8 replies to this topic

[Roll Beefgristle]

The game is significantly, significantly less stable than it was when I started playing three months ago. With every patch, more crashes and game-breaking glitches come through. I would estimate that approximately one in three games is seriously affected by this - whether it's a crash to desktop, suddenly having my framerate drop by 40 fps, the stupid bug where when you override an overheat your screen stays red.... not to mention the incredibly bad hit detection, the "collision detection" system that basically involves clipping into someone and teleporting a few feet until you're not in them any more, the polarization filter which STILL blacks out the screen for no good reason, the fact that balistic weapons seemingly teleport to different spots on your mech's body in order to fire and then have a very cavalier relationship with the target reticle...

We all love new mechs and new art and new features! That stuff is super cool and we appreciate it. But you know what's even MORE fun? Playing a game. Right now, it's kind of a crapshoot if that's going to happen.

[Thorn Hallis]

Socket7, on 30 November 2012 - 09:08 PM, said:

The people making maps and mechs are not the people who write netcode; the people who write netcode are not the ones balancing weapons, and the people balancing weapons are not the people monitoring farmers in the game.

All of these skill sets are not interchangeable. You cannot simply put the guy in charge of modeling new mechs in charge of the netcode, unless you want to make things worse.

Yelling on the forums and saying PGI is being lazy and not working hard enough helps nobody. If you want to help them, document and report all the bugs you find in agonizing detail. Figure out how to reliably reproduce them, and let the dev's know so they can take the problems they can assign the bugs to the people who can fix them.

[Roll Beefgristle]

But they're paid with the same pool of money.

[DivineEvil]

Thorn Hallis, on 01 December 2012 - 01:07 AM, said:

Which bring us to the point, that some people just not doing their work for months and deserve being fired. Preferably, if they're actually put them on fire.

Edited by DivineEvil, 01 December 2012 - 03:22 AM.

[Roll Beefgristle]

The game sorely needs to be refocused on stability until it gets back into some semi-playable shape. Yes, artists aren't going to be able to code, but putting art assets into the game and MAKING GO requires a coder, and he could be off working on the vast, vast list of bugs that we've got. If need be, hire a couple of programmers to get things in shape. Slow down the feature list until things are manageable again. There's a lot of technical debt at this point, and putting in more STUFF isn't going to improve that.

That said, I don't think we need to set anyone on fire, or even nastily joke along those lines. Each of the people on the team are just guys, doing a job. They're told by some producer or lead somewhere that they need to do thing X by day Y and so they do it. Maybe thing X wasn't the thing to be doing then, but that's not on them, and there's no reason to hate on them for it.

Edited by Roll Beefgristle, 01 December 2012 - 08:01 AM.

[Shiney]

I agree in part, having the SAME bugs for 3 months is highly unprofessional

[Homeless Bill]

Every post like this misses a key point of the development process: the people who make the maps, 'mechs, and content have absolutely nothing to do with fixing the bugs. Designers and artists create content. Programmers implement and fix things. You can't throw the art team on the 4FPS bug and expect anything to happen faster.

They have different jobs, and they can do them in parallel. Even different programmers work on totally different things; it's just not as easy as shifting a few more people onto a problem to magically fix it.

[sycocys]

They are also missing the dev posts. They are doing a massive overhaul - from scratch - of the netcode which is tying up a lot of those programming resources - as well as making a move to put the engine on dx11. Two things that will solve a lot of issues if people could just be patient and let them focus on it.

[Critical Fumble]

Roll Beefgristle, on 01 December 2012 - 01:10 AM, said:

But they're paid with the same pool of money.

Yes, but to shift their finances to bugfixes, they'd essentially have to fire their other employees. I suppose you could say "we're giving you an unpaid vacation" but how many of them would hang around rather than look for work elsewhere? That and finding people willing to get brought up to speed on the coding and work on fixing it just to be let go after everything is up to par.