395 replies to this topic

[The MMO Troll]

MMOs historically are coming into the "Summer doldrums", when less people are playing because of outdoor activities. Those that will be playing (like me) will be spread out over more MMOs than ever before, with a good amount of them trying out the two "New Shinies" this summer (Guild Wars 2 and The Secret World), while others will be enthralled by a non-MMO (Diablo III). I suspect we'll see in short order how Turbine fares when they are left with their core, Tolkien-fan playerbase keeping the game afloat with their cash.

[Tanith]

Here's irony for you:

I'm at the comp and in vent at nearly four in the morning my time, unheard of.  My kinmates who play SWTOR all night are playing LOTRO because SW is down for maintenance.  

And D3?  You guys remember that scene in Airplane! when all the reporters ran into the phone booths and the booths fell over?  That's what happened to their servers.

Too funny.

[LordVorontur]

Ah well, maintenance over, lol, now I can play SWTOR while I install D3

[Ardraug]

http://forums.lotro....g-issues/page30


if anybody plays landroval, please find a raid this Hurin guy's in and make it wipe over and over =P

[Raedwulf]

Why? On the whole he's making a perfectly reasonable argument. It's not watertight, but he makes a number of very good points (on P.30, anyway; I couldn't be bothered to read any further). Unfortunately, the leak in his argument is that he is defending Turbine against people who actually code, rather than being merely familiar with the tech industry as he is.

The main problem is that Turbine's QA is ineffective. Whether or not the bugs are being found by the individuals concerned is actually irrelevant. The bugs are making into live code. If they are not being found, then the QC is not good enough; if they are being found, then the QA is too weak to prevent them being released. Either way, the QA is at fault, and has been at fault for a long time, all the way back to Moria at least. Whatever Hurin may rightly argue, that is not acceptable.

[SellingTheDrama]

Raedwulf, on 19 May 2012 - 12:52, said:

The main problem is that Turbine's QA is ineffective. Whether or not the bugs are being found by the individuals concerned is actually irrelevant. The bugs are making into live code. If they are not being found, then the QC is not good enough; if they are being found, then the QA is too weak to prevent them being released. Either way, the QA is at fault, and has been at fault for a long time, all the way back to Moria at least. Whatever Hurin may rightly argue, that is not acceptable.

why not put the blame where it belongs?

i personally know of no developer that lets the QA decide on what gets fixed and when much less let a bunch of entry-level game-testers decide what can be released.

that lies squarely on the head of the department heads and the exec producers.

its folk like Steefel, Fernandez and Campbell that are at fault.

[Spidey]

He does have some valid points, but then he becomes an out and out troll without being provoked. Another turbine shill.

[Ardraug]

I'd partially side with Hurin if this were a 1-2 week old problem, AND people hadn't been banned/muted off forums for complaining about it, AND more people hadn't been banned/muted off forums for holding their grounds that it wasn't their computers, AND it hadn't taken Turbine months to FINALLY install the testing tools they supposedly added with U7 (should i go on?).

But my main question is... "What the hell is he doing in that thread to begin with?"

It's almost like ol' Sap brought his son into the fray.

[Hawkmoon]

SellingTheDrama, on 19 May 2012 - 14:04, said:

why not put the blame where it belongs?

i personally know of no developer that lets the QA decide on what gets fixed and when much less let a bunch of entry-level game-testers decide what can be released.

that lies squarely on the head of the department heads and the exec producers.

its folk like Steefel, Fernandez and Campbell that are at fault.

I will just say this...

Until you come up with positive proof that QA/QC are finding these errors and that the suits are ignoring them.  I will continue to blame QA/QC.

And I site the first year fiasco that was the Burg 10 second CD.  
When it was added it was stated in the patch notes that they were adding the "missing" 10 second CD on the Sneak ability.
Please tell me how you can miss something like this all through the time it was live, all through open beta and all through closed beta? (I was not in the closed beta, but was told that the CD was not in closed beta) And not blame QA/QC.

Or are you going to say that this was something that wasn't supposed to be and they added it for some other reason?

[Raedwulf]

SellingTheDrama, on 19 May 2012 - 14:04, said:

why not put the blame where it belongs?

<snip>

its folk like Steefel, Fernandez and Campbell that are at fault.

*shrug* So implicitly inherent in what I said, I didn't think it needed saying explicitly...

[Spidey]

I just reported Hurin for his last post, IMO it was rude and he was trolling. Any bets on who will be moderated or get negative rep?

And this just in, Hurin is a follower of this site.....

You presume much. . .I have received several infractions over the years when I have been unable to restrain myself from commenting on the idiocy/dishonesty of others using overly "colorful language."

Guess what, the vast majority of the time, those infractions have come while giving Turbine the benefit of the doubt (one might call it "defending" them).

When I've taken Turbine to task for actual misdeeds and/or bad decisions, I've hardly ever been dinged.

But, I wouldn't expect you to accept or understand this since you and so many over on that other site seem so wrapped up in the belief that you're fighting injustice and evil in the form of a Community Team on a game's forums.

"Self-proclamed Troller of Trolls and Master of Trolls"

Well, first, calling someone a troll doesn't make them one. Second, if you think losing an argument and just resorting to calling a person a "troll" makes you a "master of trolls," you aren't very good at your self-proclaimed job.

But hey man, keep up your long, twilight struggle against the tyranny and oppression of Turbine, Inc. Whatever gets you through the day.

--H

No need to send me PM's, brah, we can duke it out here

[Dalthalion]

I remember when Hurin first started on the official forums.  Oh, how he challenged the status quo at Turbine, and he very seldom gave them a rest, all-the-while using language that would avoid the banhammer.  I have to be honest that I cheered him on.

After a while, however, he started to get a bit full of himself, and, in doing so, he lost his original perspective.  Then again, many people choose to have a change of perspective over time, so I wouldn't call it a rare thing by any means.

Currently, he's taken to attacking just about every view that is contrary to his own, with a certain rancor.  To me, that tends to kill his arguments more than anything else, and I've paid less attention to him as a result, because he just isn't the force for proper debate that he used to be.  I'm certain I'm not alone in the judgment.

[Ardraug]

With a bit of luck, u7.1 or u8 whichever's next, reveals the lag problem in full force on HIS pc.  Would be beautiful karma.

[Thorgrum]

Ardraug, on 19 May 2012 - 22:18, said:

With a bit of luck, u7.1 or u8 whichever's next, reveals the lag problem in full force on HIS pc.  Would be beautiful karma.

Im not a tech person Im a finance guy. I can say this with absolute accuracy: I have been playing alts on laurelin server for a long time, since its an EU server and I am in the U.S. its rare crowded. I used to run the game on very high graphics and it was stunning, now even in PvE I cant go above low because the game is stuttering and has a weird shake.

On Riddermark I PvP freep and creep and its absolutely horrific. Major, major lag in big fights which sucks because we have had some pretty good open field stuff and some epic clashes in TA recently. Ive heard multiple people in OOC on both sides say they have had it. I enjoy playing lotro and I dont personally care if one forum poster has a hair across his ass and ticks off other people. The lag is real and its a game killer.

It has to be fixed ASAP.

[Spidey]

Well, he's a very unoriginal troll, his arguement always goes back to coding is very complicated and we are too stupid and immature to realize that. No shit coding in complex, so is brain surgery, so are dozens of fields, but somehow they seem to muddle along.

I may have to revisit my creeps and freep on RM, rolled some over they when the server was launched as the unofficial PvP server.

[Thorgrum]

Spidey, on 21 May 2012 - 13:09, said:

I may have to revisit my creeps and freep on RM, rolled some over they when the server was launched as the unofficial PvP server.

It has all the worst and best PvP has to offer. Zergs, flipping, ganks... The only thing we dont get a lot of are large warg packs regularly. We get them, and we have plenty of wargs but im reading about raids with 15+wargs on other servers with some defilers and WL's along for the ride.

The think about the code is, something changed from 6.0-6.1 why is it complex to simply determine what was changed? Isnt there a tool like excel or something where you can drop the code in and run a look up to see what was changed? Im sure it would take time but what the hell else do they have to do, make tuckboro a 4 section instance? It shouldnt be this hard to figure out what the problem is, it has to be a matter of devouting resources to the issue. Im just not seeing any good explinations as to why its dragging on for months....

[Darmokk]

The tool you are looking for is diff(1) or one of it's many variants that show differences between two texts (usually code) in a way that makes it most human readable.

Unfortunately bugs like this can hide in non-obvious places, not to mention harmless code changes (or networking changes) might have exposed a bug that was there all along but didn't have the conditions to manifest itself.

Here's a fancies one:

[Thorgrum]

Darmokk, on 21 May 2012 - 14:05, said:

The tool you are looking for is diff(1) or one of it's many variants that show differences between two texts (usually code) in a way that makes it most human readable.

Unfortunately bugs like this can hide in non-obvious places, not to mention harmless code changes (or networking changes) might have exposed a bug that was there all along but didn't have the conditions to manifest itself.

Here's a fancies one:

In the finance world it’s easy to find anomalies in trending data, coding apparently not so much. What I don’t understand is the apparent complexity of the operation. We all know when the lag started its across a wide enough swath of the player base to deduce that it is in fact something that changed with the new code. So how much effort does it take to identify and correct it? When a programmer knows they have bad code, or rather code that is affecting the end user negatively isn’t that mission one to isolate it and come up with a solution?

I’m hearing plenty of arguments (on the lotro boards) about how hard it is to find the problem but we are now a few months in, is it really that difficult? Even I know how to back up my data and restart it from point “X”, it really shouldn’t take this long.

[Darmokk]

Most software is written up to the maximum complexity the team can handle. If some freak accident introduces a hard to reproduce bug you overtax the team and you stall like an airplane.  Some software pieces like what you use to control spacecraft or whatever are exceptions but the market for "regular" software is like that.

It's also fairly obvious that Turbine currently pushes their developers to almost exclusively work on new stuff, store crap and useless revamps of classes and not on bugfixes, probably due to the way that employee reviews are handled in WB.

The problem won't be clearly visible in the diff, not to mention there is probably a very large diff for U6.

Myself I also still think there is some interaction with some networking issue.

[Ingaras]

Thorgrum, on 21 May 2012 - 14:12, said:

In the finance world it’s easy to find anomalies in trending data, coding apparently not so much. What I don’t understand is the apparent complexity of the operation. We all know when the lag started its across a wide enough swath of the player base to deduce that it is in fact something that changed with the new code. So how much effort does it take to identify and correct it? When a programmer knows they have bad code, or rather code that is affecting the end user negatively isn’t that mission one to isolate it and come up with a solution?

I’m hearing plenty of arguments (on the lotro boards) about how hard it is to find the problem but we are now a few months in, is it really that difficult? Even I know how to back up my data and restart it from point “X”, it really shouldn’t take this long.

Coding isn't trending data, changesets like these updates are typically rather chaotic, with some big changes in one or two spots and lots of smaller changes all over the place. And to make matters worse, bugs can appear not only in new code, but also in old code by changing the way you interact with it. The most common showstoppers to fixing it though are time and reproducibility.

These bugs don't occur on test systems, they only happen when there's enough load or when there's a latency on the network, or when there's a certain amount of package loss or a combination of those. That makes it difficult to for the devs to actually see the bug occur and track what's happening in order to find out where it goes wrong. And when they do manage to reproduce it, they might miss one or two causes, which means their 'fix' only partially fixes the issue. So unless they can find exactly what goes on, they'll need to fix the same issue 2 or 3 times.

The time is as important though: stuff like networking code for Lotro is complex territory, which means you'll want to have one of your devs who knows that bit of code very well to look at it. And those are scarce resources... if they're also needed for new stuff in RoR for example, you get prioritization issues etc.

Add to that Turbine's 'slow' release cycle, where they only can issue fixes each month or so because they also need to be tested, readied for download, server maintenance etc. is all on a fixed schedule, and you'll be 2 or 3 months (ie. 2 or 3 release cycles) before something complicated like this gets fixed.

Obviously, if they'd really want to, the job would get prioritized, it's own testing cycle and Hotfix and could be fixed in a couple of weeks, but that would take real effort...