascal, Smalltalk, C, C++, C#, Java. I started coding in '79. I taught Cobol and systems design in dept of defense. I was one of the founders and designers of various MUD drivers. I have extensive experience, maybe 10 years or more writing and selling add-ons for flight simulator. I also designed, coded and sell Document Imaging systems.
The company I work for invests some $5.3 trillion yes trillion across the worlds finance markets. So I ask you, do you think we allow our software to be delivered to our customers untested?
So yes, I do believe that I know software and the SDLC and it's associated test environments, practises and utilisation, in addition to the required QA that goes along with that. Obviously you don't agree, but hey, that's fine with me.
o7
Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
That is fine but I am very much afraid that if you can not even identify:
- the actual drop (including date or dates) you were referring to or
- the moment the forecasts you were referring to made it to the public domain,
The important part is this. And my answer is: no, i don't expect it to be delivered untested. But i also don't expect it to be delivered flawlessly. Wherever i up to now worked, there always was a rating system for found bugs and issues.
Software was delivered with the test reports along, pointing out existing problems. And usually the software, with known issues, was accepted by the customer, as long as they were rated to be of low enough impact. Indeed we players here don't get the test reports of FD. It's not a thing done in the scope of game development. But I do see that generally, while sure some bugs make it into the life game, most of them are of medium to low impact.
I mean, as an example i am sorry for all those who can't fly a Mamba because the landing gear is not retracted on the external view. But it's not something which technically makes the game unplayable. And while there was a rather small number of gamebreaking bugs published during the games lifetime, they generally shared two features: they usually were not around during the beta (so they were the unforseen result of a last minute fix) and the bugfix patch was rolled often hours, sometimes a few days later. [The generally is important. There was a fiasko patch some years ago. I don't remember the patch number, but it rolled out some major bugs, crashes included, which were already seen during the beta. In my eyes a traditional "manager wants to meet the milestone" issue. Most shameful for this game, as we most of the time were not even given a delivery date for the update. So even if they delayed the delivery for a week for a last bugfix cycle, we customers would not even have noticed... ]
But yea, in the end my answer really boils down to this: despite all your credentials, your statements are along the line that tested software equals flawless software. Which just is not true and, based on the size of the game, simply can not be true.
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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.
I am no stranger to QA, testing or indeed software launches. The problem with Frontier is they never learn. Absolutely every release they have done has been awash with bugs. Some obvious, some not so much. That is indicative of a company more interested in the money than the consumer.
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. Missions are still a mess. I guess what frustrates me, is I see whats coming in the Sept release and I shake my head and ask 'why'... Do we really need Arx? Do we really need to see spinny ships? Or do we need a huge content injection? I'm guessing, and I agree 'guess' that most players at this stage already have their ship kits and paint jobs. Are Frontier really expecting so many new players? That it warrants them spending so much time on displaying ships with kits rather than creating content?
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.
o7
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DeletedUser191218
D
I don't need to. For a start, it's not my claim. It is the claim of analysts who have done the research this. I don't know what you're having trouble with?
Does the concept of reading articles that refers to analysts' views on forecast revenues and associated share price moves strike you as a foreign concept? This entire exchange only shows how poor your understanding of this is. It's unfortunate that you have the arrogance to say all expert opinion is incorrect. What has happened is the ONLY way you can mount an argument is to criticise the fact I don't have the drawdon dates available. The fact you are arguing this somehow invalidates the work of professionals who have publicised their analysis is...well I don't want to be offensive but it doesn't exactly exhibit you're sparkling powers of reason.
But if it makes you feel better - you got me. I don't have the drawdown dates. So the share price dropped, all the analysts are citing reduced forecast revenues as the rationale, all the current fundamental style metrics are consistent with that view but....I don't have the drawdown dates so you win?
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.
qa helps and guides, but it's the team and the company doing the quality. or it doesn't work! a qa department could be just one guy, you just have to take him seriously. the grunt work can (and needs to) be automated.
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.
imo their delivery is just utterly unprofessional, barely good enough for the teenager entertainment market. yeah, that's a game nowadays.
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/
Are we still going on about this?
The game will still be here next week. Let’s get on with something of consequence.
The game will still be here next week. Let’s get on with something of consequence.
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> Source: https://i.imgur.com/XuUFCcR.jpg
</img>
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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.
Hello Mr Ant Sir,
that chart also shows that EVE numbers have almost halved during 2019 is it doomed as well do you think?
Statistics can mean anything you want them to - I know.
that chart also shows that EVE numbers have almost halved during 2019 is it doomed as well do you think?
Statistics can mean anything you want them to - I know.
should we start a new arx thread?
Viajero
Volunteer Moderator
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.
