Is it okay when the dev said it's too much work for them to fix a bug so they decide not to?

[Zimzala]

10 hours ago, Kooooooooooooooo said:

What do you mean?

DE is doing an excellent job on bug fixing on Bugframe? You blew my mind brother.

I mean people make mistakes, sometimes the same one, it happens, live with it.

Yes., they are doing very well, look at their profits.

The game has to run well enough to work well enough for the majority, even if your specific code bug is still there.

You can try to act like you are the owner of DE and demand that it be perfect all you want, it's still going to be an unreasonable request.

Kvetch, moan, do what you like, do what makes you happy.

Just because a salty group of emotionally immature gamers have decided to seriously call the game bugframe because they have no real power over their own lives and they think they need to attack the developer of the games they play to feel better about themselves, does not make it true. All games like this have bugs, some hard to chase. That's reality.

Happy Gaming.

Edited October 25, 2023 by Zimzala

[Kooooooooooooooo]

18小时前 , Zimzala 说:

I think DE is doing a satisfactory if not excellent job on bug fixing. I don't care if anyone does not agree.

 

24分钟前 , Zimzala 说:

Yes., they are doing very well, look at their profits.

You don't assess their work on bug fixing by looking at the profits, but looking at the bugs.

[ShogunGunshow]

On 2023-10-24 at 12:08 AM, (PSN)haphazardlynamed said:

it's pretty obvious that glitches are piling up the last few updates faster than they're getting hotfixed.

It's gotten so, so much worse since they implemented simultaneous updates between console and PC.

Used to be, console was lagged an update or so behind PC. So, DE didn't have to wait for the process of console certification whenever code needed to be changed with a new update on PC. DE would do lots of code changes and fixes for a few weeks before moving onto the next update, and all those fixes would be already in place when that update was rolled to consoles, dramatically reducing the need for further code updates and cert being a problem.

That is no longer the case, but DE doesn't really seem to have restructured their internal testing to account for the change. Because of console cert, DE gets maybe one or two swings at code changes to fix problems with whatever their latest update is before the devs get dragged away to work on the next update. Piling onto that that their QA testing is among the worst I've seen in the industry, and it's no surprise we've been standing on a steadily accumulating mound of bugs. And 'hire more devs' or 'hire more/better QA' seems to be a thing they just refuse to do. 

You are only guaranteed to get a fast fix on something when it's a bug in the player's favor. 

[Nekomian]

5 hours ago, Packetdancer said:

Oh, it's certainly possible to make informed guesses; those of us who have worked on large software projects which have reached a certain age, or on games professionally—or both—can often hazard a guess as to why a fix might be complicated based on personal experience, especially when observed behavior of the game does give some hints as to how a system works under the hood.

But whether or not it's accurate? Only actual folks who have worked on the game's codebase would know for sure.

1000% agree with this; I like to make some nice guesses about what might be wrong based on my experiences and logging, but in the end it's all conjecture; I trust the word of someone who actually works with the codebase and understands the scope of a project better a lot more.

5 hours ago, Packetdancer said:

That rule being "No open and unresolved bug ticket in a software project should be older than the youngest engineer working on the project."

I love this haha, I can only imagine what some systems' JIRA hell looks like.

4 hours ago, maddragonmaster said:

so why don't we focus on what DE did fix in warframe why don't we?

I think for most people it's easy to gloss over the things they do fix or focus on because they're mostly generic or wide-reaching; i.e. "fixed script error for this", or "fixed displaced piece of armor or cyst", while there's an extremely vocal minority that uses specific equipment and will actively voice concerns about if it's not working as they want it to / as intended. Every single hotfix I see the exact same issues posted ad nauseum by the same people, when tbh the general warframe player just does not care or even visits forums at all. This game has so many mechanics and functions that it's impossible for one not to be broken at any given time, and there's always going to be some subset of players begging for changes to their one specific beloved frame, mod, or weapon.

They absolutely do regularly fix things and make QoL changes, it's just often not the ones that you see people repeat on forums. I do wish they would prioritize their backlog a bit more since it gets really bad and they tend to focus on pushing out fixes for immediate content (which makes sense for a live service game), but it's not inherently wrong or bad to take the approaches they do. I've brought up before that I wish they had a specific team solely for backlogged issues, but I understand that may not be feasible in their workflow so it's mostly just wishful thinking.

There's this sort of disconnect between the players and devs though that stems from this, because players can point at a bug and go "it's so bad, this bug has been in the game 6+ years, how is TWW still looping for people" when in the background devs may have spent 3 weeks troubleshooting it to find it only affected 0.001% of players and they couldn't resolve it. It doesn't look good from the player perspective, but they have no insight into the game dev process and it's probably exhausting for the devs to explain themselves for every single issue or bug. I'm pretty vocal about wanting egregious / long standing bugs fixed too, but I also get they have priorities that may not make that feasible - some people tend to go "they make millions just hire more people, throw more money and effort at it, greedy business is greedy" when more often than not it's out of devs control since there's just so many factors at play and it's rarely that simple.

I don't think any dev actively wants to make horrible or buggy games, they'd ideally want to fix everything and make it an absolutely perfect experience for players - but that's just not the reality of things, especially for live service games, and trade-offs have to be made regarding level of effort.

Last minute edit cause new post:

5 minutes ago, ShogunGunshow said:

It's gotten so, so much worse since they implemented simultaneous updates between console and PC.

Yeah, I've voiced my issue with this too - everything requires build parity / cert now, and a lot of things that were priority fixes on PC get delayed for weeks now. I don't think their current workflow works very well for this, and it's become very apparent as of 2023 as the time between updates has gotten a lot larger as well (meaning time between fixes is also a lot greater). I know it would cost them more, but they really need to focus more on QA and completely resolving any major game-breaking bugs before committing to any cert build. Things may still slip through sure, but as it currently stands it's like a major update comes out and you honestly have to wait a month or two to play it correctly / as intended without it having some catastrophic issue. Like, there's still the issue with circuit late joins being assigned "suit" (placeholder frame) that gets reported every few days and it's been out a while now, which makes me think their QA does not test for any sort of network delay or connectivity interruption simulation that would highlight these deficiencies.

I get not every game dev cycle can be tears of the kingdom and spend an entire year on polish, but I feel like whatever current standard they're adhering to just doesn't work at scale anymore; it might've been OK a few years back and with less complex systems in place, but it's really showing now with the delays that build parity brings (even if overall that parity is good and allows them to do things like cross-play / cross-save).

[Raarsi]

TBH, I feel like Pablo's being generous on the timeframe with just one programmer working on it.  Lots of plug-ins, lots of interactions to factor in and work with, all for the 60-ish individual helminth abilities for each individual warframe, and I'd think it'd just be easier to not put helminth abilities on Umbra.  I'm not saying bugs shouldn't be fixed though; I'm saying that only so many fires can be put out while working on new content that some things can be afforded to let fall through the cracks such as this issue with Umbra, which is such a niche circumstance where it's annoying but not game-crashing or game-breaking.

Could Pablo have given a better-worded response?  Probably.  Did Pablo give a realistic answer?  I'm inclined to believe it.

[Ace-Bounty-Hunter]

On 2023-10-24 at 8:08 AM, (PSN)haphazardlynamed said:

So I'd suggest: hire more programmers?

Anyone who says this clearly have no idea how businesses work.

[(PSN)GEN-Son_17]

10 hours ago, Skoomaseller said:

don't really need a benchmark, there's a certain level of expectation players should have with regards to competency when it comes to issues like this one, especially so when said company has been, again, in the industry for a while.

Yes, and there's a certain level of understanding and expectation devs should have of the community when it comes to communication and comprehension. For example, some players pretending not to see the gigantic list of updates, changes and bug fixes that DE posts after every update...only to then claim DE ignores change, update and bug requests. I mean, literal transparency of work, shown to us every time, and some people choose to ignore it for the sake of getting their own agendas across.

It's a stupid thing for people to have to go through but we do. I especially hate that the devs have to deal with this assumption and accusation crap while constantly having to watch their words, control their emotions and show extraordinary amounts of patience because....man, nevermind. Same ole, same ole.

[ShogunGunshow]

And to be fair to DE, Warframe is an enormously complex game built on layers and layers of added systems and reworks over a decade. Like, I give them S#&$ about not catching the Chroma Elemental Ward values ahead of time, but it's, like, the only ability that works that way, in a roster of over 50 warframes and 200+ abilities. I only caught it ahead of time because I had been fooling around recently with Chroma and remembered that it boosted base values.

But also to be fair the other way, it's really embarrassing when it's clear sometimes that they only tested something in graybox once. 

But it's also really hard to find QA for a game that's as complicated as this, because unless they're avid players themselves, they likely can't know all the various interactions and systems in depth enough to break it like we do on the regular.

Which SHOULD mean that DE should leverage its playerbase's experience and have a test server. Which DE did do, like ... once? Twice? And then stopped. That was years and years ago, though, and I think they would actually get a lot of value out of a PC test server that they can rapidly iterate on for fixes before it gets pushed to live. 

Edited October 25, 2023 by ShogunGunshow

[Packetdancer]

14 minutes ago, ShogunGunshow said:

But it's also really hard to find QA for a game that's as complicated as this, because unless they're avid players themselves, they likely can't know all the various interactions and systems in depth enough to break it like we do on the regular.

Even when they are avid players, we vastly outnumber them; unless they have a considerably larger QA department than most game companies, a bug that only affects 0.5% of scenarios because it relies on a very specific unexpected interaction between two systems might never show up even when they are avid players playing the game the same way we do.

If, however, you put the build into the hands of several hundred thousand players, that 0.5% thing is way more likely to turn up.

(And, let's be honest, even if we assume every single tester at DE is an avid player of the game in their off-hours, QA and testing is not the same as just playing the game; you usually have a checklist of things you need to work down, for one thing, as opposed to just throwing random things at the walls to try to Make Big Number More Big in strange and potentially-unplanned ways.)

[Voltage]

17 hours ago, (PSN)GEN-Son_17 said:

But that is more about people choosing not to understand what he's saying and, more weirdly, choosing not to know Pablo's typical way of communicating with the public. I mean, when the heck have you ever seen or heard about Pablo, of ALL people, sounding the way op and some of you guys are suggesting? Really dude? I am quite sure you know what he meant and are just trying to stir the pot. You, @Voltage have been around for a long time and now you suddenly don't know how Pablo works? It has nothing to do with profit and loss and you know it.

Weird times bros. It's like a lot of people would rather choose to not even try to think about context anymore. 

I merely pointed out how the way it was written could drive someone to read it in that way. Not everyone is a Warframe encyclopedia who knows the years of incidents and ins-and-outs of communication. Both of my comments stated agreement to his response, as well as the blunt honesty and validity of how it was written. I'm also a pessimist, and there's just nothing that will change that.

It's rich you quoting me for omitting context when you're grilling my comment by doing the same. If I was purely interested in stirring the pot, I would be OP.

Everyone has biases, and that also leaks into the way people read things. That's just how opinionated discussions work. My initial comment eluded to the Blizzard comparison, because that's the kind of thing they stumbled over with Overwatch 2 and Diablo IV topics. They weren't being dishonest there, just pulling the "money and resources are the important part here" card. That's not wrong for reasoning in this context. It's actually likely the most important one. It still stings to read as a player though, especially when it affects a specific Warframe you love using. Your game-breaking issue being shortened to "too expensive, probably not" is frustrating in that position. 

People playing games and people making games are on opposite sides of the scale. Pablo's response is in that ugly cross-road. 

All we can do here on the Forums in the context of reporting bugs is to just document them, with detail, and inhale copium that they are fixed before the game shuts down or we quit. There's really nothing else to it.

This is precisely why you see me hardly reporting bugs (unless it personally affect my goals with the game), and I stick to the feedback side of things. I'm already well aware of and in agreement with what Pablo just illustrated, and that's why I really don't bother, because I already know that this is how bugs are handled. Feedback is a place where the discussion is purely based on passion and intent to improve Warframe, not a game of darts with how much a black and white issue like a bug is costing the company.

Edited October 25, 2023 by Voltage

[Nekomian]

5 hours ago, Packetdancer said:

Even when they are avid players, we vastly outnumber them; unless they have a considerably larger QA department than most game companies, a bug that only affects 0.5% of scenarios because it relies on a very specific unexpected interaction between two systems might never show up even when they are avid players playing the game the same way we do.

So I absolutely agree with this, QA is difficult and they're never going to reasonably find everything that players do at scale, with tons of different equipment and millions of users vs a single department doing testing; however, on the other hand some of the bugs we get are just... laughably common, and should've easily shown up in QA. Hence why I suggested their workflow might need some adjustment, because every update we'll get a very common, reproducible bug that magically manifests it for players (this time it was the operator void blast one likely due to auto-melee code, last time it was the weird last grasp / camera positioning on transference bug, etc.).

I'm not expecting a QA dept to catch every bug in the build ever, but they should at the very least get all the common or wide-reaching ones and those should be resolved before a cert build is specified, otherwise we have to wait weeks for it to be resolved while it affects everyone (like with the duviri boosters issue too). I don't know if they're not being given enough time to fix things that QA is catching or their unit tests just aren't robust enough to catch ones like this or what, but with build parity requiring cert builds for code changes now it's an awful long wait to get some things fixed that can't be resolved with scripts or asset changes. I think that's outwardly what a lot of people see too, as "another update, another major bug" and it causes this feedback loop of putting a bad impression on players thinking every update is a buggy mess when it's likely just one or two common things while they fixed like 500+.

[Stafelund]

On 2023-10-24 at 9:37 PM, Keiyadan said:

to be fair it took three years to remove a bad syndicate medallion spwan so i guess a month is way to fast

Still happens.

[Packetdancer]

2 hours ago, Naroxas44 said:

however, on the other hand some of the bugs we get are just... laughably common, and should've easily shown up in QA

I should make it clear I don't actually disagree with this, either; it is clear that something in the QA process is not quite working right. Whether it's because something's changed in how QA is being handled, or whether something which should have changed has not.

I mean, it would not shock me if their process was built around a whole bunch of rapid-fire smaller changes on the PC build (and thus smaller bite-size chunks of changes to QA prior to release) and has broken due to PC update cadence now being determined by console certification. Just as one possibility.

So, yeah, I will cut a lot of slack for some of the weirder bugs we find in this game. It is an old and complicated codebase, and no doubt digital gremlins lurk in many forgotten corners. But things like the auto-melee bug (and associated reappearance of Void Blast) should not have slipped through any reasonable QA process; on that we are entirely in agreement.

(I mean, yes, every now and then some spectacular bug is going to slip through. No QA process is perfect. But when it happens with several notable bugs, that's more concerning.)

[(PSN)Madurai-Prime]

If they can't get to it at the moment, that's just how it is. 

The rest is a person over reacting because "this person doesn't talk how I want them to talk".

[Zimzala]

On 2023-10-25 at 6:06 AM, Kooooooooooooooo said:

You don't assess their work on bug fixing by looking at the profits, but looking at the bugs.

Yes, Yes I Do.

The point of fixing the bugs is not to kill them all, but to kill enough of them to keep the game running and profitable.

The game is running and profitable.

Therefore, the bug fixing is successful and looking at the profits and longevity of the game, great even.

I realize the nit-picking pedantic gamers of WF will wail and gnash teeth at such a statement, makes me smile.

You don't have to agree, your agreement or approval is as unnecessary and irrelevant as mine is, the reality speaks for itself.

I get that many gamers think the goal of the developer is to kiss their hindquarters and drop everything to please them, but the actual quote is "The customer is always right, in matters of taste", not "The customer is always right". Fashionframe for life!

So, while you and others will never, ever, get off the high horse you ride in some effort to make a game developer spend more time and money on your pet-peeves than NASA would through guilt and strawmen, I will sit here in my beach chair an laugh at your antics, having seen countless pedantic gamers kvetch for decades about this topic, and enjoy the creations of the game developers, instead of trying to find fault.

Terrible of me, I know, to just enjoy things rather than tearing them down.

Happy Gaming!

[DrBorris]

It is fascinating how your assumptions about a person/company can affect your perception of their actions.

Edited October 26, 2023 by DrBorris

[Kooooooooooooooo]

48分钟前 , Zimzala 说:

Yes, Yes I Do.

The point of fixing the bugs is not to kill them all, but to kill enough of them to keep the game running and profitable.

The game is running and profitable.

Therefore, the bug fixing is successful and looking at the profits and longevity of the game, great even.

I realize the nit-picking pedantic gamers of WF will wail and gnash teeth at such a statement, makes me smile.

You don't have to agree, your agreement or approval is as unnecessary and irrelevant as mine is, the reality speaks for itself.

I get that many gamers think the goal of the developer is to kiss their hindquarters and drop everything to please them, but the actual quote is "The customer is always right, in matters of taste", not "The customer is always right". Fashionframe for life!

So, while you and others will never, ever, get off the high horse you ride in some effort to make a game developer spend more time and money on your pet-peeves than NASA would through guilt and strawmen, I will sit here in my beach chair an laugh at your antics, having seen countless pedantic gamers kvetch for decades about this topic, and enjoy the creations of the game developers, instead of trying to find fault.

Terrible of me, I know, to just enjoy things rather than tearing them down.

Happy Gaming!

Seeing you keep writing essay with different labelling and metaphor to degrade others also makes me smile.

Loud and clear sir!

Happy Gaming!