"pve Oriented"? You Decide.

[surrealavatar]

Alright, this is gonna be a vent post, and people can come in and rage at my rage if they want. I'm in a clan, and we often try to do runs of missions. The last 4 missions that we've done (Defense missions), at least 2 of us crashed, (At least the ones I was in) leaving the other 2 of us stranded in a high level wave and being completely and utterly slaughtered from the host migration taking about 15 seconds to switch over, leaving us there at their mercy. Spawning in dead. Not very fun.

 

So this is the problem I see, the DE team is adding WAY too much content, WAY too fast, they aren't doing any polish on anything. Fixing bugs and doing hot fixes to improve gameplay isn't polishing. Polishing is going back over all of your old things and giving them an amazing "Finish". One thing I think needs to be polished over is the bugs with inviting to games, constant host migrations happening from people CONSTANTLY crashing. And then the game session being unavailable AFTER the migration. So it kicks two out for the price of one, not bad, right? No. It is. ... That's about it, yeah, it is.

 

If you feel the need to come in here and tell me how wrong I am, that what I saw was a mass illusion, and there's a Loki hiding in my closet, you can do that, you can come in here and defend DE. They're certainly an amazing company, and them being so dedicated to making the game something amazing, which they've succeeded in doing so far is awesome, but we need to polish off and fix these bugs from re-occuring. I just missed out on a Void 2 Exterminate mission because me, and multiple other clan mates couldn't be invited, or join his session. (Yes, we're on each others friends list.) I fear that Vauban may be the cause of the crashes, my brother had crashed just after I threw a Vortex down the main enemy spawn point of Io, a long hallway, pulling at least 90 enemies into the Vortex, and he crashed, and I got booted. I think his skill may have issues with overloading with data.

 

TL;DR: DE is doing a wonderful job, but they need to go back and polish and fix small problems that make some of us extremely &!$$ed. Too much content is being added too fast, a nice polish over what we currently have could really ramp up the score. Until these bugs are fixed, I wish the rest of my fellow Tenno good luck, I'll return once I can join games again without fear of my efforts being cast into the fires of hell.

Edited June 3, 2013 by surrealavatar

[VKhaun]

Yep... but this is normal.

 

Game companies don't do polish. I have fought this battle too many times to give a crap anymore. I just don't play games where the bugs are bad, because beta bugs = release bugs. Every. Single. Time.

 

Keep asking for it. Don't get me wrong. I absolutely belive it needs to be said that this is a bad development habit but I'm warning you not to get your hopes up. I have every confidence that the release version of the game will still have people falling through maps, getting weapons that are broken or bugged, and movement control issues like grabbing ledges and jumping. That's just the way the industry works. The bean counters don't accept the decline of online games from beta/release to death, and will keep pushing them to make content instead of polish old stuff in the hopes of making more beans to count.

[MrGrae]

One hopes that sooner or later DE will decide there's enough content and balance to be getting along with and start polishing as you say, I keep getting CTD's and it is infuriating. Not game-breaking but disheartening to say the least. I simply hope the Digital Extremes address this at some point. But I have to admit, Warframe is not feature complete, polishing now, while they're still adding and refining large parts of the game is illogical since they'd just have to go back and do it again as old and new clash and cause unforeseen errors.

[MetalGerbil]

massive new patch.

issues come up.

surprised?

they need to balance getting new things out versus fixing old. do too much of either and nobody wins. but adding anything to any game, specially when its a large update, and things get messed up for a bit until things are patched up and stabilized.

is this your first beta?

[surrealavatar]

Not my first beta, but I don't think polishing takes that much time. It's as simple as digging into a feature and pulling out those infected heart valves and replacing them with new ones. Now, not simple as in "Oh, that's easy to do", simple as in the procedure itself is very straightforward. I think if they had a seperate part of the team devoted to fixing these specific bugs, and having another part that works on new content for them to fix in the future could be a viable system. But that's just me doing 1 + 1 = 2.

[GrayFox]

Don't take this reply as offensive in anyway, for starters, just think of this as "casual talk"

 

While I do agree with it, you may consider the fact that we live in a fast paced world, where everything is wanted almost instantly, and Warframe is no exception for that. As you may or may have read, a lot of the posts here want so many things in a very small window of time. Try looking at it from DE's perspective (or try to imagine what it is), They started venturing into the MMO scene with respects to learning from certain community aspects that paved the way for a good customer-provider relationship, community aspects that lead to certain distastes for other games (lack of dev team visibility etc etc) and its always apparent they are trying their best to do so. Now that they've caught the attention of their target market/audience (or a % of it), they are constantly bombarded with requests (not that they ignore them) but they're also working on a schedule, a timeframe as any game development studio/company does. DE can't solely just focus on in-game work, marketing and advertising is another thing, to potentially have a wider audience of possible income, that would lead to improving Warframe better.

 

It is noted that thew devs themselves know that a lot of things are in need of improving (they are on their to do list :P) but one person alone can do only so much work, even in for a team, they can only do such an amount of work.

 

Patience my brethren in Tenno arms, we'll definitely see Warframe in its visionary glory. 

 

 

 

In the context of Patience I'll be a bit off topic:

 

I was conflicted if I should buy the Stalker bundle right on the get go, but decided to wait for a new warframe that I can be happy with, since the weapons are already obtainable for free (just by waiting for the Stalker). And from my personal experience, that bundle itself made the existence of the Stalker to be worth the wait/the anticipation for it already has a certain degree of more depth as to what's its importance in-game (the weapons). Within the first 3 days after the release of U8, I got the dread, that really made my decision crystal clear. And as I post this, I've just claimed my Despair, completing the stalker weapons (hate and despair got it yesterday :))

 

TL;DR Too many content, not so polished. I get it, but one thing is for certain, when working with a tight schedule, a heavy work load and a very demanding customer base, people might oversee things (which is acceptable to a certain degree) and when they're pointed out, they try (and they deliver even if it's not 100%) to amend for this. Frustration, that's what I'm getting from your experience, I do understand that, but at the end of the day, DE gets the short end of the stick. May your return be as welcoming and enjoyable as you would deem so :3 Till then brave Tenno.

[Versal]

It's as simple as digging into a feature and pulling out those infected heart valves and replacing them with new ones

 

What?

[surrealavatar]

What?

Metaphorically.

[Versal]

I wouldn't consider a CABG a good metaphor for something "easy" or "simple." More so, it mirrors how polishing the game could cause other unexpected bugs to rise via complications.. I would say that polishing a game is a damn hard job, especially since you're burdened with the responsibility of pleasing a community with some palates that lean on to the CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT = GOOD GAME. We're in the generation of games where boredom is instantaneous. 

[PositronicSpleen]

For any piece of software, developers do not "polish" until the product is feature complete. Heck, sometimes they don't polish until its released if the budget/deadline is tight. It's a lot easier to catch systematic errors this way; in other words, it avoids the problem of "missing the forest for the trees".

 

The only thing really out of line with this are some of big, recent nerfs. I definitely think there was more motivation to those than balance but -- reading between the lines -- it's understandable why they happened.

[CosyPigeon]

Not my first beta, but I don't think polishing takes that much time. 

 

I'm pretty sure most of the coders at DE would laugh bitterly in your face if they heard that. Polishing does take time, finding bugs in games is time consuming, difficult, and frustrating. Your expectation that they focus on polishing the game when it is still in beta is both unrealistic and foolish. They will begin polishing the game when they feel that they have the majority of the core game aspects down pat, which they don't. currently there is no point in wasting effort in polishing the game, since so many things are subject to change and get swapped in and out based on the feedback we give them.

 

This may not be your first beta, but if you "don't think polishing takes that much time" then you sure as hell didn't learn anything from your previous ones. 

[surrealavatar]

I'm pretty sure most of the coders at DE would laugh bitterly in your face if they heard that. Polishing does take time, finding bugs in games is time consuming, difficult, and frustrating. Your expectation that they focus on polishing the game when it is still in beta is both unrealistic and foolish. They will begin polishing the game when they feel that they have the majority of the core game aspects down pat, which they don't. currently there is no point in wasting effort in polishing the game, since so many things are subject to change and get swapped in and out based on the feedback we give them.

 

This may not be your first beta, but if you "don't think polishing takes that much time" then you sure as hell didn't learn anything from your previous ones. 

 

Well no, I sure as hell wasn't part of the dev team in those beta's. My point being, the bugs that are occuring, repeatedly, and completely and utterly wasting time in missions, and destroying runs with clan mates are staggering in numbers. They could at least look back at what's causing that. Because it's breaking the game.