EPTGraviton Beam Bug - Page 11
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Mr.Minionman
United States164 Posts
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SaintsTheMetal
United States45 Posts
Aargh, now all us Protoss are being forced to learn another micro during battle, which will screw us up yet again when this is fixed in 1 or 2 months, or however long what should have been a hotfix takes! If only blizzard didn't have infinite loyal customers that they actually cared to keep as close to 100% as possible, perhaps this would be fixed by now. Hell, they could just switch it back to the old way for a temporary fix!! I'd take a 1/200 chance of the graviton beam not working, then my worker killing slowing down immensely and potentially costing me phoenix lives! | ||
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xiyuema
87 Posts
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Wolf
Korea (South)3290 Posts
On October 10 2010 13:50 xiyuema wrote: ppl seem to think blizzard has an unlimited source of developers and testers and they all work for free and all have all this free time. i dont think thats the case. There are people working on bug fixes. I'm sure the bug was found and fixed no longer than an hour after the game was released. The issue is repeatedly patching the game, and Blizzard isn't willing to do that. I wish they would patch it soon, but they don't want to be seen as overpatching, I think. | ||
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cucumber
United States116 Posts
On October 10 2010 13:50 xiyuema wrote: ppl seem to think blizzard has an unlimited source of developers and testers and they all work for free and all have all this free time. i dont think thats the case. You know, in many many other cases I would agree with this. And in every case of complex software systems I agree with everyone in this thread who has pointed out that Q&A, testing, debugging, and maintenance are huge expenses and are hard. Changes to complex systems introduce new bugs and expose/create regressions. Often very subtle and tricky regressions or new bugs. If the change to phoenixes had caused a bug affecting creep spread that only manifested in certain situations in 3v3 and 4v4 matchups, then that would be one thing. Someone who reads TL would have been irate and posted a thread, and that person would have righty been told to chill -- because complex systems are hard and you've got to appreciate that. But the phoenix bug is not that thing. The phoenix bug is just an example of broken software process. The person who checked in the changes to phoenix first had a local copy of the source + game resources. This person did not fly some phoenixes around and test their basic functionality before checking those changes into the main branch. That is obvious embarrassing fact #1. The main branch, I might add, for a released software product that goes out to millions of people upon patch release. That is a corollary to everything else in this comment and really puts the icing on the cake made of embarrassment. Then the person who checked that change in without basic testing of the affected unit made a note, which we know because the change was explicitly called out in the patch release notes, that this change had been made. The next day Blizzard's QA people came into work and found out changes had been made to the phoenix. No one in Blizzard's QA department proceeded to fly some phoenixes around to test their basic functionality post-change. See corollary #1, above. Every single day from the time that change was checked in until the release of the patch, Blizzard's QA people failed to fly some phoenixes around to test that their basic functionality still worked. (You can imply the embarrassing fact numerics from here on out.) Then the code was frozen and final release candidates appraised. Even though the patch would be released with notes explicitly calling out phoenix changes, no one at Blizzard flew some phoenixes around to test their basic functionality. Even though changes had been made to the phoenix unit, even through these changes were one of the pretty small list of changes in the patch about to be released, and even though, once finalized, that patch would be released to millions of people worldwide. No one is saying complex software systems such as SC2 should have 0 bugs or that Blizzard shouldn't ever release a patch that has issues. People are correctly saying that the fact that Blizzard would release a patch with this specific type of bug suggests some pretty crappy software development methodology is at work. Whether it's a management rush to release untested code, crappy/lazy QA, or something else, I have no idea. But there were multiple points of failure here and it's bogus to suggest that because sometimes subtle regressions or new bugs are introduced in complex software, that this is an example of it. The phoenix bug is an example of something wrong in the Blizz. dev. world, and its existence is (or should be) embarrassing to them. | ||
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Zombo Joe
Canada850 Posts
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stroggos
New Zealand1543 Posts
On October 10 2010 13:50 xiyuema wrote: ppl seem to think blizzard has an unlimited source of developers and testers and they all work for free and all have all this free time. i dont think thats the case. they could have reverted the fix to the pheonix bug instantly, could they not? | ||
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tehemperorer
United States2183 Posts
On October 10 2010 14:36 stroggos wrote: they could have reverted the fix to the pheonix bug instantly, could they not? No it is probably packaged and deployed all in one update. They would have to go in and change the version of the code responsible for that and proper process dictates that they QA the whole thing again. | ||
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Zombo Joe
Canada850 Posts
Its like building a chair that you are going to sell but never sitting on it. Instead you get someone else to sit on it for you while you are building another one. | ||
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abrasion
Australia722 Posts
On October 10 2010 13:50 xiyuema wrote: ppl seem to think blizzard has an unlimited source of developers and testers and they all work for free and all have all this free time. i dont think thats the case. Ultralisk bug was fixed fast. This can not be hard to fix, in the damned slightest. | ||
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The.Imperator
138 Posts
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KaiserJohan
Sweden1808 Posts
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Mr.Minionman
United States164 Posts
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razamanaz
271 Posts
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MalVortex
United States119 Posts
On October 10 2010 13:50 xiyuema wrote: ppl seem to think blizzard has an unlimited source of developers and testers and they all work for free and all have all this free time. i dont think thats the case. Yea, your right, its not like blizzard has 4600 full time employees or anything. They definitely don't make $~2.1 billion/year in WoW subscription fees alone, and they definitely did not sell 3 million copies of SC2 in its first month on release (due to regional pricing differences its harder to make a fun number on that, but ~$150mil is probably a lowball). Blizzard never confirmed SC2's development cost, but have stated it was less than $100mil. Even on a lowball, that makes SC2 at least $51mil in the black. Blizzard is one of the larger development studios on the planet, and all their IPs are ridiculously profitable. Its one thing to go "lol, woops, didn't see THAT bug coming!" and then patch it a day or two later. Its another when you go on for weeks and never bother. Blizzard has, as far as game studios are concerned, essentially infinite resources. That they don't bother with hotfixes or significant QA on patches shows that they don't care to put that level of :effort: in, not that their poor developers are putting in 20 hours of free overtime to keep the place afloat. The ultralisk "bug" is a pretty obvious point on this. Removing the slam attack let ultras use their unique, target-dependent AoE attack on buildings. Buildings, having large size, dramatically increased the amount of :stuff: hit by the ultra AoE. This is one of those "durr" moments, because the result is sooo obvious. Of course, blizzard patched it in that way, and it was confusing because ultras on the one hand became base-obliterating machines, and on the other, because there was no way it could be anything but intentional. Naturally, blizzard didn't actually think that one through and changed it, having never internally tested the impact of their own change. Blizzard does a lot of things right, but their patching is not one of them. They deserve every bit of flack from delayed and buggy patches. Given their resources, its simply inexcusable. | ||
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TheAntZ
Israel6248 Posts
thats because the ultralisk bug hurt terran On October 10 2010 13:50 xiyuema wrote: ppl seem to think blizzard has an unlimited source of developers and testers and they all work for free and all have all this free time. i dont think thats the case. What the fuck is wrong with you? Do you bother to think at all before you post? Blizzard pays people to do this work, and sure, mistakes happen. But not even testing the goddamn unit after patching it? What the fuck. | ||
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sjschmidt93
United States2518 Posts
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Zarahtra
Iceland4053 Posts
On October 11 2010 01:00 sjschmidt93 wrote: I'm not a progammer, but this doesn't seem like it should take this long to fix... amirite? Depends on where the bug is. I mean it's amazing how you can change one minor thing and something that isn't even related to it, in the slightest breaks. I'd still assume it was the effect of the actual phoenix change(esp. since it was changing how long the duration lasted) and fixing it would be very easy but though unlikely, the bug might be due to them changing ultras, changing shifting return cargo or any other change they might have done(or god forbid, someone pressed backspace in middle of the code and it's a nightmare to find). | ||
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Lil Sassy
United States26 Posts
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sAfuRos
United States743 Posts
On October 11 2010 04:26 Lil Sassy wrote: ITT people who don't understand video game programming continued to complain for 11 pages ITP someone trolls Don't post crap like this just to piss people off | ||
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