Can we talk about how buggy 2.1 was?

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Could people still log on and play a vast majority of the game without a hitch?

I'm telling you flat out, if that's all you expect, your standards are bizarrely low and we're unlikely to see eye-to-eye.

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Next time they should probably hold it back a few weeks

That is a straw man. What would have made more sense would have been to descope probably 1/3 of the threshold jewels so there was more time to thoroughly test the others, and once the bugs were known, communicate openly about them. Some player's outlandish tolerance notwithstanding, advertising content and then releasing it with severe issues undermines consumer confidence. This confidence is quite important to the business' ability to generate growth by word of mouth.

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Holy shit, you'd have DIED.

I feel that a single human error causes less harm to the perception of GGG's ability to deliver than these preventable errors do. Thus, I consider this update worse. This belief in their capability to deliver is crucial, for me at least, to be able to read news announcements and get excited about them.

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I'm out.

Please feel free to continue to participate, but this petulance adds nothing.

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Fluffy_Puppies wrote:

There hasn't been any game breaking bugs???

There hasn't been much server instability???

yes and yes.

2.1 was fine for me, Thanks GGG !

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Crocodarrel wrote:

The ones which bothered me the most

* Traded almost everything I had in TSC for an Eyes of the Greatwolf, which was broken and couldn't be fixed because everyone was on vacation.
* I did a Null's Inclination build for Spirit Guards only to find out it didn't work unless self casting. That was left broken for a month.
* Leveled summoner for Dead Reckoning, but it turns out skeleton mages don't work with any projectile support gems. So, they're decorative then.

We expect and deserve better yes, but your definition of a game breaking bug is wayyy off.

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For smaller bugs, a one line "we're working on this" is enough. These are not smaller bugs. Teasing content and then releasing it with these kinds of issues is a huge fuckup. I expect an ETA or patch number containing the fix at the very least, but a lot of these haven't gotten so much as an acknowledgement until we see them (or never see them) in patch notes.

How are you in any position to know what is a small or large bug?
Also, your logic is completely reversed. A small bug is easy to estimate and provide an ETA on. The large bugs are hard to estimate. The larger they are the harder they are to estimate.

Further, in an active bug fix mode (that occurs after a release) patches can be very fluid in content and time. It is a delicate balance between getting bugs patched quickly and having to many patches (which pisses off plenty of people in its own right). There are other factors that come in as well, urgency of fix, QA time, schedules of devs (some of us do have lives outside work), etc... This all factors in and can greatly effect a patches content over even a single day. So to expect that a community manager can provide any sort of ETA or patch number is laughable.

You yourself have more or less stated: "don't promise content that you can't deliver". Yet here you are asking for that very thing from a community manager.

Going on vacation that was probably planned for a long time? OMG, what terrible devs. Guess what? The release took longer than expected. I'm sure they would have preferred to release it in November, but software is hard.

Really, the options were probably cancel all devs vacation, or release and go on vacay so that the players can enjoy as much over their own vacation as possible. Lesser of 2 evils from both sides if you ask me.



20 days for a game breaking bug fix? Pretty short actually. Taking into consideration HOW those items were changing some FUNDAMENTAL interaction types. Performance fixes and mechanical changes like that need to be fixed right. Should it have been caught prior? Probably. But it might have worked in most cases and then something else changed but it didn't get tested after that change.


SOURCE: Am a dev.

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Tantabobo wrote:

How are you in any position to know what is a small or large bug?

I'd consider advertised content not working as advertised to be a High on the Low/Medium/High/Critical severity scale. Leaving my position out of it, I can tell you that this attitude is not uncommon for end users of almost any kind of software.

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Tantabobo wrote:

to expect that a community manager can provide any sort of ETA or patch number is laughable. ... Yet here you are asking for that very thing from a community manager.

I never asked for CMs to come up with estimates on their own. Developers investigate and estimate issues before they work on them anyways, GGG is almost certainly doing this for both small and large bugs. Getting that information back to the community isn't some unsolvable conundrum.

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Claiohm1708 wrote:

Really, the options were probably cancel all devs vacation, or release and go on vacay so that the players can enjoy as much over their own vacation as possible

Those weren't all the options, and even if they were, it's missing the bigger picture.

This release date was known by GGG far in advance. They had a lot of time to plan a release with a scope that they could effectively execute. As a software management practice, sailing into an iceberg like this is preventable in a lot of different ways. The common ones are delay, descope, and overtime. If you think I'm suggesting any of these three you are reading too much into what I'm saying.

All I'm saying is that "release with severe issues" is the outcome that I as a player most dislike, that open communication would have ameliorated the lost confidence, and that it hurts hype for future releases when it goes down like 2.1 did. How they ultimately remedy this in the future isn't something any of us needs to speak to.

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Claiohm1708 wrote:

software is hard.

Lousy excuse, pointless to bring that up. Promising features and then not delivering on them is very poor form, there is no good excuse for it. If all you think of GGG is some inept little office with low standards, then by all means, let them off the hook with "software is hard." If you actually respect them and hold them to the same standards as the best out there, then I think calling out a bad release is honest and seemly.

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I'd consider advertised content not working as advertised to be a High on the Low/Medium/High/Critical severity scale. Leaving my position out of it, I can tell you that this attitude is not uncommon for end users of almost any kind of software.

Severity is subjective and heavily favors the people involved. I don't disagree. But severity is not priority. Like all things, there are limited resources and even a seemingly critical bug (talisman not working as advertised) might be less important than another issue that GGG has to deal with.
So no, you can't know what is a small or large bug. Further, just because the attitude is common doesn't mean that its correct.

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I never asked for CMs to come up with estimates on their own. Developers investigate and estimate issues before they work on them anyways, GGG is almost certainly doing this for both small and large bugs. Getting that information back to the community isn't some unsolvable conundrum.

No you didn't and I did not intend to imply that (though reading what I wrote, I did) my apologies.

The gist of your post has been around GGG promising something and than not delivering on that promise.
Yet, here you are asking for that EXACT thing to occur. Until its ready in a patch, they don't know when it will be done. Sure, they have a pretty good idea. But you have already shown that being 99% correct isn't good enough. So, the correct thing to do is not give a date (there is a reason a number of companies never announce any dates until the software is already packaged).

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All I'm saying is that "release with severe issues" is the outcome that I as a player most dislike, that open communication would have ameliorated the lost confidence, and that it hurts hype for future releases when it goes down like 2.1 did. How they ultimately remedy this in the future isn't something any of us needs to speak to.

Again, find me ANY release of software that doesn't have "severe" issues on release. Also, as a secondary question, how much of the game would you say was broken on release? 1%, 5%, 15%?

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Lousy excuse, pointless to bring that up.

It is not an excuse nor being used as one. It is a reason. Software is hard, it takes a lot of time. There is an incalculable number of ways in which things can interact. To expect that its going to work flawlessly is naive at best.
As a software dev, I can affirm that we strive for everything to work right. But we arn't perfect, we can't account for everything. Things get missed, we learn from them and make sure to account for them next time.
I don't see GGG as inept at all. In fact I see them extremely adept. Which is why I give them understanding when things don't work as originally planned. The more complex a program, the more complex the interaction. The harder the testing, the harder the bugs are to find. The harder they are to fix, the harder they are to foresee. Inept? not at all.

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@Tantabobo

Thanks for the thoughtful response. I think you think I'm more attached to any specific solution than I actually am, and that I expect things to be perfect.

Setting aside how process and choices could have lessened the number and severity of issues overall, once the release was out there, they had a few options. ETAs were but one option, and you may be right in saying that providing their best ETA might be a risk not worth taking. But there's just no getting around the fact that they advertised features, released them bugged, and then said nothing about it for weeks or in some cases they still haven't. My complaint is as much about the silence afterward as it is about the bugs themselves, and I probably should have emphasized that more in the OP.

Qarl posted this thread about Dead Reckoning the day before 2.1 came out, a jewel that to this day is completely useless.

To my knowledge Qarl has not posted since. Something a dev posted about that is just left useless for months is a huge issue no matter how you look at it. This example is egregious, but the other examples were of similar severity and similarly lacking in acknowledgement. The specific bugs you have to try your best to avoid, and have to acknowledge when they slip through, are the ones your users are most hyped about. Threshold jewels and Eyes of the Greatwolf fit that criteria and should have been treated more transparently once the issues were known. Otherwise, I may think they care (and for the record, yes I believe they do), but their actions say otherwise.

I know some people disagree, but I really don't think I'm exaggerating. If you want people to get excited about your content, you have to take your content seriously after you release it.

I am of two minds on the silence. The dev in me doesn't want to say anything more than "It is being looked at" until I know what the fix is and ideally already have it checked in.
The user in me, wants much more information.

I do understand the frustration that the silence causes. It is a hard position for the any company to be in and there is no correct way to do it. So, I generally just accept it and move on.

I stand firm on my statement that "There will be bugs" in any software release. But I can understand the frustration with the dearth of communication. Especially when that communications concerns something that directly impacts you and that more information would probably not harm them in the future.


I wish you luck in Wraeclast and may the expansion be less buggy for you.