I am sorry as a potential buyer of DBC 17 , I am confused.

[BigAntStudios]

As @knockedin said, no one intends to use the game as it is out of the box. I am a Software Engineer in Test. The food on my plate is got by testing software. What people of my trade do is create drivers, stubs and mocks of components which are not available and run our tests with those to ensure production like(customer like) environment as much as possible. It is lame to say that academy teams weren't available so you couldn't test it. You might have to hire better Quality Assurance folks. I know you are the CEO and get quite angry if people tell you what to do but as a customer who purchased the game on day 1, I feel I have the rights to say it. I feel cheated. I evangelized this game to my friends and made them buy it and now I look like a fool for doing so. I really wanted to like this game. I persisted with it hoping things would be okay. But a couple of days ago, I just hit the breaking point. I had posted in another thread that I am done with this and not going to post anything here again. But since BA staff himself was responding to this thread, I wanted to give one last shot at getting the message across. We humans have lots of hope, don't we

Writing drivers is *nothing* like writing for an open-ended user generated content system - as a professional you should know that.

If you've never written for console then I seriously think you're underestimating the task at hand, even the best of Rockstar and EA have games that are DOA - as the best engineers say, you don't know what you don't know, and you don't know it.

I don't get angry with customers that give us good feedback, indeed we have implemented many changes as requested by people from here. I do get annoyed, not angry, at people that make broad statements such as we need better QA staff based on their Zero years Console QA experience and their assumptions of what the job entails and its constraints.

It is safer to assume that the QA staff shipping any console game are not idiots and that there must be some constraints, issues, or unknowns at play.

Delete the logo data and you will be fine. The next patch will fix the vast, vast majority of issues.

Thanks for supporting us, I do appreciate it, we will learn from any mistakes that have been made.

 

[Symbolism]

Ross; speaking as a guy who has been a CTO for two different software-as-a-service companies providing business critical systems to users that literally can not do normal business if the system is down, there are two things that are absolute rules.

1. If your users are finding literally dozens of bugs within days of release, you have a QA issue that you need to review.
   • I'm assuming you guys have cricket fans within your development studio, any cricket fan giving this game more than an hour of play through would uncover many of the bugs that your users are constantly bringing up in this forum (and no doubt via your support channels)
2. You never do anything except apologise and say "We're taking steps to resolve these issues and ensure that our testing policies are more robust in future" - the moment you start making excuses as to why there are so many bugs in core gameplay is the moment that you'll lose any goodwill from your users.

I appreciate the hell out of you guys taking on Cricket, due to EA ditching it and no one else attempting it. You guys did amazing work with Don Bradman 14, which is why it's so disappointing that this game seems to be a regression in many areas. While some of the bugs around the logo designer and such are ones that I can understand, the sheer amount of bugs in core gameplay really baffles me, almost as much as "Hey, guys, you just don't know how hard it is to test a console game". If I ever spoke to my user base that way, I'd expect to be hauled infront of the board.

 

[BigAntStudios]

<Snip>If I ever spoke to my user base that way, I'd expect to be hauled infront of the board.

I talk plainly and openly on here. I've been in the software business since 1979, written books on programming, etc.., and can play the corporate game if you really want me to do so, I personally think people are quite sick of that (I've certainly had enough "please hold, your call is important to us...." for a lifetime, "We're taking steps to resolve these issues and ensure that our testing policies are more robust in future" would be just like that - people understand we will patch, we will fix, we are on here all hours, Christmas or not, it's a given.).

At the end of the day the buck stops with me, it's my company, I am the board, if I am too brash and direct then I will live with the consequences of my behaviour. In the meantime, you have a direct line to the guy that can implement anything and can get changes made, and most importantly, as I did with DBC14, will fulfil on any promises made.

BTW, I should add that while I understand the issues at play and the tasks we undertook with DBC17, we did too much UGC for one iteration(!), and can therefore understand some of the issues being faced - that said, the entire QA dept of BA are certainly extremely embarrassed by the crashes that the logo's have caused, no one wants to have inflicted this degree of pain on anyone, particularly you guys.

 

[Mr Snrub]

I think Ross's reply here has been absolutely right on the nail. To be honest I think he's starting to receive a little more backlash and a little less help, in part because of the occasional over-defensive reply mods and admins have given to some genuinely annoyed people. Some of these people have posted their annoyance in very blunt (sometimes rude fashion) and have received replies in a likewise fashion from staff here.

It's hard to be diplomatic when people come on annoyed and angry I know, but a good mod will use phrases with "please" and "thanks" in them when calming complainers and ask them to stay on issue and to catalogue their issues. This time around, there's a lot more tit-for-tat attitude on here to read through and less specifics on issues and questions.

Obviously Big Ant are doing their best and there'll be a lot they'd like to do in the next patch, but if anything misses out on that or even a future one, it'll be in part down to the community not keeping on message and showing what the consensus of opinion is.

For me I'm sure Big Ant are working hard on the bugs, they do that well, but I'm more worried about things that aren't broken, but are more just flat out awkward, like the clunky fielding especially in 2 player mode.

Having to change over and over and over is just a waste of time. I know the whole looking through the eyes thing is great for career and single player, but a whole huge section of the community love radars for 2 player. Just being able to quickly show your mate what field you have instead of him looking around every ball or two. Also, being able to hide the non-custom fields might be great for those of us who consider our own ones the only ones we'd like to use.

Anyhow, I hope more than just bug fixes are in the pipe-line as people love a good fast game with mates too.

 

[BigAntStudios]

@Max Walker I will look at your issues with regard to the time it takes, will see what can be done.

We are definitely doing more than bug fix.

 

[Kiko_97]

Another perspective you may have is that a backlash from Ross to the overly emotive criticisms are more a result of the the countless hours he and his staff has poured into making the game. It's like a painting, you spend hours perfecting that one bush as it isn't quite right, when its done, you're delighted, then when you ask for an opinion somebody says the door on the house looks naff and ruins the painting, your first thoughts are gonna be anger, its your hard work and you want to be told how good it is. Yes Ross has gone overboard with reactions, but he wants to hear the good rather than the bad from first impressions. And then the bug reports can be made and things can be acted upon.

 

[sami ullah khan]

@Max Walker I will look at your issues with regard to the time it takes, will see what can be done.

We are definitely doing more than bug fix.

The last line is the key here. Bugs are there even in triple A titles. Bigant are going to fix it anyways. Addressing gameplay issues and adding the missing pieces of puzzle (cover drives, fine leg glance) is what separates bigant from other developers. Take your time Ross. We are sure that patch 3 is going to make this game a true successor to DBC 14.

 

[gamer22]

Another perspective you may have is that a backlash from Ross to the overly emotive criticisms are more a result of the the countless hours he and his staff has poured into making the game. It's like a painting, you spend hours perfecting that one bush as it isn't quite right, when its done, you're delighted, then when you ask for an opinion somebody says the door on the house looks naff and ruins the painting, your first thoughts are gonna be anger, its your hard work and you want to be told how good it is. Yes Ross has gone overboard with reactions, but he wants to hear the good rather than the bad from first impressions. And then the bug reports can be made and things can be acted upon.

But you can't force someone to write good reviews if he doesn't want to or didn't like the game. If the reviews were based on the number of hours worked then not many games would get bad reviews.

 

[Symbolism]

One thing I take a bit of umbrage with.

You can't separate Ross and the "AAA" type game developers, because the publishing company decides to treat this as a AAA release with it's pricing of around $100. By putting that price tag on it, you're saying that it is as valuable as any of the EA Sports ranges and that we should anticipate that it's as good as them.

 

[Kiko_97]

But you can't force someone to write good reviews if he doesn't want to or didn't like the game. If the reviews were based on the number of hours worked then not many games would get bad reviews.

Exactly, people had a right to complain however they chose to since they're the ones who waited and spent their money on something with high expectations. Ross just took things a little too personally and wanted to defend his work. Thankfully now we're at a stage where constructive feedback is being passed between consumers and devs and there's the hope we'll get the game we expected before Mid-December

 

[cricket_online]

One thing I take a bit of umbrage with.

You can't separate Ross and the "AAA" type game developers, because the publishing company decides to treat this as a AAA release with it's pricing of around $100. By putting that price tag on it, you're saying that it is as valuable as any of the EA Sports ranges and that we should anticipate that it's as good as them.

That's one area you can't do much about. Cricket is a niche game and doesn't have the volume/consumer base to support a low price point. EA focuses on games which nets millions in sales whereas a cricket game will struggle to hit even one million mark. I would rather there's a cricket game at AAA price than no cricket game at all.

 

[gamer22]

One thing I take a bit of umbrage with.

You can't separate Ross and the "AAA" type game developers, because the publishing company decides to treat this as a AAA release with it's pricing of around $100. By putting that price tag on it, you're saying that it is as valuable as any of the EA Sports ranges and that we should anticipate that it's as good as them.

$100? You can get it for $60 on amazon..

 

[Kiko_97]

I'd imagine he's paying in AUD

 

[EnigmaticZee]

$100 can put a year of dinner on the table ? Seriously, mate you are probably still living in the past. This is too much

PS I am an Indian

 

[Mr Snrub]

That's one area you can't do much about. Cricket is a niche game and doesn't have the volume/consumer base to support a low price point. EA focuses on games which nets millions in sales whereas a cricket game will struggle to hit even one million mark. I would rather there's a cricket game at AAA price than no cricket game at all.

Exactly, this game has the same price as huge budget games, because of the size of the production costs in relation to the size of the buying audience. If anything you can argue that AAA titles are the ones that can afford to have their prices somewhat lower due to the huge volume of sales.

As cricket online said "I would rather there's a cricket game at AAA price than no cricket game at all". Which is really the next possibility on the list after Big Ant. Cricket has far more intricacy and subtleties than just about any other sports game out there and I can't imagine anyone else wanting to make a cricket game with the 100,000,000+ things that can go wrong, especially with players made from user data that can vary in billions of combinations from each other.

I'm sure that we'll all be able to enjoy a great, solid game of cricket and appreciate DBC'17 fully very soon. Before we know it we'll be looking back and the wait will be behind us.

Also, to Ross - thanks very much for the team looking into fielding and what might be able to be done, I know time is limited obviously and there's nothing guaranteed, but glad it's getting a look at.