The REAL reason Gree continues to mess up...

[rixon]

...is the timeliness of their updates. One of the first things a dev learns when they go to work somewhere with a sizable user base is that you never deploy before the weekend.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=pushing+code+friday

Every coder writes buggy code. You've got to be ready to fix that bug. That's exponentially true when you have limited time events going on and your software is going to be put to the test. I've only seen code deployed to production on Friday a few times. It always involves someone staying late, and possibly more work during the weekend. Gree needs to step up to the plate and have at least a few members of their devops team work for the duration of events. It doesn't have to be 24/7, but it should be at least the first 6 hours of an event, and 4 hours every other weekend day. Furthermore, the entire dev team needs to be on call. Anything less is downright irresponsible.

At least you were saved by another bug. If valor was a long instead of an int...

[HellRaizer]

In the industry I work in I don't have a choice. My code can only be pushed over the weekend, but I'm also always on call if not in the office in case I need to make any last min bug fixes or help support

[Agent Orange]

A nephew in the gaming biz sent me this....

http://kotaku.com/five-things-i-didn-t-get-about-making-video-games-unti-1687510871

Inept management seems to be the reason for a lot of our problems.... Although beta testing springs to mind as well.

[Big John]

They are incompetent, that's why.

[ichbin]

A nephew in the gaming biz sent me this....

http://kotaku.com/five-things-i-didn-t-get-about-making-video-games-unti-1687510871

Inept management seems to be the reason for a lot of our problems.... Although beta testing springs to mind as well.

That article rings true for animated games. MW is a static game full of screens that you just click buttons. This should be easy as pie. As a developer myself, I can't believe the sheer amount of screw ups that these guys have. Automated testing at a minimum should catch 90% of the bugs that Gree releases.

[pick_sax]

Ding Ding Ding!

We have a Winner!!!

and your prize is 3000 of those ships! which will be removed as soon as they are awarded.


They are incompetent, that's why.

[Speed ump]

This game is basically a large database and the coding required for the interactions of the data, it's not graphics oriented, any artwork is static images here. Glitches are basically someone not catching the proper interactions and flow of the data.

[Goddess04]

not sure dont know much about programming but there sure are a lot of bugs it seems

[Ninuzzo]

They are incompetent, this is true, but they work on week end.. I have 2 ticket's reply from last Sunday...

[fatbodychris]

I think it's because Gree clearly isn't making enough money off gold sales, hence they can't afford to hire top notch help.

[NexusImperium]

I like how the (well-intentioned) OP says "the REAL reason" and then fails to actually give the REAL reason.

Here's the REAL reason(s) from a Software Engineer who's been monitoring the game over 2 years:

Speed Ump basically nailed it. This is a data-driven game. Everything about this game revolves around its data. If there's a bug, it's because there was some kind of problem with the game data. So what's the REAL reason this becomes a problem?

Gree obviously has no real QA process for this game. It's painfully obvious that deployments aren't run through any sort of meaningful unit/integration testing framework. This becomes a critical process liability because the company isn't able to be proactive in the game's health - it is instead reactive to the problems that crop up and problems like the one we just had are easily detectable in unit testing, but have lasting consequences that probably won't shake out for months and months. The game is still shaken from the arjun tank recycle glitch - that glitch added literally trillions and trillions of currency into the game economy, making base investment/IPH meaningless for the medium term. For the most recent glitch we have massive inflation of valor, which will have an even more lasting effect than the arjun glitch.

The only way that Gree can fix this is to temporarily raise casualtiy rate on valor units until the valor economy settles. Probably 4-6 months under that scenario.

The other part of this is on the project/product manager (Gree folks you know who I'm talking about). It's a bit presumptuous to assume he would read this but let me be presumptuous for a moment. Dude, get your act together. Take a more active role with your team. You are way in over your head on this and you need to get your stuff together. You need to push corporate to get FTE for Software Engineers in Test (at least 2) and adjust your release schedule. If you have a data push on Thursday or Friday then you'd better have everyone on call for the weekend. You need to have 90% unit test coverage by 6 months - if I were VP of dev I'd make sure you were unemployed in 6 months if you had one line of code less than 90% in 6mo. This community isn't going to be patient with you much longer. Gree corp acquired Funzio for millions and you're throwing it all down the drain, so snap out of it.

Rant over.