Broken
Toys
Random comments about
games and tractors
Random Bits of Lum
- Well, I Been Workin’ In The Pixel Mine, Goin’ Down Down, Workin’ In The Pixel Mine, Whew! About To Slip Down!
- Hey, Look, I’m The News For Lunch
- I Hate WoW Achievements
- “We Want Negativity!”: Five Things I Didn’t Like About Warhammer
- History: Rated M (Politically Incorrect, Massive Violence, Strong Sexual Content, Smoking)
- I’m Just A Poor Mid Level Line Producer Whose Intentions Are Good
about 3 years ago
I especially liked this bit from that link
“What I don\’e2\’80\’99t get is why Blizzard is not pandering to a vibrant, open-source addon developer community when they have to know their default UI is shit. And publishing partial notes of planned changes is not pandering \’e2\’80\rdblquote that\’e2\’80\’99s half assing. Pandering is something like this: We (Blizz) need you (the addon dev community) to have your stuff ready to go on patch day. How can we (Blizz) help you (the addon dev community) do that? Also, thank you (the addon dev community) for fixing our shit UI, you (the addon dev community) really make our game a pleasure.”
about 3 years ago
Yeah, I played last night and without Cosmos it reminded me of why I quit last year. Without the UI addons WOW is very nearly unplayable as far as I am concerned.
Blizzard owes the UI guys thanks for my monthly fees, at least. It’d be interesting to know just how many fewer players they’d have if it weren’t for those addon communities.
about 3 years ago
About 75% of Cosmos is apparently working. Grab the alpha release.
about 3 years ago
Yeah, but we got Felguards. That’s got to count for something, right?
Too bad mine plays the succubus summoning sound whenever it appears. A hulking, fearsome, MALE demon just doesn’t come off as intimidating when it enters to the sound of a seductive female voice saying, “Don’t touch what you can’t afford.”
about 3 years ago
The new UI limitations actually make the game tedius, imho.
For example it isn’t possible to create something as simple as:
/cast stun
/cast stun2
/Cast stun3
Everyone knows the routine, if one spell won’t cast, cast the next one…
Can’t so that now. Why? Oh, you can do cast sequences but that isn’t the same thing at all. Why you may ask? Because if stun is on cool down the macro will wait for stun to fire before it goes to stun2. I kid you not.
about 3 years ago
I wouldn’t claim to be know a whole ton about how to keep an MMOG running, but I have been involved in software development in the past, and this quote actually made me laugh:
“As others have said this did appear to occur on the PTRs but as our team deals with the live game we’re not intimately knowledgeable on all the goings on for bugs and testing on the PTRs. At this time I’m unable to find any information on this but we’ll try to find something tomorrow and confirm what this is and what plans we will or may already have.”
(it was in referance to the “click” sound playing when people join/leave a raid)
It seems like a simple concept for the “release” team to communicate frequently with the “development” team for coordinating resolutions. It’s not unusual for software development to experience snafus, but this is a left hand/right hand problem so basic I would have thought a veteran company would have sorted it out a long time ago. Even an intermediary QA team could have done a lot to prevent such problems.
Even worse, it looks like the code they patched in was older than what was available.. many of the reported bugs were already fixed on the test server, but never made it live. Guess someone forgot to run a cvs update, eh?
about 3 years ago
“Even worse, it looks like the code they patched in was older than what was available.. many of the reported bugs were already fixed on the test server, but never made it live. Guess someone forgot to run a cvs update, eh?”
I’m pretty sure it was the same version that was on the test server, the problem is that the version of the game on the test server didn’t change for the weeks it was on there, while the expansion beta server did recieve updates.
Since even on the beta forums they refuse to give any information at all(Even getting halfassed patch notes is like pulling teeth), no one knew for sure whether the outdated version of the game on the public test realm was going to be patched lived or a more updated version closer to what was on the closed beta server would go live.
From some Blizzard posts, even they didn’t seem to know which was going live, which seems pretty ridiculous to me.
about 3 years ago
My only complaints about this patch are incredibly minor – the new sneaking animations look stupid, and enchantments now show as white instead of green.
The one mod I view as absolutely necessary (Zhunter, try playing a Hunter/Engineer without it) had a working version available before the servers were back up on Tuesday, so I really can’t complain about the UI changes.
about 3 years ago
Maybe one of you design/dev types could explain the reasoning behind letting loot no one can use for a month or so start dropping. The BoE stuff won’t go to complete waste (although it will be at least a month after expansion before you see level 60 Alliance Shammy and Horde Pally’s running around in real numbers so closer to 2 months)but the BoP is just taking away from the players who just spent the last couple hours clearing a raid zone just for the chance to compete against a number of others in the same class for the pretty purples, only for everyone to get shafted because a Shaman/Paladin piece drops that no one can use.
I myself can’t think of a logical reason to implement this but all I do is play games.
I do agree with one of the posters over at AFK about Blizzard needing to embrace the UI community as opposed to treating them like a leprous red headed stepchild (yet taking ideas when it suits them). It would benefit both sides. Blizzard wouldn’t have to put up with a million posts going “OMFGWTF You broke my game” and the addon community could keep their mods updated and compatible with the patches.
—————–
“The one mod I view as absolutely necessary (Zhunter, try playing a Hunter/Engineer without it) had a working version available before the servers were back up on Tuesday, so I really can\’e2\’80\’99t complain about the UI changes.”
I’ll have to give this a try, I actually run my hunter with very few mods, and Simple Tranq Shot is about the only one I have deemed as neccessary so far
about 3 years ago
UI addons are crutches… toss them away.
about 3 years ago
If addons are crutches.. the default UI is a broken leg.
about 3 years ago
What boggles my mind is why is it so hard to code workable customizable UI? About the only game I didn’t needed 3d-party UI was SB, as to WoW – its as bad as UO, where you *need* 3d party to just play.
about 3 years ago
UI design is *hard*
On the other hand, the relative popularities of custom UI’s for WoW can teach future designers a lot.
about 3 years ago
Here’s Blue giving the playerbase a nice warm fuzzy. Quote via Cosmik over at n3rfed
‘Tseric, putting on his Compassionate Hat, followed up by posting in another thread.
I’m sure it’s easier to pass that judgement from your well-informed, armchair designing position. Because of the way in the whole expansion is being pushed out, the gap that we are currently in was expected to cause a number of issues. With so much content that is being pre-released, we are going to see a number of inconsistencies that will be resolved on release of the expansion. Plain fact is that this is about production schedules and not about you. This is needed for smooth production of the game, because when expansion hits and people are actually patching the rest of the content, we will have more pressing issues than going back to check some loot tables. This is about putting in order as much as we can as soon as we can, so when serious matters come down the road, we have as many resources available to address them quickly. Issues that, I assure you, will be more important than this. This isn’t about you. It’s about the game. Find something more worthwhile to complain about. This issue will not change until the expansion is released, so railing against me or anyone else on the boards is a categorical waste of your time.’
about 3 years ago
So basically, they don’t have emough staff on hand to deal with the expansion. Class.
about 3 years ago
Well I think its more of a Tseric problem than a staff problem. He’s always been ‘class’.
Right there with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton type of class. I would say similar intellect but those two have managed to make a ton of money and don’t need a day job.
about 3 years ago
No way. It’s like game design itself. So easy that everyone can do it! And does!
about 3 years ago
I know most game designers come from IT field and tend to think (or not think) in terms of code stability, maintainability and similar equally useless things when it comes to UI design.
When you design UI you should concern yourself with following things:
1) Does interface does what players need to do at all times with at most 2 clicks or 2 key presses?
2) Does interface is easy to understand and easy to master?
3) Is it consistent at all times – i.e. does what it suppose to do at all times in the same way
4) Is there too much clicking involved, what are most click-intensive tasks that should be automated?
5) What is longest click/button press chain for single action? How can I shorten it?
about 3 years ago
Jeff, to be fair with WoW it’s pretty easy to see what rises to the top because, well, lots of people use it. More people than PLAY most MMO’s, for the most successful.
about 3 years ago
“Maybe one of you design/dev types could explain the reasoning behind letting loot no one can use for a month or so start dropping.”
Assuming that it was a known issue: if the data isn’t very well compartmentalized, you can’t really pick and choose what you’re going to patch if you’ve already changed a lot.
In other words, if all the treasure data is in one big file, and there’s some stuff in there you want to patch and some stuff you don’t, it’s a pretty painstaking process to go through and clean it up, especially if you have crap source control and/or crap data design.
about 3 years ago
“Assuming that it was a known issue: if the data isn\’e2\’80\’99t very well compartmentalized, you can\’e2\’80\’99t really pick and choose what you\’e2\’80\’99re going to patch if you\’e2\’80\’99ve already changed a lot.
In other words, if all the treasure data is in one big file, and there\’e2\’80\’99s some stuff in there you want to patch and some stuff you don\’e2\’80\’99t, it\’e2\’80\’99s a pretty painstaking process to go through and clean it up, especially if you have crap source control and/or crap data design.”
Thanks for the response to that question, which I figured if it was an accidental side effect it was going to basically come down to the complexity of the bits of code working otgether.
Since I asked that question though it’s been stated that it was an intentional change which ,as has become apparent, has baffled alot of people as to why they would intentionally make the change so far before the expansion launch.
The post from Tseric that I quoted above doesn’t really give a reason and basically in a nutshell tells everybody to “suck it up your opinions don’t matter, because the game isn’t about you (customers)”.
about 3 years ago
Liet – AutoAssualt’s *2 hour* application times for 100MB patches come to mind. No, really.
about 3 years ago
So, in your folks estimation, is it better to have loot table data adjusted in a pre-patch or in a release canidate? Is it better to put the man-hours in earlier for that, or later?
about 3 years ago
Knurd: generally, you want to implement the stuff that’s going to need the most testing first. I liked to implement the new classes first, because all those new spells take a while to test. You also want them ready for day one of beta, because you need as much time as you can get to iterate on balance.
I would argue that treasure data needs to go in early too, because the data entry is prone to error and the testing is time-consuming — literally, the QA guys are spawning hundreds of mobs and killing them to see what they drop. Is this new thing spawning 1% or 2% of the time? If it’s on something that spawns a lot, little differences really add up, and it’s not always going to be apparent in internal testing (another reason to have it ready to go on day one of beta). Treasure table fuckups can really hurt the economy, and economy fuckups are hard to recover from without embarassing rollbacks.
That’s an argument to not mess with treasure data that you’re confident in, and not to bother branching bits of it even if the data layout makes it possible. They’re high-risk changes.
When I commented earlier, I wasn’t actually thinking about the unique nature of treasure data. I was just remembering times when I got frustrated that I had to patch stuff that shouldn’t have been patched yet because of data design problems. On second thought, yeah, I have to say that I’d rather not touch treasure data that’s passed testing, even if early release makes me look bad.
about 3 years ago
Lietgardis: Cheers. I do agree with what you’re saying. I guess I’m looking at it from a production angle that would say, “get the easy crap out of the way early, so we don’t have to deal with it later.” Bliz has already seemed to indicate that providing a foundation patch for the expansion is going to crop up some wierd inconsistencies for game play, but larger considerations might make that necessary. At least for the few weeks that they have planned their real release. I guess if you want to call that ‘collateral damage’, I wouldn’t argue that point.
about 3 years ago
As much as the beta server is supposed to find all issues in a game before ship, it never does. The path that Blizzard has taken has increased the odds that most data issues with the game, such as class imbalances and whatnot, will be fixed before the expansion goes live in a month.
What Blizzard has managed to do is quite clever, actually. Whether they meant to do it is a matter of some debate, but the net result is that they probably aren’t going to lose any of their hardcore subscribers, at least until they launch the expansion, while getting the patch out early increases the odds that most of the data issues are found and fixed before BC launches, and most flaws will be restricted to content issues – which is a pretty good place to be.
about 3 years ago
“As much as the beta server is supposed to find all issues in a game before ship, it never does. The path that Blizzard has taken has increased the odds that most data issues with the game, such as class imbalances and whatnot, will be fixed before the expansion goes live in a month.”
In this case it wasn’t even really an issue of finding the bugs. The worst of the bugs that went live have been known for weeks, and fixed on the beta servers for nearly as long.
I can understand not being able to keep the public test server/live patch up to date with the most current beta, but there are bugs that were literally fixed on the beta server days after the PTR went live, and as far as anyone I’ve heard can tell, the version of the patch that went live is the same version that was on the PTR when it first opened weeks ago; nothing at all was fixed except for possibly server issues from the public testing period.