Stopping the negative rumors

[eulogy098]

I still find it extremely odd how many very detrimental bugs make it from lammania to live. Frankly it seems to me that anything that goes on lammania will absolutely be brought live no matter how many reports are made. If it goes lammania - it goes live as-is 99% of the time. Really I don't understand what lammania is for, it is highly uncommon for any changes of any kind to be made between lammania and live servers.

And how it often takes weeks/months/YEARS to fix some very potent, often reported bugs to be fixed hurts the cause too.

It's my favorite game, and I only want to see it made better. It certainly appears that there are a great deal if "duh" problems that could be repaired. And these issues are what cause negative rumors to thrive.

[DustTheWind]

I have personally never had a problem with DDO customer service. I am a satisfied customer personally when it comes to customer service. Which I guess is why I never posted a thread about it. So figured I would post this in their credit.

[Borkor]

So many rumors spread around by grumpy people of the most, they rant how bad the game is coded, how things go untested, how there are no beta testers, hell how we pay to beta test for them (lammania)..

To the whole it is untrue, no one looks at the positive sides and ignore the truth in these are just rants by people who have had a personal bad experience and big mouths.

Beta servers: We know of the existence of the test server, the true beta server and have had talk of the developers who have thier own stand alone alpha servers, the test server or beta stage is what we know it to be called as "Mournlands" there is a private preview program going on there on a hush hush basis, yet certain people still maintain nothing gets tested or checked out.

No dedicated beta testers: This one really needs to be squelched for good, it would be impossible for the game to go out to lammania at the quality it is for there not to be, I would say there remains a 98% bug free game higher than almost any other mmorpg, the quality of the text and content is probably one second to lotro.. wait thats turbine too.

Turbine are a faceless corporation who don't care: Well we know they do, we talk to them all the time on the forums, on lammania, and not just customer reps, we get a little chat from developers and designers and the like, they do care and they love our input!

They don't know how to program: I have seen this comment quite a few times recently and I always laugh at the people who post the comments. Turbine really have some of the best games programmers going, the quality and accuracy of handling the amount of data that goes into this game is astounding.

Really bad customer service: Think about how many tickets per hour go into turbine, the speed and quality of the customer support is better than 99% of the games out there, if you go and ring up Sony, Eidos, Webzen to name but a few you won't get the same customer care quality as you will from turbine, this makes me believe and feel that the employees care.

So what is the suggestion? The above needs some PR work, show the developers, show the QA Team, who the testers, tell us how the game comes from the drawing board to our screens, those of us who partake on lammania by choice know you care and know and give feedback for you guys to alter, but globally the rest of the players seem to have this negative look on how things are done.

Really? Really!!? I have been (and to some remain) a programmer. I have not noticed people complaining of what you state above. I do not think the programmers are incompetent. I don't see people complaning that there is no beta. They question what the beta is doing - given what it misses. I think the testing regimen leaves a lot to be desired. As I have stated in a previous thread, in the past I thought others were being overly critical and harsh in some of their judgements regarding how this game was being handled in the development and testing aspects. The particular issue that has spawned this thread (handwraps and other monk weapons being nerfed of their enhancement bouses - yes I said that - I have noticed that my shurikens and staves are being jacked too) is clearly the biggest example of what many others have been complaining about for a long time. An apparent lack of testing of changes made to the game via new releases, along with an apparent lack of weighing the outcome of said changes to the current game situation. An introduction of a fix to handwrap crafting - a new and minor inconsequetial aspect of the game at this time - was allowed to commence - even though it broke how all monks and their weapons interact. Gimping the class in an 'epic' fashion. Depending on how the testing versus development equation works at Turbine - I am not necessarily blaming the DEVs - I don't know if this problem is something they should have detected -or if QA should have. What I do know is that someone should have. This is not a one off scenario where one could argue that "we covered most test cases" but this one was strange. No - in fact this was a global problem - that the least testing of would have caught. It merely showed how Turbine is not even doing minimal testing. The fact that it was bug reported on Lammania and nothing was done clearly demonstrates that bug reporting on Lamania is not being given much (if any) attention. One would think that such bug reports would be given a high priority and assessed promptly. Now that the sky has fallen on the forums - it gets attention - so now the bug reports may be helpful (one wonders if they were reviewed when submitted at all). If they had been reviewed properly when submitted - they could have - and should have led to a prompt fix prior to roll out - or a delay in the update. As others have commented - "it is the suits in the boardroom who make these decisions" - but even suits should understand that ****ing off all monks to appease the few that are using new crafting is a stupid business strategy. I don't want to hear about how "well they had to move it all in or nothing - so they had to live with the monk problems they introduced". That is bunk. If the updates to this game are so intertwined that it is all or nothing - that in itself is indicative of how broken the system is.

I disagree with your basic premise - that people are complaining about the programming, and think that fixes should be quick and easy. I think they understand that is not the case. The part that they (and I) do not understand is how they can keep on introducing 'fixes' that continue to break large aspects of the current game. It appears that little to no regression testing is done. The monk class, and the Min II Green Steel crafting being broken are the most recent examples of what we find ridiculous. Any standard regression testing of these facets of the game could have prevented it. Apparently these, rather large portions of the game (monk is one of eleven classes - all classes use green steel crafting), are not on the regression test list.

[EustaceTrevelyan]

Mostly agree with you, esp about lammania being a "beta test" lol. It's not, although people are coming on to look at things, and of course, it's not live yet, but beta testing (with a cadre of dedicated testers logging on to kick the tires and see where stuff needs work) is not preview, where people log on to see what's coming, and play with it a bit.

Do some bugs get found on lama? Of course. There are always bugs, many of which make it to live, but reporting them doesn't make it a beta. I am not a a programmer either, but i've studied it a bit, and really, it's almost the reverse, it takes so much talent to get anything up and running, and completely bug-free is almost impossible in a work in progress, which all software is. Short of rewriting stuff from the ground up (unecessary, costly, and there'd just be more and different bugs), it can be very hard to fix things.