Quote:
Originally Posted by JoG
This must be your first beta then. It is quite common for the program to be at different stages of stability during full beta. All things are logged and reports are generated for the programmers to see. Just because some people have stability issues does not mean everyone does. As far as a Q&A process, there is no real need during a beta. Your feedback is all that is required. Just put in a bug report and let them know the facts as you see it. We have no need to know what they are looking at or working on aside from specific things they ask us to test. Since you do not have a programming back ground it will look like it is not efficient. I can tell you it is and they know exactly what is going on. Keep trying to play as normal and submit all the bugs and errors that occur.
--JoG
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On the contrary, I have 22+ years experience developing and delivering software, so I know the difference between the right way and the wrong way. Most of my career has been spent building a selling platform for big box retailers, which handles over $10 million in sales daily, so I know what it means to develop highly reliable client/server applications that scale to thousands of users.
If they really were shooting for a delivery in May, the code base should be much tighter at this point in time. No one can tell me with a straight face this is "beta" quality code. This is at best "pre-alpha" code quality we're dealing with here.
If you're serious about developing a platform that scales, you build a system that simulates real load on the system. You had this in your budget from day one if you knew what you were doing. You use this system to ramp up the load until things start to break. These so called "stress tests" we've had the last few weekends are just for show. There haven't been more than 75 people on each server. You don't rely on a handful of gamers to plink away at the servers in their spare time to decide if your software is ready for prime time.
Now I'm not trying to bash VR Studios, I'm just calling it like I see it. I'm sure they're all in serious crunch time pouring their heart and soul into 100+ hour weeks right now. But unfortunately for them, their management hasn't seen fit to spend enough on internal QA, making their lives that much harder.