118082-drop-4-in-december

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Soooo... it didn't seem unrealistic and silly to you when they said it but now it does? Really? Huh. As for how long they really had, they did have a long time, I'll agree. But they didn't have forever. I cannot help but notice that this release is timed to coincide with other world events that may have been relevant to how much time they actually had to release.

<_< I think "buggy" is a fair assessment. They're working on those bugs, so I'm not going to rage about it, but I'm not going to pretend it was a drop with a smooth-as-silk take-off.


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"Random cosmetic issues"? *sigh* This is where the whiteknighting goes from useful to destructive, where the defense becomes so overzealous that anybody who prefers reality feels obliged to start pointing out flaws just to keep things from becoming completely dissociated from reality. Do you really want to sit down with the list of known and reported issues and start quibbling about whether the list of about 3 dozen known issues--not to mention the ones that haven't made their way onto that list, at least a few of which are major PITAs for anyone who uses chat or the auction house--are "cosmetic" or not? Some of these issues have already been fixed and some have workarounds. I have every confidence that the devs are working hard to fix them, and that a few weeks from now most--if not all--will be gone. But that doesn't change the fact that there are a lot of bugs, spread pervasively throughout the game, that weren't there last week. It doesn't change that some of them are VERY easy to spot and clearly went live without any appreciable QA at all. That doesn't mean that they didn't fix a lot of bugs, nor does it mean that they should do another one of those completely moronic "Stop the game development! There's bugs!" sort of realignments. They absolutely should not even consider such a thing. Ever again. But that's not the same as saying there have been no substantive problems. You're not the only person here who has played MMORPGs for a long time. I've seen lots of games have smoother updates than this--even at comparable points in their post-release lifetime, and even from similarly sized development studios. The game does not have to completely break the subpopulation of gamers it was intending to help with a drop in order to call the drop "buggy". That kind of drop is more appropriately called "the mother of all clustercupcakes". To earn the title "buggy", all a drop has to do is have so many bugs that you couldn't miss them unless you had blinders on. Because that's when the reaction to the drop goes from "Whoa, cool!" to "Wow, this may be cool, but it still needs a fair amount of work, doesn't it."


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The thing that bothers me is stuff like the gadget bugs were in the drop 3 PTR the first time it was up like 3/4 months ago It was still on PTR the second time a couple weeks ago It was reported in PTR forums both times and still made it to live How do they not catch something that basic and right in your face immediately? how do they not fix it over all that time? how do they not see the forum posts and bug reports? It just doesn't make sense. I can't really tell what's different between live and the 3 months ago drop 3 PTR, If anything it actually seems worse off


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Is the state of the game Michigan?


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The only gamebreaking bug, as in it literally was breaking the game and crashing the servers, was because of bad character data and could not have been caught on the PTR or by QA. Yes, there are new bugs that are annoying in various aspects, but to label anything else as gamebreaking is pointless hyperbole.

This post was linked to recently by a dev, so I assume that it remains relevant despite being from back in January:  https://forums.wildstar-online.com/forums/index.php?/topic/16069-carbine-processes-patch-types/ In it Cougar explains Carbine's triage process. Its been mentioned in at least one place that the gadget issue was triaged to low severity since it was only a display problem, and that this was probably a mistake because a lot of players take issue with display problems.


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I don't know the exact details of the exploit, but if its the one I have seen mentioned in places then it has been around long before Drop 3. And even then, it depends on your definition of game breaking, and I tend to a more literal one.


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