As a fellow professional in the video gaming industry, I have a suggestion which I hope you'll take to heart:
Let your players be testers. Listen to the bugs that they find, and fix them if they're serious enough, or if the fixes are easy enough.
It is very likely that more man-hours of gameplay are done by your players in an hour than was done by your entire testing staff during the entirety of ME3's development. This is a fact for pretty much any game.
Getting organized feedback from your players is the key to figuring out which issues are important enough to merit title updates, which ones are bad enough to require apologies to the community, and in some cases, which ones can just be ignored or fixed for future titles.
Of special note, the community understands that bringing MP to the ME franchise is tough. You haven't had multiple games to refine your MP design, your matchmaking systems, etc. There are some rough edges. But by listening to the community, you can polish those edges until you've got something robust, fun, and without the frustration that comes with particularly nasty bugs or exploits.
That said, here's a list of bugs and other issues that I, personally, have experienced and verified first-hand. I'm sure there are a lot more out there; searching back through the forums, I see a good number of bug threads. I suggest that, if possible, you guys find a good way to organize user bug reports in some official capacity.
EDIT:
To give a good example of a system that would help, check out www.GetSatisfaction.com. They sell a feedback system which includes voting on issues, moderation by staff, good exposure for official responses, integration with bug databases, etc. Just check out the feedback system used on their own website. Using that or something similar here would allow you to get much better / valuable bug reports from the community.
Common Issues:
- Nemesis occasionally fire through walls/obstacles (you'll see a red bracket behind a wall, and then get shot by it). This is worst in the cargo containers in the upper area of the level Firebase Ghost.
- In the store, character cards are given for characters that already have max XP and have all customization options fully unlocked, when players still have other characters that do not have Max XP or all options unlocked. (EDIT: Demo-only bug, according to staff)
- If host leaves and game dissolves instead of reforming, players lose all accumulated XP and credits for that mission. Not fun when your hosting player craps out on wave 10 of Silver or Gold. Especially not fun when you've used a ton of equipment and support items that you can't get back. I would even go so far as to consider this a TCR failure due to loss of significant player data / gamestate.
- Infiltrator cooldown for cloak is extremely inconsistent. Allowing it to expire naturally or disabling it manually without firing a shot or using an ability appears to result in a noticeably slower recharge time. My guess: the recharge timer when firing a shot is linked to when the shot is fired, even though the player doesn't come out of cloak for another half-second later; however, when letting cloak expire or ending it manually, the cooldown starts from that point without the benefit of the extra half-second or so.
- The sound for hitting a Guardian's shield plays at full volume no matter the distance to the Guardian. You will often hear other players fighting Guardians from across the level.
- If player uses an Ops Survival Pack (the one that gives full shields and health) right before getting downed, they get downed anyways, AND the pack is still consumed.
- Quarian Engineer's turret sounds persist after turret dies, until end of match. This can cause the entire battleground to be filled with the sound of dozens of turrets over the course of play.
- Atlas mechs walk over tall obstacles in ways that cause them to float multiple feet off the ground.
- For a while, with 2 Adepts in-game, effects for Warp and the Stasis bubble did not render at all. Targets were still affected by the abilities, but the effects were not rendered.
- With 2+ infiltrators in a game, my "you can use one ability and not come out of cloak" frequently broke. There's was about a 50/50 chance of me coming out of cloak for using any ability. Happened during at least 3+ games.
- Vanguards sometimes get stuck on objects and do weird things. I've had to quit out of games multiple times due to "jittering" all over the level, going through floors, being 100 feet up, etc.
Possible lag-related issues (latency and packet loss):
- Can't climb ladders in laggy games.
- Don't see enemies use jetpack animation in laggy games - they just pop in.
- During a particularly laggy game, turret models did not dissapear after exploding until the wave changed.
- Extraction vehicle hovers around extraction zone for the entirety of Wave 11 in laggy games, possibly longer (might have been there for more than just Wave 11, I only noticed it then).
- Hard-lock when loading into a solo Bronze game with Krogan Soldier.
- Hard-lock when biotic charging into an enemy with female human vanguard.
- Player had "Revive" prompt while alive. This persisted until end of mission.
- Once ended up with my view diagonal for about 5 seconds as a vanguard after a biotic charge.
- Extraction - Partial extraction does not make sense. It is rewarded if people are dead and all survivors are in the extraction zone, but not awarded if all players are alive and at least 1 person is in the extraction zone. This means that it's better to have a dead teammate than one who hangs around just outside the extraction zone. I have confirmed in multiple games that having 3 people in the extraction zone and 1 person NOT in the zone causes NO extraction points to be rewarded whatsoever.
- Enemies hit by a stumbling attack multiple times in a row do not reset stumble each time; there is no way to stumble-lock an enemy unless you wait for it to finish its stumble animation and then hit it with another stumbling attack. Makes sense for PVP, but maybe not PVE.
- Turrets aren't affected by force / physics. That thing has to weigh maybe 50 lbs, yet they're immovable.
- Turrets are extremely deadly, and pretty tough, but are barely worth any points at all.
- Players can be AFK an entire game, just sitting there and soaking up points and money while doing no work. There needs to be some way of dealing with this, as players are being rewarded for hurting their teammates.
- It's too easy to move around and break connection when interacting with objects. You're already forced to hold down a button, why not just lock players so they can't move, or restrict their movement so they won't accidentally pop out?
- It's too hard to interact with objects next to cover. I often end up in cover instead of interacting with an object or picking up a downed teammate.
- Phantoms often fail to orient vs. the player they're attacking.
- Nemesis AI has poor melee-range behavior; just runs and hides, sometimes ignores player completely and allows them to walk right up to them. Once you're within a certain distance to a Nemesis, it is no longer a threat (unless it pulls a BS point-blank quickscope).
- Biotic Explosions - Credit for kills due to biotic explosions are generally granted to first person who hits a target with biotics, NOT the person who fires the second shot which actually detonates the explosion.
Modifié par Mangonou, 03 mars 2012 - 12:05 .
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