Guild Wars 2

I understand that all software has bugs. I myself am the system architect and product owner of a multi million dollar software application. I get the struggles of the development cycle.

With that being said, my applications used to have the same issues i see with guild wars here. That of undocumented changes, bugs and a lack of good regression testing. It cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars to deal with the patches and QA process of getting those fixes out. My customers would get irrate with me and my team on changes that were not on the manifest. I at least acknowledged that we were aware of the issues to calm them and addressed them quickly.

All of that changed when we dropped our agile development cylce and went to a hybrid of water fall and agile. We also brought on a QA team devoted to regression and UAT testing. While this slowed down our development cycle, it increased the quality of our product. Granted we went from doing four major releases per year down to 1-2 but those releases went extremely smooth and are bug free for the most part. My clients are happy now. Our next step is increasing code coverage.

With that being said I am astonished at the lack of code coverage and regression testing i see in this game. For example, illusions were changed for the mesmer to adjust them for LOS. In doing this it seems to have introduced an issue causing some illusions to only do 33% of their original damage such as iberserker. Code coverage should hit 80% testing of issues related to this change. If the developer didn’t catch it, then that leads to the other 20% which should be covered by your QA team whose job it is to test all aspects of a change and maintain that features aren’t removed or broken. Yet something as simple as testing the damage on an ability that was changed was missed in code coverage, QA and UAT.

When my developers don’t do code coverage, it shows up on reviews and eventually a PIP. When my QA team fails at doing full regression testing, the same thing happens. UAT is the final bastion before a beta to find issues. If you don’t have time then you need to remove the change from your current build. It just ends up costing you more money in the long run.

What is Anet doing about this? You seem to have a reputation for introducing bugs that should have been easily found.

I would definitely like to see an answer to this.

yes, bump for great justice. This is really relevant… i.e the trading post is down now, for no reason at all

Arenanet is trying to cash in during the holiday season by introducing events in November and December,free account trials as well to draw in the crowd.

But the QUALITY of these updates are sacrificed for the quantity of updates.

Arenanet,you’re biting more than you can chew. SLow down with the events and new content update if you are not able to do a good one. Skip the november update and make a good one in december next time.

Halloween event was great, lost shore event is a failure so far.

I doubt one of them would anser this topic. It probly will just be closed then.
I wonder how much problems will come with wintersday patch.
I played gw1 for years i had so much faith in this company but i lost it all.
Afther today i even just stopped playing because i only was getting frustrated with the loads of bugs lags etc.

I prefer waiting longer for something new with less problems afther then something new very fast and beeing unplayable.

Today I delayed the December patch planned for my application because we found performance and bug issues with it. It was found cause of proper testing and QA.

Today’s guild wars patch is another fine example of your poor regression and QA testing.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature – see, all you need is good PR

Too many event patches taking up their time and not enough focus on fixing outstanding class bugs/general bugs that have been around since the beta days.

You know what they say about house building? Build a house upon bad foundations and it will collapse. Build a house upon sound foundations and it will stand. < Something along those lines.

Just please, start fixing outstanding bugs and more thoroughly test patches out before putting them live.

Summary: You know what’s fun? Playing a game that is is relatively bug-less and where big events are lag free (therein fun for all.)

I am a software developer and have past experience similar to the OP. Too many bugs being added in production, low quality releases, angry customers, etc. My organization did some serious soul searching and did several things such as beefing up the QA staff, more regression testing, reducing scope, more responsibility and ownership to individual developers, etc. We also release new features slower than we used to but we still pull off 3-4 QUALITY releases a year.

I don’t remember Anet being this bad with the GW1 patches but I’m sure things have changed there since then. Whatever the case may be I hope they can fix their processes/people/whatever and actually start to deliver quality in to their product.

^this
nothing more to say

/signed. Also a developer, also astonished at obvious flaws in QA process.

I’m sure ANet devs are trying their best. But if the tools and process is flawed, they aren’t going to get very far. Testers can’t catch everything, but you need good testers and good unit testing both for something this complex.

The amount of issues each patch brings is something that I expect from the small understaffed indie devs, but certainly not a company like Anet…

Let me reitrate what I’ve been saying thus far… ANet needs a proper problem, change, and release management process in place.

I’ve been in development, implementation and support for one of the biggest IT multinationals. After the horrifying experience of Lost Shores, I even wrote a very long forum post about it.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Feedback-Suggestions-based-on-ITIL

I hate to say it, ANet, but I told you so.

for those of you who are familiar, how do so many new bugs get introduced when they patch things or try to fix other problems? i understand it’s not one team working on everything, and certain items would be easier to fix than others, thus not necessarily a priority issue.. but at the same time, i assume these things would get tested, like the OP mentioned. or is it different for live updates or a game that is ever-changing?

and perhaps, when so many bugs have been around since day one, that do hinder progress or affect gameplay, i would too appreciate if those bugs were fixed before too much new content is introduced. because track record, albeit only a couple months old, is that with new content, more new bugs will be introduced. and without the old bugs being fixed, they pile up. it’s like if you don’t take out the adds that keep spawning in say for e.g. a certain fractal, you’ll eventually get overrun.

that being said, i do love new content! and appreciate that you guys are trying to do something new with introducing major stuff every month.. but perhaps do enough testing to ensure that not too many new bugs, or bugs that can’t be easily fixed or even identified are introduced with new goodies.

What I see from ANet bug fixes it looks like when they test changes to fix bugs, they are only testing for the bug itself, and not testing to see if those changes obviously effect something else.

The same seems to occur with feature changes, an example of this is the loot drop bug. When this was introduced they were attempting to increase drop quality of vets and champs, guarentee drops from champs, and also scale loot for your level on maps down to 2/3 of your level (if I read correctly). All 3 of these touched loot drops, and it is obvious that one or all of these contributed to the lowering of total amount and quality of loot drops. Why was this not picked up in QA? My guess is they were only testing for certain things under certain conditions and not looking at loot as a whole.

i don’t know anything about software development, but i do ask myself how complex/intertwined all of the code must be when changes affect stuff that is seemingly unrelated.
maybe i’m wrong here, but to me it looks like that’s happening all over the place. and i ’m guessing it might be one of the reasons we see new bugs introduced in most of the updates.

Beachead.4127:

Today I delayed the December patch planned for my application because we found performance and bug issues with it. It was found cause of proper testing and QA.

Today’s guild wars patch is another fine example of your poor regression and QA testing.

I can agree with your argument. However, it’s not true that the the bugs should be corrected always in the same way. The quantity and quality of bugs are very dependent of the complexity of the software that have them. This creates another question: How to you proper test a game that has so many features that we can’t even count? To test one feature or two, it’s easy.

The situation that i see is that ANet is struggling very hard to give more and more content every month. With this approach i believe they intend to bring more players to the game. However, this is having the opposite effect where the players are leaving because some core features are yet to be corrected. This has nothing to do with Regression and QA testing. It’s a matter of priorities.

Some skills are still bugged since the beginning of the game, and they are thinking on adding new features? This will add new bugs to the fat list creating even more situations.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your feedback. We will forward this to the team.

This thread is closed. Thanks for your understanding