I remember Daggerfall, it was so crash prone I ruined a hard drive with it.
Thankfully, no one is saying that EHG is doing a phenomenal job at finding bugs.
I’m arguing that it’s a players responsibility to report bugs that will slip through, even if EHG hired every QA tester on the planet and tested the game for 600,000 hours before releasing any patch. Bugs will slip through, no matter what. Which is why testing doesn’t stop once a patch goes live/game is launched.
What Nevyn is saying is that players tend to think “someone else has reported it/will report it so I won’t waste my time.” and then you have situations where bugs go unreported for weeks/months and because they’re a niche interaction, it doesn’t get fixed.
Prior 2010.
And selecting 2% of broken games out of everything that released is hardly an argument that games “were always like this”.
It’s still players fault that it keeps happening at an increasing rate.
Again, thinking from player perspective.
They would use cheats and be much more efficient in testing. With a single command they can fill up a chest with all the items and affixes they need and want.
No, I’m thinking from a programmer perspective. If you genuinely think that a handful of QA testers with God Mode active can find every bug prior to a patch, I don’t know what to tell you except that you’re wrong. Just flat out, wrong.
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Nobody said EVERY BUG.
You’re taking it to the extremes. But at least to a reasonable level where it’s not such a god damn nuisance.
And I am saying that you’re not supposed to release something without checking if it does what it says it should be doing.
We’re not talking about extremely obscure bugs that 1 out of thousands will encounter, or a very specific scenario that happens once in a blue moon.
We’re talking about a function that is ALWAYS happening, and is used regularly by thousands of players.
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But what’s a reasonable level for you? I handcrafted a Necromancer build, a Mastery I never played prior to this recent cycle refresh. Across my 60 hours of playtime through the campaign and a handful of normal monos, I encountered a single bugged skill node.
Just 1 in a handcrafted, non-meta build, had 1 bugged interaction.
Is that acceptable? If it is, would 2 be unacceptable?
Is it fine because you didn’t use that node, but if you did it wouldn’t be?
When the patch contains one skill change, then yes, they absolutely can.
Right… Again, thankfully no one is saying EHG is doing a phenomenal job at catching bugs before they slip through. Why are you coming at me? Lol
There are bugs that are 4 years old. Reported countless times.
And those bugs are on the known issues list in most cases, what’s your point? They’ve been reported and it’s now on EHG to fix it. Which EHG hasn’t done. This is now moving the goalpost from your original statement of “bug reporting shouldn’t be a player responsibility” to “but EHG hasn’t fixed bugs in 4 years.” which I absolutely agree is an issue.
Talking about moving goalposts.
You said reporting mattered. 4 year old bugs. 4 god damn years. Do you know how long that is? I had a niece born, and my son is 3.
Instead we get content nobody asked for locked behind the same mono grind fashion that everybody said “give us something else in end game, monos are good but are boring to do constantly.”
CLEARLY they didn’t use those 4 years to fix the bugs. What did they do? How many people are even still working on this project? Questions I honestly don’t want to know the answer to.
All the good reporting did for those players who follow this since its birth.
(Statistically some of those backers have died waiting for their favorite build to work as it should. Terrifying.)
Because it was you who took a stance regarding the “finding of issues”.
Your Ballista example is also a great showcase of this problem.
“Exponentially larger explosions” is not something an actual QA employee would miss. If a new skill is added - new functionality - it’s literally QA’s contracted job to test the new functionality - to use the skill and its passives to see if they do what they are supposed to.
Sure, players can help test this - if they are part of the testers group, or if we’re on a beta build. But not if it’s a released patch that’s running on the end user systems. That’s QA not doing their job.
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A class has 12 skills. Each mastery has 4 to 5, and access to 4 off-mastery skills.
That allows for over 20k unique combinations for how you can specialize for a mastery, though about 8.5k are shared between all three masteries.
Each skill has 20 to 30 nodes that can affect the behaviour of the skills. There are many cross interactions between skills, buffs, etc.
Then there are uniques and sets that have their own part in interactions.
Can you guess how many combinations and interactions there are in total? Can you guess how long it would take to test every single one of them?
Reasonable testing should be done - but testing every combination is unreasonable.
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This is bs and you know it.
Via process of elimination, they would test VIABLE things. Not all skills work with each other. I mean, come on. /southpark.
You don’t need to test if crit node works with dot node. You need to test if a crit build works.
Your “20k unique combinations” were not implemented all at once, and given that most of those skills and passives already received patch changes AFTER their initial implementation, it is very reasonable to expect that ALL of them would have been tested at some point during the development of Last Epoch.
I don’t even know what we’re talking about anymore.
This isn’t loto 7/37 with millions of combinations.
There are dots builds, crit builds and minions. Enough.
Yes. I also expect that QA for Last Epoch would have some level of Last Epoch knowledge, for example, I would expect that QA knows that Void Knights have this “echoes” mechanic, so Sentinel abilities tests should include a test of “echoes”.
I’m still salty about shield throw disappearing at invisible barriers on maps. I mean it’s not even about an integration with another skill. It’s map issue with barriers. (4 years old.)
Adding a single skill right now will create thousands of combinations that have to be tested. It can interact differently with other skills, passives or uniques/sets. Because the problem isn’t testing stuff that already exists (even though if you were to test simply existing builds alone, that would already be in the high hundreds) but rather testing what new interactions players will come up with.
This happens in every single game. PoE has managed to get their balance pretty decent lately, but very regularly you still have a bunch of builds that are broken due to something the devs didn’t even consider.
Even just testing existing builds leads to combinations in the millions. 1.1 had 30 new uniques. Even if you just test existing builds with variations of those uniques you already have a way higher number of cases than you can possibly test, even with hundreds of testers.
This is not a bug with the skill itself, but with the map terrain. It also affects hammers, shield rush, etc. They have been fixing a bunch of those over time. It’s already magnitudes better than it used to be.
If you still have instances where that happens, report it so they can change that part of the map as well.
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