Thanks for the response @Saltypatra!
This is actually awesome. I hope your company stays like this! Forced to work overtime is too common so it’s nice to see a place respecting a work life balance, even if customers don’t appreciate it.
Hope my comment didn’t come across as a demand to know. Speculating is fun though, even though it may frustrate you, sorry! Sorta. 
Keeping my fingers crossed. This would definitely help.
Yeah, 24/7 support is horribly expensive to have.
Oh hey you found this thanks!
If 505 is doing the QA, that may as well be outsourcing.
Looking at the 115K figure for QA, and assuming QA is fulltime, 505 has only 1 to 3 QAs. That is shockingly low. I am used to having 1 QA per team, or 1 QA shared among two small teams. I am guessing 505 lends their QA for many games beyond Gems of War.
Welcome to being owned by a huge corporation. The motto tends to be “scrape by with as few resources as possible, in order to maximize profit”.
As long as people keep gobbling up $10 elite (lol) pa$$es they have zero incentive to change this. Yes, it LOOKS terrible on the outside…but players just keep right on rewarding bad service by spending money on it.
This “golden goose” keeps feeding itself as long as the farmer makes the feed attractive enough (i.e. elite (lol) pa$$es).
Also, yes, the profits largely go into the executives/shareholders’ pockets. That’s how many corporations work. It never ceases to amaze me how many people think that buying more stuff/buying stuff more often will suddenly make a company cater to them (unless they’re a crazy high spender, anyway). A company’s bottom line going up tells the people in charge that they’re doing the right thing, not that they should go back and recalibrate anything. They likely saw a huge cash spike from the first elite (lol) pa$$ because a lot of players saw “a deal too good to pass up”…so the 2nd and 3rd ones included the same type of stuff.
That influx of income funded a ton of QOL fixes, right?
Nope.
A couple campaigns later we get…shrines. With a “!” that won’t freaking go away. That you can buy unlimited times for a chance at Power Orbs. Which somehow only became a possible Greater Chaos Orb reward once they could be gambled for with real money.
Giving a corporation money makes them want more money. News at 11.
You don’t need additional QA staff to find typos, grammatical errors or inconsistencies in troop descriptions. If you can’t be bothered to correct these despite it taking less than 5 seconds for your brain to scan, recognise and correct them before releasing a new troop, then that just screams ‘I hate this job and I will do slightly less than is expected of me just to let all of you know’ to me.
Actually, scrap that.
You don’t need an expensive QA team fixing bugs if you refuse to acknowledge any and all bugs to begin with
taps forehead
This is one of the reasons I question outsourcing. I’ve had issues where outsourced devs/QAs will miss an absurd number of typos or have grammatical errors galore because they’re not fluent in english. I dealt with an outsourced doc team too and omg. 
I have a rule for my team: If QA finds one obvious error, they should stop all testing and just pass it back. If it happens often, I have a talk with the dev. Because I agree with you, QA is not for obvious stuff (though I do think inconsistencies in troop descriptions might be their realm). But, that rule can definitely cause delays due to the potential constant back and forth, and sometimes due to higher ups and/or non negotiable deadlines, I just have to let the problems slide. insert internal screaming emoji
It’s one of the reasons that for as much as I critique how things are done for this game, I don’t blame @Saltypatra for any of it. She’s a trooper for dealing with this forum despite how negative we all are. I’ve never seen such a negative forum for a game.
Lets use detect o bot as an example. One actual in game test would have shown their QA something was wrong. They could hire every QA person in the gaming industry and still wouldn’t find it using their current system.
IP2 QA is the best job in the world, you literally fail every single time, get to sit at home watching TV and still get paid.
I just want to add that I’m a writer, and in my own work I miss typos. It happens when you look at text for an extended period of time. Should we be looking more closely into spell wording? Absolutely, and I’ve brought this up with the team periodically. However, typos and grammatical errors can escape a few pairs of eyes, and it isn’t an unknown occurance. (For example, a typo has occassionally released in a questline, and typically me and Steve both pass our eyes over them.)
Might want to look at Zuul’Goth’s spell name? 
Just a very minor thing but has escaped correction forever now. Unless it was intentional? 
…and if for some reason that happened to be ‘intended’, they could also look at all the other typos/grammar&consistency issues brought up by the forum QA, which are (mostly) ignored by the company…
…despite the claim that they ‘should be looking more closely into spell wording’.
Seeing as almost all troops spend several weeks or even months in the game files before going live, often with their spell descriptions finalised early on, one would assume even the weariest pair(s) of eyes would eventually spot and rectify these issues. Several weeks in the game files and several pairs of eyes equals hundreds of opportunities to implement fixes before pushing troops to live servers.
…Unless you’ve decided to look at new troops once and only once before okaying them…
You don’t need to stop the presses and send out new texts to your (totally human) translators to change ‘Annihiliation’ to ‘Annihilation’. Your favourite word processor’s spell checker would do just fine 
As for inconsistencies: This week’s troop ‘eliminate[s] attack by #number#’. Previously released troops ‘eliminate #number# attack’. This is not the end of the world by any means, but it’s pretty damn silly nonetheless.
A very brief search in your internal database, or in-game, or on a 3rd party website or just searching the game files would’ve revealed the phrasing that should’ve been used.
Again, ample opportunity for a lot of people between December 15th, when the troop was added, January 6th, when it was given its spell description, and March 1st, when it was released, to correct this.
Again, nothing that would require you to send out texts for re-translation.
50% mana troops are my favorite.
“All X start battle with 50% mana.”
Somehow throughout the years, despite having an obvious template, the wording has been massacred with many variations of the same thing.
“Give 50% Mana to all X Allies when battle begins.”
Did they translate the original text into a foreign language, then translate it back into English?
These variations have been pointed out many times in the past and never once have they just picked a type of wording and stuck with it. They mentioned a full text sweep they planned to do, but we’re going on 3? 4? years since that mention?
Now we don’t have to worry just about word variations though. We have to worry about blatant typos as well.
There’s multiple steps in the creation process where that got through.
“We all make typos” may be one of the stupidest excuses I’ve ever seen someone use.
These aren’t extensive novels that are mainly viewed by the author/editor. These are 1-2 sentence descriptions that are supposedly worked on for months and viewed by many different departments at some point. These mistakes happen frequently and it’s impossible that “no one saw them”. I know that the work standard is abysmally low there, but just deciding to ignore something blaringly wrong?
Anyone excited for PQ3 should be wary, knowing the fate GoW is suffering.
Tbf, they (IP2, under the direction of 505) might give it lots of attention to start off with, and then pull back once it’s established enough… 
Worth pointing out that the above examples aren’t “typos”. It’s a common error a lot of people make not knowing the difference between choose and chose. Many people would look at the above example of “chose” and actually think it’s spelled correctly. Same with affect and effect.
They’ve used “choose” on 4 other troops and 2 weapons prior to the weapon and troop released on the graphics.
They have 0 instances of using the word “chose”. It has always been “choose” or “chosen”
“Chosen” would not have worked here either.
They have plenty of English speakers at their office who can proofread 1 line of text.
They’ve made typos before that made it out live, but were more subtle. To me it looked like they missed the letter o and spellcheck wouldn’t catch that since chose is a real word as well. But hey, we can go with grammatical errors too, if you’d like. I thought those were less common in Gems of War except in quest lines, but sure. Let’s go with that.
That’s another clusterfuck in its own right.
Sometimes one chooses a mana color and does something to it.
Sometimes one does something to a chosen mana color.
Sometimes one selects a mana color and does something to it.
Sometimes one does something to a selected mana color.
Does one create, summon or conjure a storm? Who really knows.
7 months later: the Shentang Elves are back!
While it may come as a surprise to some players, especially the newest among us, this is not a new stance when it comes to how this Company communicates and/or treats its customers: a perfectly usable weapon that wasn’t breaking anything and was fun (and useful) particularly for newer players to try to extend their reach, gets messed with for no justifiable reason.
Customers who have been around long enough did see some of it coming, since it’s not a new pattern:
While the final implementation remains to be seen once they are done revisiting their flawed Lycanthropy code, it is important to remember how much of this could have (once again) been avoided if anyone was actually listening to the customers that warned about the bug (and narrowed it down) days before the Green GvG day was upon us (queue “it’s not our fault if it happens during weekend/holiday” tirade), and duly prioritized customer satisfaction.
It is well documented in this forum how there’s often a claim that they’re overworked/have other priorities and therefore can’t always be on top of things…
…and yet among all the Lycanthropy feedback and discontent, we get this:
While it is a common stance to blame solely the Publisher and sometimes the Developer, each customer can evaluate the above facts to determine Responsibility (and lack thereof) accordingly.
Enough of us tested the Lycanthropy Bug to know the above claim to be untrue, and that the issue was seemingly exclusively when Lycanthropy triggered on the Hero, irrespective of whether said hero was Deathmarked.
e.g.
Worth noting, when evaluating the Veracity of this company’s claims.
Overall I am happy with the compensation. I specifically asked in stream about it. I buy gems regularly. I bought extra faction assault tiers a few weeks back and thanks to Magus and Lycanthropy, my game froze and I had to forfeit that faction run. I submitted a ticket and haven’t bought gems since.
Now with this, I may buy gems again. So 
The deathmark comment is weird. I think the community originally thought it was connected but we now know it isn’t.
