2010-03-19, 04:45 PM
I personally think their primary issue is within infrastructure of the company itself with the side issue of not enough QA. As a former QA tester myself (it's 9$ an hour for more or less untrained people by the way, averaging 25-65 hours a week), I can understand that games have bugs due to their nature. As an example, the console titles I worked on averaged 23 thousand bugs in the database before release. Granted, a large number of these were from Alpha and the incomplete nature of it, but still not something to shrug off. The way we were structured had us directly next to the developers in terms of location except when licensing outside titles or getting a company that made a contract with us for production under our name for getting our aid on production. Even in those cases, the communication between departments was key on timely progress.
Now, MS is an online game with continually updated content which means changes in code at all times. In these cases, I'd like to think that the ties between departments are even closer; but in NEXON's case, I highly doubt it. With the developers overseas, you'd want them to have an entire department just for communications between the parties, which again, I doubt is the case for NEXON. Given the extreme time zone difference, I assume that it takes a while for them to convey things if there is a problem, so they probably have some in house devs for patch work when needed. If they do, we already know they aren't at the level needed. Sure, I know as a coder that it is fairly difficult to read another's code to look for issues since everyone has their own style, but in a professional environment, they should be expected to band-aid things properly at least until they can contact the primary devs. If they admit that they aren't capable, the company as a whole should take the responsible course of action and close the game in the meanwhile (assuming it is bad enough).
As it is apparent by their history, something needs to change. Be it infrastructure, adding to the in house QA, or just adding more comment lines to the code for new recruits to understand going on that can be stored in a backup while the official version has it removed for space saving sake.
But all this is coming from someone with experience in the field, so let me put out the obvious stuff. When a skill isn't working, it isn't that hard to notice. When you're shooting through an enemy with no apparent evidence that they should be avoiding your attack, something is wrong. And flash based? Have people forgotten sprites in their entirety?
Now, MS is an online game with continually updated content which means changes in code at all times. In these cases, I'd like to think that the ties between departments are even closer; but in NEXON's case, I highly doubt it. With the developers overseas, you'd want them to have an entire department just for communications between the parties, which again, I doubt is the case for NEXON. Given the extreme time zone difference, I assume that it takes a while for them to convey things if there is a problem, so they probably have some in house devs for patch work when needed. If they do, we already know they aren't at the level needed. Sure, I know as a coder that it is fairly difficult to read another's code to look for issues since everyone has their own style, but in a professional environment, they should be expected to band-aid things properly at least until they can contact the primary devs. If they admit that they aren't capable, the company as a whole should take the responsible course of action and close the game in the meanwhile (assuming it is bad enough).
As it is apparent by their history, something needs to change. Be it infrastructure, adding to the in house QA, or just adding more comment lines to the code for new recruits to understand going on that can be stored in a backup while the official version has it removed for space saving sake.
But all this is coming from someone with experience in the field, so let me put out the obvious stuff. When a skill isn't working, it isn't that hard to notice. When you're shooting through an enemy with no apparent evidence that they should be avoiding your attack, something is wrong. And flash based? Have people forgotten sprites in their entirety?