🛈 Announcement
Greetings! The Division forums are now archived and accessible in read-only mode, please go to the new platform to discuss the game
  1. #11
    Sircowdog1's Avatar Senior Member
    Join Date
    Mar 2016
    Posts
    3,953
    Originally Posted by dagrommit Go to original post
    The OP has been around longer than you have, and was posting in the Division forums last year.



    I suggest you read the Destiny patch notes. Or the Warframe patch notes. Those teams have been doing this for longer than Massive, but they face the same problems.

    Was I referring specifically of the OP? No.

    Does the fact that other games also screw up make it ok? No.

    Christ I hate these forums sometimes.
     2 people found this helpful
    Share this post

  2. #12
    dagrommit's Avatar Senior Member
    Join Date
    Jan 2003
    Location
    Pedestal of truth
    Posts
    5,099
    Originally Posted by Sircowdog1 Go to original post
    Was I referring specifically of the OP? No.

    Does the fact that other games also screw up make it ok? No.

    Christ I hate these forums sometimes.
    Now you're being disingenuous.

    This thread is the only one talking about software development and bugs. And you're posting in it.

    Pointing out that other games suffer from the same problems doesn't mean that this games problems are "OK". It illustrates that it's an issue across the industry.
     2 people found this helpful
    Share this post

  3. #13
    CategoryTheory's Avatar Senior Member
    Join Date
    Feb 2015
    Location
    Tokyo, Japan
    Posts
    675
    Originally Posted by dagrommit Go to original post
    Yes, a lot of modern development is reliant on libraries and modules produced by others. This is a *good* thing from a productivity and programmer perspective. It allows them to focus on the problem they're trying to solve, instead of recreating the wheel. That comes with risk of course as they're reliant on the work of others to be solid.
    It's even a little more subtle than this: the developers using third-party code may avoid re-creating the wheel, but they also end up using a third-party module that may not be solving exactly the problem they think (or wish) it was solving.

    Add to this that most languages don't allow exact specification of APIs (e.g., function type signatures in a lot of languages do not let you specify and enforce that the function never returns "null"), so developers often just specify this in the API documentation, which is usually not automatically checked. In such cases you end up relying on developers not to make the kinds of errors that we know human beings regularly make.

    An example I gave in another thread in this forum was documenting that a remote server function returns null even though in the current version of the code it never does. (This could be because the server developers plan future changes to the server that would make the function sometimes return null.) If the client code developers calling that function miss that in the documentation, no amount of testing against the current version will ever see the problem in the client code; the client out in the field will start breaking only after a later server upgrade.

    Originally Posted by hyper---sniper Go to original post
    ...But the big bugs should not happen , and could be solved with testing
    Even if you could get perfect test coverage (which for a PC game is impossible in practice: effectively every player runs it on a unique configuration) that's not going to solve your bug problem. As Dijkstra pointed out around 1970, "Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!"

    Originally Posted by hyper---sniper Go to original post
    ...we ALL pay for the game and ALL have problems...
    I think that's overstating the case. In almost four months of heavy play I have not encountered a single problem where I would have paid more for the game not to have that problem. By far the worst was the recent Ubisoft Connect incident, and even there it was only a day, so I've had 98.8% availability. I can live with that for something that costs me a few tens of dollars for months or even years of play.

    I think that Ubi and Massive certainly could be doing a better job here, and would support you if you held them to a reasonable standard, but insisting that PC games never crash for anybody is not a reasonable standard. It's also a very poor place to start if you want to determine how good or bad a job they're doing, because starting from such an unrealistic measure the only answer can ever be, "so badly that they should never have made the game."
     1 people found this helpful
    Share this post

  4. #14
    CategoryTheory's Avatar Senior Member
    Join Date
    Feb 2015
    Location
    Tokyo, Japan
    Posts
    675
    Originally Posted by dagrommit Go to original post
    Originally Posted by Sircowdog1 Go to original post
    Seems like there's a lot of that going around. People who are just now coming into the forums to make excuses for Ubi/Massive without knowledge of the full history of just how inexcusably sloppy the development and implementation of this specific game has been.
    The OP has been around longer than you have, and was posting in the Division forums last year.
    To be fair, I'm pretty sure he was referring to me. I've made only two or three dozen posts in these forums, most only in the last few days, and Sircowdog1 has been rather displeased with some of them. According to him, having so few posts here has somehow invalidated a couple of decades of software development experience focused on systems reliability.
    Share this post

  5. #15
    dagrommit's Avatar Senior Member
    Join Date
    Jan 2003
    Location
    Pedestal of truth
    Posts
    5,099
    Originally Posted by CategoryTheory Go to original post
    Even if you could get perfect test coverage (which for a PC game is impossible in practice: effectively every player runs it on a unique configuration) that's not going to solve your bug problem. As Dijkstra pointed out around 1970, "Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!"
    Absolutely agreed with this. On a related tangent, I think you'll be amused by this thread: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1229641258370355200

    It's also a good example of the limitations of testing. No amount of testing would have caught that issue unless both pieces of software were running on the same machine.

    Originally Posted by CategoryTheory Go to original post
    To be fair, I'm pretty sure he was referring to me. I've made only two or three dozen posts in these forums, most only in the last few days, and Sircowdog1 has been rather displeased with some of them. According to him, having so few posts here has somehow invalidated a couple of decades of software development experience focused on systems reliability.
    In which case, mea culpa. I don't follow the forums as closely as I used to.
    Share this post

  6. #16
    YodaMan 3D's Avatar Senior Member
    Join Date
    Feb 2013
    Posts
    8,108
    Originally Posted by Robert-of-Hague Go to original post
    Having the kind of troubles we had is of course a big problem for us customers but for the developers as well.

    I have been in the ICT-business for 40 years (now retired) and about 10 years of those 40 as a software engineer.
    If there is one thing I learned in all those years is that there is no such thing as bug-free software.
    Even in a small software module, let’s say 100 lines of coding, there is a high probability of a bug. Some bugs can be found with intensive testing, but there are bugs that can only be found in the field.

    If you consider the amount of coding in a game like Div-2 in combination with the amount of coding of the different operating systems of all the platforms this game runs on, then it will be a miracle of galactic proportions if this will ever be bug free.

    And to make it even worse: every time a bit of software is changed or added, new bugs are introduced. Testing doesn’t solve this. Even with intensive testing you can’t find all the bugs. The only possibility for a software product to become even near a bug free situation is not to change anything, ever. No hardware changes and no software changes.

    So people, get used to it.
    Welcome in the world of ICT.


    Loving the "Give Up Attitude". Let us be honest. Bugs that aren't fixed, aren't fixed because they are BER, Beyond Economic Repair. It cuts into the profits. So instead of fixing the problems, they just get players to believe that they just can't be fixed. It's cheaper if you buffalo the players into accepting it. If you accept a lesser product, then the bar at which a company set for quality gets lowered. Cause the customer is accepting of poor quality. This is comin from one who has been in the Technology Field for over 30 years. You want things to get better, we need to give them a reason to get better.
     1 people found this helpful
    Share this post

  7. #17
    I remember the old days of when game consoles used game cartridges. They had less bugs because alot more testing was done because after sale there was no such thing as patches on an offline system. Hence probably why they cost so much. I think I paid like £60 for N64 games and this was in the 90s, which was literally 1/3 the price of the console itself.

    Now the consumer are the testers, just need to be in a good enough state to sell initially.
     2 people found this helpful
    Share this post

  8. #18
    Licher.Rus's Avatar Senior Member
    Join Date
    Jan 2017
    Location
    Russia
    Posts
    937
    People's whine, moaning and being upset, because they paid money for bugged product is NORMAL too.

    And your post is equal to: spoiled food in the stores is normal, get used to it, just shut up, pay and eat.
     4 people found this helpful
    Share this post

  9. #19
    CategoryTheory's Avatar Senior Member
    Join Date
    Feb 2015
    Location
    Tokyo, Japan
    Posts
    675
    Originally Posted by dagrommit Go to original post
    Absolutely agreed with this. On a related tangent, I think you'll be amused by this thread: https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1229641258370355200
    That's beautiful. It's also a good example of, "You're not doing what you think you're doing," not to mention the joys of cut-and-paste programming and sometimes StackOverflow.

    The homework assignment he gives is a really good one:
    Think about how you'd find this bug in your own programs. You copy/paste the code, it seems to work, and you don't realize it's broken because you don't run either of these programs which made the same mistake.
    I'm tempted to say that if you can't understand the above problem well enough to make at least a good attempt at that assignment, you probably shouldn't be commenting on developer skills. (FWIW, Windows or .NET knowledge isn't needed: I have no development experience whatsoever with .NET nor do I even know what a ".NET assembly" is, but what's going on there is still quite clear to me.)

    Originally Posted by YodaMan 3D Go to original post
    Let us be honest. Bugs that aren't fixed, aren't fixed because they are BER, Beyond Economic Repair. It cuts into the profits.
    All but the last sentence is quite correct. But it's not just about profits, it's also about what you're not doing when you're spending your time on bugs. Be honest, would you really be on board with Massive saying that there would be no new content or anything but bugfix updates for the next year because they'd decided to put their entire development team on bugfixes? Would you trade all the new content from the past year for a year of bugfixes? (I know I certainly wouldn't.)

    You want things to get better, we need to give them a reason to get better.
    You could try getting together with your friends and raising a few hundred thousand dollars a year for some more developers dedicated to reliability and bugfixing.

    I am pretty firmly convinced that most gamers neither want to pay significantly more nor accept significantly fewer features in trade for more reliability. Like me, they prefer rolling the dice on a reasonably cheap game over spending a lot of money, and they just move on to the next game if they happen to get unlucky. (They may not say this, but they demonstrate it in how they actually behave.)

    Again, my usual disclaimer: this doesn't mean that Ubisoft and Massive couldn't be doing a better job with the resources they have. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that their software development and release processes are not hugely better than industry average, which means that there's a lot of room for improvement. But no matter how much effort they put in and how much money they spend, they'll never get truly reliable software as long as their users insist on running their program along with essentially random collections of the game's dependencies and other software in what amounts to a completely uncontrolled environment (i.e., on their personal Windows PCs).
    Share this post

  10. #20
    CategoryTheory's Avatar Senior Member
    Join Date
    Feb 2015
    Location
    Tokyo, Japan
    Posts
    675
    Originally Posted by Licher.Rus Go to original post
    And your post is equal to: spoiled food in the stores is normal, get used to it, just shut up, pay and eat.
    I think it's better thought of as, "Fast food chains serve what they serve; if you don't like it you shouldn't be patronizing them."

    Alternatives, such as the console versions of the games, are available. If you don't like the costs (monetary and otherwise) of using those instead, well, that's a choice you've made.

    It's fair to demand a certain level of quality from PC developers, but it really does sound like most people here are demanding a level of perfection that simply cannot be achieved on PCs in the real world.
    Share this post