In summary, Matt Firor is saying that they're working hard to fix all these bugs and design shortcomings...
Okay, so what? We paid for a quality product; are we supposed to be impressed that ZOS is fixing stuff that shouldn't have been broken to begin with?
WHY WEREN'T ALL THESE BUGS AND DESIGN OVERSIGHTS CAUGHT BEFORE RELEASE?
That's a simple question and ZOS has been avoiding it.
Irrespective of the good points of the game, there is no excuse for the state of the game at release. The fanboi mantra that "All games have bugs" is unacceptable; any of us who developed software commercially know that. Unfortunately, a whole lot of people have been indoctrinated with the "sheep" mentality.
The game was inadequately tested and, in many cases, the problems and bugs were identified and management decisions were made not to fix them. It was more important to spend money on voice-overs and marketing than fielding a good product.
Should have learned their lesson from the SW-TOR debacle...
regarding the red line above: it is literally impossible to launch a perfect program, that is why every program has patches. When a program is being written it is impossible to think of every possible scenario, the game was not inadequately tested at all, they did just fine. This is especially difficult when you have millions of people using your program at the exact same time.
I think its a little more then that. The duping bug alone was reported in beta. How can something that big be ignored?
WHY WEREN'T ALL THESE BUGS AND DESIGN OVERSIGHTS CAUGHT BEFORE RELEASE?
That's a simple question and ZOS has been avoiding it.
Because there's a simple answer and ZOS shouldn't have to say it.
Developers don't really have a say in their own deadlines like people apparently think. Every delay in release costs money, and when hard deadlines are set for a game to go live, they have to prioritize unfinished portions of the game and the biggest bugs. So even if something was a known issue, that doesn't mean they could get to it before release.
I don't know about you, but even at my job I have to prioritize tasks, some tasks, despite their importance are not as critical as others so they are lower on the list of things to do. Eventually they get done, and sometimes they don't get done in time.
You give them far too much credit, many of the exploits and bugs were reported months ago. That has zilch to do with deadlines.
They just have really bad code bolstered by a really bad engine and all of that tied neatly with the bow of incompetent server architecture.
1) Sometimes it takes many months to fix a bug that seems small.
2) When designing a program everything has to do with deadlines.
3) Unless you are apart of their IT team how would you have any idea what their server architecture is?
1.) No, it really doesn't. It certainly didn't take them "months" to fix it the moment it became widespread. They are simply inept.
2.) Ultimately, yes, but not months in the past when people point out gamebreaking errors. If someone took my simul codes and told me there is a massive data cloning bug, I am not going to brush it off in lieue of getting the code done. Unless I was incompetent that is...
3.) Their server architecture IS bad. Why do you think the game has all this downtime?
So you seem pretty knowledgeable with how this game is designed. Why don't you go into some details here?
1) Since you obviously know and understand the back end code of this game why don't you explain to us what was wrong with the code that made it possible for people to dupe items and how they changed the code to fix it?
2) number one covers this as well.
3) "all this downtime" has nothing to do with server architecture. The servers are not crashing, they are taking them down for patching.
In summary, Matt Firor is saying that they're working hard to fix all these bugs and design shortcomings...
Okay, so what? We paid for a quality product; are we supposed to be impressed that ZOS is fixing stuff that shouldn't have been broken to begin with?
WHY WEREN'T ALL THESE BUGS AND DESIGN OVERSIGHTS CAUGHT BEFORE RELEASE?
That's a simple question and ZOS has been avoiding it.
Irrespective of the good points of the game, there is no excuse for the state of the game at release. The fanboi mantra that "All games have bugs" is unacceptable; any of us who developed software commercially know that. Unfortunately, a whole lot of people have been indoctrinated with the "sheep" mentality.
The game was inadequately tested and, in many cases, the problems and bugs were identified and management decisions were made not to fix them. It was more important to spend money on voice-overs and marketing than fielding a good product.
Should have learned their lesson from the SW-TOR debacle...
regarding the red line above: it is literally impossible to launch a perfect program, that is why every program has patches. When a program is being written it is impossible to think of every possible scenario, the game was not inadequately tested at all, they did just fine. This is especially difficult when you have millions of people using your program at the exact same time.
I think its a little more then that. The duping bug alone was reported in beta. How can something that big be ignored?
Exactly - inexcusable.
The general repeating theme with Zenimax is they are in way over their head, completely unprepared to run a major online game
They have a datacenter in Germany, but couldn't get it ready for launch??? The game has been in works for years, no excuse there - running an EU server out of US because the EU datacenter couldn't be online in time - inexcusable.
Lost bank slots with lost items - and no restore - really? Wait and we are paying premium and they can't even do item restores?
Mass banning of innocent players, then unbanning of all players including those who exploited the dupe.
And on and on....
No confidence, no excuses for ZOS.
I would actually agree with the red portion, this is their first MMO and it is more buggy than if it was designed by a company that has already built MMO's in the past.
First and foremost, please know that we are doing everything we can to combat the gold spammers and bots – especially ones that “camp” dungeon bosses – that you see in game. I play the game every day; I see them too,
It's pretty mind boggling that they can't even nuke bots that are right in their face. That's really bad design. Reporting a bot today should be as easy as right-click, select "bot"/"gold spammer"/etc from a drop down, click send, bam, done. Report saves a screen shot, location in world.
Have 5, 10, whatever people in CR looking at these reports as their main job. Report comes in, CR logs into game, ports to location, looks for bot. If bot is found poke him, whisper, whatever to see if he is a player who likes to kill the same boss 20 times in a row, you know, maybe because his quests are broken and he needs to grind to next level, or if this is really a bot. If toon looks like a bot, flag account (not just toon), ban temporarily, 24hrs, 3 days, whatever. Repeat offenders get booted for longer or permanently. If it's a favorite bot spot, the CR guy can nuke 10, 20 at the same time. Per bot, takes maybe 5min?
Maybe ZOS thought it wasn't going to be a big issue, that they'd catch the bots eventually? Which is incredibly naive. Assuming they believed in their game, that it was going to be successful and attract hordes of people, in what universe would you not also get tons of bots and gold sellers? And in what universe would their paying customers not get ticked off, if not at the annoying gold spam, then for sure at the campers.
WHY WEREN'T ALL THESE BUGS AND DESIGN OVERSIGHTS CAUGHT BEFORE RELEASE?
That's a simple question and ZOS has been avoiding it.
Because there's a simple answer and ZOS shouldn't have to say it.
Developers don't really have a say in their own deadlines like people apparently think. Every delay in release costs money, and when hard deadlines are set for a game to go live, they have to prioritize unfinished portions of the game and the biggest bugs. So even if something was a known issue, that doesn't mean they could get to it before release.
I don't know about you, but even at my job I have to prioritize tasks, some tasks, despite their importance are not as critical as others so they are lower on the list of things to do. Eventually they get done, and sometimes they don't get done in time.
I do in my job as well however if there is an issue that will compromise the promised quality or service to the customer we find a way to tackle it before our deadline at our expense because that's the right thing to do. For example, have you seen the support forums? how can a $200M capital project have a support forum that bad? some intern could of been setting that up the whole time the game was in development. The same goes in regards to measures to combat the black market. They should of known that was coming and had plenty of time to put measures in place. There are no excuses this wasn't an Indie game.
Glad I live in a country where they couldn't make me rescind my consumer guarantee rights and was able to get my refund two days ago. I don't even know how it can be legal for them to insist players rescind their rights on purchase - that just wreaks of no confidence in your own product. Coincidently I got a Wildstar beta key this morning!
I'm having a great time and I can see they are doing their best. This is easily my favorite mmorpg experience even with the bugs. I've seen worse launches.
The amount of entitlement & backseat game designing in this thread is really top-notch.
I applaud you guys for not allowing your lack of experience in any relevant setting to prevent you from telling the pros 'how it should be done!'.
- I agree that the lack of response about the duping bug was lazy / a major oversight. However, if you have some magic solution for dealing with botters, then put it into practice, you could make millions. From my experience with the game there are only 2 problems that Zenimax should be ashamed of:
1) The duping glitch. Not because it happened, but rather because of how simplistic the glitch was & how long they had to deal with it.
2) People falling through the world. This problem is a bit more complex than the duping one, but appears to be primarily tied to loading priorities. Which is mindboggling to think that they wouldn't have that sorted out by now.
That aside, I think it's good that they are showing their efforts to improve the game. It needs a lot of work, but they aren't neglecting their game, and have shown a lot of effort on that front. Hopefully it will continue to improve.
Let's say The King opened up a brand new burger joint called Burger Prince and started selling burgers at a premium however the burgers had serious problems... would that be excusable? The leadership at Zenimax has been in the MMO industry for over a decade, there is no excuse for the amount of serious bugs that came with release. It is a combination of incompetence, lack of planning and a complete lack of foresight on Matt's part above all else. Funny how his former team member's war hammer game shared many of the problems this game is facing. Makes you wonder who was actually getting the work done at Mythic back in its heyday.
WHY WEREN'T ALL THESE BUGS AND DESIGN OVERSIGHTS CAUGHT BEFORE RELEASE?
That's a simple question and ZOS has been avoiding it.
Because there's a simple answer and ZOS shouldn't have to say it.
Developers don't really have a say in their own deadlines like people apparently think. Every delay in release costs money, and when hard deadlines are set for a game to go live, they have to prioritize unfinished portions of the game and the biggest bugs. So even if something was a known issue, that doesn't mean they could get to it before release.
I don't know about you, but even at my job I have to prioritize tasks, some tasks, despite their importance are not as critical as others so they are lower on the list of things to do. Eventually they get done, and sometimes they don't get done in time.
You give them far too much credit, many of the exploits and bugs were reported months ago. That has zilch to do with deadlines.
They just have really bad code bolstered by a really bad engine and all of that tied neatly with the bow of incompetent server architecture.
1) Sometimes it takes many months to fix a bug that seems small.
2) When designing a program everything has to do with deadlines.
3) Unless you are apart of their IT team how would you have any idea what their server architecture is?
1.) No, it really doesn't. It certainly didn't take them "months" to fix it the moment it became widespread. They are simply inept.
2.) Ultimately, yes, but not months in the past when people point out gamebreaking errors. If someone took my simul codes and told me there is a massive data cloning bug, I am not going to brush it off in lieue of getting the code done. Unless I was incompetent that is...
3.) Their server architecture IS bad. Why do you think the game has all this downtime?
1. You can't possibly work in an engineering environment and make this statement. I write parsing tools for a semiconductor company for auditing RTL (register-transistor-logic) designs. For brand new systems it usually takes me 1-2 weeks to get the system functionally running. It then takes me usually another 6+ months to support it and bug fix as appropriate...until its at a state of "completion". The smallest bugs take the longest to fix.
2. Everything in the engineering world functions on deadlines. Here's the grave mistake you made in your argument. As someone who writes code or designs systems, you don't get to make the decision of what you work on. Your manager makes that decision. Are you saying that you're a manager at ZOS that knows what the gannt charts for the whole development cycle look like?
3. You have utterly no clue if you think "downtime" means "bad server architecture". Here are the signs of good server architecture: minimal packet loss/stable latency (no ping spikes), stable performance under heavy load, and no crashing. Let's see...nobody has complained about packet loss or lag spikes as far as I've heard or read. The latency to the game is extremely stable for all players, including those overseas. I get 60 FPS and no lag what-so-ever in Cyrodiil with 500+ people on my screen. And the servers have yet to crash since early access.
I wrote all of this to tell you that you don't even have the smallest inkling of a clue about what you're trying to argue. Please stop.
Meh, I feel kind of bad – for the guy. He sounds – overworked and almost – desperate. The really tough part – is next. People are going to hit 50 en masse – as this month winds down – and anyone that prefers PvE will expect some PvE content. Craglorn will be nice for some – but will it be enough to keep people interested?
Originally posted by BeansnBread Meh, I feel kind of bad – for the guy. He sounds – overworked and almost – desperate. The really tough part – is next. People are going to hit 50 en masse – as this month winds down – and anyone that prefers PvE will expect some PvE content. Craglorn will be nice for some – but will it be enough to keep people interested?
I feel that PvE/PvP will keep people invested for the next 3-4 months if they enjoy mostly solo-PvE and GW2 style AvA.
They will need to make some more quality of life updates if they want to keep people longer than that, I fear.
However, their team seems truly dedicated and I think that they will be up to the task. It's just a bit harder when having a subscription to justify as well.
"As you read these words, a release is seven days or less away or has just happened within the last seven days those are now the only two states youll find the world of Tyria."...Guild Wars 2
Originally posted by Siug Logging in yesterday after being away for 3 days it was the first time when there wasn't a single mail from gold spammers in my mailbox. Been reporting those cunts for weeks and seeing progress now. Also, all my inventory and bank slots were still there. Give them a week or two more and most of the bugs are gone too. I'm sure of that.
I hear you on the mail ....funny though nobody else seemed to notice this +1
Originally posted by BeansnBread Meh, I feel kind of bad – for the guy. He sounds – overworked and almost – desperate. The really tough part – is next. People are going to hit 50 en masse – as this month winds down – and anyone that prefers PvE will expect some PvE content. Craglorn will be nice for some – but will it be enough to keep people interested?
More max level content then was offered in Daoc, WOW,AOC, Warhammer, Rift, Aion , GW2, Swtor,COH,Shadowbane and Lotro ...but not sure what you think is enough to keep people happy but it's enough in my mind to start
I know I'll just sound like a fanboy and my post will be read by few, but I feel it has to be stated.
I honestly believe that Zenimax is doing a great job considering the fact that they are in virgin territory (first MMO), in addition to the huge amount of players that dropped on them at once - which incidentally is why there is a HUGE presence of Gold Spam/Bots.. That's a sign of a heavily played game. They have done a great job so far in reducing the spam. Occasionally some of the spammers will find a new loophole in the chat system and I'll get bombarded for a while, but eventually it's gone again.
One thing I wish they would do is allow us to quickly report gold spammers and bots. Still have it take a screenshot in addition to your report, but when there are 10 spammers in the zone all at once it's very time consuming to report each one using their current system. Other games did this well. Written tickets for CS are for other issues.. Bottom line - We should be able to right-click and report the spammers as easily as it is to right-click and ignore them.
All that said, the important thing is that they are openly aware of the issues and are doing what they can to combat them. We'll just have to see how well they do over time. So far I, personally, give them good marks.
First off, that doesn't make you a fanboy. There is nothing wrong with your line of thinking. However, I don't necessarily agree.
Them doing a great job with how they are currently handling their situation is subjective, so that's fine, I have no argument. But being a virgin company is no excuse here. Not in my book anyway. If they wanted for me to take into consideration that they have extenuating circumstances, they should have handled themselves similarly to FFXIV's development team. In taking into consideration it was a relaunch, their price was reduced. The box and the sub. If ZM wanted a little more wiggle room for newbie mistakes, then they had no business trying to compete at the big boy's level, in the big boy's playing field, at the big boy's price. Beyond that, most of these mistakes were reported to them through the appropriate channels at the appropriate times. Their choice to ignore those reports is not a newbie mistake. It was a conscious decision.
The botting, spamming, duping exploits say a hell of a lot more about the quality and integrity of society these days then it does about the developer's of these games.
It's a real shame they have to spend so much money and time dealing with fucking low life's. Resources that could be much better spent on adding gameplay.
Sad truth, is that the majority of people who are actively looking for bugs in a beta, are not looking to report said bugs, but are looking for advantages and exploits they can make use of when the games go live.
First off, that doesn't make you a fanboy. There is nothing wrong with your line of thinking. However, I don't necessarily agree.
Them doing a great job with how they are currently handling their situation is subjective, so that's fine, I have no argument. But being a virgin company is no excuse here. Not in my book anyway. If they wanted for me to take into consideration that they have extenuating circumstances, they should have handled themselves similarly to FFXIV's development team. In taking into consideration it was a relaunch, their price was reduced. The box and the sub. If ZM wanted a little more wiggle room for newbie mistakes, then they had no business trying to compete at the big boy's level, in the big boy's playing field, at the big boy's price. Beyond that, most of these mistakes were reported to them through the appropriate channels at the appropriate times. Their choice to ignore those reports is not a newbie mistake. It was a conscious decision.
Which game at launch has had a support staff large enough to sort through all the junk? Last major launch was FFXIV:ARR? SE who had already been running an MMO for how many years? Yeah they didn't say anything for days when their servers started crapping out and players were stuck at level 20 because they needed those instance servers to progress the story. Or because the game had no idle timer players were staying logged in and everyone else got "World full. Try again later".
I can only imagine being on an mmo support staff sorting through issues caused by:
crappy internet
crappy computer
computer riddled with malware
hurt feelings because someone stole the chest while they were fighting the mobs
hurt feelings because someone called them a mean name
bank is empty....because they weren't paying attention when they deposited everything in the guild bank
they deleted the wrong character
Hundreds of other things people whine about that I can't even imagine.
I can imagine some poor girl in their bathroom crying and shaking, "....they just won't stop calling....angry nerds....thousands of angry nerds....WHY WON'T THEY STOP CALLING?!?!?"
The botting, spamming, duping exploits say a hell of a lot more about the quality and integrity of society these days then it does about the developer's of these games.
It's a real shame they have to spend so much money and time dealing with fucking low life's. Resources that could be much better spent on adding gameplay.
Sad truth, is that the majority of people who are actively looking for bugs in a beta, are not looking to report said bugs, but are looking for advantages and exploits they can make use of when the games go live.
Sad
And those that are too inept to find (or google) exploits during beta compensate by buying tons of RMT gold from the goldsellers once the game launches. After all, it's not about how you play the game, it's whether you "win" or not...
In summary, Matt Firor is saying that they're working hard to fix all these bugs and design shortcomings...
Okay, so what? We paid for a quality product; are we supposed to be impressed that ZOS is fixing stuff that shouldn't have been broken to begin with?
WHY WEREN'T ALL THESE BUGS AND DESIGN OVERSIGHTS CAUGHT BEFORE RELEASE?
That's a simple question and ZOS has been avoiding it.
Irrespective of the good points of the game, there is no excuse for the state of the game at release. The fanboi mantra that "All games have bugs" is unacceptable; any of us who developed software commercially know that. Unfortunately, a whole lot of people have been indoctrinated with the "sheep" mentality.
The game was inadequately tested and, in many cases, the problems and bugs were identified and management decisions were made not to fix them. It was more important to spend money on voice-overs and marketing than fielding a good product.
Should have learned their lesson from the SW-TOR debacle...
regarding the red line above: it is literally impossible to launch a perfect program, that is why every program has patches. When a program is being written it is impossible to think of every possible scenario, the game was not inadequately tested at all, they did just fine. This is especially difficult when you have millions of people using your program at the exact same time.
I think its a little more then that. The duping bug alone was reported in beta. How can something that big be ignored?
Probably not..... Actually, there was a statement that they were NOT told about the launch duping bug. The REAL problem is that instead of people these days participating in betas in a productive way, they don't report exploits and simply leverage them for themselves upon release. It's just how it's trending now. Beta is less effective than ever!
In summary, Matt Firor is saying that they're working hard to fix all these bugs and design shortcomings...
Okay, so what? We paid for a quality product; are we supposed to be impressed that ZOS is fixing stuff that shouldn't have been broken to begin with?
WHY WEREN'T ALL THESE BUGS AND DESIGN OVERSIGHTS CAUGHT BEFORE RELEASE?
That's a simple question and ZOS has been avoiding it.
Irrespective of the good points of the game, there is no excuse for the state of the game at release. The fanboi mantra that "All games have bugs" is unacceptable; any of us who developed software commercially know that. Unfortunately, a whole lot of people have been indoctrinated with the "sheep" mentality.
The game was inadequately tested and, in many cases, the problems and bugs were identified and management decisions were made not to fix them. It was more important to spend money on voice-overs and marketing than fielding a good product.
Should have learned their lesson from the SW-TOR debacle...
regarding the red line above: it is literally impossible to launch a perfect program, that is why every program has patches. When a program is being written it is impossible to think of every possible scenario, the game was not inadequately tested at all, they did just fine. This is especially difficult when you have millions of people using your program at the exact same time.
I think its a little more then that. The duping bug alone was reported in beta. How can something that big be ignored?
Probably not..... Actually, there was a statement that they were NOT told about the launch duping bug. The REAL problem is that instead of people these days participating in betas in a productive way, they don't report exploits and simply leverage them for themselves upon release. It's just how it's trending now. Beta is less effective than ever!
The botting, spamming, duping exploits say a hell of a lot more about the quality and integrity of society these days then it does about the developer's of these games.
It's a real shame they have to spend so much money and time dealing with fucking low life's. Resources that could be much better spent on adding gameplay.
Sad truth, is that the majority of people who are actively looking for bugs in a beta, are not looking to report said bugs, but are looking for advantages and exploits they can make use of when the games go live.
Sad
Agreed. Unfortunately that's become the case with nearly every game. Luckily we still have a few people who will actually do some proper testing and report the issues they find, but with each new release it gets worse and worse. You have entire guilds with dozens, sometime several hundred members, who get into betas and spend the entire time focusing on nothing but finding things to exploit for money, gear, easy levels / xp, or easy pvp kills. Then they typically turn around and cry the longest and loudest about how broken a game is, or how they got so bored so fast, etc when they fix those exploits and they get banned or have their advantages taken away.
Just look at the GW2 launch and people knowingly abusing an issue with the prices of certain items on specific NPCs. Soooo much QQ from those people when they got banned just a few days into launch.
The botting, spamming, duping exploits say a hell of a lot more about the quality and integrity of society these days then it does about the developer's of these games.
It's a real shame they have to spend so much money and time dealing with fucking low life's. Resources that could be much better spent on adding gameplay.
Sad truth, is that the majority of people who are actively looking for bugs in a beta, are not looking to report said bugs, but are looking for advantages and exploits they can make use of when the games go live.
Sad
Awhile back there was a really interesting article about gold spammers/sellers. A large majority of them are actually prison inmates in China. The gold selling companies contract prisons by giving them laptops for their inmates. If the inmates do what they're supposed to (gold spam) they get marks towards "good behavior" so they can possibly get out of prison sooner.
Then there are other gold sellers that do it as their career. These are, more often than not, the people you see botting or the people that send out phishing emails trying to hack your account.
Originally posted by flizzer I'm not playing the game and doubt I will but , come on, lets face it, as gamers we understand most launches are rocky, perhaps this one more than others. Regardless, I am sure they are trying to get a handle on these issues and players need to start panicking and acting as if the world is ending.
You are 100% right but one can still wonder why they didn't wait a month with the launch, kept the beta running and fixed these things instead, they would have earned money on that in the long run.
I can understand why FunCom released AoC far too early, it was that or close down the company but I have a feeling that this company could have afforded it. If nothing else do they get bad reviews which badly affect potential players...
Of course, I say this a lot since it seems that most MMO companies think the same way here.
Originally posted by flizzer I'm not playing the game and doubt I will but , come on, lets face it, as gamers we understand most launches are rocky, perhaps this one more than others. Regardless, I am sure they are trying to get a handle on these issues and players need to start panicking and acting as if the world is ending.
You are 100% right but one can still wonder why they didn't wait a month with the launch, kept the beta running and fixed these things instead, they would have earned money on that in the long run.
I can understand why FunCom released AoC far too early, it was that or close down the company but I have a feeling that this company could have afforded it. If nothing else do they get bad reviews which badly affect potential players...
Of course, I say this a lot since it seems that most MMO companies think the same way here.
Maybe they wanted to get a significant jump on Wildstar. But it may have backfired.
Comments
I think its a little more then that. The duping bug alone was reported in beta. How can something that big be ignored?
So you seem pretty knowledgeable with how this game is designed. Why don't you go into some details here?
1) Since you obviously know and understand the back end code of this game why don't you explain to us what was wrong with the code that made it possible for people to dupe items and how they changed the code to fix it?
2) number one covers this as well.
3) "all this downtime" has nothing to do with server architecture. The servers are not crashing, they are taking them down for patching.
I would actually agree with the red portion, this is their first MMO and it is more buggy than if it was designed by a company that has already built MMO's in the past.
First and foremost, please know that we are doing everything we can to combat the gold spammers and bots – especially ones that “camp” dungeon bosses – that you see in game. I play the game every day; I see them too,
It's pretty mind boggling that they can't even nuke bots that are right in their face. That's really bad design. Reporting a bot today should be as easy as right-click, select "bot"/"gold spammer"/etc from a drop down, click send, bam, done. Report saves a screen shot, location in world.
Have 5, 10, whatever people in CR looking at these reports as their main job. Report comes in, CR logs into game, ports to location, looks for bot. If bot is found poke him, whisper, whatever to see if he is a player who likes to kill the same boss 20 times in a row, you know, maybe because his quests are broken and he needs to grind to next level, or if this is really a bot. If toon looks like a bot, flag account (not just toon), ban temporarily, 24hrs, 3 days, whatever. Repeat offenders get booted for longer or permanently. If it's a favorite bot spot, the CR guy can nuke 10, 20 at the same time. Per bot, takes maybe 5min?
Maybe ZOS thought it wasn't going to be a big issue, that they'd catch the bots eventually? Which is incredibly naive. Assuming they believed in their game, that it was going to be successful and attract hordes of people, in what universe would you not also get tons of bots and gold sellers? And in what universe would their paying customers not get ticked off, if not at the annoying gold spam, then for sure at the campers.
I do in my job as well however if there is an issue that will compromise the promised quality or service to the customer we find a way to tackle it before our deadline at our expense because that's the right thing to do. For example, have you seen the support forums? how can a $200M capital project have a support forum that bad? some intern could of been setting that up the whole time the game was in development. The same goes in regards to measures to combat the black market. They should of known that was coming and had plenty of time to put measures in place. There are no excuses this wasn't an Indie game.
Glad I live in a country where they couldn't make me rescind my consumer guarantee rights and was able to get my refund two days ago. I don't even know how it can be legal for them to insist players rescind their rights on purchase - that just wreaks of no confidence in your own product. Coincidently I got a Wildstar beta key this morning!
8/10
The amount of entitlement & backseat game designing in this thread is really top-notch.
I applaud you guys for not allowing your lack of experience in any relevant setting to prevent you from telling the pros 'how it should be done!'.
- I agree that the lack of response about the duping bug was lazy / a major oversight. However, if you have some magic solution for dealing with botters, then put it into practice, you could make millions. From my experience with the game there are only 2 problems that Zenimax should be ashamed of:
1) The duping glitch. Not because it happened, but rather because of how simplistic the glitch was & how long they had to deal with it.
2) People falling through the world. This problem is a bit more complex than the duping one, but appears to be primarily tied to loading priorities. Which is mindboggling to think that they wouldn't have that sorted out by now.
That aside, I think it's good that they are showing their efforts to improve the game. It needs a lot of work, but they aren't neglecting their game, and have shown a lot of effort on that front. Hopefully it will continue to improve.
1. You can't possibly work in an engineering environment and make this statement. I write parsing tools for a semiconductor company for auditing RTL (register-transistor-logic) designs. For brand new systems it usually takes me 1-2 weeks to get the system functionally running. It then takes me usually another 6+ months to support it and bug fix as appropriate...until its at a state of "completion". The smallest bugs take the longest to fix.
2. Everything in the engineering world functions on deadlines. Here's the grave mistake you made in your argument. As someone who writes code or designs systems, you don't get to make the decision of what you work on. Your manager makes that decision. Are you saying that you're a manager at ZOS that knows what the gannt charts for the whole development cycle look like?
3. You have utterly no clue if you think "downtime" means "bad server architecture". Here are the signs of good server architecture: minimal packet loss/stable latency (no ping spikes), stable performance under heavy load, and no crashing. Let's see...nobody has complained about packet loss or lag spikes as far as I've heard or read. The latency to the game is extremely stable for all players, including those overseas. I get 60 FPS and no lag what-so-ever in Cyrodiil with 500+ people on my screen. And the servers have yet to crash since early access.
I wrote all of this to tell you that you don't even have the smallest inkling of a clue about what you're trying to argue. Please stop.
I feel that PvE/PvP will keep people invested for the next 3-4 months if they enjoy mostly solo-PvE and GW2 style AvA.
They will need to make some more quality of life updates if they want to keep people longer than that, I fear.
However, their team seems truly dedicated and I think that they will be up to the task. It's just a bit harder when having a subscription to justify as well.
"As you read these words, a release is seven days or less away or has just happened within the last seven days those are now the only two states youll find the world of Tyria."...Guild Wars 2
I hear you on the mail ....funny though nobody else seemed to notice this +1
More max level content then was offered in Daoc, WOW,AOC, Warhammer, Rift, Aion , GW2, Swtor,COH,Shadowbane and Lotro ...but not sure what you think is enough to keep people happy but it's enough in my mind to start
First off, that doesn't make you a fanboy. There is nothing wrong with your line of thinking. However, I don't necessarily agree.
Them doing a great job with how they are currently handling their situation is subjective, so that's fine, I have no argument. But being a virgin company is no excuse here. Not in my book anyway. If they wanted for me to take into consideration that they have extenuating circumstances, they should have handled themselves similarly to FFXIV's development team. In taking into consideration it was a relaunch, their price was reduced. The box and the sub. If ZM wanted a little more wiggle room for newbie mistakes, then they had no business trying to compete at the big boy's level, in the big boy's playing field, at the big boy's price. Beyond that, most of these mistakes were reported to them through the appropriate channels at the appropriate times. Their choice to ignore those reports is not a newbie mistake. It was a conscious decision.
The botting, spamming, duping exploits say a hell of a lot more about the quality and integrity of society these days then it does about the developer's of these games.
It's a real shame they have to spend so much money and time dealing with fucking low life's. Resources that could be much better spent on adding gameplay.
Sad truth, is that the majority of people who are actively looking for bugs in a beta, are not looking to report said bugs, but are looking for advantages and exploits they can make use of when the games go live.
Sad
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
Which game at launch has had a support staff large enough to sort through all the junk? Last major launch was FFXIV:ARR? SE who had already been running an MMO for how many years? Yeah they didn't say anything for days when their servers started crapping out and players were stuck at level 20 because they needed those instance servers to progress the story. Or because the game had no idle timer players were staying logged in and everyone else got "World full. Try again later".
I can only imagine being on an mmo support staff sorting through issues caused by:
I can imagine some poor girl in their bathroom crying and shaking, "....they just won't stop calling....angry nerds....thousands of angry nerds....WHY WON'T THEY STOP CALLING?!?!?"
And those that are too inept to find (or google) exploits during beta compensate by buying tons of RMT gold from the goldsellers once the game launches. After all, it's not about how you play the game, it's whether you "win" or not...
Sad indeed.
Probably not..... Actually, there was a statement that they were NOT told about the launch duping bug. The REAL problem is that instead of people these days participating in betas in a productive way, they don't report exploits and simply leverage them for themselves upon release. It's just how it's trending now. Beta is less effective than ever!
Crazkanuk
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Azarelos - 90 Hunter - Emerald
Durnzig - 90 Paladin - Emerald
Demonicron - 90 Death Knight - Emerald Dream - US
Tankinpain - 90 Monk - Azjol-Nerub - US
Brindell - 90 Warrior - Emerald Dream - US
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Pfft. SoE is charging for Alpha access now.
How good will those games be?
Agreed. Unfortunately that's become the case with nearly every game. Luckily we still have a few people who will actually do some proper testing and report the issues they find, but with each new release it gets worse and worse. You have entire guilds with dozens, sometime several hundred members, who get into betas and spend the entire time focusing on nothing but finding things to exploit for money, gear, easy levels / xp, or easy pvp kills. Then they typically turn around and cry the longest and loudest about how broken a game is, or how they got so bored so fast, etc when they fix those exploits and they get banned or have their advantages taken away.
Just look at the GW2 launch and people knowingly abusing an issue with the prices of certain items on specific NPCs. Soooo much QQ from those people when they got banned just a few days into launch.
Awhile back there was a really interesting article about gold spammers/sellers. A large majority of them are actually prison inmates in China. The gold selling companies contract prisons by giving them laptops for their inmates. If the inmates do what they're supposed to (gold spam) they get marks towards "good behavior" so they can possibly get out of prison sooner.
Then there are other gold sellers that do it as their career. These are, more often than not, the people you see botting or the people that send out phishing emails trying to hack your account.
You are 100% right but one can still wonder why they didn't wait a month with the launch, kept the beta running and fixed these things instead, they would have earned money on that in the long run.
I can understand why FunCom released AoC far too early, it was that or close down the company but I have a feeling that this company could have afforded it. If nothing else do they get bad reviews which badly affect potential players...
Of course, I say this a lot since it seems that most MMO companies think the same way here.
Maybe they wanted to get a significant jump on Wildstar. But it may have backfired.