LET'S TALK: Lamannia

[oberon131313]

...

That being said, why does 'core' work need to be done sooner? Why not release stuff to Lamannia at the same point you did before (what you considered 'polished', although I would debate that) and then look for feedback? Why submit a inferior product for review. Add a few weeks to the development cycle to get a quality product out and leave more ...

Tacking on more dev time to the end of the cycle isnt economical. It means that the devs would have idle time.

Releasing it to Llama before QA gets to fully hit it means that the development cycle is still the same length of time, allowing players a chance for their feedback while still maintaining the budget. Does it mean that every change that goes to llama will be broken, or even that it will go early enough that it can be pulled? Absolutely not. Some stuff will still slip through the cracks; this is simply an improvement to the status quo.

[MsEricka]

I have an absolutely NOVEL idea about madstone boots.


































Take them off and they won't interrupt stuff. Problem solved.

Shade does NOT speak for me. He speaks for himself and to benefit himself only.

[CeltEireson]

That being said, why does 'core' work need to be done sooner? Why not release stuff to Lamannia at the same point you did before (what you considered 'polished', although I would debate that) and then look for feedback? Why submit a inferior product for review. Add a few weeks to the development cycle to get a quality product out and leave more time to re-polish.

If i was to guess its because the earlier in the process they get it out to the public to comment on the less work they will have to 'redo' if feedback indicates that major changes are required. Originally Lamania was intended as a preview server i.e. basically what you saw was what you got with some exceptions and it made sense to have things as complete as possible, now that Lamania is now effectively more a test / feedback server it makes more sense to get rough drafts of changes out there early rather than spend a lot of time polishing something only to have to go back and change it possibly from scratch in some cases.

[smatt]

I have an absolutely NOVEL idea about madstone boots.


































Take them off and they won't interrupt stuff. Problem solved.

Shade does NOT speak for me. He speaks for himself and to benefit himself only.

Indeed, and that happens far too much around here with a few VERY loud people. Taht tend to be very self-centered in how they look at the game. There's lots of ways to play DDO, and the Devs have to try and middle all of that. When you get certain very loud people having too much influence simply beccause they talk the most.. Well...

[smatt]

I'm pretty sure this isn't a "label" they're heading all these with, but a mechanism. All these bits of code point to the same, main casting code, for the sake of expediency. In other words, it might take a lot of code to make something like the torches work if you use an all new way to lay them down and turn them on. Pointing this to the same code where "the players casts the spell" and these results happen is a bit sloppier, but, I'm certain, faster and easier. The bad part is these unintentional side-effects.

Wait you mean quick and easy isn't always truly quick and easy? Lies all lies

You said it (In my best Alfalfa type voice)

[Cam_Neely]

Tacking on more dev time to the end of the cycle isnt economical. It means that the devs would have idle time.

BS. Idle time? There are more then one updates in the works at a time, leaving QA with what they currently call 'final' to send to Lam and get feed back and then go back would leave no Idle time, Im sure they would be the first to say they have plenty of other things to do. Moreover, its stuff that the Devs would have to fix, would be stuff they already had to fix. Now they are doing it after it gets to the final paying customer, which is bad for the brand, as opposed to doing after Lam, before release.

*EDIT*
Making what i said closer to english

Moreover, its stuff that the Devs would have to already had to fix. Currently it goes live, we point bugs out and devs have to spend their time fixing it. My suggestion is take the level of quality that is going live, send it to lam then get feed back and fix it before it goes live. Take the 14 day hit to your deadline and do it right.

[Dark_Helmet]

Nope, what MF is saying is that posting bugs on the forums is haphazard to say the least... Such things assume that a Dev reads EVERYTHING in a particular forum, and every post in a thread. Sorry that's way too much to ask... Trying to sift through everything posted everyday.. The only peopel that could possibly do that are people that don't have a job and lots of spare time, or people that pike A LOT at work...

Setting up a Lama bug forum is a great idea... It at least attempts to narrow things down to one patrticular part of the forums for a Dev or 2 to concentrate on. No matter what they do, Lama will have a small playerbase, one that will again limit the amount of sifting required. They can also flag particular bug threads for more information, enough information, read, etc...

The live game itself needs a fully functioning bug reporting system INGAME..... It's convienant for the VAST majority of DDO players who have no interest and or time in coming to the forums. Whereas MOST Lama players msot certainly frequent the forums.

Yeah, you don't understand. I can tell by your comments.


Lama bug forum is exactly what I am talking about. Having one place that we can see and comment on. It also allows the chance that people can confirm they replicated the bug or don't see it happen.

The Dev posting about the ladder bug in the forums was exactly what I am talking about: People could see who report where the bug happened and then we got results. You could see that the post made it up there vs. the broken bug reporting mechanism.




The bug reports in game are a black hole where we don't see any results. Once in awhile, a particular person is requested to provide more feedback. By and large, you don't get any feedback that you have contributed to making a better product.

[Phemt81]

The days of a few clever designers making decisions in a vacuum are in the past.

Smart conclusion there.

Take madstone boots for example. That began life as a request from Shade who complained, when playing Crystal Cove, that he couldn't use torches & teleporters.

So... /sarcasm ON
what if he say they should stay the way they are?

[Freeman]

I have an absolutely NOVEL idea about madstone boots.

Take them off and they won't interrupt stuff. Problem solved.

Shade does NOT speak for me. He speaks for himself and to benefit himself only.

So, instead of asking for a bug to be fixed, we should just pretend it doesn't exist? That would make things simpler for Turbine, at least, since they would never have to spend any time fixing anything. Eventually, we would eventually have to pretend that every quest, item, and class in the game didn't exist though, so I don't think that approach is very feasible.

Shade was asking for the ability to use torches and other challenge items while Madstoned. Since using these items was the equivalent of dropping something on the ground and had nothing to do with spellcasting, that was a reasonable request. The problem is that instead of changing the challenge items, the devs decided to change Madstone Boots instead, to save time. Don't blame Shade if the Devs decided to treat a sore thumb by amputating at the elbow.

[Phemt81]

Shade was asking for the ability to use torches and other challenge items while Madstoned. Since using these items was the equivalent of dropping something on the ground and had nothing to do with spellcasting, that was a reasonable request. The problem is that instead of changing the challenge items, the devs decided to change Madstone Boots instead, to save time.

THIS.

Like saying: dev1 "hey, i don't know how to make bag weight their actual content"
dev2 "nvm, we'll get rid of that"...

And +1 to you for pointing out the real issue here.

[GeneralDiomedes]

There's no doubt in my mind that in order for us to make DDO the best it can be, we need your feedback. The days of a few clever designers making decisions in a vacuum are in the past.

And yet .. when an MMO worships the feedback of its player base, you end up with WoW. Smooth, polished, but kind of bland, like pop music. I hope you don't throw the baby (i.e. the Vision) out with the bathwater. I imagine there is a lot of pressure to ramp up the mass appeal now that Warner has poured $$$$ into DDO.

[waterboytkd]

Moreover, its stuff that the Devs would have to fix, would be stuff they already had to fix. Now they are doing it after it gets to the final paying customer, which is bad for the brand, as opposed to doing after Lam, before release.

Huh, wha? Maybe I'm just failing my reading check, but it sounds like you're saying MadFloyd said we're going to get more bugs, mishaps, and mistakes in the LIVE version of updates. What I read is that we're going to get more bad stuff in our Lama builds, because we're getting Lama sooner in the development cycle (it's no longer a preview server; it's now a test server), which would seem logical to me.

[Bronko]

Depends on how you look at it.

Take madstone boots for example. That began life as a request from Shade who complained, when playing Crystal Cove, that he couldn't use torches & teleporters. Behind the scenes, these two mechanics were really spellcasting. I filed a bug to make madstone boots work in this situation. Did I intend or expect the item to be changed in the way it was? No. Heck, the designer who made the change didn't exactly anticipate the results.

Sometimes a change is intentional on the part of the person who made the change, but not the team/management as a whole. Again, having stuff go out earlier to Lamannia means more stuff will show up there before it's formally reviewed.

Excellent explanation MF. You're talking about the unintended consequences of well intentioned decisions. It's strange to think that you and I share similarities in our jobs but your post makes it abundantly clear that we do. This also highlights the most important part of making changes to the game that I have always written about: it should be slow, purposeful, and underwritten by two-way communication between the Turbine team and the playerbase. If you folks are driven by desires to dazzle us with content you break the game and the long term sustainability of DDO goes out the window.

It should be crystal clear why we need responses from the Dev Team when someone asks, "is X working as intended?"

But you have now taught me one more important lessons about the game: everything is Shade's fault. This is good news for Smatt who up to this point was the sole source of blame for everything that went wrong with raids, nerfs, the guild, and anything else that has or will go wrong with DDO. Smatt, you are no longer the DDO Whipping Boy.

[Jasparion]

That began life as a request from Shade who complained

While I dont know the number of people who do play, I do know that you probably shouldnt be doing things just because one person stamps their feet and demands something. Especially when that person has a habit of only wanting things to the benefit of his favourite class.

You also shouldnt get so defensive and feel you have to apologise when people dont like something on a test server. I would think rational posts pointing out pros and cons should be read, but when people say something like "the boots were working 100% before this blah blah nerf" which is clearly wrong, should be ignored.

[Produktion_Malphunktion]

Not going to go there. :-)

I will.
Lamannia.

[Produktion_Malphunktion]

For one I'd like to have this reset...

http://my.ddo.com/charactercopy

As two of my characters recently failed to copy to "Llama land" and my other 3 are outdated...

Then I will consider going over to pet the Llama's

Yes we know. It is out of QA and PD's hands.

[Meat-Head]

While I dont know the number of people who do play, I do know that you probably shouldnt be doing things just because one person stamps their feet and demands something. Especially when that person has a habit of only wanting things to the benefit of his favourite class.

I totally hear what you're saying here. But my impression of MFs comments was more like, "Hey this experienced player reported something weird. Lemme look at that... Hmm.. That's not working like we intended.. Let's look at this item more."

I think you put too much emphasis on the "Shade" part. But that's just how I'm reading it.

[jkm]

We've also opened up a bug forum on Lamannia. This is because we continuously see posts to the effect "this was reported on Lam and it STILL went live". Having a bug mentioned somewhere in a thread is dicey. Hopefully the separate forum will help.

Honestly, you need a public visible version of fogbugz (limit visibility on exploits).

[Produktion_Malphunktion]

Tacking on more dev time to the end of the cycle isnt economical. It means that the devs would have idle time.

Releasing it to Llama before QA gets to fully hit it means that the development cycle is still the same length of time, allowing players a chance for their feedback while still maintaining the budget. Does it mean that every change that goes to llama will be broken, or even that it will go early enough that it can be pulled? Absolutely not. Some stuff will still slip through the cracks; this is simply an improvement to the status quo.

This. We are trying to be more aggressive in some ways, and using Lama as a Beta server instead of a Preview world is one of the ways. Everything has been seen at least briefly by QA by the point it hits lama. Things like items have not had full scrutiny. That said, QA makes sure it works as the designer intended, hence Madstone boot changes being not bugged after the alpha cycle.
Like Floyd said, the changes to MS boots were made for a good reason, and we heard that complaint by more than just Shade. I know of at least a handful of community bugs reported about it from CC. Was the fix the right way to fix it? That is a different story.

[fuzzy1guy]

Redacted