[TRENCHES] Tuesday, April 1, 2014 - Truncated
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
Truncated
http://trenchescomic.com/comic/post/truncated
Magics of Rockets
AnonymousLet me set you the scene for how my first title in QA was shaping up. We had about twenty people in a bay doing multiplayer testing on a AAA title. After a few months of us doing this, they moved us to different bays and expanded our team because the game was falling behind (surprise!) and we couldn’t test fast enough (they felt).
Most of us were not pleased about that as about three fourths of our bugs were coming back with large “working as intended” notes. Those of you have worked in the industry doing QA know that is dev speak for “die in a fire” so we were a little miffed about them adding more people to the title.
Fast forward a month and we are on day 30 of what will become 45 days of “voluntarily” overtime at 12 hours a day in an attempt to find a version of the game that won’t have the fans of the franchise screaming for blood in the streets outside the design studio. By this time anyone that has worked those hours can tell you tempers get short and ideas get crazy.
This is when I found the issue with the autolock with the RPG. You see, simply by pointing the screen (this was a third person shooter title) and jumping the way you were running you would ensure that the rocket would find a nice cozy home in the target’s chest. Since his seemed broken I wrote up the bug and submitted it to be sent to our devs and was greeted by our lead a few minutes later who wanted me to show him why I thought it was an issue. I then proceeded to go through about three games with nearly no deaths before he gave a heavy sigh with the words “They’re not going to like this.” before he went to send the bug in.
Can anyone guess what the dev response was? That’s right. “Working as intended, this is not a bug.”
They then patched it within three weeks of the title launching after the forums exploded about how broken it was.
So do us all a favor, if you are a dev and your testers submit something that seems to be broken don’t give them the knee jerk reaction of saying it’s not a bug. Actually look into the issue and see if it might be something that needs fixing.
Posts
(I'm sorry to be negative, but I just don't get what's going on here. I know they switched artists but it seems like this thing has really gone off the rails.)
Bugs go like this.
A - Crashes the game.
B - Not as bad as a crash, but clearly busted. Textures missing, something that can't go out the door.
C - All the things you fix or change if you have time to fix them, but could ship with.
Not a bug - Backseat design suggestions from QA, other misunderstandings, or things that would be catastrophically time-inefficient to change.
Now, when a game is on schedule, some of those B level bugs might become A's, and nearly all C level bugs become B's, and things like balance issues get promoted to C's.
However, games are almost never on schedule, which means the Devs are scrambling to get the game running correctly, and are lucky if the designers can do everything they want to do by alpha. An overpowered weapon will often be ignored on a rushed project until Beta, because just getting the game to run was a challenge up until that point.
I see a lot of Tales here where a QA person says "the game would've made more money if the devs had listened to me." That's true on every game. The problem is listening to the right people in a sea of noise. A designer is hearing unsolicited advice constantly, and yeah, some smart things are going to be in that sea of noise. It sucks not to be heard, but it's not that devs hate QA or hate testers. It's that they're hearing a hundred uneducated opinions a week and if they gave each one serious thought, they wouldn't be able to do their job.
Edit: Not to sound too negative, if a QA person _is_ often right with advice, funnels it through proper channels and is an agreeable person to work with, those QA people become producers, level designers, junior designers, developers.
I think this might be my favorite one, because it's about a guy who didn't go into game testing and it ended up being a huge mistake. Good subversion of the usual Tale flow (but still with that tasty depressing ending that we all seek).
I have been a stalwart defender of Trenches from the beginning but even I am starting to lose interest. Every time the comic seems to be picking up some momentum, something happens to kill it. A "season" ends, an artist/writer is replaced...or in this case, it seems whatever creative team is responsible now (is this still Monica and Ty?) just lost interest in what the main comic is about and started going off on tangents.
It's doubly disappointing because I think the comics from this "season" were showing a lot of promise. The dialogue exchanges between the characters were a lot sharper and funnier than in the past.
We had that Heroes commentary which would fit perfectly in place on, say, Penny Arcade, which is indeed gag-a-day and focuses around geekier things. Or it would have fit in a story-based comic if it was a scene change before Things Happen involving those characters (i.e. Q comes up and is all "guys, someone's stealing our fucking game" before returning to the Dungeon), or if it was in between storylines (kinda to help establish the passing of time between X and Y). In where it was, though? It was just really forced. It was quite literally interrupting the comic just so the author could shove in their commentary.
Now we have this Jeff and Snuffler thing. This is like, in-between-seasons material. Or every-other-day material. And, again, it's been shoved into an ongoing storyline. The same ongoing storyline, in fact.
And the characterization of anyone but Isaac (the crazy comic relief) and Marley (the slacker stoner) is all over the place. Cora's the worst for it, she goes from a white knight willing to be fired upon her sword, fighting against her employers, to someone who passively takes Q putting her to work in a room filled with fucking black mold and his changing her father's lore on a whim (though this was at least lampshaded), to someone who is covering for Isaac (who she probably still dislikes?) for the purpose of "fucking with" the same guy she followed so loyally. I get that they were trying for a "lol no ship for you" joke but they haven't had the setup for it. That ship was pretty much sunk ages ago, and there've been no hints that Cora and Isaac have even really been talking to each other. Quite the opposite, in fact. Plot-wise, Cora saving Isaac's job because she's a white knight/she owes him for doing the same would have been enough, and would have fit her character.
Using PA as an example again - it's mostly gag-a-day, with author avatars that kinda-sorta represent the authors, and whose personalities change depending on the gag of the day. And yet I honestly think that the grand storyline and characterization there has been more consistent over all those years than Trenches.
And honestly, Trenches has had potential. One of the funniest webcomic strips I've seen in a while is when Isaac just pulled a hacksaw out from under his shirt because Marley suggested cutting through the roof for food. It's pretty in-character for Isaac, because he's hilariously crazy, and if it bends the personalities of the other characters, the sheer Rule of Funny makes up for it. Especially when one of the characters lampshades how insane it is. "You cut through the floor? The floor."
Even Isaac seeing the ghostly apparition of Credenza works. Isaac is crazypants, it was pretty well lampshaded, and, y'know, black mold. (Not that their willingness to accept black mold ever made sense.)
I have to agree with the last two posts, though. Like Gaslight says, it seems the current writers have lost interest, and like Coinage says, it seems they no longer want people to care.
Yeah, Cora covering for Isaac as "I am saving your ass just this once because you covered up me being the mole, even if I think you were an asshole for doing it by framing Marley" would have made more sense.
The way Cora's relationship to Q is portrayed is just wildly inconsistent and perplexing. In the first season when they're working on Lawstar, she seems loyal to him. Then when he starts screwing the players (in her eyes) she hates him. OK, fine. Yet for some reason she's still willing to take an offer to work with him again at his new company, and even goes so far as to help him sell her dad on signing over the rights to his IP, apparently back to being cool with him. BUT, then when he starts altering the source material to put tacky freemium stuff in the game she's back to being outraged, even though anybody would have been able to predict that's what he would probably do based on past history.
Like, right there, on the main page.