10 réponses à ce sujet

[AussieAuthority]

The amount of issues atm are a joke.....I can't remember how many times i have had to alt+f4 and re start this game.....

Please at least tell us when a patch is incoming.

 

Thank you

[BWEAmelia]

I'm honestly interested in this. It seems like I see this same post come up every few days, and its always a collection of the same members in the thread. Some of the members who have commented here only post negative comments throughout the board, every day. It seems like a number of you are very unsatisfied with the mode, my natural inclination would be to believe that you would post your feedback and either continue on with another game and stop playing or wait patiently to see things resolved. Its really strange behavior to continue to play and post about a game, daily, that you absolutely dislike. I've been thinking about it and my best guesses are:

 

A.) Some feel they're not being heard.

B.) Some have noticed that they're getting attention when they're behaving poorly.

 

I've been told repeatedly that the answer is probably B.) but I want to see if I can get some level headed answers and maybe uncover some good dialogue between us. Hopefully that is the case, otherwise I think moderation of certain users will be necessary to clean up the community and keep it healthy. If the answer is A.) then we're doing our best to let the community know they're heard, and I personally have had a strong presence in the MP boards. If there is something we're missing on that front please let me know. Maybe its neither!

 

What do you think? 

[BWEAmelia]

Lots of good feedback here! 

 

There are a few misconceptions about myself I should clear up quickly : I'm not engaging in these forums to placate, to tell any person what they might want to hear, or to deliver official messaging. I am not an employee dedicated to answering player questions as I am part of the game team ( game programmer! ).  I engage with this forum as a volunteer, in my free time, because I have had very good interactions with our fans at conventions and on various social media. I think our fans are special, and some of the interactions I've had with them has helped me get through those rough crunch hours while developing, knowing that people care about what we're creating. Because of this I care about our fans experience in our game, and I'm here to lend any help I can into making that experience better. One way I'm doing that is by having conversations with players about their experience, issues they're having, and using them as a resource to investigate these issues. There are great examples of what good feedback looks like, and it having a positive impact in getting issues investigated/resolved.

 

Here are a few:

http://forum.bioware...-inventory-cap/

http://forum.bioware...and-view-stats/

http://forum.bioware...what-mages-get/

http://forum.bioware...lp-with-origin/

http://forum.bioware...rint-indicator/

I could go on!

 

There are also a number of examples of what bad feedback looks like, and it having no effect other than spamming the forum and drowning out real discussion ( this thread being a good example prior to hopping in ). Assuming the stance that every forum user is right to lash out in any way they like because they are a player of our games, or our forum users assuming that it is true is a big factor in why these forums are so quiet when it comes to dev presence. Who would want to wade into topics such as I have here, knowing what sort of things lie within when they have a fulltime job that is already quite stressful? Community managers, and moderators do, and they have my utmost respect for it. We have some fantastic people doing those jobs. If we also had healthy regular interaction between game team members and the forums I think it would be a much better place. In order to get there, in my opinion, there needs to be some change in the expectations for forum behavior. BSN doesn't have a good reputation. That's unfortunate because it drives away players who might want to interact, who could add real value to the forum, and ruins the experience for others. I'm very interested in what other companies in the industry are doing to promote good behavior and sportsmanship, Riot being a fantastic example. Unfortunately we don't have their resources, but we do have a small very vocal self-identifying group of individuals in our forums who only post unactionable negative content and I'd like to see their behavior change, or to see them move on altogether, but first I wanted to at least attempt to understand what drives this behavior. Now to be clear, posting negative content doesn't mean posting constructive feedback, criticism, or bug reports. In the threads I linked above you can see good examples of people stating all of these things with a level head and starting a good discussion.

 

That being said! As has been suggested in the thread I personally think a list of top issues that are under investigation and their status would be a good thing. The actual process of getting that done is much more complicated than one might think, especially since this list will be quite small once our patch cadence starts to hit and then this list will become very empty or obsolete. There is also the major issue of promises, just because an issue is on a list does not in any way mean that there is a promise for it to be resolved, or that it will be resolved within a certain timeframe. There are many moving parts, many many moving parts to a game studio and a game team and some issues may never get resolved ( as some users have pointed out from other games ), and this is a fact of life. I'm not promising this will happen, but its a good idea that I'll broach with some of my peers.

 

I also think having patchnotes posted to accompany our patches will be a great tool to keep the community updated and I've had conversations to this effect with the team.

 

I appreciate the time some of you have taken to post a reply and explain your feelings, some lengthy replies here, some lurkers come from the shadows, some good feedback, all in all what I had hoped to see in reply to my post. I haven't got much else to say! Be excellent to eachother : )

[BWEAmelia]

@BWEAmelia

I very much enjoy DAMP and look forward to seeing future fixes and content. 

I was wondering if you could provide any insight to a personal sore spot, the 0xp gain. I believe you've already responded to a thread about this, saying something along the lines of it being a disconnect from the host while the match is loading...I was curious if there was something that could be done (or is being worked on) to prevent this issue from occurring, or if it's a problem the community just has to live with?

Thanks for your time!

 

Anzer! Sorry you got lost in the fray. This issue is fixed internally and should be rolled out in future patch. If you get the 0XP issue at end of match you should leave the lobby and create a new one, or quickmatch to a new session as that lobby has entered a bad state and you may continue to get the same issue at EOM if you don't.

 

I'm sorry, but this is just wrong. We get a passive aggressive wall of text every time people talk about their concerns and dare to question the quality of the product the paid for. But when people ask a genuine question about game information or mechanics we get one liners that look like tweets from a teenager. Apologies if it hurts your feelings, but seriously...

 

In a thread asking about being able to view the stats of MP characters all we get is a question - "what stats?" And someone needs to put screenshots of SP attributes page.

 

In another thread someone asked for the ability to select random map when creating lobby/hosting. All we got is - "it's there already...oh wait, it's not, it's just quick match option... lolz"

 

Thread about demon commander - "Ya'll gotta run! As soon as he goes under just start sprinting, he won't hit you" - too bad people keep reporting this is not the case. So much for pr0 tips from someone playing the game for 2 years as you claim.

 

Just to name a few.

 

I still don't get it why games are treated completely different from any other product we buy. No one would accept a phone, TV or any other appliance with some functions not working. You would not accept uncooked food in restaurant. For some reason you should accept bugged games with no promise anything will be fixed.

 

 

Totally agree. I really dread to think what we would be looking at had this game not been repeatedly delayed.

Games should not launch with this many issues. There is so many things that just flat out do not work in game aswell as opposed to technical issues.

Several acessories and abilities just don't work properly. Some accessories dont even correspond to existing multiplayer content! Don't even get me starting on the appauling loot system that we have in place here (15 purple drops and i only 4 of them arent outclasssed by commons.)

All 150 hours ive spent in game has been focussed around building characters to educate others who might not want to promote every character to find an optimal spec. In me3, i posted guides and tips for almost every class in the game. Ive recorded, edited and uploaded entertainment to my non profit youtube channel and shared these among the community. Ive created, coded and moderate a subreddit for this game with the help of a friend and my partner (all volunteers), and i help moderate the me3mp community too.

The total time investment for bioware titles is thousands and thousands of hours of my own free time which i do not get paid for in any way shape or form. And you want to tell me that if i have an issue with your game then i shouldnt play it, also implicitly hinting at banning people who do complain? To me, thats just insulting. I have every right, just as every other forum member does at this point in time, to be angry at the fact that ive been sold a product at full price which does not work as it was advertised. I dont make posts saying ' hurr durr bioware sux and dont know how to make a game'. But occasionally i do post somewhat heated opinions about issues i am currently experiencing. Should i not be able to do this? Am i not entitled to get a bit annoyed that the meal i ordered and have been waiting for years to be finished, is delicious, but it leaves a sour taste in my mouth?

That said, i appreciate that someone at bioware cares enough about their fanbase to respond to some of these issues that we are having. I think communication is paramount for this kind of situation, so thanks for putting in the hours outside of your clocked time.

 

I think here highlights two key things -

 

No company, or person can please everyone. I enjoy engaging you all on a personal level with some humor and I thought that what our community probably didn't want was a robot that only replies to very select problem threads with a sanitized response, or repeating an already known official message. This of course, is usually what ends up happening since some users will be unhappy that I'm interacting in a casual way ( some will love it ), and some people will be unhappy that I sometimes interact in an official way ( again, some obviously prefer only this ) and I will probably become disinterested eventually in putting the effort forth to do either, but I'm putting in a pretty good run here. This community is getting much more honest interaction from me than they would from a moderator, and your voices have been heard with our team whether you choose to believe that or not. Many users here have brought up issues ( outside of just bugs ) that have gotten me thinking ( and I've said as much in threads ), and as someone who sits in on team meetings and discussions about what we should do next having my ear in this way has directly affected some of our priorities.

 

 

Secondly, what I'm hearing from the posts in this thread is a dissonance between "We want more dev interaction!" and "I am unsatisfied with my direct interaction with a dev!". I think a major reason for this is that expectations on response time for issues is very much out of line with the real process of development. I've found a number of issues and reported them to the team ( even fixed them! ). In fact I've spent my weekends since launch logging into the studio remotely to investigate user's issues that have been reported to me or discussed here, and I've replied a number of times to these users thanking them for bringing the issue up as its something new we hadn't seen and creating an internal ticket for the issue. A number of these occurrences happened over PM from necessity as posting personal or account details in a public thread is Not A Good Idea™. Once an issue is found it takes between days and weeks to track the cause of the issue down and get a set of reproduction steps for the issue. It then takes between days and weeks after a developer is assigned the issue for the issue to be solved depending on the issues priority and the complexity of the problem. Then it takes days to weeks to get this issue into a patch and tested by our QA team to make sure that the patch we're putting out makes the game better, and not worse. Then it takes weeks to get this patch through certification processes with first party ( Sony, Microsoft, internal EA )! The bottom line here to understand is : Just because an issue is reported here in the forums, or elsewhere, does not mean that a fix is incoming in a matter of days. That's not the reality of the pipeline of development for our studio. Keep this in mind when you realize that our game has only been out for two weeks in some places, coming up on three in others, and has already had a patch on launch. We're not chuckling evilly, juggling fixes for issues in our arms, and not applying them to the game to be malicious. Hopefully that information sheds some light on the process.

[BWEAmelia]

Speaking strictly on this, as someone earlier mentioned, would it be possible to not delay PC with waiting on unnecessary certification? PC users get the patch first, and can perform their own share of testing, and then by the time console users catch up, they have an even better patch. Essentially think of PC as more of the beta patches. Warframe does this at the moment, and while Digital Extremes are known for some really horrible design decisions, this is one they seem to have down well. You can't keep everyone happy, but placating PC users with patches and console users knowing their patch is coming, and what to look forward to, I think will go a long way.

 

This has been discussed within the team. I can't say what the outcome was, nor am I in a position to make a decision as large as that, but know that we have discussed it.

 

You know, you would get a lot less flak and a lot more respect if you guys at Bioware just apologized for dropping the ball on the multiplayer release. Not once have I seen you guys hold up your hands and say 'Look everyone, we're sorry for all the issues that are happening, we really messed up, but we have fixes incoming.'

 

But instead, you are making excuses for why things haven't been fixed, and just turning round and saying 'well no company can please everyone.' 

 

As for casual interaction, I think you've done a great job at interacting with the community personally. You are most definitely a human behind the monitor and you've proven that. Unfortunately, making jokes when there is some quite serious issues here is not going to go down well with a lot of people. If there wasn't the sheer volume of issues that there is, I think these same people would respond a little better towards your endeavors. One question for you though, why is it that the rest of the studio is completely silent? Ive seen Brojo on reddit a few times, but other than that, its just you. Where is everyone else? Because right now, you are the only person being targeted with all the complaints because you are the only one who has so far shown that you care enough about this game and its fanbase to actually communicate with us, and im not sure that is fair. 

 

Penguin!

 

I really appreciate the time you have put into the mode, and all the wonderful stuff you've generated for it. You're generally a paragon of what good feedback, content, and discussion looks like. You personally have sunk countless hours into the mode, you moderate a great community about the mode, you've posted many videos and class builds, great discussions, and your 60 second threatening run with three friends made me worried haha.

 

I'm going to pick on you a bit here, so bear with me ; ) I have to disagree with you that anyone "dropped the ball", which I think is illustrated by the fact that you were able to put so much time into the mode and not just that you continue to put time into it, a lot of much appreciated time. One of my colleagues got a comment at a recent convention along the lines of "I really hated your last game. I only played it 6 full playthroughs rather than the normal 10." Step back, and read that again. That's really confusing feedback. The statistical fact is that most people don't finish games in general. Here is a quick article about that phenomena : http://ca.ign.com/ar...at-finish-games . Our games generally have higher completion rates, but as you can see there - around 50%. When I get feedback along the lines of "I've played 100's of hours of your game but you really dropped the ball." that's confusing! It seems contradictory.

 

I have to re-iterate something I said in a previous post somewhere here in the forums. This forum is a small sample of users, and is an echochamber that can sometimes make issues seem like they are worse than they are. The quality of the launch of our MP mode is much higher than comparable products in the industry. We do have outstanding issues, and we're actively working to solve those issues.

[Andy Kempling]

Hi, I'm Andy, and I'm a dev on Dragon Age.  Nice to make your acquaintances.  I guess I should contact someone to get this account tagged as such.

 

I disagree that the ball was dropped.  The game is largely playable.  The game has held up very well, particularly in comparison to other online games that have launched in similar time frames.  The general case is that people aren't experiencing loss of service, aren't experiencing account corruption, and are instead playing the game successfully.  Lots of people log on every day and have fun playing DA MP without any major issue.  I can include myself in this cohort: I have yet to personally experience a crash or disconnect on my home computer.

 

That's not to say there aren't issues, but the truth is that most of the issues that people are encountering aren't endemic, and the consequence is generally minimal--a simple retry usually solves the problem--or out of the scope of the game to solve (hardware or computer configuration issue, network configuration or level of service issue, etc).

 

Throwing around phrases like "making excuses" is just trying to paint things in a way that suits your narrative, and this type of argumentative strategy is why I think you don't see more devs posting.  Nowhere in the job description is there a requirement to endure people constantly straw-manning and harassing you in order to push an agenda, which is an unfortunately common occurrence.  The truth is that Amelia isn't making excuses.  She is informing you of the reality of the development process, in the hope that maybe with more understanding of the reality, people would be less angry and more patient. We shall see the results of that experiment.

 

 

 

Speaking strictly on this, as someone earlier mentioned, would it be possible to not delay PC with waiting on unnecessary certification? PC users get the patch first, and can perform their own share of testing, and then by the time console users catch up, they have an even better patch. Essentially think of PC as more of the beta patches. Warframe does this at the moment, and while Digital Extremes are known for some really horrible design decisions, this is one they seem to have down well. You can't keep everyone happy, but placating PC users with patches and console users knowing their patch is coming, and what to look forward to, I think will go a long way.

 

Killsion, I appreciate what you're asking here but it simply isn't going to be the case that we skip the release process except in very extreme circumstances.  The process exists for very good reason and time and again proves itself valuable as we catch problems before they go live.  Also a shout-out to Digital Extremes, my previous studio, for doing a great job with Warframe!

[Andy Kempling]

@Zane Storm, I'm sorry to hear you're having so many problems  I know this will probably sound dumb, but have you verified that you are running the latest drivers for your graphics card?  I know a lot of the initial problem reports we investigated turned out to be resolved by checking the computer configuration was correct.

 

In any case, I believe there may be fixes for various stability issues in upcoming patches.  I'm not fully clear on what, where, and when about patches, so I'm hesitant to make any promises, but I really hope they improve your experience--encountering multiple issues per hour must be very frustrating.  Just because I've had a good experience on my home computer doesn't mean I'm satisfied with that.  We want everyone to have a good experience.  That is why we continue to chase down bugs and look to improve the game every single day.

 

Please don't misinterpret devs posting infrequently as not looking at player feedback.  Every thread in this forum is read, and we are definitely hearing your feedback.

[BWEAmelia]

Patch info in case anyone missed it - http://blog.bioware....for-dragon-age/

[BWEAmelia]

Here are the patch notes guys : http://blog.bioware....-patch-2-notes/

[Andy Kempling]

The hotfix referred to in the thread at the top of the forum is live, and has been for some time.

[Andy Kempling]

Then remove that one and post the next one.

 

There is no "next hotfix" at the moment.  I'll ask Allan about whether the existing message still needs to exist, as it seems to be confusing some people.