Customer Support?

[jorb]

We do try to test basic functionality. The complete set of things that could be tested is too vast for us to meaningfully attack.

[Kaios]

We do try to test basic functionality. The complete set of things that could be tested is too vast for us to meaningfully attack.

No it isn’t, if you have no issues in watching your players spend countless hours grinding out characters and industry just to get fucked by some bullshit mechanic especially if they decided to take a risk instead of to attempt cheesing like everyone else then you should be able to find some time go over more than just basic functionalities when it is warranted to do so such as in the case of mechanics that cause you to risk losing your character.

[jorb]

players spend countless hours grinding out characters and industry just to get fucked

Read that back to yourself and see if you can spot the resource required to detect the bugs in question.

Pretty pointless to try to dialogue with you when there is zero cognizance of the circumstances of development, or even basic recognition when I point them out.

Sure, we could test more -- that's easy and completely free for you to claim -- but we have to manage a scarce resource known as time, and spending time on testing 99 cases that are complete duds, to maybe find the 1/100 problematic case, is a horrendous use of our time.

[Ardennesss]

Sure, we could test more -- that's easy and completely free for you to claim -- but we have to manage a scarce resource known as time, and spending time on testing 99 cases that are complete duds, to maybe find the 1/100 problematic case, is a horrendous use of our time.

Given that the risk of not testing stuff like this involves an entire village of players dying and quitting the game, I'd disagree that it's a bad use of your time. If you don't want to do it yourself that's fine, give players a way to test it that doesn't involve risking their 4 month old characters.

[jorb]

Given that the risk of not testing stuff like this involves an entire village of players dying and quitting the game, I'd disagree that it's a bad use of your time.

Perhaps, and it's a big perhaps, we could be more meticulous about testing the core and critical cases, but bear in mind that the majority of critical bugs are obscure, and a lot of these bugs can go undetected for months even with player testing. Again, the set of possible permutations is too large for us to attack meaningfully. What the alternate cost is hardly even matters, because we can't pay the testing cost under any circumstance. If we have have to spend even 10 minutes per case, assuming 1/100 cases will reveal a significant bug (odds are worse than that), that means we'll spend 16.5 hours of testing per implementation, and that's really lowballing. We wouldn't do much else, and I don't think you quite realize what you're asking for.

Not to mention, frankly, the soul crushing tedium of going through 99 cases per implementation that cause no problems what so ever, and are simply idle wastes of time.

If you don't want to do it yourself that's fine, give players a way to test it that doesn't involve risking their 4 month old characters.

What would that even entail? Providing a test server where everyone has god powers and can, thus, crash the server willy-nilly?

[XXPX1]

If you don't want to do it yourself that's fine, give players a way to test it that doesn't involve risking their 4 month old characters.

This post is spurred by the recent death of my main character, whom's body disappeared completely when I placed it down.

I'm sure a lot of bodies have been relocated throughout this world. What are you suggesting we do, as players, to find this before it happens to someone?

If there was a test server, would you spend a few hours dropping bodies on various surfaces every patch so this could never happen again?

[jordancoles]

Can't possibly test every conceivable edge case that may or may not exist. Better to have a clear cut policy.

That’s fair but in the case of this example it would have been as simple as aggroing a whale from the knarr and seeing what happens when it chases you around. Did you even try anything with the flotsam mechanic? Can they be broken by the whale? Do players knocked out on them fall in to the water and drown? What about a player that gets KO’d and then the knarr gets broken, how does it help in that circumstance?

There are literally millions of things that are easy enough to test by themselves. The point being that it's not a super meaningful use of our time to attack that vast set by individual trial.

Open dev server and give me access and dev tools

???

Profit

[Ardennesss]

If you don't want to do it yourself that's fine, give players a way to test it that doesn't involve risking their 4 month old characters.

This post is spurred by the recent death of my main character, whom's body disappeared completely when I placed it down.

I'm sure a lot of bodies have been relocated throughout this world. What are you suggesting we do, as players, to find this before it happens to someone?

If there was a test server, would you spend a few hours dropping bodies on various surfaces every patch so this could never happen again?

No, my post was targeted at the village who died and quit because they tried to fight a whale fairly and instead of engage them in combat it just bashed the knarr and killed them all. That circumstance would've been encountered literally the first time you fight a whale in a knarr. Every other whale kill has involved finding a whale near the shore and just cheesing it the same way you do cave anglers. Bugs like a body disappearing when set down on solid ground can't be player found, but they should be Dev investigated after being reported.

[jorb]

Whales bashing Knarrs is an intended mechanic, though.

[Ardennesss]

Whales bashing Knarrs is an intended mechanic, though.

if you honestly rubbed your 2 brain cells together and came to the conclusion that rather than actually using the haven and hearth combat system, that whales should instead just bash the knarr and drown every player, then I hope you cease having children. That is probably the single dumbest mechanic you've ever thought up, and you should be ashamed of yourself. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.