2.6 release pushed back to 18th December

[smilodon]

I think you misunderstand me Smilo. I applaud their open involvement in shaping the game, that's unique. I work in a company where we use an agile development approach and the main principle of agile is to deliver fast and often engaging the user and feeding back regularly, then retrospective review, and improve. I think that works best when you actually have products to deliver in smaller chunks. CIG are trying to deliver large products then as a result take a lot longer to get something out to the user base. Now perhaps the 800 main testers are seeing this progress and the rest of the Alpha backers don't get that insight but that in itself goes against agile as they're excluding the majority of users or customers. I think it's commendable they added more testers from 2.6j onwards but maybe they would move faster with more data from more test client machines (not the manual bug reports method).

Aha corrected I stand.

Regarding the Evocati, they do have to sign an NDA as mentioned and I believe, often start with a game that will not actually play. Basically the Evocati start with very cut down versions that have a large number of game breaking bugs. A lot more than I would be willing to tolerate. At the very least I'd want to pick my way through the various elements of the game and find something I could load and try. While Crusader, Arena Commander and Star Marine were all borked for me on day one of the PTU at least I could get to Arc Corp and the Hanger to do some bug hunting there.

Much like the early build of 2.6 which dumped a very large number of players out of Star Marine and Arena Commander. Normally CIG won't release a version to the wider world until these 'Blockers' are fixed. To their credit though I've not seen many backers ranting on Reddit etc about how messed up the PTU was on day one (it's quite slick now).

[Galatoni]

I actually agree with what albert is saying.

Generally speaking the agile philosophy should be something along the lines of "short iterative cycles". It seems the main time this is done is when the PTU is spooled up and people are thrown at it. CIG is well aware of a crash, I would very much hope their bug reporting code would give them some good analytics to work off. I can see what you're saying, but the way I see it, if they wanted to have different experiences (ie - a more polished experience for some in the form of the PU) they should have something more permanent.

Either way you slice it though, workplaces will often take a particular version of agile, or customise it to their needs. I think you've gotta take some of this with a pinch of salt. They're making a vast sum of money, and as such should perhaps bring in some proper QA process, but then the paying backers will complain. Alternatively they could use the people that have paid to play it to test, they'll still whine, but they'll save them money. As said though, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't.

[Sneakytiger]

new update for 2.6 on the ptu has gone out this morning only about 9gb tho .

[Jamoe]

Tried for about an hour last night to "play test" Star Marine but it kept disconnecting every 2-3 minutes, almost always before the games had started. Hopefully they have resolved that because it's not even testable at the moment.

[albert]

I actually agree with what albert is saying......

They're making a vast sum of money, and as such should perhaps bring in some proper QA process, but then the paying backers will complain. Alternatively they could use the people that have paid to play it to test, they'll still whine, but they'll save them money. As said though, they're damned if they do and damned if they don't.

Every dev should be working with a high enough level of craftsmanship to a) care about their rollout and b) be able to monitor accurately during deployment and know when it makes positive or negative impact. Small group A/B testing with data driven rollout decisions works better.

Our website makes 15x what CIG crowdfunded every quarter in net income and we know innovation comes at a cost (yes outages but you make them small enough to measure and not impact the customer but meaningful enough to act upon confidently) but in the long term keeps you ahead of your competitors. We do have over 1000 developers I suppose. Then again the salary market for top Java and Perl devs is far lower than Top gaming devs and designers. Maybe CIG need a mix of both service oriented devs and creative devs/ designers. As usual it's the hard working devOps guy who gets all the pressure and 1/10th of the headcount.

[albert]

Tried for about an hour last night to "play test" Star Marine but it kept disconnecting every 2-3 minutes, almost always before the games had started. Hopefully they have resolved that because it's not even testable at the moment.

They sent out another update over night that was supposed to reduce the network disconnect errors.Good netcode you would think they could get right faster than this, as you say it reduces the test effort data to a bunch of net issues.

[sulky_uk]

Still nothing for the peasants....checked this morning

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[Jamoe]

Yea, I was just lucky with the PTU invite

Star Marine is a lot more playable now. Managed a few games although all ended in disconnects it seems to last a lot longer.

[Sneakytiger]

just wondering if we could have a ptu section under sc on ts for us guys on the ptu.

[Lysander]

As a "peasant" I still do not have access to 2.6 either yet  

[TeaLeaf]

Build 'o' is out and this one is slated as a live release candidate, so I suspect you'll see this one imminently.   The builds have been rolling out on almost a daily basis now.

[smilodon]

and 2.6 is a GO!

[RogueTaylor]

and 2.6 is a GO!

Nooooooooooooooo! Now the peasants can join us :devil::flirty:

[sulky_uk]

Not yet too hungover from xmas party to care....oh the life of a peasant

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