What happened is that someone in management thought it would be neat to pick 11-11-11 as a release date. A date is not a schedule. A schedule is a plan to have features ready at a certain time that includes a quality phase and a bug fixing phase. If you've picked a date, then development and QA kill themselves trying to make the impossible happen and shovel out a a product at that date. They worked unpaid overtime to try to make the impossible happen, yet management and marketing and other fools ignored the schedule, or never had one.

The customer, all of us, should not withhold our ire for the sake of the gentle feelings of QA and development. Scream bloody murder until the fools in management rethink picking arbitrary dates. When they do, everyone will be happier except the jerk that thought 11-11-11 was a cool release date.

For goodness sake. Why cant people stop moaning and realise thhat with this game, youre getting more content than any other game out there, for the same price as any other new game! Stop being greedy, theres so much to do with this game than say compared to a shooter

This again? "I don't care so nobody should" is not a valid argument.

Also a software engineer. I guarantee, the developers responsible for some of the more high profile bugs introduced in 1.2 are sweating bullets right now, when as the OP stated, it is not their fault, but the constraints placed upon them. My experience working in Fortune 500 companies the majority of my (storied, lol) career is that the least competent developers are promoted into management roles. This is because they cannot afford to move the most productive/knowledgeable developers into "management". So they take the flunkies, make them functional and project managers. And these guys usually are the ones cracking the whip, screaming the loudest, and pretending the hardest that they have a greater stake in the project/company,, when in reality they are glorified administrative assistants. These are the guys who are to blame, but they cluster together, point their collective fingers, and the blame is divided so many ways that no single head rolls. They create problems, put out the fires that they started, then pat themselves on the back in time for their Christmas bonus.

Game shops have a bad reputation in the industry. I have mostly worked in process oriented defense and manufacturing companies with degreed engineers/computer scientists. Game shops pull from a different tier of talent; they are young companies with talented programmers (not necessarily engineers) who are passionate about games, willing to accept reduced salaries. Process and management talent in these companies is almost non-existent. I am pretty sure that inside Bethesda right now, it's "Lord of the Flies." They are probably lucky to have proper source control. Its that bad.

The original poster failed to mention SCOPE as the final variable. Its related to quality when discussing bugs that are known. When something is not ready for prime time, it is targeted for a later release. I am sure that Bethesda knew about half of the bugs in the original release and decided to move forward. The bugs they fixed in 1.2 have probably been in the pipeline for months. All the minor complaints about game balance are just noise at this point. I'm pretty sure the developers plates are full with known issues, and the forums represent a tiny portion of the feedback they are acting upon.

Nice to see another familiar with the development process.

When you're 15 and mommy and daddy are willing to dump $60 into your hobby every few months, you really have no frame of reference for "real world" business.

Thanks very much for the well thought out response.

For positive, straight down the middle, testing then yeah the chances are that UAT will pick them up. To be honest though, for things like complex state/clashing quest bugs, UAT probably isn't going to help you. For a testing task on the scale of quest(state) testing in a game like skyrim I would imagine they'd either have to have a massively resourced and structured (risk prioritised) system testing effort and/or some seriously swish test automation. The number of potential state clashes (and therefore test cases) is simply astronomical. If there's say 250 distinct quests and each had an average of 5 quest steps then if we really wanted to comprehensively test each possible state (realistically, we don't, but for giggles) that would require (forgive me if this is wrong, my maths is rusty) 250^5, so, 976,562,500,000 test cases? Obviously, that's somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and you can always reduce test case load with state interaction prediction / equivalence-partitioning-style processes, but either way, you're looking at a MASSIVE testing effort and you can probably see why it's pretty likely that you're going to see some quest issues in the wild.

I do absolutely agree with you that QA should have had people play through all the quests to make sure they complete, but to be fair, they almost certainly did. That would probably be about the easiest function they had them to perform. Like I said though, to every QA's chagrin, a found bug does not a fixed bug make.

well said, mistetchtis001. hopefully i got promote wasnt because i wad less competent lol

No less valid than your declaration that noncombat skills shouldn't contribute to leveling.

It's a combat oriented rpg. If you do nothing to prepare yourself for combat, that's your fault. You get good at the things you do frequently in this game; that's much more lifelike than pre-determining a special set of skills that can level you. Just because classes have been rpg trope for ages doesn't mean they're the only, or even the best, way to handle character leveling.

What you're arguing is a design decision that was consciously implemented to work as it does. You can disagree with it, or prefer a different mechanism, but just because you don't like it doesn't make it "broken". It's inarguably an improvement over Oblivion, which had old school classes, and was still very prone to building under powered characters.

If it were a well thought out process, then yes, I would like to think they would find these bugs that became readily apparent to their customers on day one. My conclusion: The process is NOT well thought out.

Even if it was thought out, we are comparing only a few dozen people to 3.5 million.

Its quite obvious how the math works out.

Thats like having a small country at your aid.

I see it like this: The buck stops with the management!

All a programmer/tester can do is to operate within the budget and time constraints that are set by managers. Those managers frequently have zero development experience themselves and often lack the technical knowledge to understand the ramifications of their demands. So my blame is directed at Bethesda management. What concerns me the most is that Bethesda does not appear to be improving their technical prowess with each release. We see many of the same bugs appearing over and over again with each subsequent release. This (apparent) lack of focus on improving standards is probably the most damning thing that can be said.

The 11.11.11 release date was an obvious mistake (on many fronts). This alone guaranteed that the game went live with a known quantity of bugs -- and I can state from experience that many of them were significant bugs. A release date is required but it certainly does not have to be a funky number!

Bad management is bad!

I've not been able to find any Game-breaking bugs (Or many bugs at all, for that matter). Not all bugs can be discovered by QA, especially not in a game as big as Skyrim.

The biggest problem plaguing development is that what causes a bug in one system doesn't cause a bug in another.

Another problem, as Patch 1.2 proves, is that the fix for one bug often creates 2-3 more, sometimes worse than the "Fixed" bug - You end up having to "pick your battles". A drop in framerate's better than a CTD/Console Freeze. A console freeze/CTD is a far better bug than Memory Crash/File Corruption. A floating game object is a non-issue in comparison.

Hey! My game runs smoothly now! ... why did that Flame Atronach burn herself to death?

Maybe the game would be better if chickens were still in league with the city watch...

Exactly.

I've certainly seen this happen a number of times; it's not helped by the way that software development seems to be misused as a fast-track route into management by the ambitious and incompetent, and I've seen this happen quite a few times over the years.

I alluded to good project managers being essential to the success of a project a few posts ago, but in my experience a bad manager is actually worse than no manager at all: having worked in all three situations, it really is better to have an apparently disorganised team than it is to have a bonus-chasing halfwit in charge. Sadly, the latter seems to be the most common situation.

I once had the privilege to beta test a patch for a big game once, and along with all the other lucky chosen eagerly dove in to find and help quash bugs. Certainly many were addressed, but I and other testers were astounded at the ones that weren't. Initially, we got some responses from the developers, but very quickly stopped hearing from them at all, yet we kept hammering on what we thought were big issues. The patch finally went live and didn't fix some of the more important gameplay issues and throughout the forums people blamed us beta testers for not finding such obvious bugs. It was painful, because none of us could say anything due to NDA.

One "stakeholder" seems to have been missed - the customer. If known bugs are being allowed out the door, how about some "disclosure" to the consumer so they can make an "informed" purchase decision. I would want to know that the brakes on the new car I'm thinking to buy are "known" to fail. That the remote for the new TV is "known" to be broken. That the game I'm buying is known to corrupt my save file and force me to restart my character.

I'm surprised there have not been some class action lawsuits over selling computer gaming products with known defects which cause the product to be less then advertised.

Test technique selection and application is a huge field in it's own right and it's perfectly possible that any given team (or it's test anolyst) could choose one that's non-optimal, resulting in some bad testing. However the QA team that worked on Skyrim has seen this all before and their test technique selection has been refined over a long period of time, working on some very similar projects. With that in mind it's probably fair to assume their processes are pretty much bang on at this point.

One possible issue (especially in a PC gaming context) is the amount of possible hardware configurations. The common solution for this would be beta-testers and dogfood testers. I honestly don't know what Beth's process is in that respect (and I'd be interested to find out, if anyone knows), but I'd certainly be surprised to learn it wasn't pretty comprehensive.

In a gaming context the customer technically isn't a stakeholder, since there is no distinct 'customer' entity. Again, I don't know Beth's processes but if they follow standard COTS software practices I'd imagine there would be some user representation in the form of a chosen focus group of respected user community members. However that's not really the same as a project stakeholder in the normal sense that you'd see in something like a bespoke software project, where your customer stakeholder is actually providing the requirements for the project.

Twenty years as a successful salesman has taught me that your "customer" is number one. Without the customer you have no reason to exist as a business. Happy customers come back. Happy customers refer business. Happy customers will buy from you again as they "trust" your products. If the computer gaming business doesn't see this, no wonder so much junk gets put in pretty boxes.

I guess one lesson to learn here is "never" buy a game at release but wait a couple months for the fixes to get in and the first price drop to hit. This industry sells known defective products at premium prices.

Unfortunately, some video game makers are on a par with cigarette makers... cigarette makers put labels on their product which basically say to the consumer "don't use me: I'm going to cause you major health issues and maybe even kill you eventually" ; yet, people buy cigarettes
With video games, everyone and their mothers know video games come with bugs that, were it any other type of software, the company would be fielding multi-million dllr class action suits... but, we still do as sheeps do and buy the game

http://blogs.perficient.com/spark/files/2011/07/treecomicbig.jpg

im not giving them a pass. within the first day many people independantly and of their own accord managed to figure out how to manipulate the smithing/enchanting/alchemy skills to make uber gear. this should have been easily spotted by even the most rudimentary of QA tests and i dont buy the budget or time issue since all it is a few adjustements to the calculations. it would have taken them a couple of days at most if they had even just two guys on it and remember this game has been in development for years.

i bet you 9 bagillion nazillion rubles that within the first couple of days of the CKs release that there will be multiple mods that address the smithing/enchanting issue and at least a couple of them will be very good changes.

as for people that say jsut dont use it. i like to roleplay. in that roleplaying i like to actually collect ingots and ore and make stuff out of them and sell them back for money. otherwise every single ore and ingot they placed ingame just sits there. unfortunately its impossible not to increase smithing and enchanting to uber levels even with normal gameplay (at least for me). im not buying ingots form the vendors and making the stuff this is just stuff im finding or mining. and yes i actually enjoy mining for some weird reason. a very simple change proposed by many people would be to make items give you less experience teh more you make them. this would solve alot of peoples problems.

I agree with you not giving them a pass, but you should realize one thing. QA testing often suffers from one very common shortcoming. The testers are often given very specific test cases to follow and then document. This limits the scope of what is actually tested. Also, when testing occurs outside of those scripts, there is a strong tendency to do things the way they were intended to be used. It's not until the product hits a customer's hands (or a beta tester) that you run into "devil's advocate" scenarios that might exploit certain mechanics like the smithing/enchanting/alchemy loop. This scenario is not exclusive to gaming.

i dont know how bethesda QA works but the developers of deus ex HR, eidos montreal had people running around trying to find ways to exploit their mechanics. they missed a few by they way. :sadvaultboy: im not a genius but i thought the whole point of bug hunting and QA was to look for unbalanced and broken aspects of the game in the first place. i expect them to miss some little things here and there but as i said lots of people discovered the smithing/enchanting issue on day one. i no longer use dual wielding because even if i dont use the perks for it im still a killing machine on master difficulty. i think the only level they even tested on was adept.

overall i would say that this has been a much better release than their previous games and certainly better than fallout NV but stuff this obvious doesnt get a pass in my book. im not worried though since i play on PC and someone will fix it eventually.

eeeyup