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Development Priorities - An In-Season April Fool's Joke
Let me preface this by saying I'm all for fun and interesting game modes, just not in spite of quality of life and fair balance changes, especially for content the devs have already committed on.
I really, really, really hope that the reason the devs couldn't fix the blood event offering wasn't because they were busy working on the My Little Oni modifier. Something that will be here for between one and seven days, and something that loses its luster after 3 games of it. I sincerely hope that it didn't take the entire coding team's bandwidth to mainly increase oni's size and shrink the survivor's.
I understand this is supposed to be a fun and quirky game mode for today, which I am grateful for having, but as someone who's played this game for multiple years, why does it take months for anything to be addressed in this game? I understand game development is a process, with multiple buy-offs and approvals, but bug fixing an offering? Surely that gets escalated if the development priorities are correctly aligned. I say this in the nicest way possible in terms of providing feedback and improving the game in the long run: sometimes it's hard to believe that there's more than one developer actually doing the coding for this game.
What is everyone's thoughts on this?
Comments
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I'm guessing they just abandoned the offering because they felt like everyone would be using the bloodpoint offerings anyway. The offering also slowed down the community goal progression because it would prevent the basins from being reclaimed for longer. Just my guess.
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(um… apparently you can post comments without text… mods if you see this remove this and the above comment)
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WE can't have fun things in the game without someone complaning about it :(
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As I said in the post, I am grateful for the mode. My post is mainly about the development process and how extremely slow it is for this game.
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Seeing it as complaining is short sighted. It's a concern of where the development resources for the game are going. It's great that the players care about stuff like that. The devs would be less fortunate if we didn't get these types of posts.
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There's no reason to believe this April Fools mode took away much development from other things. We had Chucky into Alan Wake into Unknown/Sable for the past 3 big patches on top of seeing multiple adjustments to perks and killers. Not to mention the bug fixes we see in every patch notes. Big studios are going to have multiple teams working on different stuff concurrently.
As for the event offering, there likely wasn't a reason to fix it. Any fix for the offering was going to be delayed by the standard process of getting a patched approved for consoles and by the time that got out, the event was already going to be mostly over.
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Surely a 1Kb patch is able to be vetted and pushed to consoles within the span of the two week event it's designed for right? Also, sure we had Alan Wake, Chucky, and the Unknown; and the art team does a fantastic job at modeling, animating, and designing content for the game, but taking the models and actually putting code to them is what I'm talking about. Most of the new perks and killer abilities are copy-pasted amalgamations that could realistically be coded in a day's worth of time. The only novel thing that was added recently was the invocation, which I would understand if it took a few week's development time.
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If you think it's so easy, then go build your own DBD rival.
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Adding content to an existing model can be quite fast. Building the entire structure from nothing would take time.
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I can provide feedback and speculation without having to build my own game lmao. If that was supposed to be some kind of "gotcha" comment, it didn't hit the mark.
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You've decided that the work to create new chapters (which the devs already told is roughly a year long process) is simple which shows you don't actually understand the work that goes into development. While code reuse is important as there's no reason to rebuild the same stuff twice, it's not as simple as just copy and paste code from different killers powers and pray it works out.
Not to mention it takes a few days to get the approval of a patch to consoles so even if the devs immediately got to work on fixing the bugged offering doesn't mean it would be done in time for the verification of the first hotfix. Considering it's a time limited event, a single offering not working that was quickly killswitch likely wasn't important enough to fix over current projects the teams are taking.
You want to complain about the devs being bad at time management but you fail to consider that the reason the offering wasn't fixed was because they had more important things to focus on.
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Your assumptions of my knowledge on the development process are of course incorrect.
I have nothing wrong with copy-pasting code, as I understand the value of it. I made my comment because it takes significantly less time to copy-paste, so there is more time for them to bug fix, etc. Since coding is the last thing done in the development process (Concept → Art and Modeling → Coding), there is of course at least one developer that can spend an afternoon fixing a single bug.
If the devs are prioritizing other content or changes, then that is their decision, and I have no problem with that. But you cannot tell me that they are so held up on creating new content, such as seeing loadouts in the pregame lobby (that we have been begging for for years), that there's not a single dev that could have fixed that bug the day the event started.
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I appreciate this comment very much. Thank you for understanding my intentions 😊
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Did I say they were only creating new content?
The issue I have is you that are downplaying the time that can go into development and bug fixes. As a developer myself, I've run into many situations of what seemed to be a simple issue become a complicated mess and having to fix an entire underlying system. The same thing can happened when developing new systems, though at least in the specific example you give the devs have stated during the last QA that seeing other survivor loadouts wasn't a current priority.
But as far as the offering issue. The event stated March 18th (Monday) and the offering was Killswitched that evening. Then the only hotfix during the event was on the 25th. Likely the hotfix was finalized a few days before (not counting weekends) so it could be verified and fixed if any issues came up. At my job, we have a similar process where we have a week to test and prepare the patch for release.
For an event barely lasting 2 weeks and the first hotfix being finalized (Chapter was the 12th) when the issued appeared, there was no time to really address the offering issue.
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As a developer myself, I also understand that changes can be more complicated than they appear. However, this bug appears to be very small; as all the offering did was provide action speed, aura read, and an increase to the protection duration. That is my perception with only the information that I'm privy to and my knowledge of software.
You cannot tell me that the bug this small could not have been verified and fixed within the 6 days they had available to them between its identification and subsequent patch if they had made it a priority.
Also, was this event not play tested? How does one of the most important parts of an event, the offering, get through testing riddled with bugs? That is something I cannot wrap my head around. It's not like this was a corner case or obscure scenario, this was the event's main offering. What that says to me is that the devs either do not have 1) enough people to do the job, 2) correct priorities when it comes to development.
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First you are counting weekends with that 6 days figures. Second, the first hotfix was likely already finished for that cycle since you need to test and verify the hotfix changes, send them to get verified, and then have time to fix any issues that come up from verification.
They did not have up until the 25th to fix the offering.
Here's another thing you should know if you are a developer. The client is always going to find bugs that the dev team overlooked.
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It takes time for them to fix an offering. Not only was the event only for 12 days, the incoming patch which was this recent one, was already planned and sent out to other platforms for approval. It literally takes like a week or more to get all platforms to approve a patch so the bugged offering was pretty much needed to be disabled for the rest of the event
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The way I understand it, the patch validation process for consoles can take quite a while depending on the amount of things in the queue to be validated. So regardless of the patch size a company still has to wait their turn on top of the usual time it takes to actually validate to the standards of the console makers.
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I can lay that concern to rest. The creation of modifier did not impact the Bloodshot Eye offering in any way. It's an unfortunate circumstance where we simply weren't able to squeeze in a fix before the event came to an end.
To give a little peek behind the scenes, most platforms require updates to be sent in advance to go through a certification process - this applies to any game, not just DBD. By the time the bug was discovered, it was too late to add a fix to the patch which released before the end of the event.
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We'll just have to agree to disagree that they did not have enough time to fix, test, and submit their change. Especially since if you're pushing a product, it's common for devs to work overtime and weekends to fix critical issues. Surely as a developer, you'd know that.
Also "Here's another thing you should know if you are a developer. The client is always going to find bugs that the dev team overlooked." - yes, corner cases and obscure bugs. Not one of the main components to the event. The offering did not work at all. It was not tested properly or they ran out of time due to wrong priorities.
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An offering not working as intended for a limited time event is not a critical issue IMO that would require a dev team to work overtime to fix.
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It is unfortunate that the console certification process is such a bottleneck when uploading patches. I know steam has a similar verification process when uploading content. How long does the steam verification take for a game like dbd compared to console?
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I still don't know how something that important to an event wasn't caught in testing.
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