THIS SITE IS JACKED RIGHT NOW

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jakey

Can't start a game right now. Only allows one player to be ready?  Therefore no game play.  Anybody know whats up?

LastFootnote

Something is wrong, and because this mickey mouse operation only has two employees and they're in the same time zone, there's nobody to fix it. That's what's up.

AdamH

I've noticed this with other releases in the past, though the problem is much more severe now of course. Maybe it will get some attention now that there's a big stink.

It seems that Shuffleit would benefit with some line of testing before their updates are released to the public. I know somewhere around here there was a mention of automated testing by one of the devs. That would be a step in the right direction but it's not the whole picture. I think having a group of testers to run through "internal" builds before they are released to the public would benefit everyone quite a bit.

This group of testers would just run through their normal games for a few days, making sure nothing is broken like we have now, and of course could report regressions or bugs introduced by the updates. But also they could give feedback about UI changes. We could have avoided the embarrassment of the journey token stuff if anyone other than the devs had looked at the changes they made before they were made public.

There is no shortage of people around here who would be willing to do this for free. I'd like to think there's an easy way to just give a small group of people access to a test build for this purpose. It would go a long way towards the success of your product.

Kahleesi44

I know it's ruining my evening  >:(

LastFootnote

Quote from: AdamH on 28 March 2017, 10:04:47 PM
I've noticed this with other releases in the past, though the problem is much more severe now of course. Maybe it will get some attention now that there's a big stink.

It seems that Shuffleit would benefit with some line of testing before their updates are released to the public. I know somewhere around here there was a mention of automated testing by one of the devs. That would be a step in the right direction but it's not the whole picture. I think having a group of testers to run through "internal" builds before they are released to the public would benefit everyone quite a bit.
I agree with you in general, Adam, but is it possible this wasn't caused by a new release? Seems like maybe people are being kicked to these rooms because the games are failing to start automatically, perhaps because servers are down.

s2164059

Come on! Now I have to go do something productive  >:(

sunshinehippo

I've been trying to start a game all day; FRUSTRATING!! 

AdamH

Quote from: LastFootnote on 28 March 2017, 10:20:31 PM
Quote from: AdamH on 28 March 2017, 10:04:47 PM
I've noticed this with other releases in the past, though the problem is much more severe now of course. Maybe it will get some attention now that there's a big stink.

It seems that Shuffleit would benefit with some line of testing before their updates are released to the public. I know somewhere around here there was a mention of automated testing by one of the devs. That would be a step in the right direction but it's not the whole picture. I think having a group of testers to run through "internal" builds before they are released to the public would benefit everyone quite a bit.
I agree with you in general, Adam, but is it possible this wasn't caused by a new release? Seems like maybe people are being kicked to these rooms because the games are failing to start automatically, perhaps because servers are down.

I have no idea. But at least if it was an issue like you suggest and the test system was in place, Shuffleit would at least be able to say they did what they could. I have no doubts that a test system would prevent a lot of issues from making it to public releases, even if it doesn't catch all of them.

...and I feel like it would cost the devs next to nothing for free work. I just don't see much downside at all.

Stef

Sorry people, we had server problems indeed. A reboot seems to have solved the problem. It looks like it was caused by a maintenance window from amazon that I failed to deal with properly, despite the fact that they announced it way in time. I will certainly investigate further.

It had nothing to do with a new release, and Adam, we have a test server and a group of people playing on it. How long releases stay on test depends a bit on the complexity / impact of the new code. Right now it has ratings, leaderboard and inheritance, and thus will stay there a bit longer then smaller releases would.

AdamH

Quote from: Stef on 29 March 2017, 12:23:47 AM
Adam, we have a test server and a group of people playing on it.

How long has it been there?

With all due respect, the journey token issue and the fact that the endgame sounds can't be turned off or made quieter (or the fact that it now dings when I put something in the chat when it used to not do that) should all have been caught, addressed, and fixed before the public ever saw them. I think you need more people on your test server who will actually give you the feedback you need.

Shuffleit's image isn't doing well right now. I think you should be doing everything you possibly can to prevent releases like the recent ones you've had from making things worse.

Stef

If the biggest issue you name is "the embarrassment of the journey token stuff" I would say the testers group is doing pretty well. Personally I preferred the journey token before the change, some other group of people preferred it this way, fine, we changed it.

The fact that games couldn't start for some hours yesterday was a big issue; I'll happily invest time in trying to prevent that from ever happening again. The fact that some group of players preferred an image flip... I'm perfectly fine with correcting something like that in the next live release.

Ingix

Quote from: AdamH on 29 March 2017, 01:34:25 PM

With all due respect, the journey token issue and the fact that the endgame sounds can't be turned off or made quieter (or the fact that it now dings when I put something in the chat when it used to not do that) should all have been caught, addressed, and fixed before the public ever saw them.

With the exception to the Journey token issue, all the rest seem to be issues that you do not like about the client, not things that are obvious problems. It is one thing to test changes to see if they work or have unintended consequences, this should be (and according to Stef is) done. It is quite another to do focus testing to find out if there are many players who do not like  a certain thing.

If something is really bad, players will complain about it (Journey token). This way we get at least some additional features without the additional cycle of first discussing how to exactly do it.

AdamH

Quote from: Stef on 29 March 2017, 02:21:36 PM
If the biggest issue you name is "the embarrassment of the journey token stuff" I would say the testers group is doing pretty well. Personally I preferred the journey token before the change, some other group of people preferred it this way, fine, we changed it.

The journey token stuff is a perfect example of something that isn't personal preference. It's something that was objectively a problem and should have been caught by anyone. The purpose of a QA/Test team is to catch things like this and come back to the devs with it so it doesn't make it to the public. If none of your testers mentioned that this was going to be an issue, I'd say you need more/different people on that team.


Quote from: Ingix on 29 March 2017, 02:31:56 PM
With the exception to the Journey token issue, all the rest seem to be issues that you do not like about the client, not things that are obvious problems.

If I was the only one who felt that way then I see your point. Nobody can expect every user to like every feature. But many people complained about the new sounds because there's no way to turn them off. There's no way to adjust the volume (and the endgame sounds are much louder than the other sounds the client makes). This is something that should have been caught by the test team -- any feature you add like this should have a way to configure it. It's just not good practice to push out an optional feature without a way to configure it or turn it off.

I'm pointing to the most recent update because it's recent of course, but also because stuff like this gives the user base the impression that the devs are out of touch with what their users want.


As for the server outages, I don't know what kind of access the test team has to diagnostics for stuff like this, but it would have been really great if someone from the test team could have made an announcement to communicate the problem while I assume it was night time where the devs were (I don't know, I just saw a bunch of threads complaining). That's a pretty different issue, and it's one I know next to nothing about.

People just complain to me about things and I'm trying to suggest things to make them better. If I didn't think my suggestions were good I would keep them to myself, but I think this stuff would help.

Ingix

I only see what gets written here, so I have to judge by that. I noticed the complaints about audio, but it didn't feel to me "many people", but I was possibly biased because it didn't affect me. I couldn't prevent a chuckle when I read someone complaining that the game used audio during a meeting that person was in, though ;-)

From the posts in the "3 things you would like most" thread I came to the conclusion that the game is played by a relatively broad demographic and with wildly different playstyles. Some play on mobile clients almost only with each other, others use a destop computer to play against bots. Some want ranked play very very much, others would rather play the "Adventure Mode" from Making Fun.

I guess that the group of testers is more homogenous, thus not really reflecting all the different use cases the 'real audience' presents.

I also think you do really good at presenting the problems you see (or are told). It's just that I sometimes have a different opinion about what is important and not (which is of course also totally subjective).

LastFootnote

And it's happening again. At least now it gives a dialog: "No gameserver available."

I assume customers' subscriptions will be extended to compensate for all this downtime?