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Exercise simple patience and you will be surprised at the amount of money you can save. The reason devs get away with bad games, is because people continue to blindly buy video games.
Besides reading a review is usually moot as they tend to be biased in some direction, or funded by the company itself (I call it conflict of interest), while user testimony is far more accurate, but it still doesn't say 'hey guys, clean up your act a bit.' before you release it. even years later many games are plagued with functional glitchs. It's years after civ V was released, but still has a major glitch with it's workers system, Heroes 6 was released over a year ago, still hangs sometimes on AI turns. Sims 3 has ten expansion packs at least and the game crashing on save glitch took months to fix. That is what I'm trying to address. Reading a review doesn't patch it any quicker, neither does discovering many others have the same problem. If there is no fix, there is no fix. The companies want you to have infinite patience so that they can continue to take the money, knowing there are issues. I've done customer service before, the squeekiest wheels get greased first so that they don't give other wheels an idea. I'm simply saying we should squeek more, besides patience doesn't get really get anything done, and the save money part is lost on me, since this is more of a 'why are we being sold broken product?' deal. I refer to the money as a way of getting the companies ear.
back to the car analogy, it don't matter if the toyota is a 2010, 2011 or 2012, if the gas pedal sticks, then it needs to be fixed, preferrably before they release it to the public, or at least very soon after, not 8 months from now. It gets fixed fast cause it cost them more money not to.
Can you now get a better picture of what I'm saying? I'm not always the most articulate with words, but I'll keep trying to make the message clearer, cause I can see Rolling Cheese missed what I meant, by a long shot. The goal is to close the barn doors BEFORE the horse gets out, who cares how cheap the horse is after it got out, it's already gone.
Any wise consumer would read multiple reviews from different sources to get a clear overview of quality on the product.
I just gloss over your wall of texts because I can't be bothered to read in to your awful analogies and comparisons. Instead of getting to the point, you decided to use various off the wall cases of buggy games to create support for some ridiculous group/system that is unneeded during the age of the internet. Did it even occur to you that such a group/system could also be bias like the reviewers?
If people can't be bothered to research a product before buying them, perhaps they do deserve to get shafted by the greedy publishers/developers. I have no sympathy for fools that buy blind. The secret to beating the greed of publishers and developers is to stay informed and vote with your wallet.
Also your system sounds almost as idiotic as metacritic.
8 Quality Programming... what does that even mean? Is the game going to run flawlessly 8/10 times upon launching or something?
I'm looking for input as to how you would create a system like that, it would need more than one benchmark, of course, but the average of those benchmarks. All I've done is propose a system. I find most people have a life (outside of video games), so time they can devote to research may be a bit limited and this could save time. I know you tried hard to sound brilliant, but if you really wanted to scuttle it, and sound intelligent, why not bring up how difficult it would be for the average joe to know about the glitches before it's released. The system would have to focus on post release without insiders, and including insiders may skew bias.
Of course bias occured to me, hence my comment on reviews. (Lmao, no ♥♥♥♥ sherlock) I'm looking for how can I make a user input system work, which kinda kills the bias unless you skew the results.
Not sure what you mean by off the wall games though. do you mean not mainstream, of which I'm pretty sure assissin's creed 3 is, or if you mean purchased in a store, which I buy through steam... clarification would be cool. Not trying to knock you here, honestly. Different people have different ways of phrasing.
we all vote with our wallet, sure, but I also see everything else has a standard it has to pass before being sold. If a game is released and hardly works, then it seems like we're missing that standard in this industry.
If it were up to you, how would you keep bias down? how would you benchmark and what would you benchmark? as for the number itself, 8/10 could mean that the game itself functions, but has a few quirks, or has quirks with a few machines out there that have to be worked out. A 4/10 could mean tha the game crashes unless you play in a specific way or have only a few computer configurations that it works with at the time being.
The idea is to isolate it's functionality apart from the game story. The game could be about killing zombies or picking flowers, niether i'd be too wild about, but the rating would tell me if I should expect a lot of errors and crashes.
thank you kidzap, that is exactly what I'm talking about. accountability.
If we had a consumer watchdog that could nix a release based on a functionality standard, then you would see some serious changes. Take a peek through any game based forum, it doesn't take long to see that there is a prolific problem here.
I'm interested in creating solutions to this issue. If you have a better idea of how to go about this, I want to hear it. I don't have the thickest skin when it comes to criticism, but I always try to leave my ego at the door.
But I'll just say that you are right and while I did sort of skim through this thread (it's really late and I'm tired) I will give it a proper read later.
The major problem, as I see it, with your approach, is this:
If people aren't buying games you'd consider "low quality", then clearly there can't be an issue. But if people are buying these games...then who are you to say they aren't doing so willingly? Maybe they've made up their mind and come to the conclusion that the game, while not perfect, is okay.
If all this was to happen post-release, then there wouldn't be any need for a discussion: you could start a website right now and get to assigning ratings to any game you please. And anyone who cared to listen to you could. But you're talking about making some sort of required step in a game's development process? That's...well, I was going to say absurd, but let's go with unrealistic.
First of all, do you know how many games are releasing, all the time? And you're going to get permission to obtain and publically rate pre-release code of every game? Even ignoring the mass amount of "bugger off" responses you'll get from devs, who's paying for the immense time investment here? If you plan to only rate some games, then that in itself introduces bias in your system, and perhaps loopholes for people to escape being part of it.
Secondly, why would I, as an intelligent consumer, want some third party's opinion on game quality potentially interfering in the release of games I'm interested in? If I don't think a game is good quality on release, I won't buy it. If you don't think it's good enough but I do, your ratings are irrelevant to me, so if you hold up developers at all, you are doing me a disservice. And you will never agree with everyone, so you will always be doing some people a disservice.
What I think you should do, since your main cited problem seems to be that people aren't yelling loud enough about games with serious issues, is START YELLING. Make your own site, and write about the problems you see. Write well, be rational, spread the word, and hold people to account. We have the internet these days; you can do this stuff well even without major backing.
In the meantime, I'll keep reading reviews by people who I trust (RPS), and making up my own mind about what I buy. For me, one of the primary strengths of PC gaming is that unlike the walled gardens of Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, Apple etc, anyone can make whatever they want, no matter what other people think of it. I do not want that changed.
I'm in canada, we do have consumer standards to a degree, but I'm aware that they aren't that high. By standards I mean they can't make a metal box, paint Ipod on the side and sell it as a music player. If your selling a music player, it has to play music otherwise you get charged for fraud. There has been repeated confusion between content and function, and I'm trying hard to seperate it out. I'm starting to see when people see the word quality, they link it to content, where I mean quality of function.
Australia, Canada, USA, Sweden, etc actually DO have industry standards for economic protection. It's just games aren't typically seen in that same light that we sell other products with. The standards deal with fraud and public safety, which encourages consumer confidence in the marketplace.
I agree that the content should never be limited, that part is all consumer choice, but If I sold you a music CD in a store and it was a blank disc in reality, that would be the issue to deal with. the music can be crap, my problem, but if your disc was labelled AC/DC and advertised 12 songs on disc, but got 2 songs and the rest played as static so you couldn't access the content you paid for, then that is the problem that needs fixing.
It did dawn on me later that It'll never fly pre-release, and in the ninties games were delayed because they had to make sure the game functioned otherwise they opened themselves up to fraud lawsuits. As the market got flooded faster than law could keep up (no surprise there) the definition of functional shifted in favour of the developers. (Imagine angry birds crashing if it hit a green guy)
I purchase indie games like Limbo, and have plant tycoon and other 'Easy Bake' games, but the point is they function. It won't crash if I clip the wrong branch, colors don't invert due to planting a seed. Not every one likes black and white, or watching grass grow, I agree. My aim is function, not content fixing. I've purchased games that have good reviews, but the functionality is questionable.
I had a war game that wouldn't trigger the next mission so I ended up stuck in an empty field everytime, till they updated and fixed the glitch. I'm not going to dispute the content of the game, but the fact they sell you a game and tell you there are fifteen missions, but you can only play the first two before it glitches and prevents you from playing the rest. That would be a function issue. In another turn based type, It would kick you out to desktop randomly, effectivly deleting the last hour of progress. I could save every turn, but when I got to that turn it would boot me. Start a new game and I could go way longer, but every once in a while it would crash out, and you'd have to start a new game cause it would crashe there everytime. I'd go back three saves even and change my actions to try to divert the crash, but it was fruitless.
If I can't ledge kill in the new assassin's creed then thats a GAMEPLAY quality issue, not my aim to hinder the developers choices there, but if the game froze everytime I tried to ledge kill then thats a FUNTIONALITY problem, my aim is to tackle that issue. Wasn't impressed that decks are limited to certain cards only, but that would be a GAMEPLAY issue, If it crashed everytime I added giant growth to my deck, then that is a FUNCTIONALITY issue. I want to address FUNCTION, not content. It really seems like everyones concerned I want to alter what is expressed and that is NOT the goal. I play all sorts of whacked out games and normal ones too. I love the creativity. Hunting games aren't for me, but I believe that if thats what people want, give it to them. If they are selling it as a game were you can hunt duck, bears and werewolves, cool, but if everytime you shot the duck the game froze then the game is shoddy in construction.
I want indie games and all varieties to florish, but I don't want to buy a game that is unplayable. I had one that would crash everytime I tried to save, I bought it because I wanted to create and build, but without being able to save (which is a basic function) I couldn't progress. Since I'd be targeting function, opinion doesn't factor in. If it works all the time - Greenlight, if it crashes everytime you toss a bomb off a cliff - yellowlight, if it crashes because you selected the warrior instead of the mage or cleric - redlight (if I'm not allowed to select the warrior why is it an option?)
Opinions would be rendered moot, because it comes down to quality of function.
It's all well and good to yell whatever, but a fool and his words are soon parted there. If I can get an educated, focused, unifed chant going that is hard to ignore, I'll go much, much further than the crazy guy who yells on the corner of my street.
yes I do know there are well over a thousand games released weekly, globally, but Gus, can you see you addressed content there? that has nothing to do with what I'm trying to do. I want to target the shoddy game mechanisims that prevent us from actually using the product we purchased.
I do want to thank you for weighing in though, I'm not going to discourage opinion, that's human will and a human right to have one. I agree with what Gus says, but what he says still doesn't address the issue of this thread.
As a film maker I'd freak if someone censored what I had to say. Though I'm sure you'd freak if the film I sold you only showed chapter 1 and the rest remained unviewable.
Your fraud examples are not the most helpful, because (generally) fraud is illegal, and is illegal regardless of what's being sold: you don't need separate fraud laws for every single kind of product on the market.
Of course opinion factors in! If I tell you that, say, Oblivion (no mods, for argument's sake) crashes to the desktop occasionally on my PC - averaging maybe once every six hours of play. How do you translate that into your quality rating?
The only objective thing to do is to simply report my data (assuming I didn't make it up). You'd say, "one person reported this game crashed roughly every six hours". Now, that's easy when you only get a few reports, but PC configuration variation being what it is, one report is next to useless. Also I think it's important to realise that these "I'm playing a war game and it won't let me continue to the next mission" reports are pretty conveniently cherrypicked. Not saying they're invalid, but in the wild, it's very common for bugs to be much harder to track down, identify and reproduce. It might let you continue, but only sometimes. It might let you play fine when you test it but die completely on someone else's machine. So you need more reports. You need to run the game on all sorts of PCs under different conditions, to collect lots of data on when and how often bugs occur.
And once you have enough data to make meaningful reports, it's no longer practical to just present it straight up. The most objective way to proceed then would be to construct graphs or the like. But you want to go with a rating of some sort, which inherently involves losing information, and necessarily involves important subjective decisions. You can stick to an objective scale of some sort (crashes to desktop = -2 points or whatever), but whatever scoring system you come up with, you arbitrarily chose it. Who are you to tell me that one crash to the desktop every six hours is worth -2/10 (or whatever)? Personally it's a very minor inconvenience considering how fast the game loads. If a crash when you select the warrior is a "redlight", but a crash every time you throw a bomb is only "yellowlight", then what's a crash that happens 3% of the time you select a warrior or 1% of the time you throw an item that the player can only find two of in the game? How are you coming to these conclusions? It's necessarily based on your opinions of how important various functions are, of how much playtime an average player might lose to bugs, etc etc.
Of course, like I said earlier re code analysis and gameplay information collection, perhaps you can collect data on these things too and act on at least measured averages of some sort...but that's another multiplier on the amount of work involved.
I think you might be confused. I'll try to clarify.
Content would be the story, music and 'look' of a game.
Function comes from the command structure.
In development, you first have to design and build the structure, which dictates how it will function. After that is built you then fill it with content. Two completely different parts of the program
In music you have whats called a 'table of contents' that is the structure of how it's formatted, how the data is directed, length of file, title, etc. It the gets filled with content, the music itself. If there was a lack of function then your music would come as one long file that you'd have to fast forward and rewind through. With a functioning structure you can then skip through songs without guessing at where the start is.
as for the 'cherry picked' game it's called Battlefield 3. It was released for xbox360 (plus PS3 and pc, but the example was taken from the xbox release, to reduce hardware variation.) the bug was later fixed by update so variations in hardware and operating structure was reduced for this example.
I could have chosen 'True crime' for the xbox/ ps2/ pc. That had a fine structure for pc and ps2, but the one released for xbox was actually a build version as opposed to the final version, and no action was taken to fix it. The company continued to sell a product that they knew didn't work right.
Though in sims 3, if you built a second floor, you could keep playing, but if you saved the game would crash you out to the desktop without saving (frustrating). Quick loading? maybe Oblivion is, but sims 3? lol nooooooo. it loads to get to the menu then loads to play the game. After ten times I had better things to do. over 200 000 players had the issue and EA still took it's sweet time fixing it. It would have been better to go back to the previous update, fix the major bug and issue a new update once completed.
While PC's of course come in a wide range of variations, there are 'mainstream' configurations that encompass the most common configurations. I expect it would take longer to find bugs in the more customized configurations, that's natural.
The redlight and yellowlight, 1-10QP ratings are arbitrary, meerly examples at the moment as a system with benchmarks hasn't yet be really proposed. It's the easiest thing in the world to tear apart someone else's ideas, but it takes much more effort to build and create.
This is just a fact finding mission. Nothing has really been proposed as for the system itself. First we have to work on what it should target and how it can target it effectively.
As for fraud laws, I clearly stated I'm NOT looking to change the law, or even amend it. Gov't, Law and routes like that are slow, archaic and ineffective to address the speed at which the market shifts. It's 'we the people' that have to make these changes, If you change how an entire group approaches the market, you can then effectively change the market for the good of everyone, and business practice then is forced to change or perish. I've also been trying to point out that existing fraud laws actually can deal with it, but percpetion of the product has to change first in order to enact it. I frequently see games not percieved as products, maybe perhaps because that they are digitally built, not sure why. As intellectual property that gets produced, it is a product, but functionality is viewed as grey area. There are ligitimate reasons for that. Though if functionality were defined (and lack of knowledge of game structures fuels this problem) then it gets simplier in defining 'below acceptable standard of function'. Without the definition, the resulting 'acceptable standard' and a accountability that follows, we are defenseless against that type of fraud.
As for a single case of crashing, lets be honest, no one cares. If your the only one with the issue, then it's most likely (but not absolutely) something you did. Now if 250 - 600 cases (still small beans, but more significant) of crashing occur along the same vein then it can begin to reveal where the glitch is originating. If the glitch originates from hardware or software configuration that could be used as a minor benchmark. If the glitch occurs and your using the recommended hardware they suggest that would be a bit more of a major benchmark. If exiting a building caused a color glitch that would be minor, but still worth noting. If exiting the building caused the game to crash or hang up 5 times out of 10, then that would be a little more major as it hinders your ability to actually play the game.
I'm still looking at the second to last paragraph you posted though as that has the most useful criticism there. I'll spend some time seeing if I can come up with a solution for that.
"the problem isn't the problem. The problem is your attitude about the problem"
Captain Sparrow
I qoute him here cause I'm seeing alot of attitude over this subject, but not many constructive solutions.... which I find odd. Is there people out there that actually like that thier games crash a lot?
I'll edit the intro on monday, I think it's creating confusion.
But okay, everyone can have their definitions. Thing is, if you want to insist that content is "story, music, and look", then it is absolutely not the case that earlier I was only addressing content. So have it whichever way you like.
I could also say it's the easiest thing in the world to have a empty overview to a problem but never present any details to fill it in. Please don't post your ideas on a public forum and then get all defensive about people pointing out flaws in them, that's really boring.
My argument is that your ratings will remain arbitrary because there is fundamentally no way for them to not be so. If you want to remain objective at all, you need to present the data without judgement, not transform it into ratings. There, that was a constructive suggestion, right? I'll be happy to listen to any other ideas anyone has about how a system like that you're talking about would actually function.
I'll agree with you there, I opened this forum for input. I really try hard to not be defensive and be more objective, I don't always succeed at it, but I do try.
I was trying to convey the idea I'm looking for help at this stage to point me in the right direction and discover which details will be the best to focus on in order to start proposing a system. It's a daunting task, but I believe it can be achieved. I agree also that the second half of the second quote you posted of me was a bit snarky. I apologize for that.
I'm gonna agree to disagree on the content part though. When I used to build games I always created the framework of the world first. Then could produce multiple games on the same structure. If the structure rules failed then the game would crash to desktop, but if the content I added had failures then they would show up as visual anomalies, but wouldn't interrupt the structure function.
right now I'm at the overview stage, and ya that was the easy part, sorta. Trying to locate the best ways of targeting the issue is my goal. When I collect enough data and have a better idea of how this would function better I plan to start working in more details, and if someone else has a better way to benchmark this, by all means proposed solution. I want input.
Don't get me wrong, I like you Gus. You've given me a few things to consider and that's what I'm looking for. Your last two posts have good points for me to consider, and I do appreciate that.
This has been an interesting exercise for me, so I'm going to inform myself some more this weekend, before deciding the the best way to move this disscussion over. As I look at it. Gus is right, I'm being too defensive over a conceptual idea. If I edit the intro too much it may make the posts responding to it seem off. I may just start a new discussion with a new approach.
I'm going to keep pushing at this issue till something gives. I've also been trying to combat hacking in BF3 for console, though I may have bit off more than I can chew. :/
I'm going to try and brush up on my editing skill as well so that I'm not so long winded.
lol, try talking to me AFK, I shoot from the lip and ask questions later, lol. (O_o).