OctoWow - Forums

Change logs are a lot of work when you are fixing dozens and dozens of bugs a day.

In the current state of the game our priority is making the game better and more stable, if we have to choose between spending an hour making a changelog (that would be a mile long) or spending an hour knocking out another 3 bugs, that is an easy choice for us. I doubt anyone wants to read a changelog that is 76 bugs deep.

You will have to see the bug fixes for yourself on the PTR (and soon production servers) as things improve. We are going to be making weekly development summary posts going forward so hopefully that will satisfy most people that things are being actively improved if they don't feel the improvement themselves.

A changelog does not really "PROVE" that we can fix things, the fixes that we have already made prove that

Changelog allows us to go back to PTR to see if the bugs are really fixed or if there is regression from an other fixes.
Without changelog on what we are expecting to see fixed, I see only 2 behaviors:

- we don't go back expecting the thing to be fixed on the long run,
- or we go back daily and report the same bugs over and over, as we have no way to know if it was treated as fixed or no.

Changelog are not mean to micromanage you, it is used to sync your reporters with your fixers.

You have a base of free testers that any company dreams of and the time spent to list what should be fixed or not and making a generic/small report will be the best daily 30 minutes you can spend on the project.

Now, I have no idea on how many people can spend how many hours on the project
I just think communication is really important

That is a good point and we definitely do need to get a list together of things we expect to be fixed at some point or at least a public list of known bugs. For now our system is/has been that we regex match against the /bug reports to determine how much of an impact certain bugs are having, and also run mass deletions of certain bugs when we fix them then check again in a day or two to see if new reports of that "fixed" but have come back.

For now that works well with our scale and imbalance of bug fixer to bugs reported. As we continue to sweep up all the large/easy bug fixes, this balance will change though and we do hope to very soon get more detailed changelogs out when we push changes. Unfortunately we just aren't there yet ;(

This PTR is a bit step in that direction though as at the very least we have a dedicated "ok its live now we need to tell people" moment compared to before when we were restarting the server twice a day with live fixes.