I have come to the conclusion that they have no idea what they screwed up and are at a total loss on how to fix it. That's why we are getting these pointless hotfixes now, to make it seem like they are really hard at work to fix what they screwed up.

They offer no excuses or insights into the matter because they simply cannot. If they knew what the problem was and how to fix it it would have been done by now.

Cannot
Code
Properly

Yes, this usually applies to every coding project in companies not even related to gaming.

Coding is complicated.

"Clearly simple mistakes"?
Until you've learned to code, you have no right to say that. If you think you can consistently write completely bug-free code, you should go to school right now, because those skills will make you a very rich man. The fact is that writing bug-free code is impossible, even in projects that have had the combined work of thousands of people for dozens of years (see the Linux OS), and fixing one bug can produce ten others.

Sorry but where I come from, if someone is incapable of doing a tasked they are trained for then they are gone. I don't need to know coding to know that they are incompetent thank you. Was you paid for that comment?

An example:
Republic Scout mk.0 having 3 equipment slots on release of 1.8

I ask myself "how did this happen?"

While I understand that mistakes can happen especially when rushed but the only things that come to mind would be either

1. Someone was going to be quitting and purposely messed things up.
2. CCP gave some new guy the job of doing the LP store suits and the monkey had no idea what he was doing.

Literally nothing else would be an alright excuse for this mess up. This isn't the only things that was broken.
All of the broken Cal/Amarr scouts and light frames at launch. Messed up skill multipliers which included skills that weren't corrected until a few days ago.

Oh I agree- I'm not upholding CCP as some standard of coding excellence, other than the negative example. But the idea that CCP should "omg just hot fix it already" is unfair and displays a remarkable amount of ignorance about the complexity of the task. It's like hiring a contractor to build an addition onto your house, and when they run into difficulties because of a shaky foundation and existing parts of the building not being up to code (Unreal Engine 3 lololol), you stamp your feet and rage at them.

As for the excuse: they waited as long as possible to release the patch while still meeting their March promise, presumably trying to fix this bug and others. This is probably why they couldn't give a more concrete release date- fixing bugs like this is not a systematic process, really, it requires one coder or a team to have a crystallizing moment of clarity. Ultimately, they must have decided that it was better to get the content out than to delay the patch for bug fixes, and I think I agree with them.

ive recently been learning to code. if you dont have a plan of excatly how each and every bit will fit together then later on down the line something will bite you on the arse. with all the changes in direction we are lucky this update works at all. things really could be much worse.

i rember times on eve where i couldnt even logg in for hours afterwards because things went arse up. weve had it lucky this patch. oh man the horrible horrible bugs that happened in eve.

if it bugs you that much stop playing till its fixed or use cheaper gear.

what would be nice is if we heard something in an offical channel or fourm post it what was going on instead of the random dropping of stuff in threads.

I'm just sitting in a political theory lecture class giving no fucks (it's my last semester and I'm a Comp Sci major) and forum warrioring for kicks.

The Fucks?

Hahahah my favourite line was this one ^

But seriously CCP, sort this problem out, it's definitely THE most important thing to get right at the moment as it affects EVERYONE playing the game!

anyway coding is complicated and messy and very very confusing, as much as I'd love to work on games I have no idea how to code, especially something as complicated as eve or dust. Op I share your concerns but I'm willing to wait, best thing we can do to help is give them all the info we can. I'm still loving 1.8!

It means that the battle server isn't calculating until after you're spawned in. Hence why the client knows exactly how much max HP you have. Or in terms of the forge gun it's the client thinks it can fire it faster than the server would allow.

Hmm I haz a theory. To be able to have equipment skill bonuses, since equipment is server-sided, CCP had to move all skill bonus application to server-side. However, due to pre-existing performance issues and having to frequently re-do skill application whenever someone spawns, as well individually applying skill bonuses to each of the dozens of pieces of equipment on the battlefield at any given moment, and then distributing info on these applications to every client, the skill applications get pushed down the stack in favor of hit detection, damage calculation, player position tracking, etc. This would explain the variable amount of time it takes before applying your skills.

Edit: to be clear I'm totally spitballing without knowing anything about their actual code base, I'm just bored.

It's actually really not. China makes your precious iPhones, and everyone seems to think they're the most quality thing since machine-sliced bread.

Or maybe CCP thought they'd save money by keeping a bunch of children in a warehouse doing nothing but manually entering in stats with applied skills

Reverse Psychology and threats do not work on CCP. Otherwise I'd be mailing letters to Iceland and Shanghai from false addresses with confectioners sugar in them.

In the end our best bet is posting emotionally calm and focused ideas repeatedly. Eventually it will sink in. Sustained ranting only works for getting things nerfed or giving CCP pause over a critical decision.



Drama, oh how I am entertained by thee. Threads with discussions like this one are good to.

Actually Shanghai is part of China so it is.

Odds are everyone's posts in this thread are from electronic devices made in China. Singling out Apple makes you look petty Awry.

From a code perspective there are things we will refer to as "Procedures". All of your character data to include skills and passives are stored in a database of some sort. We'll call it the "database". The Database is in the backend and is independent of the application server. The application server is the server we connect to in order to play Dust. When we load into a match a lot of Procedures" are executed...ALOT. These procedures connect to the Database and pull all sorts of things. This would include Installations, spawn points, some graphics, a checksum (something that checks that everything is correct), and character builds/fits and passives.

So they made a change to the process of checking passives. They made a change on some level in these "Procedures" (that contain complex functions, custom functions, math, code, etc.) that has created a loading delay that wasn't there before. The best way to imagine it is that 32 players have different configurations of different things and different passives. The server processes all of this and then has to propagate it to all of the clients (PS3) or just yours. Whatever the change they made was has created delay.

Changes that can be made (based on my personal experience) would be things such as:

-Code "optimizations". Sometimes Optimizations are actually not really optimized because they weren't tested in production. You'll find that you can have a really strong theory but then in production there were elements that weren't calculated

-Version Changes. Let's say that Unreal Engine released a patch to the dev software. That patch may have updated in a way that uses more resources for loop logic which is really common. Loop logic is something like this (note: I'm not using real code for many reasons)

1) X = character that hasn't had passives processed
2) Check Character "X"
3) Check Passive skills
4) Apply passive skills and propagate to clients
5) Go back to step 1

In programming, patches often can take a very good code and make it bad code because of new features.

-Operating System changes and updates. Sometimes a simple BSD or Unix or MS update for security holes can jack up a whole lot of backend stuff.

I hope that sheds a little light. BTW this isn't theory, this is personal experience and I have a lot of it on the backend sides of things. I maybe wrong but whatever it is would be in line with what I posted.

Although there are other things I hope this gives you an idea of where things can be an issue.

EDIT: You can apply this logic to a lot of the bugs we are seeing. To include misfires of forge guns, etc.

>implying there are QA testers

I would too, and so would lots of people. The issue I think lies with the contract with Sony, which is why there also can't be a test server. So until that contract is up, there's really nothing anyone can do about it. Kind of a ****** situation, eh?

The part you underlined is worded incorrectly. It reads as refuting the claim Dust 514 is developed in China. What Awry should have said is, "The quality of the game has nothing to do with being made in China. [insert example here]."

I have refrained and have never posted negative replies on any forum format. I can see the vision CCP has to make a connection to EvE and have one massive virtual world where the possibilities are endless. I do hope that vision comes to fruition someday.

If someone asked for my opinion, and they didn't. I would say, go back to 1.6 and collectively fix as many bugs, lags and glitch issues as you possibly could. 1.6 was pretty damn close to being balanced. I love the new toys as much as anybody else. But let's face it. Not a one of them work as their intended.

Slow down and don't worry about these guys wanting a fresh pair of panties in every update. What we, the serious, long time players want is a stable platform. A character that fits our play style and persona. Not an update that forces you to become something your not.

1.7 was a Tank Spam sandwich with a slice of Rail Gun with a cool Combat Rifle to drink.

1.8 seems to be the rise of the Scout with cloaking.

Some may rail on my post and some will surely have something ignorant to say because he/she was abused by their father. The facts are serious though. 75% of my corporation do not log on anymore and each update drives more away. Most were veterans and some scrubs but any player that turns away from DUST hurts us all.