I do not want to give silly excuses here....

DemiGoth · Post by **DemiGoth** » Thu, 28. Nov 13, 16:10

Of course you deserve a bug free game, but you may ask why these trade problems were not uncovered during testing: We had a group of testers dedicated to testing our economy over a long period of time. These guys used a special version of the game which allowed them to run the entire economy at a higher speed. It seems that most of these problems we now see did not happen with this time acceleration. Meanwhile these problems also do not happen early on in the game or if you (like most testers do) have to restart the game frequently.

Why on earth would you create a special speed patch like this? Everyone should know that specific things like this won't work as intended if you test them in a special version and are not looking at the 'normal' development of the progress in the game. IMO you should just let a couple of testers play through the game normally over the course of weeks (playing 8h/day as job doesn't sound too bad

) as well as let other testers play through certain parts continuously.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad you found this issue and that it's about to be fixed, but man... You made a big baddie there with your release version of the economy

I also see that you've made your first patch for the performance bugs. Can you be more specific on that one? I've noticed from several treads that a lot of performance issues have arose from SLI systems, as well as most AMD CPUs and older Intel CPUs.

Anyway, downloading X Rebirth again and awaiting the patch and I hope that the performance bug for my system is solved, so that I can finally play AND see if your economy patch works as well

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epion · Post by **epion** » Thu, 28. Nov 13, 16:19

Srsly ... that statement just takes the cake ... what the ****? I can't describe how baffled I am at the stupidity implied by that statement ...

firestorm79 · Post by **firestorm79** » Thu, 28. Nov 13, 16:19

I for one am quite impressed by Bernd's candidness.

I am quite optimistic about XR's future.

[puts up flame shield]

Palanor · Post by **Palanor** » Thu, 28. Nov 13, 16:20

" Meanwhile these problems also do not happen early on in the game or if you (like most testers do) have to restart the game frequently."

How come in my games the economy comes to a screeching halt at the "100 cell run"? That's quite early in the game . Are you playing the same game I am?

Mauzi! · Post by **Mauzi!** » Thu, 28. Nov 13, 16:23

His quote also contains a clear hint that the middlegame and endgame wasn't properly (aka at normal speeds) tested ever, and if so only at increased speeds.

Considering the general quality of Egosoft's insufficiently tested stuff I fear for the worst, including having to trash a savegame. Guess we better wait with "real playing" until they confirm it is safe, not risking a savegame with 1000h on this !

dubnium · Post by **dubnium** » Thu, 28. Nov 13, 16:28

now he only needs to address the insane design decisions and how they're going to fix them.

Earth Ultimatum IV. · Post by **Earth Ultimatum IV.** » Thu, 28. Nov 13, 16:28

Everything points towards my theory:
The game has been rushed towards release by Deep Silver... Because 7 years of work without any profit.

_nox_ · Post by **_nox_** » Thu, 28. Nov 13, 16:30

I hate to be on any bandwagon but that paragraph basically admits to the worst practices in the industry.

"Our systems could not be tested as-is, so we didn't test them"

If a system can't be tested, there IS no q/a.

I do appreciate the admission though.

AkrionXxarr · Post by **AkrionXxarr** » Thu, 28. Nov 13, 16:39

DemiGoth wrote:(playing 8h/day as job doesn't sound too bad )

It can actually be pretty terrible. xD Using The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker as an example, you know how many people disliked how they had to travel the ocean for long periods of time to get anywhere? Imagine that your job is to do nothing but that.

People quickly get fed up with things like having to replay unskippable cutscenes (like the fight sequences in Resident Evil 4), and it's things like that which paid testers wind up repeating for those 8 hours a day. :B

WarChicken · Post by **WarChicken** » Thu, 28. Nov 13, 16:42

You do know that Q/A is always at the end? If that end was sooner than they anticipated, they just didn't have much time to test the lategame stuff.

I for one am VERY pleased with Bernds statement.

It shows that they are doing something and that they are willing to work on it - post release and post bugfixing - just as I said.

I'm still not going to play the present game - After I played XR a few hours, I got Albion Prelude to fix my X Addiction (I skipped that one before) and will play that while XR is being bugfixed and then feature enriched.

Looking forward to it in a few Months.

raven_sb · Post by **raven_sb** » Thu, 28. Nov 13, 16:43

*sighs* This is just a frustrated observation. For the past few days a lot of people on the forums have been calling for Egosoft's blood because 'they haven't been communicating'.

Now the CEO of the company is communicating a)Why patch 1.18 is taking so long (so we can relax - they aren't just going to take the money and run), and b) the potential cause (and reason for) the trading problems.

The end result of this 'communication' - people calling CEO and the developers names and basically ripping them a new one.

Is it any wonder that most developers in a situation like this stay silent?

WarChicken · Post by **WarChicken** » Thu, 28. Nov 13, 16:48

DemiGoth wrote:playing 8h/day as job doesn't sound too bad

You didn't write that, did you?!? I am a game tester - that is I was a game tester for the last 5 years (not for egosoft, tho). Believe me, the times where you actually have fun at your workplace is quite limited.

Also, you don't play. You test. You go to the things you're meant to check, and check them over and over again in all possible configurations, situations and possibilities. Depending on the size of your task, that can last for hours, days or weeks. In worst cases even months.
If you think this repetitive boring tasks are fun, go and be a videogame tester. Enjoy.

Furry Muppet · Post by **Furry Muppet** » Thu, 28. Nov 13, 16:50

Why on earth would you create a special speed patch like this? Everyone should know that specific things like this won't work as intended if you test them in a special version and are not looking at the 'normal' development of the progress in the game.

Nonsense. If you fly to a remote area and just sit back the economy is essentially fully OOS. Using a speed patch should have yielded the exact same results as the normal speed version. It is very, very strange that the results are so incredibly different.

The real question now is: how do they test the 1.8 patch? If they can't use a speed patch they can only do short-term testing and try and check if all individual processes work as intended. If so, it should work on a larger time-scale, but only time will tell.

RWolf · Post by **RWolf** » Thu, 28. Nov 13, 16:52

dubnium wrote:now he only needs to address the insane design decisions and how they're going to fix them.

+100

I would really like to know what they were envisioning when they made some of these choices and if they even existing in the games GDD...does the game even have a GDD?

Mauzi! · Post by **Mauzi!** » Thu, 28. Nov 13, 16:53

raven_sb wrote:*Is it any wonder that most developers in a situation like this stay silent?

Yup, no point in commenting Bernd's open statement in a negative way, I even would go as far as calling that statement rather bold - not many would dare to admit such in public. I only am sad about the fact that this kinda openness totally missed before release when we seemingly would have needed it most...

And of course, this is only about the immediate goal of bugfixing and we didn't get the (promised) answers many of us wanted yet.

pirke123 · Post by **pirke123** » Thu, 28. Nov 13, 16:54

I'm happy he gives an honest statement. Keep up the good work!

RWolf · Post by **RWolf** » Thu, 28. Nov 13, 16:57

pirke123 wrote:I'm happy he gives an honest statement. Keep up the good work!

I agree, it feels like a bit of progression.... kind of like having group therapy session and someone finally starts to open up and be honest.

We need a bit more of that though. Cant leave it at "ok ok, we didnt properly test the game and we are sorry" doesnt really fill the info gap completely, its just the tip of an iceberg really.

krathi · Post by **krathi** » Thu, 28. Nov 13, 16:58

raven_sb wrote:*sighs* This is just a frustrated observation. For the past few days a lot of people on the forums have been calling for Egosoft's blood because 'they haven't been communicating'.

Now the CEO of the company is communicating a)Why patch 1.18 is taking so long (so we can relax - they aren't just going to take the money and run), and b) the potential cause (and reason for) the trading problems.

The end result of this 'communication' - people calling CEO and the developers names and basically ripping them a new one.

Is it any wonder that most developers in a situation like this stay silent?

To be fair, if you do something dumb then, really, you should expect to be called out for it.

They did something silly with their internal testing of the game: they didn't actually run a series of 'true playthroughs.' That's either hubris on their part to think that the game would be perfect or just plain short sighted not following best practices of the Industry.

If you develop a product, any product, one of the things you do with it is test it in a real world environment without any additional things. They didn't do that.

So, yeah, they'll definitely get called out on that.

They messed up. It's nice that they fess up on that but, then again, they did have SEVEN YEARS to catch that. If we skip by the first five years of development they still had TWO YEARS in which to catch these problems.

Two years.

Not two months. Two years. In all that time they didn't think to have some beta testers play the game normally? They didn't think to run a small internal beta test to play the game and see how it was? They didn't use any focus groups to find out if the UI actually makes sense?

These things are basic elements of software development. How can a company that has released multiple products make such basic mistakes?

Mauzi! · Post by **Mauzi!** » Thu, 28. Nov 13, 16:58

Furry Muppet wrote:Nonsense. If you fly to a remote area and just sit back the economy is essentially fully OOS. Using a speed patch should have yielded the exact same results as the normal speed version. It is very, very strange that the results are so incredibly different.

Dunno how much you know about the X games in general, but all of them were like that, having totally different results depending on the speed you played them (in previous X games we had SETA for such). Some of this was even crystal clear to notice, e.g. shots going through the target too fast to get registered, or the pathing AI missing out on that station corner which crashes the ship. These few examples from the past already reveal why testing with higher speed could have been known to lead to wrong testing results.

Your general statement of "nonsense" is true only in that it is nonsense in itself and your follow-up claims wrong.

PeAVeYqc · Post by **PeAVeYqc** » Thu, 28. Nov 13, 17:01

They should have release the game early acces on steam like space engineer,... Or beta key.

egosoft.com

egosoft.com

I do not want to give silly excuses here....

I do not want to give silly excuses here....

Re: I do not want to give silly excuses here....

Re: I do not want to give silly excuses here....