Dimitris
Posts: 13282
Joined: 7/31/2005 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: RobotCriminal Wow really didn't mean to start an argument here, sorry about that. My point was this: 1: If more people submit crash logs/save files then developers have more data to work with and things get fixed faster and more efficiently. 2: Things getting fixed faster and more efficiently equals a better game experience for everyone. 3: Streamlining the process of submitting saves/crash dumps leads to a lot more submissions than just relying on the good will of people to do it. It's hardly uncommon in the game industry to try to make this as easy as possible for people to do, I've seen a number of games go so far as to basically wrap it up and then just ask for end-user permission to fire it off. #3 is mostly what I was getting at. Ocelot might have worded it a good bit more strongly then I would have, but he isn't wrong. I understand that no one writes perfect software, and that no matter how hard you QA and beta test things are bound to crop up when you release it to thousands of man hours of end user use on a ton of different hardware configs, and that why I went through the trouble of registering an account and wrapping things up nicely to try to help. However the bottom line is that I just paid 50 bucks for a piece of software that crashes a whole lot, and frankly a lot of end users are a lot more likely to just smack the close button and go to bed instead of trying to find what forum its supposed to be submitted on. Pointing people in the right direction or implementing some semi-automated version (ie /Crash folder with logs and save files) would probably get a lot more submissions for you guys. That was my suggestion, and it was from a standpoint of trying to help you out with data collection, not attack you. Sorry if it came across wrong. We appreciate the concern, but frankly this is the first time someone comes here and tells us "the game crashed and I didn't know which forum to post to". (It's not like we don't provide quite clear tech-support instructions both on this site and on Steam). So you can understand the "WTF" reaction to this. Most of the issue reports we usually have are what you would call "logic flaws" (ie. why is my aircraft not shooting at this target) and these are really hard to explain simply by a semi-automatic submitted report. This is part of why there has not been a big incentive to automate this process until now. The crash thing is a recent spike which looks to be tied to specific sound hardware configurations (see here for example: http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3775015 ), so a more appropriate description is you paid 50$ for a piece of software that crashes _on your setup_ a lot. We are working on a fix and as a temporary workaround we recommend de-activating sound effects. We appreciate the fact that after your day job, family obligations, other hobbies etc. you expect a game you bought to be working without hassles (as we all) but please do keep in mind that we too have day jobs (mostly in IT too so we get your thing), families, other obligations and working on a WOTY-grade game is but one of them. We have consciously chosen to be abnormally accessible through these forums and other venues (try talking directly to e.g. the dev team of the COD series on a daily basis, for comparison) in order to support our customer base as much as possible, but this decision is always reversible and hinges on our customers respecting the nature of the game and what we've done (and sacrificed; one day I may write a book...) to make it the success that it is. There is a reason for everything we do (or don't). This is our passion project. If it becomes more like "work" ("I've paid for this! FIX IT!!!"), we may be forced to treat it more as such; something that I'm quite certain the majority of our customers would not prefer. It's up to everyone here to contribute towards this not happening. Thanks!
< Message edited by Sunburn -- 1/5/2015 1:51:23 PM >
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