All the same fundamental flaws in all their glory.

[Battlefront.com]

FaxisAxis,

I hope this is true. That would certainly change how I think about it and whether I want continue with it and invest my time and faith in it.

Oh, it is VERY true. CMx2 is here to stay for a long time, but it will evolve over that time too. Look at how much we've done to it already

Steve

[aka_tom_w]

Every developer can do things the way that works best for them, but personally I'd quit and work at my local grocery store before I went the route of having to manage a bug database that was open to the public. We've got one internally for beta testing and that's enough to manage. Important bugs mentioned here are topics of conversation amongst testers and they do get entered into the bug database if they warrant inclusion.

This may be one of the most enlightening nuggets of wisdom Steve has offered. Everyone reading should know it is absolutely, completely true.

"and they do get entered into the bug database if they warrant inclusion"

So what does that mean, it means the bug needs to be able to be replicated and it needs to be deemed an actual bug meaning the behaviour in the example is not what was meant or intended to happen in the game by the designer/developer.

You if can let them know which scenario it happened in and under which SPECIFIC circumstances, then they can test it and replicated and note for fixing.

[ October 03, 2007, 05:34 PM: Message edited by: aka_tom_w ]

[Lethaface]

Lol @ * ...

When joining battlefront earlier this year, for ToW, I never imagined getting the same urge to write a long nuanced statement, as I always had in my discussions with friends and fellow "hang on the street" youth about Israel, Palestine and USA...

However, this topic made me...

Luckily for you I'm going for a long 3,5 weeks holiday to the far (far) east ( approx 27C now) and smoking my last joint for some time at the moment.

So, I will just keep this statement very un-nuanced, as I like to do sometimes to get rid of stress

Disclaimer: Im no fan-boy; I never liked CMx1 (never got further then the demo).

In my short stay here I must say that the BFC staff shows up more then I ever saw on any other forum

Everybody got their own opinion, thats fine. Dont try to force others into your opinion, because that is Fundamentelist in true fashion

In my opinion CMSF was enjoyable from the start in RT singleplay. RT tcp ip was also nice, however some crashes here and there. Had a few nice PBEM games, however in some noticed some serious movement bugs. I'll be trying that out in 1.04 next month.

1.04 has greatly increased my sys performance. Also I must add that in the short time i could try it out, the gameplay seemed smoother, both sides more active, etc (killed of the americans in Allahs fist @22 tanks lost). I cant place it exactly, but must say that I CAN PROVE BFC is actively working on a nice, although buggy released, game. Thats not an opinion

Like truppenfuhrer said; i'm not really bothered by those minor glitches, as long as they dont have a big influence on the total game. There are probably some left which will say hello now end then, but for me the game is 100% playable.

With the support from BFC, I actually only want to be in the Tactics board

If one wants to achieve something through criticm, it better be constructive criticism. Cuz that negative one, that one don't work.

Enjoy yourself, what ever you doing

Cheers

[Guest Guest]

deleted per user request

[Zemke]

I think people are over reacting about some relatively small issues. I agree with Steve most LOS issues have been solved, although not perfect it seems better. Infantry combat seems better, more responsive and I have had no "stuck squads.

I think where we are now should have been the release version...but that is history.

I am still testing things, but so far I have to say I am enjoying the game a lot now. I think it will stay on my hard drive after all.

As for my other "wishes" posted else where, I can wait and hope.

I have to say the 1:1 seems to be working pretty well now...it is starting to feel and look right.

I still don't like playing in real time on larger battles, but the smallers ones I can manage.

I would still like to see TCIP WEGO like the old CM1. Steve may I ask why it is not in the game, I am sure this has been answered but I have not seem a reason.

[Ketil]

A horse and buggy is a much more simple means of transport that has a lot less to go wrong with it than a car.

Own many horses?

[Thomm]

The noise to information ratio in this thread is phenomenal!

Best regards,

Thomm

[C'Rogers]

Remind you of any political administrations?

All of them?

[FinnN]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

Every developer can do things the way that works best for them, but personally I'd quit and work at my local grocery store before I went the route of having to manage a bug database that was open to the public. We've got one internally for beta testing and that's enough to manage. Important bugs mentioned here are topics of conversation amongst testers and they do get entered into the bug database if they warrant inclusion.

Well, fair enough each to his own. But it does render arguments about bugs somewhat meaningless. If you see something in the game and you don't like it, is it a flawed design, is it a bug that'll get fixed, is it a bug that isn't considered important or is it something misunderstood? I see very few discussions about bugs and design decisions which don't mostly consist of people arguing which heading it belongs under. Several times I've seen people (BFC or beta testers) plead that if someone is mentioning a bug that they provide full information on it - well without any sort of form to ensure that it happens that way the chances of that occurring are zip, never mind the huge overhead of interpreting someone's post and entering it into a database. It's also interesting to note that only 'important' bugs end up in the database - a clear sign that the current system isn't as efficient or as useful as it could be.

Have fun

Finn

[aka_tom_w]

"It's also interesting to note that only 'important' bugs end up in the database - a clear sign that the current system isn't as efficient or as useful as it could be."

Clearly, you MUST admit it must be the developer's choice to determine and establish which bugs are "important" in the data base. Remember there is only one brain in a Jar, its not like they have a huge vault somewhere full of brains in jars. (the bugs are fixed by just one person, the old fashioned way ONE AT A TIME.)

[FinnN]

"in the database" is the key phrase there - how can you identify problems systematically by spotting patterns otherwise? Some sort of proper bug reporting system would be an improvement, even if the results or how reports were handled were never made public. I hardly think I'm saying anything astonishing or even remotely controversial here. At the end of the day it's up to BFC how they operate though.

Have fun

Finn

[SlowMotion]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

I for one didn't like the fact that a unit would forget about a target when it moved out of LOS, even though it was sure to move back into LOS.

A quick question here:

Does that quote mean that the way this currently works is the way you think it's going to be in CMSF?

I made this topic and got no comments:

http://www.battlefront.com/discuss/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=52;t=003122

What I saw in this case was the target line followed the invisible unit for several minutes. Sometimes stopping, sometimes moving.

[VonWebb]

Originally posted by Adam1:

Can you fix the problem? If so, great. Do it. Otherwise please stop hammering people for pointing out the most basic and obvious problems. I don't need your subjectivist philosophy lessons or rhetorical devices.

PS - All the time is a less precise way of saying "frequently, with consistency". I thought we were conversational here.

Is this something like the town meeting reponse, steve?

[dalem]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

Dale,

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />That's unfair Steve. Some of us see the big picture just fine, we just disagree whether it's worth hanging in our living room or not.

I'm being totally fair. </font>

[thewood]

VonWebb, funny you say that, I was just thinking yesterday how the reponses to comments on this forum would never happen face to face like in a toen meeting.

btw, I moved to "small" Boston suburb only 15 minutes from Fenway and is over 10,000 people. It still runs through town meeting. That is absolute chaos.

[Thomm]

This poor Syrian devils should not have died. LOF went through two buildings:

[Thomm]

What they see:

What they should see:

[Thomm]

Look to your left, soldier!

[Thomm]

I gave these guys a hunt order to regroup them. They had other plans!

These plans affected LOS in quite a negative way.

[Thomm]

Another LOS broken.

[Wiggum]

Great how you show Battlefront all these bugs !!

I hope they will fix them.

[thewood]

I don't understand the last one. It says no LOS through the wall. Isn't that correct?

[Battlefront.com]

Adam,

Hope things have cooled down. I was given the impression that 1.04 was supposed to be where this stuff was all fixed. I believe someone had indicated that 1.04 was the last patch addressing game issues and that it would be indicative of the final product, hence a new demo was being compiled (again, as 1.03 had been indicated of same...) to finally settle things. It did not seem to me that - if this was the case - a serious problem could be fixed. Given the commitment involved and required of BFC, I would have been pretty concerned.

sigh... that's why I stomped on that rumor the moment I first saw it. I knew for SURE that it was going to keep on going even after I made a VERY direct set of posts to try and squash it. It got started by someone who completely and utterly misread something I said. What I said is that v1.05 is designed to be the last regular patch so we can get on with moving the game system forward instead of spending 100% of our time patching whatever exists. HOWEVER, I also clearly said that if more patches are required to fix important things, we will put out further patches. But they will be done alongside of us moving the game system forward.

Zemke,

I would still like to see TCIP WEGO like the old CM1. Steve may I ask why it is not in the game, I am sure this has been answered but I have not seem a reason.

It's been discussed in more detail a few times, but it basically boils down to "we didn't want to spend the time on it since PBEM does almost exactly the same thing". I know people hate hearing that we actually make decisions about what to include or not based on how long it takes to do it, but unfortunately it is something that has to be done. CM:SF already took FAR longer to complete than we wanted, so spending another month doing something that is largely redundant wasn't seen as viable. Obviously many WeGo players disagree with that, so we'll see what can be done later on. But there is no quick fix and therefore it won't be implemented anytime soon.

FinnN,

Well, fair enough each to his own. But it does render arguments about bugs somewhat meaningless. If you see something in the game and you don't like it, is it a flawed design, is it a bug that'll get fixed, is it a bug that isn't considered important or is it something misunderstood? I see very few discussions about bugs and design decisions which don't mostly consist of people arguing which heading it belongs under. Several times I've seen people (BFC or beta testers) plead that if someone is mentioning a bug that they provide full information on it - well without any sort of form to ensure that it happens that way the chances of that occurring are zip, never mind the huge overhead of interpreting someone's post and entering it into a database. It's also interesting to note that only 'important' bugs end up in the database - a clear sign that the current system isn't as efficient or as useful as it could be.

Not at all. The problem is that any game, especially a complex one, has hundreds or even thousands of bugs. The only thing for sure is that there is not enough time to fix them all. Since even looking through bugs sucks up development time, having 20 different bug reports about a pixel being out of place or some non-problematic glitch that showed up one time and you weren't really even sure if that is what you saw, is counter productive. Noise to signal ratio needs to be kept within a certain range or the entire system becomes inefficient. Opening things up to have thousands of people posting lots of stuff, much of it not even a bug to begin with, completely breaks that ratio. Which is why I've said I'll go work in my local grocery store, happily bagging catfood and celery, than deal with letting everybody be a beta tester

"in the database" is the key phrase there - how can you identify problems systematically by spotting patterns otherwise?

Rarely are bugs systematic or require patterns to be identified. Therefore, "data mining" one's way to a less buggy game really doesn't work. The system we have for tracking bugs works great (well, we don't like the actual software, so I'm talking about the procedures) and is not the reason why there are bugs in the game. There are bugs in the game because all games have bugs, especially complex ones. The reasons why known bugs aren't all fixed is because there are only so many hours in a day to fix things, not to mention add new things being requested.

SlowMotion,

Does that quote mean that the way this currently works is the way you think it's going to be in CMSF?

I made this topic and got no comments:

http://www.battlefront.com/discuss/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=52;t=003122

What I saw in this case was the target line followed the invisible unit for several minutes. Sometimes stopping, sometimes moving.

There are some oddities of the current system, for sure, but overall it is much better than the CMx1 system. CMx1 is like an animal or small child that lacks the ability to discern "object permanence". Move it out of sight and there is no idea where it went, even though all you did was put your hand in front of it. CMx2 is more like real Human understanding. Tracking a moving, but invisible unit, can be seen as "guessing" where it is going. Therefore, I don't have a problem with tracking invisible units because that's what Humans do in real life in similar situations. What CMx2 lacks, however, is having this "guess" be randomly more or less accurate. That would be nice to have, but it isn't a top priority to code.

VonWebb

Is this something like the town meeting reponse, steve?

No, because in a town meeting most people don't say squat because they don't have the courage to stand up and be heard or challenged on the spot. Not so for a virtual experience like this. In fact, a certain radical minority in our town managed to neuter town meetings because every time they got up to speak they came off sounding like they didn't know what they were talking about and that their ideas were brittle to an extreme. So their solution was to muzzle the debate, not improve their abilities to debate. The funny thing is it backfired and they've lost most of their influence since then. Really interesting stuff to experience in real life.

Steve

[Battlefront.com]

Dale,

Of course you're not. You're doing exactly what you deride others for doing - ascribing a particular motivation to a person or group of people without a full understanding. You may think you are the only one who knows what the f you're doing, but if that's true, I am the only one who knows what the f you're doing wrong from a customer point of view.

I know... you think we should constantly suck up to the customer and never, ever disagree with them no matter how rude, off base, or counter productive their behavior is. I thought we agreed to disagree on this?

You can't have it both ways.

I'm not trying to. If all customers were polite, constructive and otherwise pleasant when they posted you wouldn't have any issues with my handling of the people that aren't because they wouldn't be there. But they aren't, so I have to be realistic. You've heard of Realpolitik, yes? Well, this is a sort of Realcustomerservice that I employ It isn't perfect, but the alternative is to be like Nevil Chamberlain

Steve, I've never stated that arguing in a vacuum is the only way to go (nor do I think arguing Falco style is a good thing). What I have done is point out that when I (for instance) bemoan the loss of something from CMx1, you point out that either a) Steve never played it that way so forget it, or it had to change due to 1:1 so forget it.

Bemoaning something lost is not an issue. Saying what replaced it is crap because it isn't what was there before is a problem. I'm not saying that you're bemoanings fit into that, but the hostility that is seen from some DEFINITELY comes from that.

So we're to simply forget about CMx1 as a personal experience - what we liked or didn't like is irrelevant (and personally, based on your statements over the last few years, I doubt you have any real concept of what your customer base thinks are strengths and weaknesses of CMx1, but that's another topic)

The day our customer base speaks with one voice is the day I have a heart attack from shock Remember that many people here are convinced that CMBB is the best thing that has ever graced a computer, then when I say from a sales standpoint that isn't true then they attack us as being incompetent sales people. Dale, you can pretend all you want that there aren't a variety of unreasonable, uninformed, and counter productive customers here... but they exist.

But as our understanding of CMx2 increases, and your reasoning becomes more clear and our criticisms become more pointed, you take the position that the release of CMx1 is somehow relevant with respect to buttressing your position. CMx2 is poorly-received by a small portion of extant CM customers? No biggie - CMx1 was poorly-received by a small portion of non-existant CM customers.

As always, you take this out of context. I've tried time and time again to show you the context, but you still fail to understand. I'll try AGAIN to point out what should be a very simple concept to understand, yet still isn't getting into that head of yours...

There you go. CMx2 can't be fundamentally flawed because CMx1 was worse.

NO! That is not it at all. The argument that is sometimes put forward is that "CMx2 sucks because CMx1 was perfect". All I am doing is taking the customer's flawed argument and standing it on its head. The notion that everything worked just dandy in CMx1, and therefore NOTHING should have been changed, is a demonstrably false line of reasoning. As I have said to you dozens of times already... a customer can say to me "I don't like he way it works in CMx2 compared to CMx1" and they will get NO ARGUMENT from me. NONE. But when someone says that something works less well in CMx2 because a more flawed approach in CMx1 was somehow better, well... I get all over that argument and kick it to the curb. You have so far been completely incapable of seeing this and so I presume you'll still not understand that all I am doing is being logical, rational, and deliberate when someone else is attempting to do the same. If they voice it as an opinion, the most I will do is try to show why they might want to reconsider the opinion, but fundamentally I do not say that they are incorrect.

Aside from just being frosting for my long paragraphs above, your words directly above show that you simply don't "get it" still about this core issue.

Dale, it is you who doesn't get it. An opinion is different than a factual statement. When someone tries to make a flawed factual sounding argument, I take issue with it. If it is an opinion, it gets an entirely different treatment

CMx1, as you advertised it and as the game output showed it, was NOT misaligned with respect to stated scale and stated scale effects. CMx2 is.

We have been over this many times and you completely duck out of the discussion after I challenge this flawed statement. CMx1 was more misaligned with respect to the stated scale and stated scale effects than CMx2. I can prove that with a factual discussion, which is why you choose to a) duck out of the discussion and continue to try to derail the discussion by the strawman argument that I'm only tearing CMx1 apart to build up CMx2. Again, I am simply showing factual flaws in your statement and I feel I have done so very, very thoroughly. I have also said that if you want to rephrase your comments to say something along the lines of "I liked the abstractions of CMx1 better than CMx2" I would completely and utterly leave such a statement unchallenged. But you wont'd do that because you don't want to be expressing an opinion, you want to be expressing something more than that. Yet when challenged you basically dodge and smokescreen your position instead of defending it.

Also, there was nothing like CMx1 when you made it - pretty 3-D with the ideal of "realism" over playability and still loaded with fun features. Nothing. Now, we know 3D tactical environments and game systems can be done, and done well. You have set the bar yourself, so anything different/less is going to invite comparison.

Ironic that you say that and yet you wail loudly every time I make the comparison. It is you that wants it to have it both ways... you want to judge CMx2 based on CMx1, yet you do not want to entertain any discussion (from me) about this comparison.

I've never believed or stated that your opinion isn't valid, Steve.

The problem I have with your position is that you don't see it as an opinion, but instead see it as fact. I challenge the "fact" you present and you get upset and tell me I'm not playing fair. In other words, you are attempting to set the rules in such a way as to prevent me from fundamentally challenging your position. Or as I have put it many times before, you wish me to argue in a vacuum while you argue from the very context you are trying to denny me access to. It's all rather frustrating.

Steve

[Lurker765]

Originally posted by Battlefront.com:

Adam,

</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Hope things have cooled down. I was given the impression that 1.04 was supposed to be where this stuff was all fixed. I believe someone had indicated that 1.04 was the last patch addressing game issues and that it would be indicative of the final product, hence a new demo was being compiled (again, as 1.03 had been indicated of same...) to finally settle things. It did not seem to me that - if this was the case - a serious problem could be fixed. Given the commitment involved and required of BFC, I would have been pretty concerned.

sigh... that's why I stomped on that rumor the moment I first saw it. I knew for SURE that it was going to keep on going even after I made a VERY direct set of posts to try and squash it. It got started by someone who completely and utterly misread something I said. What I said is that v1.05 is designed to be the last regular patch so we can get on with moving the game system forward instead of spending 100% of our time patching whatever exists. HOWEVER, I also clearly said that if more patches are required to fix important things, we will put out further patches. But they will be done alongside of us moving the game system forward.

Steve </font>