swampjedi

1962: Red Chins

Ulti, I'm keeping them even to help with boredom. Mining especially is horrible beyond belief. Basically, I have the others to insulate with. Agility then RC then Hunter then Mining then Cons. At some point (83s?) I need to drag some of the others up to speed (mainly range and craft).

1960: Monks 1961: ZMI MONEY TIME!

Though it's "off topic", I'd say Jagex and Blizzard aren't even really in the same sub-market.

Bauke, Ahh, now THAT is a perfectly fair criticism in my book.

You can't be serious. When you have a family to support, it's not that easy. Bauke, Depends on what you're trusting QA to do. Deliver bug-free content? No, I don't trust them, any more than I trust them to walk on water.

I'm an American. I don't work for Jagex and I don't want to. And I'm not saying don't complain. I'm saying direct it where it belongs.

No, but I can make a very educated guess, based on experience - but mainly knowing what research into successful and failed projects says. One major study found that 90% of failures are directly attributable to management.

And frankly, if you know production code at ALL, you'll know that that small a defect count is pretty amazing. Listen folks, I think updates should be less buggy, too. But the problem lies with management scheduling, irreducible complexity, and code base clutter - NOT with the coders and testers sucking (more than likely). That's all I'm saying. I want you to go easy on my comrades. They're doing the best they can. Rail at the management.

1959: Mainly glass, a few hides.

I'm not even going to blame QA. They probably get the code at the last second, because when things fall behind testing is the first thing to get cut. The problem is how the process is rushed, and THAT is purely management.

Quick reply, more later - I don't give a crap about Jagex. I just know what it's like to be a developer forced to do crappy work due to management decisions, and then get blamed for it. Fair?

Kietaro, that sounds awesome. Just keep in mind that even that is a toy project compared to even a small-scale production environment. I am not knocking what you did, because it's awesome (I once wrote a PONG clone for the NES, which was super fun). Yes, too much focus on the metaphor. Agreed.

Yeah, you get it for sure - and wait till you get on a project team with 250k lines of source, horrible vague requirements, and crusty old engineers that give unreliable information. Dang, I miss school. Refactoring breaks the crap out of things. For anyone who has never done it, imagine putting a box of glass sculptures in a paint mixer and then gluing them back together as good as new.

The complexity of the code base, yes. All of the crap about management was ancillary.

Laura, Geez we might as well talk about civics and government and physics and chemistry too, by that logic. I'm not the boss of you, but you're arguing on a different planet - and as such, it really isn't productive for this thread. Plus, I just agreed with you. And nice edit while I was replying. Aurian, It's not hard. With a little experience, I could put together a kit car pretty easily. Oh, kit cars don't count? Do you really think car companies engineer cars from scratch?

You're talking management, logistics, advertising, business, and economics. I'm talking technical - which is the whole point of this thread. Is a automotive COMPANY harder to run that a game company? Sure! Is it easier to build a reliable car than very complex, bug free software? Not on your life.

No. Wrong. Very, very wrong.

Mechscape costs money to develop, and is currently not generating income. Where do they get that income? RS members. So yes, it directly affects RS, since that cash could be spent on RS. I'm not saying that it should be. Heck, if anything, maybe Jagex is creating MS because the RS codebase is a disaster after so many years of updates. They know that it's reaching the point where it would need to be rewritten from scratch - but instead of doing that, they're doing something totally different.

Removed the quote from the first post.

People complain NOW, with 2-4 updates a month! :-) I wonder if folks would pay $10/mo for more updates. Heck, some games are nearing $20 monthly now. $6/mo would make me happy even if this were like RSC.

Then I salute you. You don't just gripe, you act.

I apologized, both on this threat and in a PM. What the heck else do you want? -.-

It IS that simple, in the end. Sure, you can gripe about it - but the only real way to get your voice heard is to leave. Your money is the only thing they care about. I'm not saying don't gripe. Just don't act like you have a God-given right to a perfect game.

Oh, a Randite? That explains a lot! :-P I've never heard them say that. I say it from experience. No one, and I mean no one, can test software like your average Joe Idiot Player. They have a standard that we hold them to. If we don't like the product, then we no longer purchase it. There is no other standard in the world of commerce (barring government regulation). I do wonder how the teleport bug and free plank bug got through, though. However, I know enough to not immediately jump to "they were stupid" - because it's more complex than we think. As for the numerous construction bugs - no. I don't wonder. State changes (ie, building mode, "in house mode") are notoriously hard to get right, ESPECIALLY when there are multiple (unexpected) transitions between the modes.