Making yet another post about this because of lazy devs

[Packetdancer]

That’s your headcanon. This patch has shown they are without a shadow of a doubt lazy.

I think they could stand to change up their test process, no question. However, it is startling easy for bugs -- even ones that show up quickly in the hands of players -- to sneak through at any game company. Largely because most game QA -- indeed, a breathtaking amount of software QA in general -- ends up being done by testing "does the thing work if we do <steps expected to work>", sometimes with variant steps, rather than "does the thing break if we do things that, by all rights, should not affect the thing we're testing".

Maybe they finished and tested the PvP mode, checked it off, then made a fix to something unrelated -- say, having an issue with Wanderer's Minuet if you've got two bards in a PvE party. That's in the PvE combat! Obviously it won't affect PvP; why redo all the PvP tests for a PvE change? But, surprise, games tend to be made up of a bunch of interlocking systems that shouldn't affect each other but sometimes do. And things like that make it, as noted, very easy for bugs to slip through.

This can be addressed by changing the QA process, but I don't know of many game companies that want to put in the time (or, given deadlines and crunch, can necessarily spare the time) to do that sort of comprehensive test matrix, including retesting everything else when you change one specific thing.

(Source: I have worked as a game developer professionally, and have many friends and former co-workers who still do, thus have painful familiarity with ways that game QA can be done.)

They laugh at the horrible hrothgar hairstyles and continue to handwave their problems.

This, I think, is also why folks don't take your complaints seriously.

Plenty of people can state that the Hrothgar hair situation is a problem, and one they think should be addressed.

But you outright say the devs are laughing at the players, mocking their desires. This ascribes active malice to their actions, and regardless of whether or not you think the Hrothgar hair situation should be different, I've seen no evidence they're actually maliciously laughing at players about it.

It may be only intended as angry hyperbole, but ascribing active malice to another party just ends up making any potentially-valid complaint sound a bit paranoid at best. And it certainly isn't going to make the party in question inclined to listen to what sounds like an unhinged rant, much less try to take it seriously as a bug report.

[TaleraRistain]

I think they could stand to change up their test process, no question. However, it is startling easy for bugs -- even ones that show up quickly in the hands of players -- to sneak through at any game company. Largely because most game QA -- indeed, a breathtaking amount of software QA in general -- ends up being done by testing "does the thing work if we do <steps expected to work>", sometimes with variant steps, rather than "does the thing break if we do things that, by all rights, should not affect the thing we're testing".

This! So much this!

My team is one that tries to test what's expected and then the corner cases, even some really weird things. We try to think like our internal users and external customers. And then we have "How would Dave break this" cases. This is one of our users that we love using in QA because he *always* finds something we miss. So we test as many things trying to think like him. And then we bring in Dave and he finds something we missed. And even then sometimes a bug slips through because maybe we couldn't get back to x or y point. Not to mention as we make things more interconnected to give ease to users, we often make the backend a lot more complicated. More complications, more bugs.

[Packetdancer]

And then we bring in Dave and he finds something we missed.

This is an entire mood.

And it turns out this wasn't entirely a bug but inefficient server processing that caused a backlog, so a lot of the results weren't ready to be communicated in time for the end of the lottery. Rather than fixing a bug the solution might be improving how efficient it is.

The root cause isn't a bug, per se, but the fact that the process was not fault-tolerant is, at least in my opinion. It's an understandable one to make, given that data replication is often handled by some underlying database system and not by the game's own code directly. Still, the code surrounding it should probably have required an acknowledgment of data transferred successfully, and add things to a retry queue if it failed to get said acknowledgment, and I do think the lack there qualifies as a bug.

[MiaShino]

The root cause isn't a bug, per se, but the fact that the process was not fault-tolerant is, at least in my opinion. It's an understandable one to make, given that data replication is often handled by some underlying database system and not by the game's own code directly. Still, the code surrounding it should probably have required an acknowledgment of data transferred successfully, and add things to a retry queue if it failed to get said acknowledgment, and I do think the lack there qualifies as a bug.

Bestest part about working with databases or servers as a systems engineer, attempting to bring things up to administration. Nothing brings happiness quite like identifying potential handshaking issue with simple fix only to be informed about deadlines. You then check your notes and ohhhh right, I brought this to your attention three weeks ago and was told it would be addressed. Now I get to spend time fixing it on live deployment.. fan fricken tastic also with upper management breathing down my spine.

Became so feist inducing I spent inordinate amount of effort just self hosting everything. Fricken costly too.. fiber, hardware, heat dissipation not cheap. I may give dev team much of the feist at the times but I truly feel for whoever has been tasked with resolving this because I have been there and it stinks.

[Packetdancer]

I may give dev team much of the feist at the times but I truly feel for whoever has been tasked with resolving this because I have been there and it stinks.

Every time I have changed jobs in my life, it's been so as to try something new; there have only been a few times it was just as much to get away from the previous job as to try a new one. But my first job out of high school was as a database administrator, and that one I definitely was leaving in part to not be doing it anymore; I honestly don't think you could pay me enough to do that again.

So, you have my abject sympathy... and I definitely can also imagine the myriad possible database-related scenarios that could give rise to an issue like the placards not receiving their data.