Frequency of patches

Generic non-balance topics.
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Adeptus Noobus
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Frequency of patches

Postby Adeptus Noobus » Sun 19 Jun, 2016 9:22 pm

In my most humble opinion there are quite some balance issues on which a great many people not only agree but have also shown examples why they should be changed/fixed/removed etc.
I ask myself why these are not fixed with hotfixes any longer. I do agree with major changes being issued only after longer periods but some minor stuff should be managed more quickly to ensure toxic gameplay does not take hold in the first place.
The purpose of this post is to ascertain why hotfixes are no longer issued and what the rest of the community thinks about this.

P.S: First things popping in my head are always the Inquisitor and suppressing LRR flamers 8-)
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PhatE
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Re: Frequency of patches

Postby PhatE » Mon 20 Jun, 2016 3:06 pm

Considering there's an unpaid (to my knowledge) dev team that's working on things then this becomes much harder to pull off. Technically speaking, if I have a team that all work in certain areas and one person is away then development time is hindered because of it.

For ex, if one dev fixes a bug but then leaves for a short while for reasons and a similar bug crops up and the other can't fix it/don't know how, then you can see where dilemmas crop up.

I deal with this daily as a security engineer. If I get a ticket sent to me and I'm unfamiliar with how to solve the issue but a co-worker know exactly what it is, I have to;

A) Fix it myself, in which resolution time increases if I haven't seen it before
B) Find them and get them to fix it

Either case, the issue still isn't fixed.

But to be fair, development teams should be exactly that. It's a tightly knit group that should all be on the same page.

Plus you have to factor in the testing aspects of everything. You can't really release a patch that *might be* broken. It requires thorough testing or else people just see incompetence instead of the hard as fuck work that the dev team puts into these things. Working in IT in general is a pretty thankless job to begin with so all that they're asking is for people to be patient while they work out what they need to. Software development gets it just as bad as the rest and a lot of, let's say "customers", complain a lot. But please note this isn't a stab at you or anything. I myself have asked the question more times than I can remember. It's just to give you some perspective as someone who has been around this type of field for many years.

Also taking into account that there is no/zero/nadda update service to make this streamlined. Beta builds need to be selective as well meaning that you need the right people who can really do the proper blackbox testing (testing without seeing the code itself). The availability of said people is probably quite small.

I hope this gives you some level of insight on what might happen with software development. All teams are different in their work ethic, skill, and availability but it's really up to the team lead to decide when things get patched and what gets patched. Sure, we'd all love for all the bugs to be fixed but you're dealing with people that don't have all the time in the world and probably not the best of tools in which to make our experience playing a 8 year old game all that much more enjoyable.

To end this on a lighter note and not that I watch GoT's, I figured that this is appropriate;

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Stream - http://www.twitch.tv/phatness_

Since everyone forgets, my timezone is AEST (UTC/GMT) +10 hours. AEDT is (UTC/GMT) +11 hours. Hopefully no-one tells me what time any tournament is on.
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Adeptus Noobus
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Re: Frequency of patches

Postby Adeptus Noobus » Mon 20 Jun, 2016 4:21 pm

I perfectly understand what you are saying. I do believe however that balance issues are mostly stats related and those should not take long to change :) While I recognize that the Devs are not getting any compensation whatsoever and syncing up work seems difficult I can't help but think that they are professionals when it comes to software engineering (at least to me) and should know how programmers work in teams.
I will clarify: I was not asking for big changes but small ones. Stats, pricing, cooldowns, things that should just be values in some file. I ask this because in the time since we had the last patch quite a few things have come up that are clearly cringe-worthy and are in need of hotfixing and are not big things (i.e. game/unit design stuff) but rather small things (suppressing flamers, DA Exarch, Inq wargear cost).

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