Horizons More waiting....

[samuelb]

I am a beta tester, always have been since just post Alpha (missed it by two days), so I am no fly-by-night, Johnny come lately player (if that even matters).

I Beta tested 2.2 for a few hours and decided, this looks good, I am going back to the live server to build credits ready for the off.

Today (yesterday was a wash out) I plug in the HOTAS, boot up ED and I am off - passenger missions in my long neglected Orca, here I come, woo hoo.

No.

Within an hour I had four post-it notes with bugs on them next to my PC.

Four.

So it looks like I am back to waiting again. I refuse point blank to put any more time into this bug infested game. My time is precious and it is now going elsewhere. Shame.

Why, oh why, (and I realise I am not the only one to make this noise) do FD not sort the existing bugs out before introducing a plethora of new ones?

I run my own business which relies upon custom software that we produce and if I started behaving in this way my company would go the way of the Titanic. I would love to look at FD's QC procedure because something is wrong.

Now I know I am risking the wrath of the die hard fans here (BTW I am one), but can no-one else see this spiral of bugs upon bugs is hurting this game?

If there is something I am missing please let me know, I am always happy to be educated but as it stands, I cannot see any logic in this approach.

 

[Hydrino]

Everyone's mileage varies with PC game bugs. I find very few bugs with ED, certainly no more than with many other games I have bought.

It also helps to formally report the bugs we find/experience.

I work in a huge organization and we use custom and cots software to do businessy things and we have bugs even with software from huge vendors with much deeper pockets and thicker staff than FD. I had an issue with Microsoft Exchange today where it sent out an email to a person I had removed from a distribution list and that our Exchange Team had already checked a week ago due to the same issue; mysteriously the person returned on the sent mail but wasn't visible in the member list! I can't stop using our email however.

I'm not trying to shout you down as your experience is 100% valid. I just disagree with any assertion that FD are not trying to fix bugs, and that most transactional business software is as complex a beast to trouble-shoot as ED.

FD has publicly confirmed they keep a variety of test rigs, including older hardware, in an effort to catch and replicate bugs in the diverse PC ecosystem. That's no excuse, but chasing edge case bugs takes time and money and FD continue to do that. If you read the change log you can certainly see FD has fixed many, many bugs with this release (as with all past releases), and put some speculative fixes in for others. They will continue to do so. It is in their own interest to have as few bugs as possible. But should they stop artists and UI persons and audio engineers to chase down a bug in the Stellar Forge or Networking code? I don't think so.

I do hope your bugs get fixed soon so you can enjoy the game.

 

[samuelb]

Thank you.

I was fully expecting someone to reply with vitriol but your well thought out, measured reply has (with the help of 12 hours distance from the issue) encouraged me to keep plodding on.

Glad that I had my rant - always makes you feel better.

Fly safe commander.

 

[Pyrotiger]

Bugs are annoying me today. Like after every update, the autopilot becomes possessed with suicidal tendencies. And now ships are getting stuck in the dock again, and spinning round again. These bugs are old, often reported...and still not fixed. I don't get it.

 

[Shadowdancer]

So many bugs will be overloked by people experiencing them, others get assigned a low severity and are slated to be fixed after launch, and some are just so absurd that even if they are reported, they can't be tracked down in time to even find the root cause. Two examples for that last group would be the "AI weapons cheat" in 2.1 where enemy ships were assembling weapons by a combination of memory management and networking (basically hardcore haxx0r AI), and the "jumping escape vector" during interdictions that turned out to only happen when the interdiction crossed between bodies with differently inclined orbits. Both of those had developers post on these forums in great and fun detail. Any sufficiently complex piece of software will have a lot of those with wildly varying visibility and severity.

Does this suck for players? Hell yeah! But player experience varies a lot. Since 2.2 hit and also during the beta, I've been doing "my stuff" which is mostly lightweight bouncing around the place, exploration, and recreational buggy driving, and that all works a lot better than before.

 

[BillD]

Bugs are annoying me today. Like after every update, the autopilot becomes possessed with suicidal tendencies. And now ships are getting stuck in the dock again, and spinning round again. These bugs are old, often reported...and still not fixed. I don't get it.

I have been using the Autopilot on my anaconda for about a month now with no incidents in hundreds of dockings and landings at all, until the beta. Man this thing has totally missed the slot 3 times docking on standard Coriolis stations now out of 5 docking attempts. I have had to to take control apply full power to shields to absorb the impact, then back it up and do it myself.
I have uninstalled it now.