T-Bag

There is a sticky thread which basically says they don't post as much on here due to all the idiots on here, and I don't blame them.

tigerhgrrrrrr

Surely they should get on here & reply to questions though?, just ignore the idiots. I have no beef with SI but they must watch that they dont get considered as acting "above" the games fanbase.

For what its worth I think FM07 was shxxe but FM08 is awesome.

Lyssien

I am too missing the SI people in these fora.
I guess they don't enjoy being here anymore, but I still don't understand it: The same "vitriol" and slating happened when CM4 came out, but they were around.

I really don't understand this. They are just tired, I think.

ZaPPPa

Absolute rubbish. </BLOCKQUOTE>
How about you start with making these forums nicer by not telling others that they're naive, stupid and talk absolute rubbish.

Or, how about you tell us why the testing regimen is good enough in your opinion? Many of us have intimate knowledge of testing processes and I'm sure many would like to know if SI is using some of the latest and most succesfull methods.

Serpico

Ackter gets frustrated because he sees the same mud throw around at the testers all the time from people who (through no fault of their own) are ignorant of testing process. He does need a slap every now and then to get him to calm down a bit.

DJ

UELLfan

Indeed DJ.


On another note,
For those who haven't tested it's difficult to understand that's 99.99% sure a bug making it to the gold stage has already been spotted and logged beforehand.

However, it's easier to spot and log a bug than to fix it completely. The line has to be drawn somewhere and once the bugs considered 'critical' have been sorted it's only a matter of how many irritating bugs can be sorted before the game/patch has to be released.

ZaPPPa

You don't think there's a lot of software engineers on these forums?

I have said this before, but in a game that features full simulations, bugs should not be spotted by testers, but by a testing suite. In old-fashioned development teams bugs can be hard to fix because they are detected late and the programmer has made too many changes between the previous version and this one. Or, and to me this is an indication SI is using the old-fashioned methods, often new bugs are introduced by bug fixes and are not detected until a human tests the new version.

If features are automatically (run-time) tested after every compilation, the developer has a much better idea of which line(s) of code caused it. If that same bug is not detected until a week later by a human beta tester, the tester will first have to convince the developer that the bug exists, then has to go back and forth trying to pinpoint it, then the developer has to go through multiple versions trying to detect when the bug was introduced, figure out what code was changed and then finally pinpoint the exact line(s) that caused it... Now, which method is faster do you think?

In other words, the testing method can most certainly be the problem.

Ackter

And a method which has limited scope for such an open-ended title such as FM.

Sureit works for the majority of games, but the majority of games are completely set in stone. FM isn't even close to being "set" in any way.

r0x0r

Exactly. This goes hand in hand with people calling for no more patches this year, just writing it off and getting on with FM09, with the aim of making it more bug free...

They don't seem to realise that right now, there's a bulk of code called "Football Manager". We play it, testers play it, SI get feedback and try to improve it. Every now and then we get a newer version in the form of a "patch", and once a year we get the latest version in the form of a "new game", but at heart, FM09 will be FM08, just with a year's more work and a few new features. SI could release a patch a week or a game every 2 years, FM10 will still be the same game when it hits the stores...

After all, it isn't a new game, it's merely "Football Manager", at the state it's evolved into in October 2010.