Pending Changelog: Experimental Branch: 0.42.116002

[finnpalm 312]

I'm a dev too and I really understand a lot of what is happening here.

 

About communication problems I agree.

 

Well, maybe you two, who have experience in developing software, might be content with such a simple statement as "hang on, we're not quite done yet". But I guess the majority here wouldn't be. I'm guessing they wouldn't even be satisfied if the game was completed tomorrow and dropped off in their lap. They would probably find some reason to complain. And that's the kind of people community managers are aiming to take care of mostly. Those like yourself that nod your head and accept every tidbit of info you recieve are not the problem crowd. The people who goes "Hey, shitface! Speak ENGLISH ffs" are. And my guess is they're in the majority. Hopefully I'm wrong on that.

Edited March 12, 2014 by Strawman

[lucianpin 80]

Well, maybe you two, who have experience in developing software, might be content with such a simple statement as "hang on, we're not quite done yet". But I guess the majority here wouldn't be. I'm guessing they wouldn't even be satisfied if the game was completed tomorrow and dropped off in their lap. They would probably find some reason to complain. And that's the kind of people community managers are aiming to take care of mostly. Those like yourself that nod your head and accept every tidbit of info you recieve are not the problem crowd. The people who goes "Hey, shitface! Speak ENGLISH ffs" are. And my guess is they're in the majority. Hopefully I'm wrong on that.

You see, I don't need detailed technical explanation to understand what is going on and why no update on stable. Anyway I like explanations. And the post from reddit was dedicated to the majority who is irritated that there was no update on stable. Even if he (rocket) would have posted here that explanation, here are so many unuseful posts that someone who is reading after two days would barely find that explanation. This kind of explanation would be better made as an announcement.

Edited March 12, 2014 by lucianpin

[Irish. 4886]

Such passion and conviction..  :|

[Nibashe 52]

So I've just been replied to by Dean. I was in a terrible mood this morning. No coffee, rounding up my final tasks at the office here in Germany before moving to Brazil in 2 weeks which is very stressful as I need to bring my team here up to speed with procedures and policies before I leave to make sure they keep up the same standards plus some git reared my car whilst talking on his phone.. so I was not too happy.... 

 

Anyway, he said the following:

 

Quote from Rocket:

 

"Patches are not and have not been specifically scheduled to certain dates. There has been no announcement with certainty when a patch will deploy to stable.

We do announce our server maintenance periods, they occur every Wednesday. When a patch is approved for deployment it will be deployed during a scheduled maintenance period, or in emergency situations an unscheduled deployment may occur.

Because deployment of patches outside of scheduled maintenance can occur, we warned everyone that one may occur last Friday.

Regardless of negative experiences some people have two things are paramount:

1. We continue to inform people about potential disruptions, i.e. the possibility of patches being deployed. This is because deploying a patch can result in servers being down for extended periods of time. This requires planning with many different people all around the world, such as GSP's who have customers who would bombard them with different questions as to why their server is not online.

2. We will not deploy patches to stable that we know introduce new gameplay breaking bugs. We simply cannot do this. If we know something is broken that breaks gameplay we cannot deploy the patch. It doesn't matter if we have made any "promise" for the update - the purpose of stable is to provide a known level of experience. Each deployment to stable must be a step up in playability.

So in conclusion, while I understand your frustration - I am sure you can see that there are reasons why we must warn people of pending patches, and then there are reasons why we might not end up delivering on that warning. That is, quite simply, just the reality of the situation. It will improve as the project becomes less and less risky in terms of it's area's of development. But right now we are dramatically changing the architecture to better support fixing bugs and issues with the engine."

 

Thanks again btw Dean, really appreciate the personal reply.

[tarascon 50]

^ Thanks for sharing that.

[sniperdoc 251]

Hopefully they will learn now not to give dates of when they intend to push to stable because they are just embarrassing themselves, i hear you cry ALPHA but it seems like they are a bunch of cowboys. Doesn't matter now anyway the snowball effect has started they will be forever chasing their asses. They have narrowed this bug down (not actually found it yet) but then theres still all the other bugs that will need fixing, and then when experimental updates all those bugs aswell and so on.

The only one who thinks it should be embarrassing is you... the dates and projected release times are just that... they're projections. Not deadlines. Keep coming from a place of ignorance and not knowing and you keep posting nonsense... wtf?

[MagneticToast 102]

My question is, if you have boonie hats and other small things done, why not just add those before releasing the larger portions of the patch?

[sniperdoc 251]

Anyway, lack of comunication is the real problem.

 

I think that pretty much sums up my only complaint. Too much twittering and almost no forum updates to speak of. That's a little annoying.

[sniperdoc 251]

im not sure, but wasnt they supposed to update the game today under the maintaince?

There's no SUPPOSED TO... they said that they would TRY to release patches with every maintenance period. They didn't promise or set deadlines. This game is in alpha format and as such patches get released with "best effort" in mind. It makes no sense to release a patch when material is clearly not ready. Hence why EXP hasn't been updated with a new patch that fixes some critical bugs.

Unless an update is made to experimental servers, and that update appears stable, there WILL BE NO PATCH ON PUBLIC SERVERS. Not really "rocket"-science... (couldn't resist)

[wild_man 4442]

why some guys so angry nervous about when patch coming or not coming? :o

 

you think is better to have with problems or after fix problems? :huh:

 

when is ready they release not before :thumbsup:  ;)

 

relax calm the nerves take please chill pills stop to be worry :)

 

and stop also to make QQ post asking 'where is patch you promise and is not coming lying bastards?'   >:(

 

too many guys start to look like idiot spoil baby who don't get exact what he asking from his poor mother and make tantrum rage in supermarket  :D

[fluxley 2228]

And for all those calmly curious as to what problems are preventing the release to stable

 

 

No patch today :( by Mikelolin dayz

 

 

[–]rocket2guns 98 points

2 hours  ago *

Anyone who wonders why the patch has not been moved to stable only needs to play on the experimental and you can see the reasons there. If you are disappointed the update is not on stable, simply go play on experimental and you can see these changes. You also quickly see issues as to why it is not out on stable.

Believe me: we want this patch out much more than the community. Because continuing like this is a majorheadache for development as branching and merging becomes an absolute nightmare. This is occurring at the same time as us finishing our planning/roadmap process and starting up our new feature scrums. However, this desire doesn't change the fact that for the patch to be pushed onto stable we must not introduce new serious, game-breaking bugs.

Currently we are tracking two new major issues that we see as being blockers:

Invisible Characters/Zombies

We believe this is caused by them becoming stuck in geometry on client(s) and therefore rejecting new updates. In order to fix this our QA has been going back through different build revisions and checking to see if this occurs so we could isolate the exact point in development it started occurring. That was an extremely labor intensive process and through this we managed to narrow it down to an exact revision that caused the issue.

Now that we have found out exactly when that occurred, we start to look into why that happened. Once we fully understand the problem we can design a solution. The problem is that these are not simple issues or bugs, they are complex bugs that can result from a variety of factors. They can be caused by multiple issues, or simply just a symptom of a much wider problem. They are also often very hard to reproduce, and are exceptionally difficult to produce estimates for on fixing.

Network pauses roughly every 30 seconds

This recently appeared on experimental, and has been noticed by many. What happens is regularly the server stops sending updates for a second or so, which is caused by the server hard-locking for some reason. It lasts only a second before the server starts sending updates again. It looks like desync or rubber-banding for the client.

The current most popular theory for this is that the Experimental Server Architecture itself is causing the issue. I.e. the Experimental "Hive" central database simply cannot handle the load, and therefore when a players is killed or dies, the updates are delayed and the server is forced to stop and wait for the central server to respond. I'm vastly oversimplifying the issue but I am sure you get the point. We're again testing this in detail with our 30 fulltime, onsite, QA staff. It's a huge job and it's been a major effort.

Edit: Network Pauses... bug has been confirmed as being related simply to the Experimental database not handling the load. The experimental database is not configured for load balancing and is run on simple hardware so it simply cannot respond to servers fast enough. This leaves us with one blocking issue, the first issue. We have a full reproduction and we know the commit that caused it. It's related to network messaging changes. Simply reverting it will probably not work, because the change is complex.

 

source http://www.reddit.com/r/dayz/comments/207ueh/no_patch_today/cg0njmh?context=3

Edited March 12, 2014 by Fluxley

[Diablo_rf 11]

Shows their priority on working on the project rather then spending time on explaining everything to their customers actually...

Or would you like them to spend money they could invest in a developer/artist into an community manager?

 

For that amount of money they already did, I would like to have a community manager, considering the fact in which phase the game is, and how many people complaining about different things.

I'd say, to have a community manager in this case its A MUST!!!

[RRambo 41]

I just want some freaking rollarblades or something ! or a razor scooter! but I know first things first. 

[Dennus (DayZ) 123]

For that amount of money they already did, I would like to have a community manager, considering the fact in which phase the game is, and how many people complaining about different things.

I'd say, to have a community manager in this case its A MUST!!!

People being unpatient and whining is the problem.

You should be glad to be able to even play the game in this phase.

[SmashT 10907]

For that amount of money they already did, I would like to have a community manager, considering the fact in which phase the game is, and how many people complaining about different things.

I'd say, to have a community manager in this case its A MUST!!!

Probably not going to happen. This is an old post from Rocket specifically about that. For better or worse, Rocket likes to be directly in touch with the community instead of appointing a third party to handle it.

 

Look, I really want to clarify something. And I hope this doesn't get lost in a whole bunch of endless posts. It's not my intention to be a dick, my intention is to engage in a real dialog, real discussions, with people rather than go through some plastic process and appoint a community manager.

Personally, in game development. I have never, ever, seen this work. The game developers don't really listen to the community manager, because he's not in the development team. The community manager is generally there to feed out updates.

Now, there's been some real good discussion here. I've got angry, you've got angry - that's good. Points were made. Now if I wanted to avoid the "rocket is a dick" or "rocket is an arrogant prick" comments I could just as easily not come into the forums, or lock all the things I don't like, or appoint someone to be a "community manager" and then just ignore everything. But I haven't, and I've also chosen to let you all see the real me, flawed, with my tendency to sarcasm and swearing and all.

I can change that, and turn on my super-professional non-swearing, non-sarcastic, ignore-everything-I-don't like mode. But what I really want to do is to try and develop something where the community is deeply engaged with it. That can only happen where I can be me, and that people let me make mistakes, let me say the wrong thing sometimes. I don't expect anyone to be perfect, I think it's only fair that people don't expect me to be perfect either. But I think it is fair to expect me to be able to grow and learn from situations.

So I am going to focus the attention of the next update on some mechanics to provide more expansion for group play. It's clear to me from the discussion here that this is an area we all agree if improved will help steer things away from being a total deathmatch.

What I ask, is that you don't hang on every single minute detail of everything I say and then bash me over the head with it every second, so that I become so scared to post what I am thinking lest someone on reddit thinks I'm a bad person. I would say about 90% of the ideas I ever have are absolutely terrible. The only way I have found to escape this, is by talking to other people about the ideas and then using their feedback to find the 10% that have some merit. If this is how the forums end up, where I'm scared to be myself (resplendent in all my humor) then I will loose the ability to do that.

http://forums.dayzgame.com/index.php?/topic/6487-wtf-is-happening-to-the-server-community/page-19#entry70060

[dgeesio 1034]

basically rocket is the community manager.

 

all rest of the team are making the game.

 

crack the whip lets get vehicles already!

[basinox 300]

basically rocket is the community manager.

 

all rest of the team are making the game.

 

crack the whip lets get vehicles already!

 

 

Have patience my son.

[windchimepuppet 15]

The new way the FoV works kinda makes me feel cramped.  I have to put it up all the way to get out of the cramped feel but when I right click with a weapon, the view has to zoom out a little bit more to accommodate to the FoV.  I understand what you're aiming for with it, im just wondering if you will ever make it so that when you iron sight that it will be set closer to the actual iron sights by default?  make it so the FoV doesn't affect the iron sights view is what im saying.  it just doesn't really help with shooting if looking down the iron sights feels like holding the gun out in front of me as far as I can. :\

[jimgun 64]

Can't seem to connect to experimental at the minute.

 

Just get "Wait for host" on every server.

[Brasilo 16]

I feel somehow that Zombies are dong a better job of following you on exp. Devs are on teh right track ... because i never seen Zombies run up there

(industrial  office building elktro)

 

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=235491972

 

 

And i rly like the nonstop zombie spawning party! Last time 8 randome people got together to try to survive the hords of zombies in berinzino. it took 20min all bullets and in teh end everyone ran in different

directions with no bullets letf to defend them. it was just awesome!

 

Keep up the work and cant wait to be able to throw things at my fellow survivers!

[Gekkonidae 270]

They might be making updates to fix some of this stuff is why they might be temporarily down. Or they are doing it as part of maintenance.

 

I'd just be patient and let them do their jobs. They've been getting quite a bit of backlash from impatient rage/whiner nerds from what I've seen.

 

If I were a dev there's no way in hell I would ever post where I'd be at with anything if I received some of the responses I've been reading, goddamn! I would just be patient and be happy with the level of transparency they are providing to the community. They don't exactly have to say shit, if they really didn't want to.

 

Sorry, just reading how impatient and nasty some people are makes my head spin. 

 

These guys are all hauling ass on trying to get everything fixed. I'm sure additional stress is not going to make them get it done any faster.

Edited March 12, 2014 by Gekkonidae

[jimgun 64]

They might be making updates to fix some of this stuff is why they might be temporarily down. Or they are doing it as part of maintenance.

 

I'd just be patient and let them do their jobs. They've been getting quite a bit of backlash from impatient rage/whiner nerds from what I've seen.

 

If I were a dev there's no way in hell I would ever post where I'd be at with anything if I received some of the responses I've been reading, goddamn! I would just be patient and be happy with the level of transparency they are providing to the community. They don't exactly have to say shit, if they really didn't want to.

 

Sorry, just reading how impatient and nasty some people are makes my head spin. 

 

These guys are all hauling ass on trying to get everything fixed. I'm sure additional stress is not going to make them get it done any faster.

 

 

Not a dig, was just seeing if anybody knew anything, as i searched and found nothing. Let them make the game at their own pace as far as I'm concerned.

 

Nothing to defend here move along.

 

edit. quote fail

Edited March 12, 2014 by Jim Gun

[Schrankwand 5]

 

 

Look, I really want to clarify something. And I hope this doesn't get lost in a whole bunch of endless posts. It's not my intention to be a dick, my intention is to engage in a real dialog, real discussions, with people rather than go through some plastic process and appoint a community manager.

Personally, in game development. I have never, ever, seen this work. The game developers don't really listen to the community manager, because he's not in the development team. The community manager is generally there to feed out updates.

 

So what he is talking about there is that they had shitty management. Because the community manager does not intersect with the dev team, he intersects with the head of the dev team, if done right.

 

The community manager needs to be the spokes person that DIRECTLY talks to the Development head. He has a strategic update, listens, prepares major responses every week adn the development head meets him WEEKLY. 

 

A community manager is a manager, a strategic position that has a say. If he is only there to give out updates and not as a communication manager, he is useless, that is true.

 

However, for some reason, many other companies use communication officers with great success. 

[sniperdoc 251]

However, for some reason, many other companies use communication officers with great success. 

In some ways, as much as I despise Creative Assembly for being arsehats, they do it right on their forums using a CM. However, Moderators deleting, hiding, and deliberately burying negative posts by upset community members... not so much. That's just poor ethics on their part, which seems to be par for the course for them since the move to Sega.

Gist... CM's can definitely be a good thing if used properly. That way you don't get PR nightmares like Dean's announcement that he was "going to spend everyone's dollar on Mt Everest, travel the world, leave DayZ in the dust and go back to his family in NZ" and that the reason for it, that DayZ "is broken." ;)

[AceQuat 63]

i'll jump on experi-mental when there's new assault rifles (akm, fn fal) :)