Next patch will fix it™

    Hi,


    I just wanna warn whoever is making these threads in the News/Game section to be a bit more careful and choose their words.

    Let me explain what I'm thinking.


    1. So the first announcement about v8 was this:


    Okay, one would think that the updating of the operating system and optimizing the APIs would help the game and make it faster.

    I have personally tested this on PTS and was finally happy to see the inventory being opened in 1-2 seconds instead of the usual 10 seconds.

    When the patch was live, it was nothing like PTS, bugs and lags everywhere.


    2. Moving on, next announcement:


    Quote from piink

    Dear community,

    on Monday 17th of May we will release the version 8.0.0 rc-7.

    This update does not bring any visible changes to the test servers, but it is part of the performance improvement release we are working on.


    Your OGame Team.

    Okay, excellent, performance improvement!

    No, still the same, or worse.


    3. Moving on:


    Nice, a hotfix that will fix the error messages (I'm assuming the "Can't send fleet, try again later" and "Server not responding" ones).

    Did it fix? No.


    4. Next one:


    Quote from kewlness

    Dear Community,


    Today at     15:30 CEST we received a hotfix in the servers running version 8 which should fix the performance issues some players have been experiencing.

    Best Regards,


    Your OGame Team

    A hotfix for performance issues? Nope, didn't fix anything.


    5. Next

    Quote from piink

    Dear community,

    we had a hotfix version applied to the PTS today at some point to fix several things from the last patch.

    [Bugfix] The loading times have been improved significantly.
    [Bugfix] The admin and banned acounts do not show up at the leaderboard any longer.


    Your OGame Team.

    Finally! Loading times improved significantly.

    Anything fixed? No.


    And now there's v8.1, and we all know it didn't fix anything, but on the contrary.

    Whatever, not the point I wanna make here.


    So to conclude, we had 5 announcements, and in every one of them there are promised performance/lag/server error fixes.

    Neither one of these brought the promised to live servers, if anything, it only made it worse.


    I don't know the reasoning behind this, I can understand that maybe it is some sort of attempt at damage control, to say the players what they want to hear because of the increasing outrage and complaining on the forums.

    It might also mean that the developers did promise but did not deliver what was asked.


    All in all, please, in the future, do not announce things of fiction, whether intentional or not.

    We deserve better.


    Thanks for reading

    Goodbye old friend.

    It has been a good run (2005ish - 2020).

    We provide the statements Gameforge wishes announced to the players - nothing more.

    We have not delivered any false promises.

    We are merely messengers at which you are throwing stones.

    Simple as that.


    However, I can understand based on the PTS experiences it was truly believed these upgrades will fix issues experienced by players.

    It seems, the test environment has issues adequately mimicking the live environment.

    It is another issue Gameforge will need to resolve.

    Kewlness, I understand you're just the messenger.

    However, there have been posts by piink, she is an official GF representative.

    Also, you didn't come up with the idea of making a thread about the upcoming fix without prior notice from GF representative, so I'm not blaming you, I'm blaming GF.

    Not sure who, COMAs, PR department, or the Developers and QA's.

    But I can assure you, one or more of these above stated are guilty.


    False promises are delivered, as you can see above in the examples, and again, I'm not blaming you.

    All I'm saying that this strategy is not good and false promises have been delivered.


    I'm just suggesting, purely to GF, please, next time, when you announce something make sure it is tested and it works.

    Again, don't give us fiction and false promises, whether by piink, prongs or via volunteer messengers.

    Goodbye old friend.

    It has been a good run (2005ish - 2020).

    In fact all this is what is handed down from the tech team of Gameforge. The community management has the task to manage the community. they don't test anything - that qould be ther QA department (Quality Assurance). When something is posted it has to be assumed it has been tested and is working. I agree that at times some things are broke when rolled out on the live servers, sadly that is entirely our of anyone's hands here.



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    Quote from Cassandra Vandales

    In fact all this is what is handed down from the tech team of Gameforge. The community management has the task to manage the community. they don't test anything - that qould be ther QA department (Quality Assurance). When something is posted it has to be assumed it has been tested and is working. I agree that at times some things are broke when rolled out on the live servers, sadly that is entirely our of anyone's hands here.

    Bold of you to assume QA exists at all

    Quote from Di5turbed
    Quote from Cassandra Vandales

    In fact all this is what is handed down from the tech team of Gameforge. The community management has the task to manage the community. they don't test anything - that qould be ther QA department (Quality Assurance). When something is posted it has to be assumed it has been tested and is working. I agree that at times some things are broke when rolled out on the live servers, sadly that is entirely our of anyone's hands here.

    Bold of you to assume QA exists at all

    Ye, I read on Discord they have only one guy Baldrov, who is also a QA for other games.

    Goodbye old friend.

    It has been a good run (2005ish - 2020).

    Quote from nanogram
    Quote from Di5turbed
    Quote from Cassandra Vandales

    In fact all this is what is handed down from the tech team of Gameforge. The community management has the task to manage the community. they don't test anything - that qould be ther QA department (Quality Assurance). When something is posted it has to be assumed it has been tested and is working. I agree that at times some things are broke when rolled out on the live servers, sadly that is entirely our of anyone's hands here.

    Bold of you to assume QA exists at all

    Ye, I read on Discord they have only one guy Baldrov, who is also a QA for other games.

    May I commend that brave sole soul for fantastic job in last 2 years.
    I know it is hard to copy existing database and test it in real conditions.:rolleyes2:
    Once again great job you worth every € you got

    if is only 1 guy QA then is understandable ... :censored:.... they should at least make a decent team if they squeeze DM out of us with every uppdate.. at least we deserve a playable game.. not one full of bugs and performance issuess.. never been worse than now


    Insults are not allowed.


    - kewlness

    Edited once, last by kewlness ().

    Quote from Di5turbed

    Bold of you to assume QA exists at all


    I don't assume, I know. :P


    Quote from nanogram

    Ye, I read on Discord they have only one guy Baldrov, who is also a QA for other games.


    Where did you read that?



    It is true though that they lack people afaik and that they are hiring.



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    Quote from Cassandra Vandales

    Where did you read that?



    It is true though that they lack people afaik and that they are hiring.

    On discord, always seen that Baldrov and Weteha guy, knowing Weteha is a dev, i did a history search on baldrov and he said he's a QA for ogame, but for other games aswell.

    On the topic of lack of people, they should consider remote work / hiring staff from other EU countries.

    But they have some stupid rule to must be in Karlsruhe.


    Maybe their QA approach is wrong.

    There are a lot of techniques, but the most common and reliable ones are automated tests.

    I've written about that in another thread in here.

    Covering the game with couple of hundreds tests would relieve them of so much work when every patch is deployed.

    Goodbye old friend.

    It has been a good run (2005ish - 2020).

    WeTeHa is actually the OGame boss more or less. Not a dev in that sense.


    They do that, but the qualifications needed aren't met by all. And yes, it is easier still that the people need to be at KA: The reason is simply that this is more reliable than people not being there. There used to be CoMas not at KA and there were many issues with it.



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    The issue is TDD is nice in theory but it significantly relies on the quality of the tests.

    If the standard is code coverage, then you will wind up with nonsense tests just to get to the coverage threshold.


    I am not sure what kind of testing setup the developers/QA actually have.

    I suspect the bigger issue though is the test environment does not accurately reflect the actual live servers.

    On the test servers a lot of the lag issues improved with version 8.1 but on the live servers it actually got worse.

    That is honestly indicative of a test environment which is not like the production environment.

    Slight correction, Baldrov is not a oGame QA, hes QA for other games but not oGame, hes on the discord cause he plays the game

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    Nahh, I wasn't talking about TDD.

    TDD is a fairly new thing, most certainly not something Legor and the small crew around him used in 2003 or whenever ogame was first developed.

    It is however a nice idea to consider if there is ever a redesign/rework of the game, it would certainly make the job easier.


    Since oGame is a browser game, no better tool to test it with but with a framework like Selenium/Pupeteer or w/e.

    This way, they would be testing the UI and the functionality of the game.

    And for APIs use postman or smthn like that.


    And yes, PTS makes no sense, there are obviously crucial differences PTS->Live server - making PTS kind of unnecessary.

    Some time ago when I was working on a project, we had a few development environments and a production one, but unlike oGame, development environments were the slower ones, since there were multiple of them per server and a weaker machine was used.

    Production servers were the buffed ones, so we really never paid any attention to lags and response time which were 1-2 seconds greater than the production.


    Yet again, that wasn't a game based purely on time/timing, so yeah.

    Goodbye old friend.

    It has been a good run (2005ish - 2020).

    Edited 2 times, last by nanogram ().

    The PTT imho only serves the purpose of testing new game features and allow players to give feedback. (as long as PTT doesn't reflect live behaviour in terms of performance)

    I kind of like the new strategy of rolling out updates on 1 uni to test and then rolling it out to all later. But this only works if updates are delayed depending on how that 1 uni reacts to the update.

    Quote from Nixian

    The PTT imho only serves the purpose of testing new game features and allow players to give feedback. (as long as PTT doesn't reflect live behaviour in terms of performance)

    I kind of like the new strategy of rolling out updates on 1 uni to test and then rolling it out to all later. But this only works if updates are delayed depending on how that 1 uni reacts to the update.

    I dislike that strategy, no updates should be tested on a production environment.

    I see why you think that is good, better less damage on 1 uni than on all of them, but it's unfair to that 1 uni (or were there 3 from 3 different communities?).

    Goodbye old friend.

    It has been a good run (2005ish - 2020).

    Quote from nanogram
    Quote from Nixian

    The PTT imho only serves the purpose of testing new game features and allow players to give feedback. (as long as PTT doesn't reflect live behaviour in terms of performance)

    I kind of like the new strategy of rolling out updates on 1 uni to test and then rolling it out to all later. But this only works if updates are delayed depending on how that 1 uni reacts to the update.

    I dislike that strategy, no updates should be tested on a production environment.

    I see why you think that is good, better less damage on 1 uni than on all of them, but it's unfair to that 1 uni (or were there 3 from 3 different communities?).

    Making PTS or production closer to live servers would obviously be the fix, but if that is not possible, you have to make do with what you got.


    This however is a classic trolley problem situation. Do you test on 1 server and potentially hurt 1 server, or do you just roll it out live and hurt everyone?

    Or you copy real uni on pts , I know, shocking concept.:rolleyes2:

    That might not be enough, it would need the same player base as real unis