119 replies to this topic

[Pezzer]

Tiy0s, on 22 August 2023 - 03:52 PM, said:

Posting this on my personal and not my dev account because it's not about PGI, but my own personal response to this.



You're taking a screenshot of a single post I've made in an entire conversation about the balance of these new weapons. If you actually read the conversation, you'd know that I am beating myself up incredibly because of accidentally letting this change slip by me. People telling me I've ruined the integrity of their championship series opener, cauldron members calling it a catastrophe, and who knows what else. I'm probably going to end up taking a sick day on community outreach because of how much negative community feedback I've had sent to me directly about the mistake of mistyping a 4 instead of a 3 on a weapon stat.

These weapons were my first major project since joining PGI that I took the initiative on, and I wanted them to do as well as they could. And I'm mostly satisfied with how they turned out despite a few glaring issues that we're fixing in September.

So I'm sorry I made a single post alleviating it with humor as I beat myself up on this issue, and I'm sorry that the single post of me trying to deal with it through humor is all that you cared to read.

Congratulations, I logged in to post on the forums for the first time in years because of how infuriated I am by this response.

SEPTEMBER?

You know that this problem exists as of Day 1 thanks to the community, but you can't put out a hotfix to fix the most egregious errors ASAP in order to support your consumer base? What the heck? 9/10 games I own on Steam would've had a patch out within hours to days of finding out about a problem this big...doubly so for anything easy to fix. I just recently downloaded like 5 hotfixes for Phasmophobia because the devs are pleasantly-obsessive about keeping the game free of gamebreaking bugs and easy fixes. I understand that this game is incredibly complicated, but clearly the problems with MASC and BLasers quite frankly aren't, so there's no excuse.

WHY is there NO HOTFIX PATCH? This is a fair demand for the community to make, given the PvP-centric live-service nature of the game.

Edit: You wouldn't even have to beat yourself up about this mistake because guess what? Code is easy as heck to fix. This isn't someone's life in your hands, it's numbers that you can fix within minutes and then patch as a hotfix. There's no need for the drama or time off if you just make the necessary edits and shoot it out to the playerbase, it's that darn simple, why is this such a dramatic complicated thing?

Edited by Pezzer, 25 August 2023 - 07:48 PM.

[pbiggz]

Pezzer, on 25 August 2023 - 07:44 PM, said:

Congratulations, I logged in to post on the forums for the first time in years because of how infuriated I am by this response.

SEPTEMBER?

You know that this problem exists as of Day 1 thanks to the community, but you can't put out a hotfix to fix the most egregious errors ASAP in order to support your consumer base? What the heck? 9/10 games I own on Steam would've had a patch out within hours to days of finding out about a problem this big...doubly so for anything easy to fix. I just recently downloaded like 5 hotfixes for Phasmophobia because the devs are pleasantly-obsessive about keeping the game free of gamebreaking bugs and easy fixes. I understand that this game is incredibly complicated, but clearly the problems with MASC and BLasers quite frankly aren't, so there's no excuse.

WHY is there NO HOTFIX PATCH? This is a fair demand for the community to make, given the PvP-centric live-service nature of the game.

Nobody in this thread except for Tiyo and Confracto have any direct experience with PGI's development cycles, and im willing to wager maybe 2 or 3 of you have any experience with development, or IT in general. Arm-chair project manager isn't a real job title and I think you should spend less time berating a developer for a problem that doesnt actually hurt you.

[MechMaster059]

Pezzer, on 25 August 2023 - 07:44 PM, said:

... it's that darn simple, why is this such a dramatic complicated thing?

As a developer I can tell you why: They've become ensnared by their process.

I've worked at several different companies over the years and this is a common side effect/problem with "Agile" methodologies. ("Agile" LOL)

There's something called a Sprint Cycle and once a company has become used to operating within a given Sprint Cycle it takes on an almost religious significance and any suggestion to deviate from it is treated as some kind of heretical blasphemy.

So here we are... 1 month to fix a single character constant value in a flat file.

Edited by MechMaster059, 26 August 2023 - 04:33 AM.

[pbiggz]

MechMaster059, on 25 August 2023 - 08:19 PM, said:

As a developer I can tell you why: They've become ensnared by their process.

I've worked at sever different companies over the years and this is a common side effect/problem with "Agile" methodologies. ("Agile" LOL)

There's something called a Sprint Cycle and once a company has become used to operating within a given Sprint Cycle it takes on an almost religious significance and any suggestion to deviate from it is treated as some kind of heretical blasphemy.

So here we are... 1 month to fix a single character constant value in a flat file.

That is a questionable interpretation of Agile, that being said, its still, at best, conjecture. I dont work for PGI so I have no insight into their development cycle. You certainly don't either.

[Typhlon]

KursedVixen, on 26 August 2023 - 06:30 AM, said:

I could say many other things , BUT AN ERROR THAT WENT THROUGH TO THE FINAL PATCH, i don't personally blame the one dev i blame the whole team FOR NOT HAVVING ERROR CHECKING LIKE ANY COMPETENT GAME DEVELOPER SHOULD!

It's really not a big ask for something this simple and easy to catch, and it's always wild to see people who play a game so parasocially attached to the devs that they'll defend them to the death when the status quo for a long while has been "buggy patches with low polish."

PGI is a company owned by an international holding company - not your little brother. This is a corporate product, not a passion project. It exists to make money. Being so desperate to defend what is clearly a low standard of QA and care does nothing but make you and your wallet more exploitable to the growing trend of producers dumping out half-finished games. Have some standards and give SOME level of care to the things you spend your time and money on.

The reality is, a competitive PvP game needs to be careful to avoid introducing bugs. And ANY service which can't be hotfixed needs to be EXTREMELY careful of the same. PGI has demonstrated, over and over, that they are not being careful. And if they want their struggling game to succeed, then they need to do better. Because every player that leaves, counts.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

KursedVixen, on 26 August 2023 - 06:30 AM, said:

I could say many other things , BUT AN ERROR THAT WENT THROUGH TO THE FINAL PATCH, i don't personally blame the one dev i blame the whole team FOR NOT HAVVING ERROR CHECKING LIKE ANY COMPETENT GAME DEVELOPER SHOULD!

I would hazard a guess 95% of the people in this thread don't know what a competent game developer looks like, let alone a developer. Errors happen and values like this are often the hardest to verify. The most egregious thing (and it really isn't as bad as many of you make it out to be) has been that it won't be fixed until next patch and that is likely because of the effort involved to roll out patches, if the game is running on a skeleton crew, I can understand their hesitance to fix it.

Edited by Quicksilver Kalasa, 26 August 2023 - 07:08 AM.

[Glory in the Highest]

An unnamed somebody linked this thread in SJR Discord. I haven't logged in to these forums in so long that there was a message from 2018 waiting for me. MWO mattered a lot to me for a while. A lot. So you know I'm serious when I've gone through the trouble of remembering my login and coming here to share my immediate reaction to this totally unprecedented mess.



Followed swiftly by


Yeah, we did send PGI a cake once, to comfort them after the Transverse fiasco. That was a riot.

[Typhlon]

Glory, on 26 August 2023 - 01:34 PM, said:

Followed swiftly by

I'm a nerd, I like me numbers and every game I go to for competitive play keeps messing up so bad that I gotta find a new one >:c

[VaelophisNyx]

Ultimately pushing a hotfix is NOT hard and this is 100% hotfix worthy. You already have an incremental version updating system, you can absolutely push a tiny update to fix something for the incoming comp. season.

[Pezzer]

5 days in, no hotfix still. Yet the "spectrum"-riding White Knights with 1000s of posts are still defending the devs. Incredible.

The economy has seen better days, so I'll just hold on to my money for now PGI. I appreciate the budgeting help though, I guess, you're certainly making the checkbook a lot easier to balance this patch cycle.

[VaelophisNyx]

the check engine light, on 27 August 2023 - 03:18 PM, said:

I make no defense of PGI but you are being patently unfair to Tiy0s. Again, this is why customer facing is utter shite. You have little to no understanding of what is involved and what the obstacles are, how common mistakes are and this reflects so many customer interactions I have had that I am much more sympathetic to PGI and Tiy0s by now [Redacted].

my brother in christ it is one line of code. one CHARACTER of code. that needs to be fixed
this is a "push the 0.2kb patch and clock out for the day" deal

[Meep Meep]

VaelophisNyx, on 27 August 2023 - 04:16 PM, said:

my brother in christ it is one line of code. one CHARACTER of code. that needs to be fixed
this is a "push the 0.2kb patch and clock out for the day" deal

But whats the rush? So far even with the hsl running three is problematic on all but the heaviest mechs and the ONE mech that can actually boat them is suboptimal at BEST. Clan heavy larges are far easier to fit and efficiently use on everything from lights all the way up to assaults. Binary for IS is a big boy mech weapon.

Again this is much ado about NOTHING. Get over yourselves.

[Meep Meep]

[Removed post]

I'm not defending our pride oriented screamers in this thread but in reality this is just a very minor mistake. Nothing is broken in the game by being able to mount 3x binary with no ghost heat. No op builds suddenly started taking over the meta and the ONE mech that can capitalize on the hsl can't actually effectively use all the binary it can mount. Nearly all the 4n I'm seeing now have backed off to 4x binary and that would still be the same if the hsl was reduced to 2. Name me a mech that is overperforming with them?

[CherokeeRose187]

Meep Meep, on 27 August 2023 - 05:56 PM, said:

Nearly all the 4n I'm seeing now have backed off to 4x binary and that would still be the same if the hsl was reduced to 2. Name me a mech that is overperforming with them?

I even bought a Stalker 4N to test, it's a nothing burger. It's too hot to be usable in actual games.

BLC is great for mechs that have limited hard points and you want one or two, they aren't great for stacking. I built a Raven 4X that I think will be good with a couple of them.

But it is interesting to see just how long it takes to fix a "bug" like this, especially when it's already been called out in the code. It's not like they need to do deep research, like with the ADM graphics bug.

Edited by CherokeeRose187, 27 August 2023 - 06:15 PM.

[Quicksilver Aberration]

VaelophisNyx, on 27 August 2023 - 04:16 PM, said:

my brother in christ it is one line of code. one CHARACTER of code. that needs to be fixed
this is a "push the 0.2kb patch and clock out for the day" deal

Yeah, one line of code doesn't change the amount of effort to deploy, just to build. This only points out the fact you know little about how things work. I may not know the specifics but I do development work, and one line or 1000 lines typically takes the same amount of effort to deploy (QA and validation might be a little different but still) and it isn't trivial even if it is a zero downtime deployment.

Like the person said, mistakes happen, you want someone to blame, blame PGI leadership for not prioritizing a hot fix, not the developer. Y'all, seriously taking your anger out on the wrong person (hint, it isn't the dev).

Edited by Quicksilver Kalasa, 27 August 2023 - 06:38 PM.

[Meep Meep]

CherokeeRose187, on 27 August 2023 - 06:14 PM, said:

But it is interesting to see just how long it takes to fix a "bug" like this, especially when it's already been called out in the code. It's not like they need to do deep research, like with the ADM graphics bug.

If this was a popular game flush in cash and players it would already be done in a quick hotfix patch and the cost to push out the hotfix(there is ALWAYS a cost) would be absorbed.

But this is not a popular game flush in cash and players and its owners only allocate a very limited budget to pgi to spend on things like pushing patches out over a cdn which has a real world cost even for a tiny hotfix patch of a few bytes.

If they deem the hsl error worth fixing it will get fixed on the next monthly patch. In the meantime people will be running far too hot builds to 'game' the error.

The solution for next patch is to maybe do an extra qa pass on the changed code just to ensure no more slipups slide in. But that also costs money so..

[Typhlon]

[Redacted]. This is a thread ostensibly about how PGI keeps pushing buggy patches without the bare minimum QA. And also about how they don't fix problems (again, literally nobody is even mentioning the clan MASC thing. They know about it, they haven't fixed it, we don't even know if they're going to fix these bugs until it actually happens).

CherokeeRose187, on 27 August 2023 - 06:14 PM, said:

I even bought a Stalker 4N to test, it's a nothing burger. It's too hot to be usable in actual games.

Quad Binary 4N is intended, it has +2 HSL for larges. What isn't intended is triple binary gauss vom on IS mechs reaching 79 damage alphas with good heat management, but that's still not even the point. idk why people don't understand that and why they keep presenting 4N as the reason this is Balanced actually, and also why they keep presenting this as if my argument was that it's incredibly OP.

The argument is that it's a bug, an extremely easy to catch (and fix) bug, and it was dropped with little to no testing/QA at the start of a comp season, in a game where many players are already frustrated with the low quality of QA and slow response to bugs, on top of this being the second time a community dev has made a typo which got into the game (and again, the MASC one still has not been fixed). The T-Comp not working with ANY of the new weapons is just gravy to all that.

And just fyi, a build being "too hot" to be practical for a QP game does not at all reflect its use to good players on good teams, either in QP, FP, or comp. The average solo will not get good value out of a 4x binary 4N, but I promise you that it's the strongest mid-range alpha trader IS has for hilly maps. Or it WOULD be, if you couldn't fit 3 binaries and 3 ERMLs onto Annihilators with 33 heat sinks and... no HSL... Thanks to...... A certain bug

Edited by GM Patience, 29 August 2023 - 10:47 AM.

[CherokeeRose187]

Meep Meep, on 27 August 2023 - 06:37 PM, said:

If this was a popular game flush in cash and players it would already be done in a quick hotfix patch and the cost to push out the hotfix(there is ALWAYS a cost) would be absorbed.

But this is not a popular game flush in cash and players and its owners only allocate a very limited budget to pgi to spend on things like pushing patches out over a cdn which has a real world cost even for a tiny hotfix patch of a few bytes.

If they deem the hsl error worth fixing it will get fixed on the next monthly patch. In the meantime people will be running far too hot builds to 'game' the error.

The solution for next patch is to maybe do an extra qa pass on the changed code just to ensure no more slipups slide in. But that also costs money so..

This game could have a lot larger audience and cash flow, wasn't initial interest 1/4 million players... if you go back and check the stats.

Consistently bad choices led to it's current state, and that sit squarely on management's choices over the last decade of steadily leaving player base.

I'll offer my unwanted advice, again, PGI should look to what other (successful) games of the RPG origins genera are doing and try to emulate them.

For example, World of Warcraft still has a massive player base, there are even private servers with far larger player base (and possibly even cash flow on a donation basis) than PGI can muster. There are numerous ways things from WoW would be integrated into MWO to make it fun and exciting (again), and to even incorporate things like IS/Clan warfare, etc, into the game in a real and functional way.

Instead we get a couple new decals and couple mechs with rearranged hardpoints once a month.

I won't trash the effort put into the new maps, and the occational new mech chassis is nice.

But, the latest event, Solaris without ELO, was sadly pathetic. I almost feel bad about the things I did. Almost. It's not like ELO coding isn't already available, I mean, it was literally deleted at some point, so it already exists. After the 10th win in a row it did almost start to feel wrong. It definitely got boring, which is not something the real Solaris 7 ever was.

Edited by CherokeeRose187, 27 August 2023 - 07:12 PM.

[Meep Meep]

Typhlon, on 27 August 2023 - 07:04 PM, said:

Quad Binary 4N is intended, it has +2 HSL for larges. What isn't intended is triple binary gauss vom on IS mechs reaching 79 damage alphas with good heat management

Not trying to be snarky but isn't that more or less par for the course for clan vomit builds? I mean heavens forbid IS start to close the clan vomit gap in a meaningful way.

[KursedVixen]

Typhlon, on 26 August 2023 - 06:43 AM, said:

It's really not a big ask for something this simple and easy to catch, and it's always wild to see people who play a game so parasocially attached to the devs that they'll defend them to the death when the status quo for a long while has been "buggy patches with low polish."

PGI is a company owned by an international holding company - not your little brother. This is a corporate product, not a passion project. It exists to make money. Being so desperate to defend what is clearly a low standard of QA and care does nothing but make you and your wallet more exploitable to the growing trend of producers dumping out half-finished games. Have some standards and give SOME level of care to the things you spend your time and money on.

The reality is, a competitive PvP game needs to be careful to avoid introducing bugs. And ANY service which can't be hotfixed needs to be EXTREMELY careful of the same. PGI has demonstrated, over and over, that they are not being careful. And if they want their struggling game to succeed, then they need to do better. Because every player that leaves, counts.

I'm not even going to get into my 'thing' with this one dev but yeah...