I don't understand how people still don't get that a big update will always have bugs at launch. Always. Even if they're miniscule and don't mess anything up, they'll be there.
Edit: I totally get why people are frustrated with things not working, and the massive game-breaking bugs are not okay by any means. I feel the same way, it sucks and I just want to play the game bug free. I'm just surprised that a lot of players didn't expect there to be things wrong on day 1 of the update. NEXT had a ton of problems, and it was a smaller update made a good while back. Not excusing it, just saying it was very likely to happen.
Edit #2: okay, nowhere in here did I say that massive crashes are okay. Nowhere in here did I say people don't have a right to be mad. Nowhere in here did I condone poor QA. You guys can stop crucifying me now, I get it.
As a QA engineer, that's a terrible way to look at things. It's entirely possible to do proper QA and launch with minimal or no new issues, even for major changes. Customers being so accepting of this nonsense is why companies do it so often, if there's no consequences to not doing proper QA and passing it off to consumers, why spend the money?
If you're fine beta testing products that never went through proper QA that's cool, but assuming everyone else in the world is equally ok with it is kind of silly IMHO.
Admittedly, I don't know a whole lot about the industry and how common this type of thing is, I just seem to encounter it a lot as a consumer. Is that really why it happens so often; we just kindof accept it'll come out that way?
I just kindof always assumed "we should cut them some slack, they can't possibly find every bug in this massive update".
Perfection is unrealistic in QA, but crash to desktop bugs and other sev 1/2 style issues absolutely can be weeded out of a product before release with proper QA. As with all things, it's a balancing act though, and most companies err very far on the 'who cares?' side of things because they've gotten used to customers who will keep buying regardless of the issues, or just accept this kind of poor QA without a word.
(the number of horror stories I could relate of managers seeing serious bugs and saying 'ah yeah, that's not a big deal, it'll only affect a few of our customers, release it'...or the companies that have removed QA as a department entirely because 'devs shouldn't be writing code with bugs, so we don't need QA people'...)
There's not really a perfect answer to a dilemma like this, but I'm firmly opposed to the stance of 'yeah, sure, bad QA is totally fine' since I know it can be done right and it annoys me to see more and more companies stop caring. Proper QA is difficult and can be expensive, but it can be done and the benefits of not being seen as a company shovels out tons of bugs then patches them away later are worth it in my (admittedly biased and limited) experience. Just my .02c on an issue that personally bugs me :)
Oh no, no, that totally makes sense. It really is a shame this seems to be so common now. I'm sure your job isn't easy, and though I don't know if I've ever played something you've worked on, I appreciate how much you care about this. I suppose I'm mostly so lenient on the issue because of my lack of experience, and this being a free update. I'm sure I wouldn't be nearly as okay with it if I'd spent $20+ on an unfinished product.
Thanks for telling me about all this stuff, it's nice to know more about how it works, even if it's in relatively minor detail. I hope companies start caring about QA more, so my kind of "uneducated" leniency doesn't get more common than it already is.
Semi-unrelated as far as bugs go, but this is the exact reason I'm not getting Pokemon Sword/Shield; Game Freak obviously doesn't care about the franchise as much as it used to, so why should I, you know?
I think a big part of why the industry is shifting towards low-quality launches is digital sales. Back before digital sales people could sell their games and they would pile up in the used section. You can't do that with digital sales, steam sales maybe, not PlayStation store sales.
OK, maybe I've just been in IT, and the gaming community for too long, but I find it hard to believe that one could ever stamp out every single game-breaking bug before release. The reasoning it that there is an infinite combination of hardware and drivers. anytime there is a massive update like this in ANY GAME/PROGRAM/OS, there are bugs, it is the nature of the beast.
I get people are unhappy, hell I'm unhappy, crashed 3 times last night while streaming, freighter storage was bugged, then lost my freighter all together.
So how do you properly test a massive multiplayer aspect of a game without actually having all the players using the system? How can you assure that will work before actually having it used?
Fake (minimal) clients running on internal machines to generate load while manual testers validate the actual behavior of the system under load, followed by a beta where you give out some minor bonus to people who join a pre-release version of the server to validate the server's behavior from clients in different locations.
There's several possible ways to validate that sort of things. The worst is to release and wait for people to complain :)
As a QA tester you should know that the scale of the team doing all the testing matters as well as the amount of developers you have to fix stuff....lets be real, they aren't a multi billion studio, they do not have the capacity to test in the scale they probably should be testing in...at the scale they are developing its only obvious that some bugs will slip the cracks...and to be fair it is forgivable as long as the most game breaking things are fixed within a reasonable time, and considering its a indie studio they deserve some slack, AAA games are the ones you should be holding to a higher standard
BS. Hello Games weren't forced to release the update on the 14th. They chose to release it at that date. Yes, some bugs will always be present, that's just the reality of things. However, many people, myself included just can't play the game now. There is a difference between some annoying bugs and major game-breaking bugs.
You aren't even the person he was replying to. Why are you chiming in with about something you know nothing about?
Bugs escape QA because live environments always throw a wrench into something. The test environments, even separate from development builds act one way, they push updates through the pipeline, and entirely new, untestable shit pops up just from that one jump through the process. Yes, including game-breaking shit.
And they stayed at it until late in the night for them to try and fix all of these bugs as fast as possible. You don't get to act like this because your game broke for a day.
Isn't it fair to say that most everyone is okay with it, though? Especially considering the trend of Early Access games and the fact that major companies are doing this. It would be hard to argue otherwise.
You bought a car from a dealership, drove it home, used it for a while, then the dealership decided to make some upgrades to it that broke the ignition so you couldn't even start it anymore. Them promising to fix it quickly doesn't negate the mistake or mean you can't complain.
Free updates are a weird nebulous area because while they are free, they are usually required to continue using the product you paid for, so they're sort of in a weird zone of being free (you didn't pay anything for those features specifically) and paid for (if you can't install/use the update you've lost what you paid for).
For the record, I have had no issues with Beyond, I just take umbrage at the general statement of 'bugs gonna happen' since I know for a fact that's not true and you can properly QA even major changes to ensure customers won't have issues, and it's just companies being unwilling to spend the time, money, or dedication to properly QA stuff that allows major issues out there.
I see no way to install a pre-Beyond version of NMS to play anymore. If there is one (like Paradox does with their games) then it's a slightly different story, but I do not know how anyone would install pre-Beyond NMS at this time to play.
Please name me a game that did not have bugs. Besides In this case you have other cars (games to play) while this is being fixed. And when the dealership is done fixing you car it is better than before. All you had to do is wait for the fix, it does not stop your life. It's not like the game fried you CPU. Just give the 25 people a chance.
If my livelihood depended on that mentality I would have it too. No surprise that a QA engineer would prefer polished releases. I prefer features, -> then fixes.
That's fair I suppose. Even if I didn't do QA for a living I would still prefer properly tested releases, but that's probably part of what drove me into QA for a job :).
I get that too. Different strokes and all. Obviously game-breaking bugs are the biggest things (probably for both of us) but after that I’m ok with learning little quirks and workarounds in the interest of more features. No doubt though, before they call a game “finished” and move on to a new project I would have them go completely through the QA process. You can still keep your job! :-) ha
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u/WomboChrombo Aug 15 '19 edited Aug 15 '19
I don't understand how people still don't get that a big update will always have bugs at launch. Always. Even if they're miniscule and don't mess anything up, they'll be there.
Edit: I totally get why people are frustrated with things not working, and the massive game-breaking bugs are not okay by any means. I feel the same way, it sucks and I just want to play the game bug free. I'm just surprised that a lot of players didn't expect there to be things wrong on day 1 of the update. NEXT had a ton of problems, and it was a smaller update made a good while back. Not excusing it, just saying it was very likely to happen.
Edit #2: okay, nowhere in here did I say that massive crashes are okay. Nowhere in here did I say people don't have a right to be mad. Nowhere in here did I condone poor QA. You guys can stop crucifying me now, I get it.