Gold Candidate

https://twitter.com/catnipgames/status/1265705522243788800

Weren't they supposed to let the gold candidate be tested on QA for at least a week? What happened to "doing better"? Old habits die hard.

You do not have to launch this today. You do not have to follow the monthly schedule that you said you'd reconsider. You do not have to launch before it's sufficiently tested.

I repeat.

You do not have to launch before it is sufficiently tested. You do not have to follow a monthly schedule.

Repeating again.

You do not have to follow a monthly schedule.

 

I really wish I could hit that like button about a 100 times

 

QA server has been up 24/7 for those to test the latest patches. You did not take the initiative and look to see if the QA server was up and test? Shame Shame Shame!

 

What exactly is gold candidate? Anyone else lost.

 

Gold candidate or gold master is the version that probably will be released to public if no bugs or things prohibiting release are found in the final QA tests.

 

That's great and all. But the fact is the client being released this morning has changes that have never been on QA. That seems to have been the case for 70+ production releases.

The ideal situations would be:
1) A new QA client is pushed out a week before release. It would be "locked" in the sense that no new features, items, quests, etc would be added after this point
2) At least once a day a new QA client would be pushed containing only bug fixes. With a larger team and more QA tests, this could easily be multiple times a day
3) At each QA release a list of bug that were fixed and how to test for them would be posted so QA testers have check them
4) The final (gold) production client is blocked from release until all critical bugs have been fixed and tested in QA. Preferably, tested for at least a 24 hour window

Since the QA testers are volunteers from the community, I take offense to what is happening now.

 

This doesn't sound promising. Got my fingers crossed.

 

Oh. hehe

 

This gold candidate is not what is on QA. And what has been on QA this week is broken- can't harvest, can't craft, can't loot at least some things. If you had looked at the QA forums or tested yourself you might know this. We do need more people testing on QA but to get that we need devs to put patch on QA for us to test, and not move it to live until it works. Right now most people quit QA testing after reporting a couple bugs that get ignored and pushed to live anyway.

 

You know, standard software release practices...

 

I was on QA this release and did not find anything not working on what I tested in my POT.

 

Also, just because there was not a build pushed to QA does not mean there were no builds. Chris noted that there were a lot of builds he created that couldn't be accessed from a standard client, but I'm sure they could use their dev clients to test them. There are also a lot of features he noted would not make the release because they didn't have time to test them, but will be patched in as soon as they do.

I agree that it would be nice to have at LEAST a day or two on QA with the gold client before release so players can hit it; we are a much bigger (and in some cases more thorough) testing group. However, I don't know that it is going to be as huge a deal as is being made out to be here. There are just going to be a few more bugs than there should be, and they will get taken care of.

 

The goal of a software release shouldn't include "eh, only a few bugs..." Well, a professional one anyways.

 

https://twitter.com/catnipgames/status/1265998364249899010

It sounds like this skipped QA and went straight to production. This is what we're trying to avoid.

 

There is a new release? I didn't see that anywhere until yesterday.

 

The poor development habits exhibited by Portnip use to bother me. But what I find interesting, after years and years of this, is that threads like this come up and we act all surprised that they have poor development habits. I could spend the rest of my career writing books on various development topics with Portnip as the case-study.

 

I agree. Up until a certain point, the notes were very clear and informative. Now, I find it surprising that notes were even released.

 

No one is asking the players to go on QA for a week every month, they want the "Gold Candidate" build, the one that is supposed to go live, to be on QA for bug testing and bug fixing for a week, instead of having releases be bug-full due to absolutely no testing happening. Big difference.