Gold Candidate

Discussion in 'General Discussion' started by oplek, May 28, 2020.

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  1. Damian Killingsworth

    Damian Killingsworth Avatar

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    its Agile dev, bruh ;)
     
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  2. Godra

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    You called it Portnip. That's awesome. That just made my day!!! :D
     
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  3. Tazar

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    To my knowledge - the new Flexible Tier scene did not get to Q&A at all...

    I went in it today - and found the following issues:

    1.) When you walk up to the scene in Mistrendur and click "Enter" - nothing happens. When you hit the E key several times, it will eventually bring up the menu to select difficulty.
    2.) Once you are in the scene - there are no monsters (This was known and to be fixed in the first patch today... oh wait... now it's tomorrow...)
    3.) If you try to harvest anything in the scene, you'll go through the harvest motions... watch the harvest circle complete... then wonder why it did not actually harvest anything as you are still kneeling going through the harvest motions endlessly and without meticulous collection. Hitting escape to exit does nothing. Jumping finally broke it and I found myself walking around the scene with A.) A harvest circle still on my scene telling me that I am harvesting cotton even though I walked 1/2 a scene away from the bush, B.) Unable to target anything in the scene for further action.
    4.) I exited the scene and instead of appearing in Mistrendur, I appeared at Brittany.
    5.) I walked to my player town (and still had the harvest circle on my screen in Novia) and was unable to enter my town. I logged out and back in to clear it.

    I love the game and really try to support the team, but this is REALLY disappointing to see so little in the publish, and what is there is massively bugged and forced out the door at the last moment without QA.

    *sighs*

    *Heads off to the bug forum to start reporting*
     
    Last edited: May 28, 2020
  4. FrostII

    FrostII Bug Hunter

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    Getting pretty tired of saying "Oh well, tomorrow is a brand new day !"
    Fix EVERYTHING that is broken and nothing else till nothing is broken.... that should take about 6mthx, but we'd at least have stuff work as advertised.......
     
  5. Beaumaris

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    LOL! Hats off to you for still taking it personally after 70 releases.
     
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  6. Sulaene Moon

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    The problem is we know this will never happen.
     
  7. oplek

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    (link)

    So it sounds like it shouldn't launch today... riiiight?
     
  8. Violet Ronso

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    Why? Not like Chris said HIMSELF that they need to reevaluate their monthly release cycle because it was hurting them more than it did them good, not like they KNOW their build isn't working and they should take the time to make sure it does, NOT like the majority of their playerbase is fed up with their bullshit and broken releases and maybe its time to change...

    Sorry! I mean, Woot! A 79th release in a row without ever missing a SINGLE one :O...

    Seriously, I can't even find motivation to play the game, not because I do not enjoy it, but because I realise how badly they are killing it themselves and I don't want to waste my time playing a game where their lead Dev doesn't even consider how his crap hurts his players... Seriously, a big middle one to Chris right now, to all his broken promises, his time wasted running after the shiny nut, and his very obvious lack of quality work. Fix artifacts & Crafting (as in make crafting more interesting), Fix all the combat issues, fix ALL the broken systems that barely work (I mean how long has brewing been out with no fucking reason to do it). Seriously, they have 2 more months to surprise us because trust me, 90% of the people I speak to in this game are waiting for Godzilla to come out the 23rd of August, and if this game isn't at least on the right path in the next 2 months, no one will look back...
     
  9. Cordelayne

    Cordelayne Bug Hunter

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    I don't know how many times we have to ask them to scale back the release cycle and just fix AND finish what is already implemented in the game. It's the "SotA Special"...80% completed 20% unfinished; just enough to monetize it.
     
  10. oplek

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    Or, you could just not force yourself to follow the monthly cycle - that you and only you are forcing yourself to follow - and give it a few more days.

    It's been a little over two months since this thread was created, when it had been a couple months (I think) since the topic had been brought up and they said they'd "do better". Yet here we are, release after release, making the same mistake over and over, and not allowing enough time for the gold candidate to be properly tested, forcing the playerbase to go through a monthly patch hell for the first week after release, not knowing what previously-working or new feature is going to be broken and unplayable.
     
  11. Sulaene Moon

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    That's the "SotA way". They don't keep you coming back for more. They keep you coming back to see if it's fixed.
     
  12. Last Trinsic Defender

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    We is this song ringing in my ears whenever a new patch is scheduled? :)

    (Midas, PrePatchday)
     
  13. kaeshiva

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    Clearly they do no internal testing at all.
    How else could things so blatantly, so obviously broken ever make it live?
    We're not talking about edge cases here, we're talking about things added that have 1 purpose that do not function for that purpose.
    (Scoff and I still chuckle about the "Teleporter to Ardoris" that had ONE job....)

    And if they happen to throw it on QA to sit for 24 hours, that doesn't accomplish anything unless people know to go test, know what to test, know what they changed, etc. and patch notes for QA is never really a thing. And relying on 'volunteer testers' and a lottery type reward system isn't going to have people lining up out the door either. If anything, its a disincentive, knowing how many hundreds of hours I've spent on QA and gotten zilch but seeing other people spamming the forums with repeat bug reports having all the 'bug finder' loots. That, and when you do go on QA, you have no idea what you're meant to be doing - well, I stopped bothering long ago. Having a player-assisted QA process is great - but it can't be the ONLY line of defense between "I changed something" and "Live client."

    I work in the software industry. If one of our dev team decided to go change random things in the code, not tell anyone about it or document it, and it got into the live version and customer systems were breaking because of it, that person WOULD BE FIRED. If the person managing the dev team decided they weren't going to do any documentation or patch notes or change logs (or heavens forbid, follow an actual change process or dev roadmap ...or at least flirt with the idea of following a dev roadmap...) they'd be replaced. Quickly.

    This is not some 1-man indie project, this game raised over 20 million dollars before they took the tracker off the website and that's been gone a couple years, it was extremely well funded. I actually help out with another mmo project that is a 1-man indie thing, built on a shoestring budget by 1 guy living in his parents' basement, and even he tests things himself before pushing them to live. (Also has functional maps/minimaps and both ground/flying mounts in that game, from day 1.) Imagine what someone with that kind of drive could do with 20 million, or even 1 million. For a long time we put up with it because "it was early access" but those days are long past.

    I'm sorry if this comes off as overly critical. I've always been a die-hard supporter of Sota and the team, understanding of the limitations and of the need to monetize everything to keep paying paychecks, etc. While I find I have no reason to play these days (no meaningful progress in a play session) - I'm still lurking around keeping an eye on things, looking for an incentive to jump back in, keeping my subscriptions active and my keyboard warm. But it seems its just disaster after disaster and nothing's changed, if anything its gotten worse. There's been no meaningful fleshing out to any of the dozens of unfinished systems - instead we're adding new unfinished systems. Don't get me wrong, pot teleporters are nice, but its another example of something that is woefully incomplete in functionality. New potion skills that I've never seen anyone ask for, that don't work. Talk of treasure maps, which sound nice and all, but we don't even have basic maps! And while the bard tree is certainly exciting, its flip flopped between "way overpowered" to "completely pointless" so many times that I don't know from 1 day to the next if I log into my bard if she's even playable. . The motto seems to be "get it to limping, and leave it and move on to the next thing."

    If you can't afford to hire an actual tester, if nobody on the team plays/understands the game well enough to do testing / or are too busy to do testing, then at the very least, leverage your very capable very willing volunteers and empower them to actually test this stuff by bringing them into the loop for ongoing changes, try having a QA cycle that lasts more than a single day, etc.
    Failing that, if you make a change, take 10 minutes, log into the player client and see if it actually does what its intended to do. Remember warlock chains combining into wayland loops? Its not hard to imagine how that happened (they're alphabetically adjacent) but if someone had just done a once over and tried to combine each thing, it woulda been caught. I've always been very impressed with how quickly and how well the dev team reacts to crisis - I mean, within minutes Chris was stood in my front yard handing me a new warlock chain when that happened. Fantastic - truly. But it would have taken a lot less time to just have someone go through and test each of the combines or, after the combinability was added, put it on QA for a day, add 'test all artifact combines' to a list of things that need to be tested, and give your player-testers time to confirm that they've gone down the list and its working (or not). And if they do report a problem, don't ignore it and push it to live anyway!! Nothing discourages bug reporting more than seeing the same broken stuff ignored report after report.

    Take a breath. Make a plan. Finish something. If while you're finishing something you need to keep feeding us tidbits of buyable-stuff to keep lights on, we get it.
     
  14. Scanphor

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    Well written post and agree with pretty much everything you said. One point, as quoted above, is something I've said repeatedly - I've heard Chris talk about "making small incremental adjustments" then the patch goes out and the thing is doubled (or halved) - these are not small tweaks and is something I've noticed time and time again when things get 'adjusted'.
     
  15. oplek

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    Did they resume this? Last I heard, they just kind of stopped doing the rewards and didn't tell anyone. And it's about a year later. From memory, Chris in one stream said "... oh yeah I guess that was a thing" when asked about it. So even more QA testers were frustrated and stopped because they were trying to get those rewards... but got silence for months.

    [Edited because I had too many "like"s]
     
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  16. Charon

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    This is why I cancelled my sub. I have no faith that @Chris is going to wake up tomorrow and think "Wow .. we're doing this to ourselves. Let's step back, evaluate what we have, prioritize what needs to be completed and work down that list.". It's just not going to happen and waiting for sanity to break out is making it all worse.

    Doing the same things over and over hoping for a different outcome is the definition of?
     
  17. Anpu

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    It's kind of sad that when I heard there would be this new consumable skill, I immediately wrote the following down:
    1. The new potion skill will be added to the character sheet. No trainer will be added for it.
    2. Many people playing will ask in Universal Chat where the trainer is for this, of which is not added yet.
    3. The trainer will be added, but the skill will only work on a limited amount of item(s).
    4. More items will be added to work with this skill, but not all will work correctly if at all.
    We will see if my prediction of 4 will come to fruition.

    I do see both advantages and disadvantages to adding content in the game this way (Hey! A new skill!! except uh, it doesn't work yet or can't be trained.....). This will however do nothing but continue to feed the negative perception of the game, because it will continue to feed the broken systems perception (this is however another discussion).

    Content really should not be added in this manner, but this seems to be how Chris wants to continue development of the game. The continued cycle of feeding the negative perception of the game will continue until this cycle is broken.
     
  18. kaeshiva

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    Honestly, I don't know. I heard some rumblings that things were going to change but can't find any information on it either, so went with last established thing that I was aware of.
     
  19. Vladamir Begemot

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  20. Oakenhammer

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    ^ This

    @Chris @Elgarion What we'd like to see process wise:
    1. Pick an aspect of the game and analyze it to evaluate whether the experience is fun, rewarding, and meaningful.
    2. Design a solution and share it with the players so we can provide feedback
    3. Consider the feedback, finalize the design, and implement the changes
    4. Publish the changes to the QA server for a whole cycle, so there is sufficient time to test and bug fix
    5. Publish to Live
    I think most of us would be okay with a 3 to 4 month timeframe from beginning to end for this process. If the development is staggered and multiple aspects are being worked on concurrently, but in different stages of the process, we could still see new content being added to QA and Live every month or two while providing sufficient time to design and test the systems.

    As @kaeshiva mentioned, we can be patient and you can continue to develop store content while this process is occurring. In fact, the new store items could be related to the systems that are currently being worked on in order to help build anticipation. For example, if fertilizer for agriculture is being worked on, how about a Replenishing Dung Pile?
     
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