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.
Sad… but i have to agree with you… early and rushed releases had ruin many great games in the past… i know they have delays to respect… but still i think the consequences of a rush release are way bigger than a delayed one… as i see things going, many players will just quit…
Positive: Thank you for fixing the French translations errors!
Negative: Still impossible to go with one single press of button to the last item of a list!
Example: In Hero menu, then Inventory menu: There are now 61 different items, how the hell is it not possible to go from the 1st one directly to the last one with a simple press on “up” button? Its a pain! Same for the troop filter: A simple press on “up” button should bring me directly to ZulKari kingdom. Same also for team slots.
Also an important feature to add to the troop filter is the option to reset ONLY ONE of the filter. The “X” button is not used on this troop filter, so when we are on the filter that we desire to reset, we should be able to do it just by pressing “X”.
edit: just saw a little translation error remaining: Dawnbringer special power say in French: “Deal x damage to all enemies boosted by yellow allies”. Should be “…boosted by all yellow troops (allies and enemies)”
Hold up. Either you’re working in an industry where this never happens or you haven’t left college/university yet, because the bolded parts are pretty obvious to me—this isn’t your starving indie developers we’re dealing with here. They’re backed by a publisher. Who presumably has a lot of say as to when they jump, how far they jump, and for how long.
In other words, suits. (Devs: Breathe once for yes, stop breathing for no)
It wouldn’t surprise me at all that some imbecile in a suit is making all these questionable decisions. Happens to me at work all the time, and I work in finance. Higher ups decide to launch 3 products in 30 days, the ones below start hustling, nevermind how we usually take that time to do 1 product decently well. Not surprised to see the tell-tale marks of such management here.
Let’s take a fictional but highly plausible scenario: Suit sees [metric] is going down. Suit dislikes this. Suit has never coded a line of anything in his life, but has the money. Suit decides that more frequent releases, a new troop per week, and adhering to an ironclad, if arbitrary line will make [metric] go up which means the numbers go up which means the money comes in.
The devs just bend over and take it, as it were. This happens a lot in companies that make non-F2P games. You might know it as “crunch time”. This is the F2P version of it, and we’re seeing what happens when some clueless but monied individual or collective of such individuals start to think that an inflexible, almost rigid release schedule is what will make the game better. (It’s not.)
Suits are management, and whether I feel sympathy for the devs has no bearing on whether I think the product produced is good. I’ve worked on death marches and it leads to exodus. I work with people who have also worked on death marches, and that environment is what led them to seek greener pastures.
So before you take make some presumptions about my experience in the software industry, read my point: a good team, poorly managed, produces poor product. So my forecast is unless the GoW team starts adopting healthy habits like “delaying releases so QA, including beta testing, can find the defects” I don’t predict anything but this when new releases come out. It might be the suits’ fault, but that doesn’t factor in to “Is the game fun?”
The patch notes are the death stroke to me. We finalize those before we ship to the app store. We build our patch notes based on submitted tickets. Each ticket is proof that we A) intended to put this feature in this release and B) went through the QA process for that bug/feature. Compare this to GoW, where devs are often astonished a bit of code has made it to live. It seems they start building the patch notes after app store submission, and are even surprised post-release to find things they didn’t expect. It’s a wonder we expect them to answer questions about the game. It seems difficult to figure out which code is even present in current GoW, let alone understand how it was intended to function.
That affects whether I think a troop is worth $50. The suits aren’t worshiping the god who has a wallet.
You and I both know they can’t, and that they would have done so long ago if they had any actual say in the matter, if we go from their responses to other matters such as adding in highly requested features, however arbitrary or piecemeal.
I feel like you’re making the argument, “You shouldn’t be disappointed because you need to have empathy for the devs.”
I do empathize with them. But that is separate from if I’m disappointed with the product produced. If I don’t believe we’re going to get higher quality as the game progresses, that affects a lot about if I continue to play.
This happened last release: I almost quit because I was astonished how many things broke. Part of why I stayed was an expectation things would get better. Instead, many of the issues have regressed. That, combined with the stress and drama of waiting for things to settle down to what the release should’ve looked like, makes it harder to decide why I’m sticking around.
i really like the way you express your thoughts and im pretty sure many ppl think just the way you do and prefer to remain silent being so scared of the possible consequences of saying “no, i dont like this” or “hey that guy speaks the truth”… i believe we live in a sheeps’ world and that shows everywhere, in every aspects of ppl life… so why would it be different when it comes to games? no wonder why the “suits” ppl control everyone… we let them do what they want… we almost all scream inside ourselves but just go “ah, well, whatever they do, whatever they choose, i will just agree” its weird though that these same passive ppl who never stand their ground for their inner beliefs are the first to become really active and “sometimes” aggressive when people like you dare and say what many ppl think… with all that said, i add that as for myself, i wasnt so fund of previous updates either and i feel that as i was starting to get used to them, they throw in other major updates that really scrap the games imo…
Really? Goblins still loop like crazy. I had a full mythic high powered team destroyed by just nobend and grapplepot and nobend evaded skulls 6 consequetive times! No gnomes in 4 hours. #fedup
Goblin teams are always going to fill and loop, that is their purpose. Dragon teams also get a lot of extra turns. I was talking about the AI constantly getting extra turns on all teams, 5+ almost every turn. It still happens but not as much. I am level 1129 with very powerful teams and I couldn’t even win 1 trophy PVP games yesterday.
I love that little blue glow from Base Mythics that appeared on the start of battles. Make them feel spacial from other ascended troops. It’s a little things that make the game a bit better! ^^
I got a gnome after 5 hours, my fast start team had no mana, he filled up and ducked off, leaving me really ducked off and my Mrs pissing her pants laughing at my rage.
Good point, though in the interim until 3.4 (3 months) It’s “Probably” ok IF there is a confirmation after. Not something the player should test though…
Luckily for you that’s a one time bug (the Tutorial prevents Empowered). On my Empower Draining Tutorial I actually matched Red and didn’t use my explorer to prevent a AI cascade. For fear of just this occurring to me.
One thing that needs to change in my opinion is the hero class menu. I don’t remember all the classes and they seem like they may get more use in the new formats. It’d be great if the classes had more visibility, like maybe how troop cards are with 3 readouts. Also I still think the pricing is too high for what it is, prices need to drop.
Good point, though in the interim until 3.4 (3 months) It’s “Probably” ok IF there is a confirmation after. Not something the player should test though…