Why Is The PTB So Buggy?
Well I can answer that with what I believe is the main culprit for these extremely buggy patches.
First off, lets just rename the PTB from Player Test Build To Players Test Bugs? Ok? Thank you.
Next lets get into the main 3 issues I believe cause it,
- Spaghetti Coding
- Deadlines
- Poor QA Testing
So with spaghetti coding, we all know that DbD has a poor track record of having things break all the time. They change something with hook and now Oni doesn't have a head when loading in. The only reason for this to happen is for the coding being messy. Something some people may not know is that DbD was originally coded in a visual coding program. Basically a program that used blocks instead of lines of code. Its really good for learning to code but for actually making a game, not so much. By now they have moved on from there but the foundation of the game is still basically built with blocks, which are extremely messy and hard to work around. So with the foundation basically being paper clips and rubber bands, things are bound to break all the time until the game is remade from the ground up.
Now I can't be 100% on any of this but from things I have heard and inference I believe this is a main issue with DbD
Deadlines are the next thing, and boy it has only gotten worse. Originally there was no scheduling for when patches would go live or when mid chapter patches would happen. Then 2.0.0 rolled around and they made the schedule of 3 months for 1 chapter patch and 1 mid chapter patch. with 6 weeks in-between the 2 patches and 2 weeks before each patch for a PTB. Even back then we complained about the amount of bugs in each PTB and urged them to reduce the year from 4 chapters to 3, but of course they wouldn't do that because of money or something. However, recently they changed it for 3 weeks for a PTB, basically meaning every 3 weeks we would have something new to test. This has just enhanced the issues of buggy PTB's with this one being a Prime example. With even less time to make the next chapter or mid chapter the PTB is just writing full of bugs.
Which brings us to poor QA Testing.
Given that in the known bugs section we only saw 4 bugs I can definitely tell that something is up with how they do QA testing. 1 option is the known bugs are things that the programmers run into and tell the people who make the patch notes to include, with no interaction with QA at all. Or 2, the QA tester only encountered 4 bugs while testing the PTB before us... something doesn't add up.
I honestly don't know what is up with QA testing but I guarantee that something in the chain is wrong.
I have always had 2 ideas of what is wrong. Either the QA testers aren't doing... QA testing and don't report the bugs we find literally hours after patches go live, or the QA testers do find the bugs, but the programmers never have time to fix them, so the patch gets shipped out with the bugs being left in.
Either option isn't good game running standards and something definitely needs to change.
So TL:DR. Basically everything that makes DbD the game it is today is the reason why each PTB feels like a termite colony.
That's a lot of bugs.