destruction of palisades

[Austinh15]

the elephant in the room is this: how are you testing your changes?

i think the 'unable to find evidence but please tell me where/when to look' thing is similarly hard to swallow because you haven't specified what you've searched for or what you might be missing.

it's understandable there's some cat and mouse behavior around tracking player actions, but if you can just say, for example, that you searched exhaustively for catas being built this world, as in each cata built has a unique object id or event recording of its construction, and those catas weren't used to damage walls within 24 hours of their creation, then that should remove all doubt, no?

i guess it would be neat/reassuring/something, if you could share how many catas were built this world, and how many were destroyed before they were used, and how old the catas were when they dealt damage to anything.

Loftar and Jorb actually have a regression environment with an entire automated test suite testing various use cases. When loftar is close to finishing his Sprint and he moves the Story into the "Ready for QA" status, he's actually just running this through his build pipeline of millions of unit tests. Once that merges, they create a release branch and push it to Regression where they load test by spawning in 1000 hearthlings at each thingwall in the test environment, and then lastly, Jorb the hero steps in and does some manual QA to verify that the feature is functioning correctly for the end user. After this, Jorb and Loftar hold a retrospective for their team of two people where they talk about what went right, what could have gone better, what needs to change, and kudos! In this meeting, they go over their Say/Do, sprint velocity, any form of churn in the sprint, etc etc.

You're actually really lucky! Because this bug was a Severity 2 incident, Loftar deftly added the logged bug (after triage of course) to the sprint and took out OCO from the sprint (shucks would have been done this sprint too!) so that he could fix this for the community. This was almost as bad as the Severity 1 Incident where we couldn't destroy wellsprings, but not quite there. Hope this sheds some light on the operations at Seatribe!

[stya]

Is there really a need for a debate though?

https://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=39&t=77562&start=20#p955447

Going back to that page is kind of funny now.

[loftar]

i think the 'unable to find evidence but please tell me where/when to look' thing is similarly hard to swallow because you haven't specified what you've searched for or what you might be missing.

Fair enough. In this case, I have logs of whenever a catapult was built and where, and when a catapult was used, where, and against what type of object. They don't have any persistent IDs that are logged, however, so I can't directly match a construction against a use, but have to roughly match their locations by rough mental math on the coordinates, that's why it's not necessarily simple for me to do an exact match on all instances of catapults. There were a few situations in the logs that were a bit rough to match by eye, but I didn't feel like I should be missing anything.

As for testing, I was also a bit shocked that I didn't catch this bug. Testing is always manual, because there's virtually nothing repeatable in testing these sorts of things, and I can't say I remember exactly how I tested the catapults, but I do certainly remember testing them, so I don't quite understand how I managed to miss it. I do apologize.

After this, Jorb and Loftar hold a retrospective for their team of two people where they talk about what went right, what could have gone better, what needs to change, and kudos! In this meeting, they go over their Say/Do, sprint velocity, any form of churn in the sprint, etc etc.

[Austinh15]

So then, what does the Dev process look like for you Loftar?
Do you just build your changes and put it on the test server and verify/repeat until you get it how you like it? I've never worked in the gaming industry myself so I have no idea what or how you could automate literally anything.

I've worked on projects that have existed for like 20 years in the software field, and the product got so big and interconnected that we HAD to automate because changing one thing could be a breaking change elsewhere or down the pipeline. Releasing was always an act of God in that world.

[mulamishne]

Beyond the fact that Cata's could do the sub 24 hour siege, the rest of it sounds like you just forgot to push the change I guess. If I was a guy who didn't read changelogs, I would have just figured nothing had changed and it was bau lol

[loftar]

Do you just build your changes and put it on the test server and verify/repeat until you get it how you like it?

I mean, yeah, pretty much. To be clear, testing is quite a bit of a problem, and I already feel like I'm spending more time testing than I do actually developing, so if I could automate it somehow, I'd be quite up for doing so. I just find that at least 90% of bugs are the unexpected interactions that I'd never have thought to write a test for anyway, and also, as I said, there's very little repeatability in testing. Except for in this one particular instance, I'd never have a reason to test "time when catapults become operational".

I also very much feel the problem of interconnectedness, though not so much on a technical level as on a game-mechanical level, which really just makes it harder, because if it were just a technical problem, I'm sure it would have a technical solution, but the game mechanics kind of are what they are.

If anything, it's not like the build process is particularly complicated, and I don't have to put the code on a separate test server or anything like that. Changing something, recompiling and restarting only takes a few seconds, so at least my iteration times are pretty okay, but for sure, testing is a fairly big issue for me. I also don't really feel like a separate "QA person" would really be too feasible, because without knowing the exact changes, I feel it would be hard to know exactly what to test for. I guess I at least have the privilege of knowing the entire codebase, so there are quite few "surprises".

[Soft]

I had several catapults installed and they were used immediately. The last time was yesterday. You can see it by the traces that are not present near the destroyed palisade, but are located far away, near the installed catapult. Several catapults were used, and the village was maliciously destroyed


several players are maliciously exploiting this bug, destroying and looting.
Please take action, as my village no longer exists. thank you very much

[SnuggleSnail]

I had a look around this shithole and the vandal scents at the initial entry point are older than the scents in the middle. The thingpeace is also only like 35% through its broken stage, which implies that the thingwall has been broken multiple times since the older scents are 9 charge minimum delta vandals. There wouldn't be a reason to break thing thingpeace twice if they were doing insta catas.

Not saying they didn't do the do, but I think it's more likely the guys who got fucked are coping. It's a splinter of rasveet's group, and he's pretty widely known to be a huge retard.

[Soft]

in fact the hacking was done twice, i think the second time was for fun, to break the equipment that was not reached the first time

[dafels]

Hmm, that's fair, and perhaps somewhat more of an argument for fixing the whole "bashing while drying" thing, but that being said, it seems that it would have to be pretty rare to just happen to find someone in the process of extending their walls while not keeping watch over them.

This is very good argument to fix the cascade bug even though the fact of it letting bypass the whole siege mechanic is a good argument by itself. Whenever you expand your village which is not rare and pretty common you're at risk of being raided without a proper siege and I'm not sure why anyone would have to watch their palisade until it has dried and how that would help exactly.

This will be abused more often now since everyone now knows that you are giving free pass on it and I'm not sure why the hesitation to fix this, there will be alot more instances when this will get abused from now on. This is exactly why alot of people are frustrated in the game, there's nothing that would explain this even if it is a intended mechanic that lets you bypass the whole siege mechanic