H1Z1: King of the Kill issued a mea culpa to the community in a letter this past week, admitting that Daybreak has been rushing patches out the door without enough testing. The game’s producer promised that future builds will receive at least a week of internal QA testing before being pushed to the test servers. The downside of this move will be that the patch cadence will be slowed down.
“We were not very happy with our last update in particular,” Daybreak posted. “We broke too many things, and if I could go back I would have done things differently. Luckily, we can go forward and make improvements to our process for the future, but the biggest change to that process is proper testing.”
So what’s H1Z1 working on? Some of the improvements mentioned included limb damage, poison gas that isn’t as hard to see through, and shorter durations for flashbangs.
Samizdat Armsbend I don’t need to be a car designer to critique an automaker attaching the muffler to the driveline.
Blinkenn Starting to doubt that. The fact we’re not seeing any working systems being brought from EQN’s portfolio to Landmark says a lot. I don’t really think EQN had more than a tech demo to be honest. If it had more than that, Landmark wouldn’t be releasing as a stripped down Minecraft wannabe.
Damonvile Patches will be split in two to ease development.
I’m actually missing Smed.
Right, but the initial report said producer and I immediately jumped on it because it struck me as odd.
Like I said before, I know community managers use handles so that makes more sense now.
Probably the black hole that was EQN development costs, sucking money from all profitable DB games.
“Moving forward we will split the patcher from the game, the new PatcherZ will cost $11.99 but previous owners of the previous game will not have to pay as it will be free to them. Also, every additional patch will now cost one dollar. This may sound like a bad idea, but we have like seventeen guys working on monetization and one on patches. Someone here worked on EQ I think so…” *ninja smokebomb*
Samizdat Bannex19 Yeah, pretty much every CM uses a handle and even some developers do too.  Bashiok, Zarhym, Nethaera, Elrar, Tigole, Kalgan, Dahanese, Jouska, Taric, Ryze, Tryndamere, Lyte, etc.
Ironwu I get the feeling that we’re going to see Daybreak resort to mobile games if the H1Z1 esports junk doesn’t pick up steam (and it likely won’t).
Samizdat Armsbend thatchefdude I think the balance is: Play games that are fun. Don’t play games that aren’t. You don’t have to view your subscription as a meal plan for developers but you also don’t have to fabricate a personal vendetta any time a company – and all who work for them – isn’t up to your standards.Â
I guess I just don’t invest enough of my own happiness or disappointment in any entertainment to take it that personally. I feel sympathy for some of the individual workers and don’t believe they deserve heaps of shit-talking, but they aren’t my financial responsibility either. Shit-talking or “coddling” developers are both useless. Just play good games, don’t play bad ones. It can be as neutral as that.