Keep this in mind...

[BornBetter]

Every year a new NBA2K comes out this forum is flooded with "this game sucks" and "why did they change this" or "why didn't they update this"? Believe me, I know where all of you are coming from because I went through the same thing last year with 2K12. I bought it on release and was ready to trade it in immediately because of all the problems it had on first release. Let me reiterate that, FIRST release.

I'm no game programmer but I am a web developer. Trust me when I say that first releases are never 100%, especially when you have a deadline. If the 2K developers had all the time in the world then yeah, we should expect nothing less than perfection. However, someone obviously higher up the food chain has had them program a whole new gameplay system (essentially) and implement all these new features within a deadline. Of course the game isn't going to be anywhere near perfect.

Don't get me wrong, everyone has the right to complain and I've seen a lot of valid complaints. But I've also seen a lot of people blowing their lids over the first release of this game. 2K12 was utter **** on release day, then several patches later it got better and better. Have faith guys, I know it's hard but hopefully a lot of the stuff posted in these forums can and will be patched.

Just my two cents.

[Sportsflibs]

Re: Keep this in mind...

Good point. They have a hard dead line.

On the other side if people aren't vocal then they don't get the fixes they want.

[infam0us]

Re: Keep this in mind...

I don't mind the complaining as long as its organized. No need for like 30 threads about the scoreboard bug or the glitch with VC in marketplace. Mods have been doing a good job of keeping things organized.

[kjjnesb]

Re: Keep this in mind...

I've come to be accepting and understand of launch day bugs and glitches but not frustrating design decisions. The Auto Save thing has made making draft classes and editing rostersi n Association a pure nightmare lol

[demfl]

Re: Keep this in mind...

I'm sorry but having a deadline is no excuse for major bugs on release. If someone is running a fast food place, they wouldn't serve a half cooked burger just to cut down on wait time for customers.

If deadlines are the cause of releasing a complete game with bugs, well how about starting earlier. This post isn't pointed at 2k but at the notion of the deadline excuse.

How much would it cost a company to complete the game a month early and hire 10 people on a 2 week contract to only play a certain mode and report back with bugs etc?

[BornBetter]

Re: Keep this in mind...

I'm sorry but having a deadline is no excuse for major bugs on release. If someone is running a fast food place, they wouldn't serve a half cooked burger just to cut down on wait time for customers.

If deadlines are the cause of releasing a complete game with bugs, well how about starting earlier. This post isn't pointed at 2k but at the notion of the deadline excuse.

How much would it cost a company to complete the game a month early and hire 10 people on a 2 week contract to only play a certain mode and report back with bugs etc?

Are you seriously comparing a fast food place to programming a video game? Do you think Windows was completely bug free when they released it? I remember when XP came out and they were presenting it to the public and they got a blue screen of death. **** happens is all I'm trying to say. When you work with technology you learn to understand this.

[Trackball]

Re: Keep this in mind...

Are you seriously comparing a fast food place to programming a video game? Do you think Windows was completely bug free when they released it? I remember when XP came out and they were presenting it to the public and they got a blue screen of death. **** happens is all I'm trying to say. When you work with technology you learn to understand this.

It was Windows 98, actually. And even then, to be fair, it was a very early build.

<iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/eKtGXPfabLQ" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" width="420"></iframe>

Anyway, yeah, hard deadlines suck.

[BornBetter]

Re: Keep this in mind...

It was Windows 98, actually. And even then, to be fair, it was a very early build.

My bad, at least I got the OS right lol

[demfl]

Re: Keep this in mind...

I only used the burger example to simplify "barney style" my point. Windows is completely different than 2k games.

Using 2k12 as an example, are you telling me 2k didn't noticed messed up team stats, 0 dollar contracts in association, etc; many of 2k12 bugs were so obvious.

[BornBetter]

Re: Keep this in mind...

I only used the burger example to simplify "barney style" my point. Windows is completely different than 2k games.

Using 2k12 as an example, are you telling me 2k didn't noticed messed up team stats, 0 dollar contracts in association, etc; many of 2k12 bugs were so obvious.

I'm sure they did, but what I'm saying is they probably had other features prioritized over all these other things that we haven't seen fixed. They implemented a whole new play style. Hence why I brought up the deadline thing. You can only do so much within a specified deadline.

Obviously you're not aware how a development team works. You have a bazillion meetings about what to work on and what needs to be implemented. It all gets prioritized and then the code for it is written. Then the code is reviewed and tested. Repeat this for every piece of functionality in the game. That is the way the development world is, a lot of annoying red tape and baby steps to get to certain points. When you only have ONE year to develop a game of course you aren't going to cover all of the bases.

With that being said, if you want to point the finger at anyone point it at whoever makes the decisions on what goes into the game and what doesn't. Our priorities are a lot different than that of the business analysts. They are concerned about major things that make the game sell and not the shade of blue on the New York Knick uniforms. Its sad to say, but thats just how it is.

[MrBigShot1]

Re: Keep this in mind...

Are you seriously comparing a fast food place to programming a video game? Do you think Windows was completely bug free when they released it? I remember when XP came out and they were presenting it to the public and they got a blue screen of death. **** happens is all I'm trying to say. When you work with technology you learn to understand this.

This literally made me laugh....lol

For me its not the gameplay issues, its the removed features like uploading a slider set, and being unable to turn off autosave.

[ruxpinke]

Re: Keep this in mind...

the ability or lack thereof to save multiple slider sets is mind boggling. always made a vs CPU set, and a head to head set. cant do that now.

[basehead617]

Re: Keep this in mind...

One other thing people forget is that sometimes fixing a bug at the very end inadvertently causes another right before final submission. It's not like all bugs are seen throughout the whole QA cycle. For the very late changes sometimes they're missed because there's literally only a day or two of QA having it. Dev teams try to minimize late changes because of this danger but you can't get rid of them entirely.

Some things like that are found and they can't take the submission back due to deadlines (which they pay huge fines to the league and to retailers if they miss by the way), so they get it ready for a patch - sometimes day 1 if its bad enough. Also notice some people don't freeze quitting a first myplayer or association game but some people do. Those are the hardest to fix. What if NOBODY in QA got it, now they're scrambling to figure out what it is?

In NBA 2K a lot of stuff can be fixed via roster updates too. As PC people and modders know, the 'roster' contains far more than people think. It's not just related to a list of players and ratings etc.

The one year cycle is really rough on development. If you think about it, people are promoting and supporting the release for a couple months after - and then the next year's goes into QA like 3 months before the release. That's really like a 7 month cycle where you have no other distractions and you don't have to have the game fully working/testable and be in bug fix mode. I don't envy it.

[BornBetter]

Re: Keep this in mind...

One other thing people forget is that sometimes fixing a bug at the very end inadvertently causes another right before final submission. It's not like all bugs are seen throughout the whole QA cycle. For the very late changes sometimes they're missed because there's literally only a day or two of QA having it. Dev teams try to minimize late changes because of this danger but you can't get rid of them entirely.

Some things like that are found and they can't take the submission back due to deadlines (which they pay huge fines to the league and to retailers if they miss by the way), so they get it ready for a patch - sometimes day 1 if its bad enough. Also notice some people don't freeze quitting a first myplayer or association game but some people do. Those are the hardest to fix. What if NOBODY in QA got it, now they're scrambling to figure out what it is?

In NBA 2K a lot of stuff can be fixed via roster updates too. As PC people and modders know, the 'roster' contains far more than people think. It's not just related to a list of players and ratings etc.

The one year cycle is really rough on development. If you think about it, people are promoting and supporting the release for a couple months after - and then the next year's goes into QA like 3 months before the release. That's really like a 7 month cycle where you have no other distractions and you don't have to have the game fully working/testable and be in bug fix mode. I don't envy it.

You hit the nail on the head

[The 24th Letter]

Lol it's always funny when people look at it like 'this has BEEN an issue, why hasn't it been fixed yet" it sounds so simple....and before I got into my field I may have thought the same. I've been on tech release teams that worked on two year projects. We do a bug sweep every two months, do client testing, trial releases. And guess what happens the day of release? BUGS.....and of course we have clients and employees coming at is hard to fix it. We also have employees saying things like "you did all this extra stuff, while you could've just fixed this". I hold off on cursing them out because I like my job, lol. I just know how hard we worked to finally get the release out.

What they don't get is that we had a deadline, and hey, we actually tried to fix what you asked but it caused a crap load of other issues so we had to move on for the sake of time. Point is, with technology, there's hardly just a 'switch' you can flip to fix things.

And hey, I was supposed to be off this week, but guess why I have to go in. The "patch" we just released caused more issues...sound familiar?

/endjobrant