Hiya,
So, with this little cluster of issues with Adventure, basically a backend change has not survived first contact with you folks. What I mean by that is, that there’s no amount of testing in the world that can do better than actual players playing the game and making the game’s systems interact with each other, because there are always more players doing things and generating more outcomes than there ever can be testers.
That said, it’d be a cop out to just leave it at that. Because yeah, you folks will always find bugs that we don’t, but that can’t be where we stop as a development team. So, when we do end up with bugs that make it out to live builds, we do look at our process and ask “Is there something we could have done differently or some process we could set up from now on that would catch these types of things?” Sometimes there’s something definitive, sometimes there’s not much we could’ve changed to foresee something, other times we can just make a small tweak to improve the odds even if it isn’t a guarantee.
Regarding content, even though most of the things in the game get announced and released all together (because we only have one planned release every few months to put things in, it’s essential), things do come down different pipelines so there’s not necessarily much encroachment between say, Skins and game features.
Because we do have a commitment in PQ3 to be releasing content regularly, we do need to make sure that’s something we deliver. But that doesn’t mean it’s in competition with development or bug fixing.
So, why do bugs hang around on the Known Issues list sometimes? Well, it could be that the devs are having trouble reproducing it in a controlled environment to fix it, it could be that we’ve had to make the decision to fix other issues that ended up being a higher priority, it could be that someone (usually me specifically ) has forgotten to remove one from the list prior to the CX team publishing…
But, we do also have to balance fixing existing bugs with other priorities, like continuing to make improvements to the game whether that’s a QOL for something that you folks have raised, or something we feel the game needs. We obviously don’t have unlimited resources, so we do have to make judgement calls about where our time needs to go, which I know is frustrating for us (because we want everything done, fixed and clear in this game we care a lot about), but also for you because they’re things you experience directly. That said, when something critical does happen, as many people on the team as necessary do literally drop everything they’re doing to fix it, as we did with these Adventure issues this time.
I’m gonna say that I don’t believe our Known Issues list is ever going to be zero, but we do care about getting things fixed for you. I know that development is a pretty big black hole from the outside a lot of the time and there’s things we can’t necessarily share, but I wanted to sit and write this up for you to hopefully help a little bit with that where I can.