Matrix Games Forums

Sadly, I completely agree with you, Klydon. No game can be tested so completely that it can get out the door bug-free. We hope to be able to deal with that as well as or better than most games. And we also hope to have fewer than most games when the time comes.

On another note, I'd like to invite you to express your opinions (if you have any) on the Global War AAR I am running . . . I am actually fairly new to WiF as it is actually played. I read the RAW faithfully twice a year for 15 years before joining the beta-test team, but I had never played an actual game, so I make mistakes that people catch and help me to correct. I'd love as much input as possible.

That goes for everyone, new to the game or seasoned veteran. I am not proud in my play. I have certain goals (for testing reasons), but they are very flexible, so voice your thoughts, and sound the trumpets!

-Aaron

ORIGINAL: Klydon

Obviously everyone wants it sooner rather than later, but in my mind, there has been proof of significant progress here lately with the two posted AARs. When they start posting AARs, you know the game is up to the point that it is at least in a workable format for the most part. Consider it like a ship being launched from the slip. It is floating, but much work remains to be done before the ship will be ready to go.

Even when this game is released, if any of the other games are to be a measure, there are going to be issues with it, despite the best efforts of the staff and testers (WITP, WITE to name two examples).

For me, undiscovered bugs are more terrifying than things that go bump in the night.

I have numbered reported bugs from way back when beta testers first started working on the game (March 2006). Several times I restarted my numbering scheme because the counts got close to 1000 and I wanted to limit the numbers to 3 digits. My guess is that there have 4000-5000 bugs reported. Now many of the early ones concerned the things I was working on then: graphics for the units and map. Later there were data issues with those same items. Each of the 150 forms has been critqued by the beta testers, which I usually recorded as bugs, even if they were cosmetic. On the other hand, there were a lot of bugs reported that I immediately corrected, without them ever making it to my master list.

These days most of the bugs concern subtleties in the rules, or complex sequences of events. For example: an overrun naval unit is intercepted, a naval combat is fought, aborting units from the naval combat are intercepted on their way back to port, resulting a second naval combat. All the various naval unit movements need to be completed in the correct order and eventually the sequence of play has to return to the land movement phase where the overrun first occurred.

My intension is to reduce reported bugs to zero before releasing the game. To do otherwise seems silly to me. Why sell something that you know will fail under certain circumstances?[&:] Conversely, it is perfectly acceptable to simply not implement some of the optional rules or desirable but non-essential features. So if either of those have bugs associated with them, then those rules/features can be delayed for a 'post-release' version of the product.

As Aaron said, everyone has the same goal here: a high quality product ASAP.

I should rephrase that Steve as I meant no slight to you guys as you are obviously squashing bugs and doing as much as possible to make sure the product is a quality one coming out.

The simple math would dictate however that when a game is released, it will go from being tested by a smallish group of beta testers (who are working hard to make sure the game is right as well) to being released to a huge pool of people that will also run it through its paces. In that huge expansion, there are bound to be things that got missed or simply didn't come up from beta testing that will get exposed. No fault of anyone except we are all human and do the best we can. They will get caught, improvements made, etc and patches done to make the game even better.

As far as a knowledgeable player of WiF, I have to say I am not. An old player of WiF might be more accurate as I first played with the game in the early 80's and thought it was one of the best games ever done at the time and it still is when it comes to a WW2 strategic scale game. It puts games like Third Reich to shame. I have some of the early expansions, but never got a chance to play them. I think the last I played was 5th edition without any expansions.

ORIGINAL: Klydon

I should rephrase that Steve as I meant no slight to you guys as you are obviously squashing bugs and doing as much as possible to make sure the product is a quality one coming out.

The simple math would dictate however that when a game is released, it will go from being tested by a smallish group of beta testers (who are working hard to make sure the game is right as well) to being released to a huge pool of people that will also run it through its paces. In that huge expansion, there are bound to be things that got missed or simply didn't come up from beta testing that will get exposed. No fault of anyone except we are all human and do the best we can. They will get caught, improvements made, etc and patches done to make the game even better.

As far as a knowledgeable player of WiF, I have to say I am not. An old player of WiF might be more accurate as I first played with the game in the early 80's and thought it was one of the best games ever done at the time and it still is when it comes to a WW2 strategic scale game. It puts games like Third Reich to shame. I have some of the early expansions, but never got a chance to play them. I think the last I played was 5th edition without any expansions.

Yes, I agree.

I've been testing the game for years, and it's been a pleasure to work with Steve and Aaron. Steve lives and breathes this game -- he works seven days a week, 16 hours a day, as far as I can tell. If I post a bug or email him something, I almost invariably hear back within an hour or so. He takes every bug report seriously. (Er, I hope this lavish praise doesn't violate the NDA!)

And yes, it's true that the sheer volume of purchasers will find things we testers miss. MWIF is an extraordinarily complex game, and it takes a good deal of time for me to reproduce just one bug. But Steve is very good at stomping them once we can reproduce them.

Back to topic: Any ETA for the game yet??


"Soon" isin't enough anymore, since that it has been for years already

ORIGINAL: von altair

Back to topic: Any ETA for the game yet??


"Soon" isin't enough anymore, since that it has been for years already

I robbed this quote from last page. It's from Red Prince...

"My point, I guess, is that a decision was made in 2009 not to speculate on release dates, because setbacks can cause quite a bit of anger. Since that time, all that we can really tell you is what you see in the Monthly Reports. They do show a lot of progress, particularly if you try to read them all the way from the first to the most recent (not an easy task, I admit). If you care to make your own estimates from that, you are welcome to speculate, but it is beyond our abilities to tell you any of the following:

The date of the Apocalypse
The year the Cubs will next win the World Series
How many matches AIK will win next season
Exactly when MWiF will first be installed on your computer


I'm sorry about this, but it's just the way things are.

We are doing our best to show you where things stand (Global War AAR, among others), as well as tell you where things stand. But sometimes things get in the way: Steve's eye surgery and kidney stone, my pneumonia, troubles with Delphi . . . . the dog eating our homework . . . you name it.

I swear to you that if I told you right now that this game would be released on Date X of Month Y in Year Z . . . . there isn't a chance that Lloyds of London would give any odds at all. Not because I'm wrong, but beause things are too dynamic. It might end up being Month M insetead, and all would be happy. Or, it could be Year Z+2, and everyone would scream bloody murder. Lloyds wouldn't like that.

Please believe me when I tell you we are all doing our best to get this game on the shelves as soon as humanly possible. To quote once more from that series, Stargate: SG-1: "It's what we do."

End of quote...

So take some popcorn or chocolate and go to the AAR Global War thread and start critizising Red Prince for all the moves he makes (since he's an inexperienced player, I'm really having a ball, watching him [:D]). That's all there is at the moment...

I'm a little dumbfounded, really. I'm glad my words had an impression, and thnk you for deeming them worth repeating, Centuur.

As for you having a ball . . . [:'(]

And I'm glad you're enjoying it. It's teaching me a lot . . . not that it's been helping much, but it is teaching me. [;)]

deleted

the Apocalypse failed to come this year.

twice.

the Cubs though, hired a brand-new front office and management team. maybe the owners were rather entranced by Brad Pitt in Moneyball...

ORIGINAL: brian brian

the Apocalypse failed to come this year.

twice.

the Cubs though, hired a brand-new front office and management team. maybe the owners were rather entranced by Brad Pitt in Moneyball...

are you sure that Apocalypse have not happened.

just see the colts season

ORIGINAL: brian brian

the Apocalypse failed to come this year.

twice.

the Cubs though, hired a brand-new front office and management team. maybe the owners were rather entranced by Brad Pitt in Moneyball...

Warspite1

Genuine Frontier Gibberish [;)]

ORIGINAL: warspite1

ORIGINAL: brian brian

the Apocalypse failed to come this year.

twice.

the Cubs though, hired a brand-new front office and management team. maybe the owners were rather entranced by Brad Pitt in Moneyball...

Warspite1

Genuine Frontier Gibberish [;)]

Terrific film! [:D]

[/quote]
Well, knowing that Steve is married, I think his wife will keep him in check. I know my wife keeps me in check if I'm doing things I shouldn't do...[:D]
[/quote]
A clever, now dead, great uncle of mine, used to call his wife 'the brake'. Mind you, I have had two brakes in my time, and I've burnt 'em both out

As for the release date of the game. Crikey, I remember back in the day reading a post of Greyshaft, (who I think I might have gone to university with if it's the same Lord Greyshaft). This was back a good way. And I confess I was a doubter. But now years and mountains of work by the developers later there is a real prospect of a release before we all croak. Hooray!

ORIGINAL: von altair

Back to topic: Any ETA for the game yet??

"Soon" isin't enough anymore, since that it has been for years already

An heretic! Burn him alive.

PS : we need to fix baku location on the map.

How about offering the game as a pre-release, perhaps at a few dollars off of what the final price would be, with the understanding that it is still a build so that you have more people working on it? No one can complain, because they knew they were becoming a member of the build team at the time of purchase, and would of course receieve all the updates as well....might help both sides as it sate those who want to try the game now, and have more people finding potential problems....

If I remember well, this was commented and rejected before. Don't remember if because of Matrix or because of Steve but it's all the same, isn't it?
[:)]

I can understand that if it is Matrix because hey have never done that in the past; it was just a pasing thought....

I don't think I was around for the last time this was suggested, but from where I stand, this would not actually help all that much in terms of "fixing the game" for final release.

As you may know, it's been a rough month for me. Recovering from pneumonia has cut the time I can put in from 9-13 hours daily down to 2-3 hours if I'm lucky. I've been using that trying to get work done on the test game I've been posting in the Global War AAR.

During September and October, after Steve's eye surgery, I was responsible for the tasks of collecting, organizing, and detailing the bugs reported by the beta-testers. From this, I created daily reports for Steve to review and work on. This task alone used up about 4-5 hours of my day, since we are also trying to implement a more efficient and structured system for eliminating the bugs that remain. In fact, new bugs reported in October were only half the number reported in September, so I think a lot of progress was made in that respect. From this experience (which I hope to take up again once I'm fully recovered), I can tell you that running MWiF as an "open beta" version would require a primary team 2 to 3 times the size of what we currently have. Steve would need someone to do the job I was doing (me, when recovered), and I would need several assistants myself.

It's a critical mass kind of thing. Mid-way through 2011, we were overwhelming Steve with bug reports, and he had to split his time between organizing them and programming. When I took over the organizational process, it allowed Steve to focus completely on programming, and that had a significant impact on the amount of work he could get done each day -- even while recovering from eye surgery and a kidney stone the size of Gibraltar. It is my belief (and Steve or Matrix may disagree with me here) that an open beta would put us back into the realm of an overwhelming workload, and that would be counter-productive.

So, whether it was Matrix or Steve who rejected the idea the last time around, it is my opinion (hopefully fairly educated) that this would be a Bad Idea.

I'm sorry if that disappoints you, but I want to be honest.

-Aaron

ORIGINAL: Red Prince

would require a primary team 2 to 3 times the size of what we currently have. Steve would need someone to do the job I was doing (me, when recovered), and I would need several assistants myself.

When I took over the organizational process, it allowed Steve to focus completely on programming, and that had a significant impact on the amount of work he could get done each day -- even while recovering from eye surgery and a kidney stone the size of Gibraltar.


-Aaron

I just quoted a couple of parts........

maybe it wouldnt be such a bad idea to actually get some more people working on the game. Especially since it seems health issues have affected both of you..............

EDIT- Just wanted to add that everyone has problems,... be it family, health, etc,..so please dont take this as criticizing anyone for having issues,....ESPECIALLY health issues. I am happy to hear that both of you are doing better.