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+--- Thread: What Every Mapler Should Know (/showthread.php?tid=51268)
What Every Mapler Should Know - Locked - 2012-05-31
Eos Wrote:Every single "We're working on it" announcement they've ever bothered to make for an issue has reiterated that they're waiting on Korea to fix it.
Publisher != Developer
No one said the situation was unique to us. Other locales do the same thing. JMS is the only one I'm aware of that does anything themselves, or appears to, and we've never figured that little quirk out.
If you want to contest it do it right - Provide evidence it's not true. I guarantee you'll find more supporting it than disproving it.
Well I didn't mention anything about publisher vs developer relationship so I have really no idea where that came from. If there's anything I don't understand is why it's forbidding for them to do their own work under that situation. Could they not fix the bugs themselves? Are they not intelligent enough? Do they lack the manpower? I just don't understand why they have this system in place that is just so inefficient. The source provided states that the process itself takes 6-7 months to process. While I don't know how Nexon handles or manages its time how does this apply to the bugfixes announced in this patch? They are most very recent, some from the patch beforehand. Do they plan these out beforehand just to give themselves a pat on the back?
What Every Mapler Should Know - SaptaZapta - 2012-05-31
This is the way I understand it:
The source code, and the programmers, for all versions, are in Korea. This does not mean that "KMS programmers fix GMS bugs". There is a "GMS team" in Korea (and employed by NexonKR), who work (almost?) exclusively on code for GMS. However, if they run into difficulties, they have the KMS programmers (who are more familiar with the infrastructure, presumably) there to consult with.
What Every Mapler Should Know - Eos - 2012-05-31
Locked Wrote:Well I didn't mention anything about publisher vs developer relationship so I have really no idea where that came from. If there's anything I don't understand is why it's forbidding for them to do their own work under that situation. Could they not fix the bugs themselves? Are they not intelligent enough? Do they lack the manpower? I just don't understand why they have this system in place that is just so inefficient. The source provided states that the process itself takes 6-7 months to process. While I don't know how Nexon handles or manages its time how does this apply to the bugfixes announced in this patch? They are most very recent, some from the patch beforehand. Do they plan these out beforehand just to give themselves a pat on the back?
You answered your first question with your second question.
What prevents them from doing it is they're not the developer. You're asking why the guy at the counter at McDonald's isn't going back there and making your food for you so it gets done faster. It's not his job. He's there to hand you the food someone else makes. If they pineapple up the order, he's not going to go back and do it for you, he's going to pass that info back to the "cooks" and they're going to fix it and he'll pass the new version to you.
Nexon America does have a rudimentary development team, which is really more of an implementation team. They mention the server engineers and whatnot in the dev blogs as partnering. They're the ones who take what Korea gives them and install it. Just because you can screw a light bulb into a socket though does not make you an electric engineer capable of building a better light bulb, or even capable of understanding why the bulb isn't working the way the person you got it from said it should.
Nexon confuses the issue themselves by using the word "developer" too loosely. It can mean both the actual programming people and can refer to the entire creative design staff that come up with the ideas and those two are pretty different. Take Eurydice here ; http://www.southperry.net/showthread.php?t=41629 "Next week Ill be travelling to Korea to talk with the other MapleStory developers about future plans." That can have two very different meanings. Is E going to discuss technical aspects with other programmers? or is E going to discuss overarching thematic design with the creative team to figure out how to incorporate Nexon America's exclusive content into the presently evolving paradigms and themes? That simple statement and the questions it raises right there casts doubt on exactly what E has meant all this time by claiming to be a "developer". What they describe the developer as doing here http://www.southperry.net/showthread.php?t=39014 ", the developer is delivering all of the new files and a list of changes to the server engineer and the producer" sounds closer to actual programming, but is ambiguous as to whether or not they're referring to a person who's actually physically present or one who is online FTPing stuff across to them. Even the "Once the maintenance is over and the game is stable, the developers and server engineer go home to sleep." doesn't really clear that up.
As to the overarching question of why. Why are they so ambiguous? Why does their paradigm seem so stupid? You'd have to ask them, but you have to consider that MapleStory is a franchise. It's not several independent companies running their own game willy-nilly. Everything that gets merged into the game has to be potentially be merged into all copies in all locales or they run the risk of forking too far to be compatible with each other. Centralizing development ensures that everything that gets added in has better chances of of remaining interoperable than it would if you set 10 developers down in different rooms and let them go on a different copy of the source for three years then tried to put what each of them came up with independently back into a single coherent game. Even in Korea they're broken out into separate teams for separate locales, but because they're physically present with each other they can better interact and try to avoid stepping all over each other. It does not always work as we've seen numerous times, but it has a lot more chance of success where the teams are together than if they were scattered.
What Every Mapler Should Know - NealK - 2012-06-22
Indeed, I was ignorant about some things... Thanks for enlightening me!
What Every Mapler Should Know - NealK - 2012-06-22
So, what am I supposed to do now? I think there is a bug on the forum because I can't go anywhere except for this page! Or maybe my comments are on moderation...
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family tree maker free
What Every Mapler Should Know - Kamala - 2012-06-28
Thanks for these important notes!
What Every Mapler Should Know - alwzn4vr - 2012-07-01
What every mapler should know is that Nexon has no clue about software quality control. I haven't played in 3 years and came back to see what's going on. Same crappy non tested releases as per usual. I suspect that the terms 'unit test' and 'integration test' are foreign concepts to Nexon.
What Every Mapler Should Know - Ariza - 2012-07-09
ok i got it
What Every Mapler Should Know - Kevin645 - 2012-07-19
Got it
What Every Mapler Should Know - Cere - 2012-07-19
Eos Wrote:A GM is generally an entry-level employee who sits at a desk all day doing shifts of one of two things: patrolling in game to deal with suspicious activity, and responding to tickets by searching an online knowledge base for what the approved resolution for the nearest possible match is, and closing the tickets with that answer. Most of their answers are copy pasted because they have no ability to do much else.You know, what I wonder is -- if most of what they do is nothing but checking against a "knowledge base" for C&Pable replies, what is the point of the ticketing system? Like, I've gotten the same "post it on the forums" response thrice in a row to different bug reports, which were all immediately closed with no further reply... why don't they just remove the Bug/Glitch category entirely and direct users to the forums right away instead?
Not that I know how effective the forums are, but since it's the official recommendation...
What Every Mapler Should Know - SaptaZapta - 2012-07-19
Cere Wrote:You know, what I wonder is -- if most of what they do is nothing but checking against a "knowledge base" for C&Pable replies, what is the point of the ticketing system? Like, I've gotten the same "post it on the forums" response thrice in a row to different bug reports, which were all immediately closed with no further reply... why don't they just remove the Bug/Glitch category entirely and direct users to the forums right away instead?
Not that I know how effective the forums are, but since it's the official recommendation...
This policy is new.
The response to a Bug type ticket used to be (after a few months, of course) "I have forwarded this issue to the proper department" or something of the sort. The forums were almost completely ignored. Hime would respond in maybe a handful of threads each month, and usually the response would be "log a ticket"...
Now they have a lot more people (they don't call them GMs, for some reason) browsing their forums, and decided to get rid of the huge backlog of Bug tickets, assuming that most of them refer to bugs that are no longer relevant (since the content they were in has been removed or drastically changed anyway). So they now send that "if you're still having this problem post it on the forums". Personally I don't like this method because they don't seem to have any system to make sure every thread is seen. Your issue can easily be lost in the spam.
What Every Mapler Should Know - Cere - 2012-07-19
SaptaZapta Wrote:This policy is new.I see. Yeah, when I went to browse the official forums, I saw that a lot of threadmakers had not bothered to check the Known Issues list first :S
The response to a Bug type ticket used to be (after a few months, of course) "I have forwarded this issue to the proper department" or something of the sort. The forums were almost completely ignored. Hime would respond in maybe a handful of threads each month, and usually the response would be "log a ticket"...
Now they have a lot more people (they don't call them GMs, for some reason) browsing their forums, and decided to get rid of the huge backlog of Bug tickets, assuming that most of them refer to bugs that are no longer relevant (since the content they were in has been removed or drastically changed anyway). So they now send that "if you're still having this problem post it on the forums". Personally I don't like this method because they don't seem to have any system to make sure every thread is seen. Your issue can easily be lost in the spam.
What Every Mapler Should Know - Octopi - 2012-07-23
After reading this I got the impression Nexon wasn't liked or something... Yes I read all this when It directed me to it after registering.
What Every Mapler Should Know - Leaves - 2012-07-23
SaptaZapta Wrote:So they now send that "if you're still having this problem post it on the forums". Personally I don't like this method because they don't seem to have any system to make sure every thread is seen. Your issue can easily be lost in the spam.
Well, it would seem that their thought-process behind this is "if it's a big enough issue, it'll garner a few pages of a thread, and we'll see it". While not the best possible policy to actually locate ALL issues, it is a far more effective policy than their previous one, which was "ignore all issues regardless of their severity (unless absolutely game-breaking)". I think they're improving quite a large deal there, so yeah.
They've realized that their manpower cannot possibly handle the large amount of tickets, and have decided it is far better to centralize all reports in the forums. This is a smart decision that considers the resources at hand.
What Every Mapler Should Know - qnanyang - 2012-11-28
I agree the point of this game is to have FUN.
What Every Mapler Should Know - Robben - 2012-12-22
Good notes - even for a veteran Mapler like me
What Every Mapler Should Know - crazyboy123 - 2013-01-15
nice thread
What Every Mapler Should Know - dtgwer - 2013-01-15
So happy to see some maple forum have stuff on this....
What Every Mapler Should Know - xgolddaggerx - 2013-01-16
nicely put. ^ - ^