Dev Harassment is concerning

[Packetdancer]

But it is possible to thoroughly test something only to have a completely unforeseen thing come along

Especially for games (and software in general).

As I've noted elsewhere, there's more than one way to test something. Game companies -- and really, many software companies in general -- tend more towards the QA methodology where you go "Okay, we've finished feature X, we should make sure that it works when you do what's expected." You'll try different ways to do X (hence the old joke about "A QA tester walks into a bar. Runs into a bar. Walks into a bar backwards. Skips into a bar. Crawls into a bar. Dances into a bar..."), but the goal of the testing is to make sure that Feature X works when you do the things that are expected to make it work.

The other approach, however, is to make sure that feature X does not fail. That may sound subtle, but it's very, very different. (And also a lot more work.)

To use an analogy, let's pretend you want to make a cake. The software QA approach is generally going to be something like "I have a recipe here. If I follow the directions, do I end up with a cake at the end?" as a baseline, and then trying a few other approaches that should hypothetically still work. Sometimes they work ("Used egg substitute, still produced cake."), sometimes not ("Used Splenda instead of sugar. Instead of cake, produced aardvark. Which exploded. Please fix.").

The test engineering approach is going to be where you have a massive list of things, many of which by rights should not affect the cake outcome. ("Time of day: morning, evening, night." "Stove type: gas, electric, inductive." "Other appliances powered: refrigerator, toaster oven, microwave." Etc.) Then you go through and try all the possible combinations to make sure that nothing goes wrong with the cake-production recipe in any of those states. This can be a lot of work, which is part of where a good SDET -- Software Developer/Design Engineer in Test -- is invaluable, as they come up with ingenious ways to automate these tests. To test the durability piece of hardware at work some years back, one of our test engineers made a literal foot robot that stomped on the design to see if it broke within X number of stomps. (It was not a quiet robot. The robot eventually got to live in a closet with some soundproofing so that it could stomp as much as its little silicon heart desired without the humans in the area wanting to stomp on it in return.)

The thing is, though, many systems are big, and complicated, and those features that shouldn't affect the cake sometimes do.

For games and desktop software, doing full test engineering is probably overkill; it would take a ton of time, and a lot of software development has the mindset of "move fast and break things" -- i.e., come up with neat stuff and fix it afterwards. Doing a thorough test engineering approach would require locking down a system's design much earlier so that you can come up with your comprehensive test plan before you have stuff to test. And if a feature fails in a game, the worst that happens (usually) is some players are inconvenienced and upset, or you get the public relations equivalent of a black eye when you completely f@$k up a release. Conversely, with mission-critical stuff, testing can be crucial; if someone lets a bug slip through on an ATM, people can lose money. If they let a bug slip through on a diving rebreather or a medical device or an automobile drive system, people can literally die. (I'm not joking; it happens.)

When you test to see if a thing works, it's much easier to check it off a list... but it's also a lot easier to encounter situations where something that you wouldn't think would affect a system causes it to break afterwards. Like if you test the controller code for your game, and it works on every test machine you have with every input device you have. Yay! Then someone else on the game team comes back and goes "Uh, my controller works in the test program, but does not work as soon as I start playing." And you go, "Huh. Do you have two controllers plugged in?" Nope, they do not. "Does it show up fine in other software?" Yep, it does. This works for everyone else working on the game, so what could be wrong? And then you find out they once had a Razer Tartarus MMO keypad installed, which happened to have a joystick on it, and that for some reason their system was borked and the Tartarus driver was still active and creating a gamepad entry that always took XINPUT (Windows game controller input system) device slot 0... and that your code was taking the first enumerated XINPUT device, not the first connected enumerated XINPUT device. Since generally, when a thing is disconnected it's no longer enumerated by XINPUT, the two scenarios seemed to be the same... but it turns out, they were in fact not.

(This is not strictly a hypothetical example; the XINPUT issue is in Unreal Engine 5's input library, and I was the person pulling my hair out about why my controller did not work when I was running the game within the dev environment, while literally everyone else in the Unreal developer groups I belong to was like "I ran your code to test, it works for me?" It turns out when Unreal says the play-in-editor mode uses "the first controller" it is very literal, and does not mean "the first connected and available controller.")

There are many, many possible ways things could go wrong in a codebase the size of an MMO, especially since almost no MMO system operates in a complete vacuum; it needs data from other systems, or pulls state from somewhere else, or relies on a utility library someone else wrote into the codebase 7 years ago or whatever else. Heck, there are many, many ways a thing can go wrong just in the game engine something uses, even without adding in the game-specific code. (Do not start me on Unreal 5. I like it much better than Unreal 4, but I have questions about how some things got through QA to the final 5.0 release we just got the other week.)

This doesn't excuse things; few things are absolute, and there absolutely is a middle ground to be found between "just test to make sure a thing works" and "perform comprehensive testing to make sure a thing does not fail". And a big, hotly-debated system that was going to have immediate heavy participation and people watching closely to see how well it worked... well, that's the sort of thing that probably should've had a rigor to the testing that fell somewhere in that middle ground. (Few game companies would do that even for big systems -- and I'm guessing SQEX is no exception -- but that doesn't change the fact that I think they should have.)

I don't think this is a failure on the part of the actual developers, per se. Everyone makes mistakes, and while we can all theorize at what the root cause of this (admittedly spectacular) issue was, none of us actually know. It could've been a typo by a tired programmer, or it could have been a bit of unexpected behavior three systems down in code written by someone who burned out and left the company during Heavensward, or a weird edge case involving database locking, or... *gestures vaguely* But I do think it's a failure of process, because while everyone makes mistakes sometimes, when the process works, those mistakes get caught. Even if I think it's not SQEX specifically but game development (and honestly, software development in general) that are failed by the "test for success" versus "test to ensure no failure" mindsets.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

None of which changes the fact that folks have a right to be upset and/or irritated. Or to press SQEX to explain how this happened for the sake of transparency -- and because a post-mortem write-up of what went wrong can be of benefit to their own process -- or even to unsubscribe if they feel it was the last straw in their trust of the company.

[AscendentBlue]

Now you're talkin'! Although I expect 95% of the folks in this forum will be thinking "What the ....?"

[Kaurhz]

"I'm sick of all this developer harassment, but let me proceed with an apt demonstration of harassment on you, the community instead"

Neither of which is OK.

[PawPaw]

Do mods not exist on this forum? How are some of these posts from the OP still up?

[Stormpeaks]

Hello all!

I am new to posting here and I'm not sure if this is the appropriate place for this but I feel its necessary to be said regardless. I've seen quite a lot of heated discussions about the player housing situation and a few other past events where players have felt slighted or in some way inconvenienced and overwhelmingly people have been voicing their frustrations in a way that seems a tad overkill. Frustration is one thing but calling devs names or being hysterical about this or any situation does nothing but cause real people to be stressed out. I know we often laud the dev team and Yoshi-P especially but the opposite can be true too. Very bi-polar which is to be expected from such a large MMO audience.

I hope people who read this can voice their frustrations more gently and constructively in the future. I'm sorry you were inconvenienced but this is a game that you enjoy and its a career that game devs slave at to make. the disparity between our commitments is immeasurable. They want to make the best game they can and believing otherwise is foolish. I don't mean this to be another "praise Yoshi-P!" post so please understand that I just think our collective voices when compounded have a very drastic effect on real people and we should act accordingly.

TL;DR stop being mean pls

"seriously guys just be nice to the devs, but let me be toxic to the entire community and disrespect them"

[Lily_Skye]

Hello all!

I am new to posting here and I'm not sure if this is the appropriate place for this but I feel its necessary to be said regardless. I've seen quite a lot of heated discussions about the player housing situation and a few other past events where players have felt slighted or in some way inconvenienced and overwhelmingly people have been voicing their frustrations in a way that seems a tad overkill. Frustration is one thing but calling devs names or being hysterical about this or any situation does nothing but cause real people to be stressed out. I know we often laud the dev team and Yoshi-P especially but the opposite can be true too. Very bi-polar which is to be expected from such a large MMO audience.

I hope people who read this can voice their frustrations more gently and constructively in the future. I'm sorry you were inconvenienced but this is a game that you enjoy and its a career that game devs slave at to make. the disparity between our commitments is immeasurable. They want to make the best game they can and believing otherwise is foolish. I don't mean this to be another "praise Yoshi-P!" post so please understand that I just think our collective voices when compounded have a very drastic effect on real people and we should act accordingly.

TL;DR stop being mean pls

white knight

[Kaurhz]

white knight

Yes because expecting a modicum of respect and constructive thought/discussion is a difficult concept to grasp, thus we are all designated as white knights for not having a misaligned social compass.

[Packetdancer]

I just don‘t understand what this has to do with the complaints recently? They have been pretty civil so far. It is clear people are fed up with some of the decisions SE has made, and as long as these complaints are constructive there is no problem. However, there seems to be a hive mentality within people within this community that equals constructive criticism with wishing death upon the devs. It seems like they want to nip every complaint in the bud. It kind of reminds me of „There is no war in Ba sing se“.

Stuff doesn't have to be literal death threats to be kinda over the top. I haven't seen many death threats, and thankfully none on these forums -- though the number I have seen is still non-zero, which is depressing even if also unsurprising -- but I've seen a weirdly high number of posts (on Twitter and various other places, and a few even here on these forums) saying the lottery was rigged and a scam, and that the individual programmers responsible should be taken to court and sued for real-money compensation that should be split among people who failed to get a house, or even that the individual developers should be jailed for fraud. While those aren't threats of violence, they still seem a demand for action against the devs that's a bit out-of-proportion to the actual issue at hand.

(Though I suspect it's because it feels like a financial hit, given how expensive housing can be in-game. So maybe it hits the same part of the brain where you get denied something you were saving real money for? I dunno.)

Anger's okay, and understandable. Demanding answers is okay... and probably not a bad idea, both for the sake of transparency and because the simple act of distilling a "what went wrong" report can probably help SQEX improve process to ensure stuff like this is less likely in the future. And that seems to be where most players are.

But there's a non-zero amount of players -- sometimes very loud players -- who are still leveling demands that don't really seem... reasonable. Or rational. And if I were to take any one thing of value away from this roller-coaster of a thread that's part rational discourse and part "the OP seems to have dressed in a clown suit, started screaming like a metal band's lead singer, then self-immolated", it's probably that the folks who are being reasonable (but still angry) might want to go "whoa there, calm down" when they encounter the folks who aren't being reasonable. Because if you have a small-but-loud lunatic fringe, they can sometimes start to drown out the more rational responses -- or just be loud-and-present enough that the rational responses sort of become just more noise -- and that is not a great thing if you want developers to actually pay attention to what the playerbase is saying.

[thereal_aliceanders]

Just curious is there actual proof of death threats? I'm not seeing them. All I'm seeing is some legit pissed off people, doing what they (including myself) do when SE makes an epic mistake, they call them out on the forums.

[IdowhatIwant]

Just curious is there actual proof of death threats? I'm not seeing them. All I'm seeing is some legit pissed off people, doing what they (including myself) do when SE makes an epic mistake, they call them out on the forums.

No, every time the devs screw up and people get angry now, some one makes a thread like this.