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On August 02 2012 18:38 Vamphyr wrote:Show nested quote +On August 02 2012 16:40 endy wrote:On August 02 2012 16:35 KurtistheTurtle wrote:On August 02 2012 16:28 endy wrote:
I guess that you're still going to buy HotS, so they probably don't care. no. the wallet vote is the only vote. Oh I know, that's the main reason I didn't even purchase SC2. But I'm sure Luckyfool will. Millions of RTS fans will too, because there are literally no other decent RTS on the market. I simply meant that Blizzard was abusing their monopoly position. ^This. Blizzard knows that it is the only company with a quality RTS and because of this they think they can bend our patience and tolerence every which way without any consequences. I've been in love with Starcraft since Vanilla but things are starting to get riduculus...
You're applying malign intent to what was essentially a freak accident. There are many FPS console games out there that will never be patched, if you'd rather play a game that will never experience post-patch bugs, I highly recommend you check them out.
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On August 02 2012 17:03 IceBurg wrote:
They did test. For months. The arcade beta had been open since at least march. Some things happen that you cant account for. So much QQ in here I had to check that I didnt stumble into a Diablo 3 forum by mistake.
You can definitely account for breaking the game. I really want to know what happened between the 1.5 beta and pushing it to live, because the beta certainly didn't break the game like this.
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On August 02 2012 18:30 Morfildur wrote:
Anyone with real experience in software development (not just "I wrote a website") knows that releasing anything will lead to problems, even if you send it 20 times through QA and have every single line of code covered by a dozen Unit Tests.
Game Development is a very, very complex topic and such problems happen sooner or later, it's just a matter of how fast they are with fixing it.
Actually, this is incorrect. With appropriate testing to a very high standard, you can eliminate the vast majority of problems. This testing, though, is expensive and takes a lot of time, and does not normally apply outside of regulated software development. As an example, I would not expect CCP, Blizzard, Bioware, or another game company to invest that much time and money into testing on a game. As someone that formerly worked for a company that did nothing but software testing and QA for regulated applications (primarily avionics and medical devices), I can assure you that these programs are held to a very high standard by regulatory agencies and that thousands of man hours are spent in code review, simulation testing, hardware/software interaction testing, and run into the ground so that possible bugs and error conditions are handled without crashing the system or having it behave in an irrational manner. (Would really suck if an Airbus 380 or Boeing 777 had a "blue screen" on takeoff or approach, or if the Instrument Landing System were to suddenly forget where it was.)
Wings of Liberty is (obviously) not on the same level as "critical life support software", but it is slightly above the average console or computer game as it is the basis for a pretty good segment of a multimillion dollar industry. I'm not sure how it would work out (legally speaking) if during ASUS ROG we saw a 1 supply roach max vs a Kaldarin amulet templar army. (I think it'd be hilarious, but it's not my money riding on the line.)
I do agree with you, though, that the really important thing is how Blizzard fixes this, and how fast they do it. That more than anything will affect how people view the company. (For comparison, look at the SOE mess around SWG (or, as I call it, Smed is a bastard and I will never purchase their products again) and how CCP handled the community rage over the Incarna expansion for EVE (aka, Soundwave is a troll).
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On August 02 2012 18:37 bgx wrote:Show nested quote +On August 02 2012 18:28 rockshock wrote:On August 02 2012 18:25 Kleinmuuhg wrote:On August 02 2012 18:21 rockshock wrote:
I do wonder tho, Did any of the peopel QQing hard over this patch actually test the beta and give full feedback to blizzard? Or are you people who just jump on it now thats it out into your actual game. And to be fair it doesnt take ages to look through a profile and find out the league of people unless youre totally emptied for braincells of course. Use common logic and its not that hard to figure out. Its not the job of the players to test the beta and give feedback to blizzard? Blizzard uses the beta to get it's product tested and if it isnt voluntarily tested they have to find another way. Theres a public PTR for a reason. Of course its upto the community to test the patch. I dont see how the community got any right to whine and cry about stuff not working when theres been a beta for it for ages. And theres no way blizzard got the means to fully test it on theyr own. Thats why we got a public PTR in the first place. Your reasoning is disgusting. If blizzard is incapable of testing the patch it gives them NO RIGHT to implement the patch live and test it there. In fact it should prohibit them from applying the patch.
Um.. actually they're well within their rights to release a buggy patch. Or a bad patch. They could completely destroy the balance of the game, throw their hands up in the air and say "WAIT UNTIL HotS WE'LL FIX IT THEN LOL ROFL SUCKER" and that'd be that. There's no consumer protection against them making mistakes that cost you nothing or devalue your purchase that I'm aware of.
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Germany2896 Posts
Blizzard's patch record is pretty bad. Remember patch 1.16? Many simply stayed on 1.15.3, and everybody else hacked their game so it didn't suck that much. Or the ladder features around 1.14? Delayed forever, then released broken, poor WGT. Solution: Custom server + old version, then it doesn't matter how much blizzard fucks up their patches.
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On August 02 2012 18:51 felisconcolori wrote:Show nested quote +On August 02 2012 18:30 Morfildur wrote:
Anyone with real experience in software development (not just "I wrote a website") knows that releasing anything will lead to problems, even if you send it 20 times through QA and have every single line of code covered by a dozen Unit Tests.
Game Development is a very, very complex topic and such problems happen sooner or later, it's just a matter of how fast they are with fixing it. Actually, this is incorrect. With appropriate testing to a very high standard, you can eliminate the vast majority of problems. This testing, though, is expensive and takes a lot of time, and does not normally apply outside of regulated software development. As an example, I would not expect CCP, Blizzard, Bioware, or another game company to invest that much time and money into testing on a game. As someone that formerly worked for a company that did nothing but software testing and QA for regulated applications (primarily avionics and medical devices), I can assure you that these programs are held to a very high standard by regulatory agencies and that thousands of man hours are spent in code review, simulation testing, hardware/software interaction testing, and run into the ground so that possible bugs and error conditions are handled without crashing the system or having it behave in an irrational manner. (Would really suck if an Airbus 380 or Boeing 777 had a "blue screen" on takeoff or approach, or if the Instrument Landing System were to suddenly forget where it was.) Wings of Liberty is (obviously) not on the same level as "critical life support software", but it is slightly above the average console or computer game as it is the basis for a pretty good segment of a multimillion dollar industry. I'm not sure how it would work out (legally speaking) if during ASUS ROG we saw a 1 supply roach max vs a Kaldarin amulet templar army. (I think it'd be hilarious, but it's not my money riding on the line.) I do agree with you, though, that the really important thing is how Blizzard fixes this, and how fast they do it. That more than anything will affect how people view the company. (For comparison, look at the SOE mess around SWG (or, as I call it, Smed is a bastard and I will never purchase their products again) and how CCP handled the community rage over the Incarna expansion for EVE (aka, Soundwave is a troll).
While i mostly agree with you there are some factors to consider:
The difference to avionics and medical applications is that those run on a defined hardware, have a very limited scope and the interfacing with other parts of the system is very strictly defined.
As an example, there is no situation like:
User clicks on 'Find Match' but before the Server returns the response, the user clicks on something else which means the asynchronous request requires a different callback but it can't be used yet since the other request is still pending, which means we either need a new thread or we have to delay the User until the first one finishes, making the UI feel slower and making the User create 'Battle.Net UI is too slow' posts. I myself had several situations where i was too fast for the battle.net UI and got into a deadlock preventing me from joining custom games until i relogged because i clicked a button before the system was ready since my internet was faster than my PC, making it show the custom games list before the cached mapdata was loaded from the slow harddrive.
In a heavily client/server oriented UI there is a lot of asynchronous stuff going on, which is by nature extremely hard if not almost impossible to perfectly debug - especially considering that different hardware and operating systems schedule the threads differently and different internet connections lead to threads taking longer for different sections of the code.
If their QA systems all have ok internet connections (i.e. usual corporate internet) they can miss problems that appear on very unreliable connections that have occasional spikes or suffer from package loss like some WLAN connections through 3 stone walls that some people use at home.
Sure, with proper programming you can avoid 95% of those problems but you can never completely get rid of them in a program of that scope if you still want to have a very responsive UI and short release cycles.
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I agree, this is too extreme and completely unacceptable.
I can't for the life of me understand how this patch could go through with so many bugs. Quite a few of them are dangerous too - could easily mess up some "real" games. I hope Blizzard in the future tests their patches better - we can't have a repeat of this.
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Bugs happen, its sucks but thats life.
Every game has this problem, especially when the beta test is carried out by only a few thousand people. Hardly anyone who actually plays SC2 will have spent any major time on the beta test since they will have been playing the actual game. Of those who did participate in the beta, many were probably just messing around and not actually testing things out.
Once the patch is released, hundreds of thousands of people are using it and then more bugs will arise..... its a quantity issue. This was a major overhaul of the entire game and its backbone, the same thing happens in WoW and just about every other game out there when a major patch hits. They test and test and test but simply don't have the numbers of people testing to ever find all the bugs.
Granted some of the bugs probably happened when applying the patch to the live servers but they can't know what bugs are going to arise until after the fact. The mark of a good company is what they do once the bugs are found, if blizz doesn't fix them for a month or two when they suck, but if every other blizz game is anything to go by, hotfixes will be out within the next few hours and days.
Stop moaning about things that are actually out of Blizzards hands. No one can predict what bugs or glitches or problems may arise once a patch goes live. They will be fixed. Stop being bitchy little children and join the rest of us in the real world please. The bugs have been reported, blizz will fix them, life will go on.
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I can't imagine people being so bitter as to stage a boycott of the game because of two days of some bugs in a patch that will quickly be fixed. It's so weird, instead of asking yourself whether Blizzard deserves your money, why not ask yourself whether Heart of the Swarm will be worth your money without starving yourself from a game you'd enjoy for spiteful reasons.
Obviously, there were too many bugs and it's not acceptable, but still...
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Short answer:
Blizzard is a monopoly. They can get away with stuff like this. And they know it.
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I'm also a professional software dev, and I've been responsible for introducing unit and functional testing into the QA process at the company I work for, so I know a bit about this. I am absolutely certain that a lot of the bugs we're seeing, like the optimizer's inability to handle insufficient hard drive space, could and should have been covered by a test (automated or in a human test protocol). The errors in the process that generates the balance ruleset for a newly created game also seem like they should have obviously been covered by an automated test to me: There are a limited number of ways to open a new game, you loop through all of them and compare a hash of the data comprising the ruleset in the generated game to a hash of the expected ruleset.
Other stuff, like the weird pathing in certain situations, is basically impossible to write tests for in advance, since before you know which paths produce errors, you'd basically need a working pathing algorithm to generate the data against which you're comparing your results, and I'd imagine that the edge conditions for a pathing algorithm are incredibly complex. I would bet that there were dozens of special cases that the new pathing algorithm handled incorrectly, and we're seeing the one or two that slipped through QA.
My takeaway from this is that there is a mix of forgivable bugs of the sort that we should be prepared to accept in exchange for the advantages of having a game that is actively maintained and patched by its developers, and other bugs that should never, ever show up in professional code.
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blizzard needs a launcher that doesnt suck
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Perfectly expressed blog post regarding the epic fail 1.5 patch... I hope Dustin etc read it.
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On August 02 2012 18:30 Morfildur wrote:Show nested quote +On August 02 2012 18:13 Chargelot wrote:
What people don't seem to understand is that it's not as simple as "it works here, therefore it will work there." It's something they've remarked on in WoW and SC2 before. Applying a patch to the live servers is a lot different than creating a patched PTR. They could have 1,000,000 of the finest QA employees on call 24/7, but it wouldn't make a difference come patch day.
The bugs and errors did not exist on the PTR, but they do exist on the live servers. Why is that? Something went wrong when they were applying the patch. You can't test the quality of patching, only what is to be patched. When you're doing such a massive overhaul, yes, sometimes these things can happen. The patch was fine. The patching was not. I'm sure they'd be open to highly technical suggestions on how to prevent this from happening in the future. Hell, they'd employ you if you fixed this issue. This. We don't have any insight into the Blizzard release process and assuming they don't test their stuff thoroughly before releasing is, well, stupid. Anyone with real experience in software development (not just "I wrote a website") knows that releasing anything will lead to problems, even if you send it 20 times through QA and have every single line of code covered by a dozen Unit Tests. Game Development is a very, very complex topic and such problems happen sooner or later, it's just a matter of how fast they are with fixing it.
I have no idea how Blizzard release management works but is it not safe to assume it's not good after such a terrible release? I agree with you that there are always bugs and problems with new code, it's part of the business. Shouldn't part of your development process allow for adequate testing? If you can't sufficiently test and verify all changes are working properly, maybe the scope of the patch was too large in one shot which is still a quality control issue.
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On August 02 2012 19:17 MasterOfChaos wrote:
Blizzard's patch record is pretty bad. Remember patch 1.16? Many simply stayed on 1.15.3, and everybody else hacked their game so it didn't suck that much. Or the ladder features around 1.14? Delayed forever, then released broken, poor WGT. Solution: Custom server + old version, then it doesn't matter how much blizzard fucks up their patches.
Yeah but by that point it was clear they had like one intern working on bw. This is the big patch leading up to the expansion of HotS, and it's terrible. The ui improvements are more like yet another round of lateral movements where they just change things but don't really improve anything, on top of all the buggy shit. It's embarrassing.
I just have no faith in this company to produce anything of quality any more
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United Kingdom1715 Posts
Makes me chuckle (in a cynical, frustrated way) that most people here will just go straight back to using the game however broken it is, and paying Blizzard money for HOTS. Even the people who say they won't.
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they lack people with certain skills it seems...
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United Kingdom16710 Posts
On August 02 2012 22:27 floor exercise wrote:Show nested quote +On August 02 2012 19:17 MasterOfChaos wrote:
Blizzard's patch record is pretty bad. Remember patch 1.16? Many simply stayed on 1.15.3, and everybody else hacked their game so it didn't suck that much. Or the ladder features around 1.14? Delayed forever, then released broken, poor WGT. Solution: Custom server + old version, then it doesn't matter how much blizzard fucks up their patches. Yeah but by that point it was clear they had like one intern working on bw. This is the big patch leading up to the expansion of HotS, and it's terrible. The ui improvements are more like yet another round of lateral movements where they just change things but don't really improve anything, on top of all the buggy shit. It's embarrassing. I just have no faith in this company to produce anything of quality any more
What makes you think there's more than 1 intern working on WoL? XD
SC2 is clearly quite low on Blizzard, and particularly, Activision's priority list. No one should be surprised they messed up like this.
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I haven't checked out the new patch myself just yet... And given all the discussions going on at the moment, I don't plan to. Pretty terrible attempt at an update by pretty much all reports.
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All I can say is thank you based Valve for making and supporting DoTA2
+ Show Spoiler + Now make an RTS esport ;;;;
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EPT
