Learn what “rigorous” means. Use your beta testers. It’s not fair that you doled out cute little ‘B’ icons to a lot of people but it doesn’t mean anything.
Would you say that “spending an entire day fielding issues, including overtime dealing with a server downtime” is a lot of extra work, time, and resources?
I’m extremely disappointed that “Hey guys, you should probably slow down and/or delay this release” was met with “No, sorry, you don’t know what you’re talking about, we’re good at this”. Speaking frankly, every update proves whatever process you have isn’t working. Not even the patch notes release without defects. Devs are often astonished at what code is running live at the moment.
I’m willing to bet the players found more bugs in the last 12 hours than QA did this month. You should be firing them and hiring some of the players.
Players:
What Salty is explaining above is that the GoW team is on a death march, a result of poor management. The deadline plus feature list matters above all else, and it’s considered the Worst Possible Thing to hold a release. What exists on the ship date will ship whether it works or not, we have seen this demonstrated twice now. Beta tests and other stakeholder-involved previews are not done, because they would provide justification to delay releases and that would upset the god.
Normal software people would read “we need more time to release things”, then look at 3.3, and say “why wasn’t this delayed”. That particular quote is Trumpian rhetoric: responding to “maybe you should slow down and test” with “I AM slowing down and testing, but, believe me, there are two new troops coming and you’re going to love them! Now, please understand the game has to release and that means we don’t have time.”
Teams that believe in this mentality don’t get better, so don’t hold out hope. The game’s still fun if you stop participating in the forums and pretend it never updates.