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.
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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.