Wierdly enough i HAVE been in a game dev team, although it was not of the coded variety in that case.

i do however had loads of experiance replicating bugs.... remember the invisable shotgunners a while back? yah your welcome :P

Bug removal in coding can be an extremely frustating activity, an entire feature could produce a stack overflow if you didn't quite get the terminating conditions on a recursive algorithm just right. Or calculations incorrect because you made a typo or accidentally transposed a character or fatfinger an extra "." or number.

Sometimes bug-hunting and removal is the greatest detective activity you can play, and the best help you can get is quantity. That is something that can be unfeasible in all but the supergiants of game development companies, thousands of people just playtesting. It gets very expensive. However, Mmre people giving their insight, more people submitting videos with a different perspective, it all helps to find that mission condition in the recursion. or that extra ".".

my point was that there is a limit to what you as a player can replicate.

and CCP ruitinly asks things of players that they cannot do, like int he example of OP where they ask him to replicate things using tools the QA team NOT the players have access too...

isolating things isnt something a player can do for the most part on a live server with payer interfearance, its soething that is done in a controlled environment where you can carefully eliminate variables without other players wandering around muching up the tests or introducing more variables as your trying to narrow them down.

while my title may of been a little harsh the point is that CCP is asking things of the players that the players cant reasonably acomplish as a replacement for adaquate Q/A

Find a few more examples of this occuring, otherwise this is just an edge case where the Q/A team are having difficulties because of the multiple variables occuring and haven't got a high staffing level or the time to account for all these variables and the players have difficulty because they don't have access to replicate their bugs in a controlled environment.

you sir are an idiot.

Sorry, but not true. We have an internal QA team, and also run daily playtests on current builds of the game.

What is more tricky to do is to replicate the precise conditions that causes specific issues to occur. Community feedback and videos demonstrating the particular circumstances around issues help us reproduce and fix them. In reference to the issue that you linked - we managed to isolate this issue and hotfixed a solution a couple of days back. :)

This thread is so ******* painfull to read. Ghost how the **** do u think make the game and complie the code. The very nature of programing means u can test the dam thing.

Programing games is one of the hardest things to do. Thats why games programming corses allow one of wtf bugs. Because its complety possable u simple never encoutered it before.

I new one guy whos code failed due to chipset of the 1 computer of a lap of hundered being diffrent. His face was awsome when his (eventual perfect pass) blue screened for the first.

This why programer forgive strange bugs and go irate over blantent ones :-P

Hahahahaha all the people defending Ccp with "Hey op, ccp is too dumb and poor to fix dust, don't pick on them!"

how about bugs that have exsisted for a year :P

like the way the railgun randomly overheats without shooting

or the way railguns slugs phase through objects

or the way railguns shoot and you get heat but no projectile or damage is produced.


those bugs are all over a year old now and CCPs stance is "if you dont have video it doesnt exsist"

ive made more threads reguarding these issues alone that i just cant be bothered to go through the same song and dance where its not real if you dont have video.

Let me know when you make an intelligent post.



That just proves the bugs are difficult to replicate, I can say I have never ran into such bugs and I bet a majority of people haven't either. If you can't replicate it, and no-one has clear evidence it exists then "absence of evidence is evidence of absence"

Devs ask for the videos because if you already have one or know how to replicate it by step-by-step instructions, why duplicate work?

you also have a capture card though wich most do not have. the funny thing is that YOU can find ways to replicate and record but the Q/A department somehow has trouble doing the same while having more resources?

Stumbling across a bug during use is way different than forcing one out. I program industrial programmable logic controllers (PLC) and there are times when bugs only do something if something else is half way through cycle c and only while in subroutine 3. We also program with icons that represent the action and provide feed bad data. It is hard to do like that, I couldn't imagine trying to read all of that.

basically TLDR:

if we as players dont know how to replicate it CCP cant replicate it and it will never get fixed.

proof?: year old railgun bugs that we cant replicate and therefore are still in the game since open beta

So what's your point? That some bugs are still in the game because we can't find the environment in which they are caused?

You just proved my point.

if WE the players cant replicate something then it wont get fixed....

aka WE are CCPs QA, they simply take what WE can replicate it, verify it, then fix it, but issues that we are unable to replicate on command dont seem to even get investigated CCP side of things.

CCP needs specialised peopel that are dedicated to replicating persistant year long bugs rather then forcing players to do the work for free if they ever want to see it fixed.

its been a damn year, persistant through EVERY build of the game outside of the originals on the other game engine.

as much information as possable has been handed over multiple times from multiple sources but since we the players dont have replication instructions for 100% on command replication of the bug/s it wont ever be fixed.

do you not see a problem with that?

No, again, because if you can't replicate it 100% without fail, you haven't found the sole source of the bug and CCP maybe be slightly closer in their search but not by much. Also because we, the players, number in the thousands, and If we say for the sake of argument and numbers CCP has 100 employed playtesters in their Q&A and we have 5000 people playing the same hours as the playtesters work. The players are 50x more likely to find a bug and remember the situation that caused it. If we then remember the playtesters need to be paid, well go with a low conservative estimate of -ú15000 a year. That's -ú1,500,000 a year just to find bugs.

I'm all for bug finding, but I also like to be efficient with what I do. Instead of hiring more people, implement tools which can record a Dust clients last 10(?) minutes of input and varibles, and put estimates at what timing the bug happened, they programmers can run through that timeframe of variables and see if they see anything unusual. I don't know if that's possible, but I'd rather CCP spend their resources and money on finding better ways to gather data when bugs occur, rather than just to lever them out with the brute force of sheer numbers.

Sorry, but not true. We have an internal QA team, and also run daily playtests on current builds of the game.

What is more tricky to do is to replicate the precise conditions that causes specific issues to occur. Community feedback and videos demonstrating the particular circumstances around issues help us reproduce and fix them. In reference to the issue that you linked - we managed to isolate this issue and hotfixed a solution a couple of days back. :)

yah except those testers have tools WE dont have.

like sterile test environments where they can eliminate variables
logs
access to the games code

if WE cannot replicate it that means that it basically REQUIRES those tools in order to find out its origin.

so the bug will go on forever untill they actually use those tools.


the problem is they arnt even bothering

What if the sterile test environment is getting rid of those variables in the first place, and therefore the only place that the bug can be found is in the live environment?

please refer to the points where i say "logs" and "access to the games code" for the solution to that problem

im sure as well that they have many other tools at their desposal that we dont.

if one of their tools fail that doesnt mean all of them do.

And what if we can't send them logs and they are simply working on something to solve such an issue?

Ghost is right, a lot of bugs are seemingly random to us players; forge gun dry fire, RDV that just sits there not dropping the vehicle, RDV that yoyos the vehicle, rail turret installations that are constantly firing, dying from hitting the ground even though the inertia dampener was on, vehicles that exploding the moment they tough the ground after being dropped by the RDV, vehicles that fall through the ground after being dropped by the RDV, tanks turning the wrong way when the turret is turned too, gun that jumps while taking a short fall in ADS, splash damage not applying at all, splash damage applying to some people but not the person standing right there next too them, splash damage being the only thing applied in direct hits, tank reload bug (like the handheld weapon one we used to get), .

Those are just the things I could think of off the top of my head and each one of them randomly happens and there's no way for me to figure out why because I don't have the proper tools for it. CCP says they have a Q/A team, well they better hire more people for it because we don't have the proper tools for the job and we're not beta testers anymore.

gun that jumps while taking a short fall in ADS