I'm a little late to the party but...

Was I the only one who laughed out loud when I read the part about Melee/Ranged/Spell Power tomes? Rubbinns and a couple others were sarcastically calling them in that other thread before they were confirmed... Really does look like Turbine is turning everyting into tomes now.

The BB change thingamabob is nice. I'll give them that. But not much else.

Aside from that though, I didn't see anything of note. New pack looks and sounds boring as fuck, and we totally need more level 13 quests.  No cool new features/quests, no bug fixes, and a known issue list which seems to be expanding at the same rate as the universe. And they still haven't acknowledged the ladder bug...

Flav wrote on Jul 29^th, 2015 at 1:34am:

Sorry, Flav, but it's still possible Kookie had already sent Varg. that bug. And he still felt it was a special favor just to look at it.

This is Bugzilla, yes.    Or Trac, or Jira, or 8 million other systems.  Launchpad.  RT.

Excellent post.

DropBear wrote on Jul 29^th, 2015 at 12:21am:

Agreed.


DropBear wrote on Jul 29^th, 2015 at 12:21am:

Yep, pretty standard.  It's better with (at least) a third environment - one that's as close to production as possible.  It's bizarre - that's a 4-digit dollar investment, and some code-moving changes, but it'll save you hours every time.  Remember that last update where they went ___ hours over... oh right.  All of them.  How does that happen after the first time?


DropBear wrote on Jul 29^th, 2015 at 12:21am:

Completely agree, and I'd add one crucial part here:  I think they're lazy and too entrenched.  The problem with a company like Turbine is you have nobody who's accountable but also knows a) coding and b) coding within the system.  That's where the producer steps in and says 'wtf, three weeks to fix this string table error?"  When you have codemonkeys who set their own schedules and are indispensible, you're going to have issues.


DropBear wrote on Jul 29^th, 2015 at 12:21am:

Yes.  (Seriously.  I can't come up with any other reason than they're overwhelmed with reports.  Were.)


DropBear wrote on Jul 29^th, 2015 at 12:21am:

This they've actually described before... it's basically "we have enough reports."  Kind of cheap, because that *should* mean "we can replicate it, we know what's up, so more reports won't help."  I have no idea what it actually means, because some of that shit's been on there for literally *years*.


DropBear wrote on Jul 29^th, 2015 at 12:21am:

That's in line with the above.  They have no QA.  You can't just use the changelog summary, because with these idiots it's 50 lines of "after you drag the stone to your bag..."  You need somebody in between Varg and Cordo, where the shit actually gets *tested*.  Not only are the release notes incomplete, half the time they're wrong, and 90% of those are shit you can confirm/deny in five minutes.  Spend an extra hour and go through your list, and just check them off.  It's so basic.  Blood pressure rising...


DropBear wrote on Jul 29^th, 2015 at 12:21am:

Probably right.  Ties in with nobody being accountable to how long things should take.  "Look, I fixed 35 bugs this month!"  "Yeah, but 30 of those are string table errors."


DropBear wrote on Jul 29^th, 2015 at 12:21am:

Agreed, although version control doesn't really have anything to do with bug tracking itself.  This is two things: bad version control and shitty testing.  There are arguments for and against test-driven development (where you write the test first, and then the code, or vice versa), but in either case, first thing you do when you find a bug in *existing* code is write a fucking test!  That way, when some idiot "fixes" bags, it blows up right away, before it hits Lam, and everybody figures it out but nobody reports it because omg won't this be fun and now it's live and now your economy's shot for *years*.


DropBear wrote on Jul 29^th, 2015 at 12:21am:

I think they don't.  We're not arguing about that.  :-D  I think they have a system in place.  It's just not used well.  Partly that's understaffing, partly it's shit code, and mostly lethargy.

Look, here's the problem: you can't fire these guys until the game's not making money.  Warner's gonna milk this thing until it's just Fran buying cakes to get through EN LoD and Uurlock and Cordo jerking each other off in some warehouse.  And probably longer - look up Hollywood Accounting - they're experts at keeping losing companies around until it *actually* hurts the bottom line.  The problem is not that Warner knows that, it's that *Turbine* knows that.  How hard do you work when you know they can't live without you?  It'd be almost impossible to bring somebody new in at this point to do anything other than specialization - AI, graphics stuff, sound...  nobody would take this job anyway, since the pay is shit and you'd have to live in Boston.


DropBear wrote on Jul 29^th, 2015 at 12:21am:

That sums it up nicely.

Ah Pook wrote on Jul 29^th, 2015 at 4:36am:

Artorias wrote on Jul 31^st, 2015 at 6:57am:

Plot twist: you get 20th reward list of Defiler of the Just.

Quote:


Think Keanu Reeves - "Whoa ..."

Finally a reason to visit my ship.