I think the programmers and worker bees are probably pretty busy. Its the
management direction that I find appalling really, not the work the
developers do. It's just really irritating that they insist they do lots of
testing, they insist they have bards among their testers, and yet every time
they change anything significant it breaks for bards. My enchanter and
druid don't have hardly anything to complain about to compare.
While it might not be as serious a bug in real life as buying a stock, in
terms of programming difficulty its no different. In RL terms their product
as a whole is trivial compared to the stock market.
I'm grateful for what they've done too, but I'd be a heck of a lot more
grateful if they'd just admit it when they drop the ball instead of making
excuses and pretending nothing has gone wrong from their end. I mean lets
get serious. When the head spell guru, GZ, sends me a personal email
attacking me and demanding to know what I am doing differently on my tests
to get such different results as he does in his tests, without even
bothering to consider that his personal client is different from the one
that's live, is ridiculous. How can he seriously consider any of his
results valid when he uses a client that's different from the one we all use
for his tests? There's only one way to explain that and it has to do with
ego. Nobody writes bug free code, I'm the first to admit that. When
another tester finds a bug in my code I don't take it personally, Verant's
problem is they all too often do.
Kitasi
-----Original Message-----
From:
Mike.Langlois@... [mailto:
Mike.Langlois@...]
Sent: Wednesday, January 26, 2000 3:30 PM
To:
eqbards@onelist.com
Subject: RE: [eqbards] WAaahooo!!
From:
Mike.Langlois@...
I imagine that the animation guy's been working on Kunark and each mob in
each
of the planes. But anyway...
I don't want this thread to turn ugly, so I'll stay out of it from here on.
I don't believe that EQ is so buggy that it can be compared to buying the
wrong
stock, or having 5 keys missing on your keyboard.
Those errors would render the software/keyboard 100 percent unusable.
Every class has 40-50th lvl players. It works. It's fun. It's SO
addictive
that we agonize over the most trivial aspects.
I also don't believe that the Verant employees who put out SO MUCH work are
a
bunch of lazy, slack-jawed troglodytes that can't be bothered to do
anything.
If anything, I think they're pushed to the wall with trying to keep up.
Everybody wants something, and each change takes much time. Changes I make
in
code or process take alot of time.
How much time do you think it takes just to READ all of the input from
players,
in game and out?
I'd be proud if I produced something as complex and addictive as EQ. And
I'm
grateful for the work they put in.
Golias, Imperfect Bard in an Imperfect World
====================
From: "Kimes, Dean W." <
Dean_Kimes@...>
Strumming the 'flute' drum is an animation. At least they could have fixed
it so we beat on the 'flute' drum. Then they'd be halfway there and only
need to change the 'flute' into a drum when they do a graphics patch. Also
unless this 'animations' guy does other work, he's been sitting around doing
nothing most of the time. I doubt they have a programmer who just does
animations for the existing game. If so, he put a bunch of animations in
once, fixed the playing while sitting, and that's about it since release.
Also the people who could have fixed the other things like our broken song
din't not fix it because of time constraints. They didn't fix it because as
far as they were concerned it wasn't broken. Once they decided it was
broken it got fixed pretty quickly. Same thing with Shamanic Alchemy, etc.
This isn't a resource issue. All that matters is whether they think
something's broken, and it takes 6+ months of customers complaints to
convince them that something they think works is fact broken. That's their
real problem. If we say something appears to be broken their approach is
ask some programmer if its broken, when they say no it works fine, repeat
that to the customer or ignore them depending on current whims. Actually
getting them to test to see if it might really be broken takes a ridiculous
amount of effort.
Somebody should also point out to Abashi that Microsoft doesn't put out word
processors that are missing 5 letters of the alphabet when they release
them, and then claim they are waiting to put those in later. His comparison
of user complaints between Microsoft and EQ was ludicrous. My company puts
out software and we'd for sure be getting customer complaints, in fact
lawsuits, if we had half the bugs in our code that Verant does. I can hear
the help desk now. "I know it looks like your buying a Tech fund whenever
you buy our Asian Growth product, but its just a graphics glitch. We can't
fix that in a patch right now."
Ki
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