Dev Notes: Week of December 22, 2014

[RhythmNBruise]

Hello, MW players!

This week we were mostly in find-and-fix mode for issues stemming from the 5.0 release. Thanks for your help in the relevant glitch threads!

"Lost" accounts tool is live!

We got the lost account recovery tool live with CS late in the week. (Sorry about the delay - we wanted to make sure that it wasn't going to accidentally nuke anything!) If you are having issues accessing your account because of stale GameCenter linkages, CS is working through their ticket backlog. If you haven't filed a ticket yet, please do.

Next week

We're going to be a little short-handed for the next two weeks because of the holidays, so you won't see dev notes from me next week. We do have a pager system and people from every department are on-call 24/7 to deal with issues.

How's It Work - Tools

We got another question in our AMA about our development process tools, so here's a quick overview of some of the stuff we use...

Email and calendaring: Google
Chat: Skype
Version control: Git (some other projects use Subversion or Perforce)
Ticketing: JIRA
IDE: XCode (for iOS) and Android Studio (for Android)
Data: Excel/Google Sheets and SQL

We use a modified Agile process, where we set sprints and work towards them, but it's hard to measure Agile velocity with emergent issues, so we don't try to adhere too closely to a fully-Agile process. Mostly it's an iterative process for major features, with the designers, engineers, artists, and QA working hand-in-hand to come up with the best ideas. Emergent issues are dealt with on a case-by-case basis -- some engineers are specialists in one sort of issue or another, and some are more utility infield types.

[Bluehavana2]

What about some of the other issues noted in the forums. Couple that come to mind are:
- triple strike temp bonus obviously not working
- validation of 50-30-20 calcs on attack hits

Many others...

[Campy McCamperpants]

The bottom half of your post makes as much sense to me, a lay person, as is if I tell you about my job. For example, I can talk about something like the "blue sky laws" that predate the adoption of the federal securities Acts in 1933 and 1934. The National Securities Markets Improvement Act made clear that federal law will supersede State law regarding net capital rules, custody rules, margin rules, financial responsibility rules and recordkeeping rules which are set by the SEC or FRB. I could also talk about what a "person" is defined as in finance. Under the NSMIA of 96 it defines a person as an individual, corporation, partnership, business trust, state, trust, associations, joint stock companies or joint ventures, government and political subdivisions of government, and unincorporated organizations. I could go into actual financial planning techniques but I don't want to give any secrets away :-)

[MrFister]

hahahahaha.....entering alpha side PAR of 2 for a left hand search. Your wall man I'm room man...search bravo

I'm seeing a rhythm in which there are multiple ventricular foci with the resultant QRS complexes varying in amplitude, axis and duration. It appears it has a characteristic morphology in which the QRS complexes “twist” around the isoelectric line. (Tdp)

[East Coast Bias]

Now let me get this straight, you're gonna be short handed and still you roll out a glitchy game, a number of simultaneous events that are guaranteed to have further problems, and your player mods who are supposed to tell us everything will be alright have run for the hills these past few days? How about not having a single new event until the new year and we can all come back refreshed and not worried that another glitch will cause heartburn and ill feelings just when we want to usher in the new year on a high note? Give everyone a break, the players, the paid mods, everyone - and post when the start of the first event will be. Now that would be a great start to the new year, not that you guys will listen.

[Sheldor Sir]

LMAO

'We're going to be a little short-handed for the next two weeks because of the holidays, so you won't see dev notes from me next week. We do have a pager system and people from every department are on-call 24/7 to deal with issues.'

Hope you aren't expecting to enjoy Christmas then!!!! cause if this is true you will ALLLLLL be working a LOT

[YankeePhil]

Tell me more about this pager system, because you claim that you're on call 24/7 but yet you refuse to figure out why my faction has been unable to participate in Frontline and give us BS generic responses to a technical issue that has and still needs to be addressed.

[DEWIN NUTTIN]

Baghdad Bob is a piker compared to some people.
I'm more amazed with each passing day.
These guys are the best.

[Bobar]

...

Next week

We're going to be a little short-handed for the next two weeks because of the holidays, so you won't see dev notes from me next week. We do have a pager system and people from every department are on-call 24/7 to deal with issues.
...

Please do your customers and all Gree stuff a favor: DONT START ANY EVENTS during x-mas and New Years Eve. We ALL know it won't work as you alway have bugs. Keep it running in "eventless-mode" give everyone spare time and some days off. Recreation would be fine.

If some are working at your office, let them fix bugs, check the code, program stable running events, play your own game to get it known an do some beta testing.

[Bubseg]

What about the upgrade temp boosts not stacking

[MrFister]

1- game still freezes when I attack another player - 100% of the time
2- haven't heard or received any feedback on why our faction is locked out of FL or why we were compensated with FL units. We have to be able to participate in order to use those.

[Mr llama]

If I worked for gree I would tell my deeply religious family I worked at an abortion clinic so they could still look me in the eyes

[NexusImperium]

We use a modified Agile process, where we set sprints and work towards them, but it's hard to measure Agile velocity with emergent issues, so we don't try to adhere too closely to a fully-Agile process. Mostly it's an iterative process for major features, with the designers, engineers, artists, and QA working hand-in-hand to come up with the best ideas. Emergent issues are dealt with on a case-by-case basis -- some engineers are specialists in one sort of issue or another, and some are more utility infield types.

@RhythmNBruise

Just a helpful little bit of advice from a Software Engineer experienced with the Agile modus:

Gree needs to establish 2nd-level support (you already have 1st level - customer-facing support). 2nd level would be 2-4 software test engineers or QA who can take bugs from 1st level and triage/repro/code unit/regression tests against. A PM or Business Analyst from the dev teams/product/feature crews can take these and introduce them into your various product backlogs. Then introduce/allocate them as usual in your sprint planning meetings.

You need to be tracking bugs and issues in your sprints. Otherwise you're treating the product like a pre-release product and the bugs aren't getting the attention that they need and development resources aren't allocated correctly (you just admitted that you're not tracking velocity with issues). This is really, really important and I really want to emphasize this to you. You need to be tracking the work you're doing and factoring it into your velocity.

This isn't really a criticism - just friendly advice.

[Oh oh Gree]

Glad to hear you guys made it to the 1980s and got the old corporate pagers out to the crew.

However, a better solution would be hiring staff to work and manage your games 24/7 for the rare occasion an issue pops up with one of your games.

Enjoy the holidays and hope Gree provides you with some change for the pay phone and a few packs of batteries to cover the non stop buzzing of the pagers.

[Bluehavana2]

Anyone in the sf area.., I'd like to send a gift to put under the gree Christmas tree.
I have a big ball of string all wrapped and ready to go!
Also, anyone have a couple of tin cans they can donate to make the gift complete?

Merry Christmas all!!!