[FEEDBACK] [SUGGESTION] Dear Ubisoft, here's some advice about QA. | Forums

[SilentMover]

Ubisoft has taken Apples approach by convincing us, the consumers, that it's not Ubisoft and the developers that has made a mistake, but instead somehow it's the consumers fault that something has gone wrong or is messed up.

If you go to the technical support section for the PC, you'll see the devs asking the guys in trouble, "have you updated your drivers?" or "have you tried so and so?" for issues that other people have clearly posted about like it's somehow our fault and its pretty annoying. Clearly if multiple people are asking about the same or similar issues, there's a problem within the game and not the other way around.

I bought this game about a month or two ago thinking that since it has been at least over a year since the games original release, that most of the bugs and graphical issues would've been patched out by now. Yet, I am having crazy graphical, texture, connection drops (pvp and coop), and FPS drops every time I load up the game to the point I just gave up and stopped playing. This game is not AMD friendly nor is it optimized like other games out there (and it appears that others are having the same or very similar issues that I'm having as well so I know it's not something I can fix). A "finished" game that has been out over a year and a half should NOT be having these kinds of QA issues and yet here we all are beating a dead horse. I remember I used to be so excited for any game with the Tom Clancy logo on it but after the experience I've had with this game, this game is doing a disservice to the Tom Clancy name.

[Ghost-Ami]

Ubisoft has taken Apples approach by convincing us, the consumers, that it's not Ubisoft and the developers that has made a mistake, but instead somehow it's the consumers fault that something has gone wrong or is messed up.

If you go to the technical support section for the PC, you'll see the devs asking the guys in trouble, "have you updated your drivers?" or "have you tried so and so?" for issues that other people have clearly posted about like it's somehow our fault and its pretty annoying. Clearly if multiple people are asking about the same or similar issues, there's a problem within the game and not the other way around.

I bought this game about a month or two ago thinking that since it has been at least over a year since the games original release, that most of the bugs and graphical issues would've been patched out by now. Yet, I am having crazy graphical, texture, connection drops (pvp and coop), and FPS drops every time I load up the game to the point I just gave up and stopped playing. This game is not AMD friendly nor is it optimized like other games out there (and it appears that others are having the same or very similar issues that I'm having as well so I know it's not something I can fix). A "finished" game that has been out over a year and a half should NOT be having these kinds of QA issues and yet here we all are beating a dead horse. I remember I used to be so excited for any game with the Tom Clancy logo on it but after the experience I've had with this game, this game is doing a disservice to the Tom Clancy name.

Well, some things definitely are RTFM type issues, but it is annoying when customer service reps doing tech support almost reflexively ask these kinds of questions when they ought to be familiar enough with the game to be able to tell when it's not "that".

They are often trained to go through a tick list of basic questions when dealing with any issue, but that approach doesn't train them to think and troubleshoot critically, and it often insults the intelligence of the customer bringing the issue up. ((((

[AI BLUEFOX]

Yeah getting through Tech Support as an intelligent and knowledgable consumer is difficult. Their default support scripts are targeted at users who really do have issues at the basic level and very often the operators won't have any more knowledge than what is in the scripts.

@ami, I'm probably not getting my point across in terms of the way data is transferred during a patch update. I'm not discounting flaws in the actual source, but it is more likely we're not seeing what the Devs are seeing in Paris. You don't introduce a weapon with the magazine on the stock, not see it, then fix it with the mag in the wrong place again and not actually look at it. This could be the case, obviously, but it seems more likely to me that the data is the issue. I don't know the architecture, I'm making an educated guess, but I think the whole gunsmith and charactersmith functionality is based on a graphics engine that uses position data to "assemble" the individual graphics components and then assembles the components into the whole weapon against a set of fixed frameworks. There isn't a graphics file in the patch it's an engine with a database in it, and deployment of the data is subject to consistent (everyone) and inconsistent(some people) errors.

For me, this structure of the game is why the patches are so big; it doesn't matter how many items you have in your shopping trolley, the trolley is always the same size - based on the frameworks. No idea why Steam have the patches so small in comparison, by the way, but the interface to Uplay has a part in that, perhaps preventing any data compression. It also explains the bloused boots issue; there isn't a position in the character framework for the intersection of the boot above the ankle in charactersmith. There is in the game engine which will have a more detailed character model, but to add that position in charactersmith would require a complete change to the data architecture. The icons of course don't have a framework, which is why we can't use separate elements of their kit or customise them.

All purely my speculation of course and I could be wildly out. It really could be terrible, terrible QA when releasing patches! I'm not denying that could be the issue.

[IamCP]

Dont forget they delayed the hotfix...
And the result still very much disappointing.

[GiveMeTactical]

They are often trained to go through a tick list of basic questions when dealing with any issue, but that approach doesn't train them to think
and troubleshoot critically, and it often insults the intelligence of the customer bringing the issue up. ((((

My personal take?

These people, or at least the majority of them, just took a class or two and are getting paid the bare minimum so yes, "Train to go through a basic list" is all they know how to do or feel comfortable doing, once you push them beyond the initial 20 questions they start to freak out and pedal back and forth almost always ending on the ticket being closed as "Answered"... I believe because otherwise they don't get paid.

I may be exaggerating a bit, even though I think I am dead on the money because after all, the shareholders demand their money on the 1st of the month, whereas the consumer will willingly wait a long time

Companies now a days have lost all sense of honesty and morality with the BS that everyone else does it... case in point.. bought new appliances on September 9th ON SALE (almost 4K spent on Dishwasher, Kitchen/Microwave & Refrigerator + all the accessories to install, otherwise warranty goes out the window boy are they getting the last penny from all sales), my wife told me the delivery date was the 17th (or so I heard and I didn't really paid attention to the month) so I figured, ok, a week or so away, not a bad thing. We go back to the place, I write a check and the lady reminds me that the people will call me 1 day prior October 17th for delivery (now we are looking into 1 and 1/2 months for delivery????). Ok, I didn't pay attention to the month, that is on me and now I have to take responsibility for my own actions, no problem, we will wait because the wife is all excited and that can lead only to good things (but I digress). 2 days ago my wife gets a call that the refrigerator is on Back Order, WTF??? (I bought this thing on Sale???) and the next delivery window is November 30th!!! ... Long story short, we're getting our money back in 1 week and going somewhere else to buy it.

[Ghost-Ami]

Yeah getting through Tech Support as an intelligent and knowledgable consumer is difficult. Their default support scripts are targeted at users who really do have issues at the basic level and very often the operators won't have any more knowledge than what is in the scripts.

@ami, I'm probably not getting my point across in terms of the way data is transferred during a patch update. I'm not discounting flaws in the actual source, but it is more likely we're not seeing what the Devs are seeing in Paris. You don't introduce a weapon with the magazine on the stock, not see it, then fix it with the mag in the wrong place again and not actually look at it. This could be the case, obviously, but it seems more likely to me that the data is the issue. I don't know the architecture, I'm making an educated guess, but I think the whole gunsmith and charactersmith functionality is based on a graphics engine that uses position data to "assemble" the individual graphics components and then assembles the components into the whole weapon against a set of fixed frameworks. There isn't a graphics file in the patch it's an engine with a database in it, and deployment of the data is subject to consistent (everyone) and inconsistent(some people) errors.

For me, this structure of the game is why the patches are so big; it doesn't matter how many items you have in your shopping trolley, the trolley is always the same size - based on the frameworks. No idea why Steam have the patches so small in comparison, by the way, but the interface to Uplay has a part in that, perhaps preventing any data compression. It also explains the bloused boots issue; there isn't a position in the character framework for the intersection of the boot above the ankle in charactersmith. There is in the game engine which will have a more detailed character model, but to add that position in charactersmith would require a complete change to the data architecture. The icons of course don't have a framework, which is why we can't use separate elements of their kit or customise them.

All purely my speculation of course and I could be wildly out. It really could be terrible, terrible QA when releasing patches! I'm not denying that could be the issue.

Right, so to address the digital elephant in the room, so to speak.

The patches are not 15+ GB because that's the size of some sort of "container" for them. They are that size because every update from Uplay is all updates since launch. I think Ubisoft believe this works as a kind of "clean instal", but it's totally unnecessary as Steam prove every update when they simply give you the new files and old files that have been changed.

Updating a game is not hard. Modern games are extremely modular, and you can just drop new files into the place they should be and rewrite newly updated files over old ones.

In the case of games that utilise large archive formats to store most game files (and keep directories tidy) you typically also have a "replacer" protocol where you tell the game to first look at loose files and folders for something the application and patch files addresses, then if nothing's there the game looks in the archive which has a similar directory structure inside it.

Here's an example of how it works in Fallout 4.

The primary components of any piece of content from Bethesda themselves and from many modders are a main, light, or patch file (esm, esl, esp) containing the actual information the game needs to bring the an object's function and assets to life in the game and two archive (ba2) files, one for textures ("textures") and one for meshes, material swap instructions, custom scripts, et cetera ("main").

Let's say there's a piece of clothing in such a mod or DLC---really it doesn't matter whether the devs made it or a modder made it, it all works the same---that you don't like the texture on and you want to replace it yourself. Do you need to unpack the ba2 texture file and replaced the individual dds image with something else? Well, you can if you want to, but it's not necessary. Quicker to just look in the archive, see the texture you want to replace is in the archive as armor/fatigues/ArmyFatiguesF_D.dds (or whatever), then make your own folders in the same directory the game keeps these archives ("data"): textures/armor/fatigues/ and drop your own ArmyFatiguesF_d.dds texture file in there.

Next time you boot up the game and the esm, esl, or esp file tells the engine to render a pair of army fatigues it will first look in the folders you made instead of the archive, and it will load your texture instead. The same thing can be done with meshes.

That's how most modders "update" game assets to look how they want. If you're Bethesda and you want to alter one of your own assets your loader opens the relevant ba2 archive and replaces the asset directly, it's as easy and copy/pasting new items into zip or rar or whatever files. You do not need to download the whole archive again.

Ubisoft refuse to simply replace the files that need replacing via Uplay, and before you say it's because they use an archive (forge files, I think) that can't be easily edited by the loader, nope, this is obviously not the case because Steam can do it. When you get an update from Steam they send you only new assets and old assets that have been changed, and that works just fine. And, what do you know, the Steam updates are a few hundred MB or whatever.

There's literally no reason you need to replace 95949520340 files that are not being altered in any way.

The weaponsmith issue is quicker to address. It almost certainly does not work that way you suggest. Weapon modding in games works in most cases by using mesh files that can store "attach points" that tell the game where things go. The receiver mesh has "magazine", "stock", "barrel", et cetera parent attach points, and each of those mods' meshes has a child attach point telling it where to appear on the receiver mesh. Combining this with orientation data stored in the mesh tells an accessory mesh exactly what direction to be facing when its attach point intersects with the reciver's attach point.

In the case of the LVOA's initially broken mag it was quite obvious that the translation/orientation of the mag mesh were wildly incorrect. This didn't happen because weaponsmith was being goofy. It was following the instructions it always follows, aligning the attach point on the mag with the attach point on the receiver. The problem was that the mag mesh didn't have the attach point in the right place. Or the attach point was in the right place within the mesh but the magazine element was translated and oriented wrong.

I think maybe you're imagining that meshes in modern games are just basic obj files, just a skeleton of vertices and lines? Obviously that's the most important bit, but modern mesh file formats can store a host of other data. Bethesda's nif files for weapons contain attach points for weapon modding and animation data for firing and ejecting cartridges, for instance, and their clothing nifs contain also attach points---say for adding extra pouches to a backpack or spikes to some postapocalyptic armour---and also "bone" data that tells the mesh what parts of the body of a character it is tied to and how it will move when the character moves.

As I've already said obviously Bethesda and Ubisoft have their own file formats and tools and whatnot, but how Wildlands functions will not be fundamentally different from what I've described.

[biomag83]

@ami, I'm probably not getting my point across in terms of the way data is transferred during a patch update. I'm not discounting flaws in the actual source, but it is more likely we're not seeing what the Devs are seeing in Paris. You don't introduce a weapon with the magazine on the stock, not see it, then fix it with the mag in the wrong place again and not actually look at it. This could be the case, obviously, but it seems more likely to me that the data is the issue.

That's what I think is by far the most logical explanation. I don't see the QA missing those issues and at this point I don't see anyone in management saying those bugs are not worth delaying since the patches are created to actually fix those issues. And saying Ubisoft devs are too dumb is probably the dumbest thing to assume.

I had the same issue while stilll working in QA a couple of years ago. Depending on what server we were using we were getting different issues with the same game build. It happens, it's freaking annoying as QA since you can't test on the live servers for obvious reasons.

But then again, we were not Ubisoft, the issues were not that big and we didn't ruin our reputation with hopelessly obvious bugs and patches that introduced more issues than they repaired. In such a case I would guess that we would have made a very very hard effort to get closer to the live environment servers with our testing environment. Might be Ubisoft is too big to change - it happens - but that's were you start getting a bad reputation and you have to make the calculation how much damage is it worth to not make the structural changes.... and a third party should never have a more advanced version of your own product. It makes you look silly especially if you put the work in to adept to their solution and not them.

[UbiInsulin]

Here's our explanation as to why the patches are on the large side. It does not address why the Steam and Uplay patches are so different in size, so I'm trying to track down an answer for that.

In terms of the issues some of you described with customer support reps: As a former support rep, I can say that they never mean to imply that issues are "your fault." We can't help you solve your issue if we don't ask any questions or skip simple troubleshooting steps. We're also doing our due diligence. When we do report that players are encountering an issue, we want to make sure that we didn't miss anything obvious that could have helped you.

When we do report something to the team, it carries more weight if we say "Players reported that they're missing X. They tried doing A, B, and C to restore X to their game, but none of this restored X to the game even though they meet the condition for having X" rather than just saying "Players reported that they're missing X."

[GiveMeTactical]

Insulin, this is my typical call to AT&T or Xfinity tech support when something does not work with my internet... Hello, I am so and so, my acct # is this and I my internet has been down since this morning, my MAC address for my modem is this, I am behind a router but I have disconnected it and wire my PC directly to my modem, I have gone to CMD and Release/Renew my IP and I also restarted my PC, your automated solutions does not say that there is anything wrong in my area yet, I am having issues connecting to any website with any browser, I have windows 7 ultimate 64bit (call me old fashioned). I have tried, rebooting the modem, I called in and ask the automated response to send a new signal to my modem and nothing has fixed it.

Tech supports then starts to tell me that we will go through some normal trouble shooting to see where I went wrong and asks me to restart my PC... WTF? I just told him/her I did, I told her EVERYTHING I already did and I didn't do it just for ****s and giggles, I did it to avoid having to go from the essentials or basics so no, while I get where you are coming from as a CM, the tech support is totally different.

And believe me, I do try to help friends in need and I know how hard it is to trouble shoot when you are not looking at the mirror or what the PC is doing but when I talk to guys I know what they are doing by listening to what they have told me they already did, I avoid it and continue with it.

Again, no all of them do that but most do. Most of them know less that most people know about basic PC maintenance because I assume they get paid minimun wages.

[Ghost-Ami]

Here's our explanation as to why the patches are on the large side. It does not address why the Steam and Uplay patches are so different in size, so I'm trying to track down an answer for that.

In terms of the issues some of you described with customer support reps: As a former support rep, I can say that they never mean to imply that issues are "your fault." We can't help you solve your issue if we don't ask any questions or skip simple troubleshooting steps. We're also doing our due diligence. When we do report that players are encountering an issue, we want to make sure that we didn't miss anything obvious that could have helped you.

When we do report something to the team, it carries more weight if we say "Players reported that they're missing X. They tried doing A, B, and C to restore X to their game, but none of this restored X to the game even though they meet the condition for having X" rather than just saying "Players reported that they're missing X."

Insulin, my love, I know you mean well, but that "explanation" from Keeba is meant to fob laypeople off with something that sounds fudgily intuitive but doesn't actually make any sense if you've ever cracked open a game and worked on it. It's a "customer service" response rather than a technical response, and that's the sort of intelligence insulting "assistance" that strains the ocular muscles of so many of us---because of, you know, the eyerolling---who are expert users (or something close) of a given piece of software or hardware. But don't take my word for it, ask Steam users if their Wildlands experience is worse than mine with Uplay. There are zero issues that crop up on the Steam version of a game that the Uplay version magically lacks.

As I mentioned in a previous post Steam patches are smaller because they only include new content and updated older content to be overwritten. There is literally zero reason to overwrite old files that are not being altered. So that's why the sizes are different. The answer you might want to track down is why Ubi are so intent on overwriting old files that are not being changed in the update.

In any case the main thrust of this thread is that I'm not asking the devs to never ever give us oddly glitched content that may be based upon a plurality of causes and unanticipated interactions between this and that; I'm asking that they stop releasing broken meshes, textures, and animations that are always wrong and reproducibly so in 100% of cases because someone at the studio just didn't bother to check something in all their tools load and then load it into the game and make sure it's implemented correctly. ((((