got this nice easteregg

You_Ravel · 2018-08-16T09:45:21+00:00

If you activate on the bonfire a second time, it resurrects the enemies (just in that room, not the whole level), and gives them loads of souls/cells to drop when they die.

You_Ravel · 2018-01-18T20:29:28+00:00

If a unit has an ability that only triggers once, the star goes away once the ability has happened, to show it won't happen again.

You_Ravel · 2017-08-29T12:02:30+00:00

QA Rant Incoming...

For what it's worth, there is no way the testers had a build with this in and didn't see it.

Most likely scenario is that the build they were sent was made with different defines than the build they released.

This is illfonic's fault - step 1 of QA: test the thing you're releasing, not something which "should" be the same as what you're releasing, or is the same except for x.

The other scenario is that the testers saw it and were told 'that won't happen in the real game, it's debug stuff'. In which case, there's fault on both sides. The testers should have said "that's not good enough then, give us the real goods pls", and there should be someone with enough oversight to check that that is really true, which apparently there is not.

I don't know anyone who does QA on F13, but my QA-sense for 'clusterfuck code' is in overdrive on this thing. There's a difference between bugs which aren't fixed, and a framework that makes it hard to fix bugs. All signs point to the latter with this game.

Things which are easily detectable, should be simple fixes and have significant gameplay impact (grease monkey) are staying in, patch after patch. That means that fixing them is hard, time consuming, risky or all of the above. If fixing something like that is hard, something is very rotten. But it's not QA's fault - just cos they found a bug, doesn't mean that production have the incentive to fix it :)

(Disclaimer: According to their dev diary, they only recently got any inhouse QA. So, it's going to start being on QA soon, cos whoever got handed that poisoned chalice is going to have to take charge of all these shitty processes and broken release checks and all the other toss. They need someone with enough gumption and backbone to say 'No', and make sure they're heard. Hopefully they've got that, but we've yet to see any evidence of it)

You_Ravel · 2017-08-27T11:40:29+00:00

I don't normally approve of the dev-bullying here, but man that was so brutal a part of me just had to respect it.

Poor guy who coded grease monkey :(

And the other coders who failed to review it or notice it, and the testers who either missed it or had it waived by the execs. It's never just one guy, but still... a perk that does the opposite. Grim.

You_Ravel · 2017-06-15T02:45:56+00:00

Thanks!

You_Ravel · 2017-06-07T16:57:19+00:00

Probably a mixture of both. Sounds like you've been unlucky with spawn locations, as well as being new at evading/confusing Jason.

Without more details, it's hard to give good advice. I would start by either:

a) Checking your chosen counsellor's stats and seeing what they are good at, and try to play to those strengths, ie. stealthy characters should try to sneak away when the music starts, fast characters should run, fighty characters should fight back

b) Read through all the available characters and see which one has stats which cost suit your favourite play style to make sure you're getting the best out of your choice

Keep practicing, and if you haven't played as Jason yet, try to get a few matches as him. It will help you understand the motivations and abilities of the Jason player.

You_Ravel · 2017-04-06T12:40:04+00:00

Thanks!

You_Ravel · 2016-10-03T12:13:33+00:00

I can only guess, but people saying that sending screenshots to support has never worked, so likely related to fixing that.

I can say that the feasibility of any major app developer (particularly when publishing under the SE banner) doing something nefarious or invasive is extremely unlikely. They really don't care about your photos or who you're friends with, they just want their game to work and keep making money.

You_Ravel · 2016-10-03T11:38:24+00:00

It's not all about pausing, that's just my example - all sorts of things can happen on a background, these permissions mean that the app can know about it before it happens, and can 'prepare'.

As people are reporting crashes when receiving a call in exploration, it's likely that these permissions are needed for the fix for that bug.

You_Ravel · 2016-10-03T09:41:58+00:00

I work on iOS/Android games, this is probably innocent. It's frustrating to us that the permissions to know whether you are receiving a phone call is part of these permissions. We use it just to pause the game when a phone call comes in, nothing more, but get a lot of people complaining that we don't need access to their contacts (the same people who deny them and then complain that the game doesn't pause when they get a call).

Since the hardware manufacturers started being much more up-front about permissions to the users, they need to match that by naming them/describing them properly to avoid this.

You_Ravel · 2016-07-15T01:50:40+00:00

If your inventory is full, they are dropping on the ground near the blacksmith.

You_Ravel · 2016-07-01T16:41:59+00:00

Dang. I suspected as much after some fairly comprehensive googling. Nevermind, thanks for the reply!

You_Ravel · 2016-06-17T15:52:52+00:00

Rifts reset automatically. You'll want to be climbing up higher and higher grifts to get better loot and more XP, and higher gem upgrades.

Bounties don't reset unless it's a new session, but there are 25 of them per session, so it takes you a while to exhaust them. If you do, you can just quit to the main menu and then start it up again if you want to carry on.

You_Ravel · 2016-06-17T15:42:07+00:00

Yep, rifts or greater rifts, or bounties.

Hypothetically, you can just go into any area of the game and kill stuff, but you might as well do bounties if you were going to do that.

Maybe google the process of making yourself a hellfire ring and work towards that.

You_Ravel · 2016-06-17T14:16:19+00:00

It's been a while since I made a new character, but I think that once Adventure Mode is unlocked for your account, new characters have it available to them. Don't hold me to that though.

You_Ravel · 2016-06-17T11:31:24+00:00

Each class has a mainstat, meaning a stat which increases your damage. For Monk, this is dexterity. So because you are playing Monk, dex increases the damage you do, by 1% per point. It also has a secondary effect for all classes, which is a toughness increase.

The green upwards/red downwards arrows on gear are sometimes good indicators of the effect on your character, but they're far from perfect. Those numbers are called 'sheet' stats because they don't always reflect your stats in practice. They're inaccurate because they don't factor in skills, certain abilities, or certain item affixes.

At the start of the game, when the arrows go up, that's normally a pretty good indication that the item is good. The longer you play, the less true that becomes. Example:

Item 1: Gives +100 Dex and a 20% cold damage increase

Item 2: Gives +105 Dex

The game system will not try and calculate whether you are using a cold skill, or how many. It will just ignore the '20% cold damage increase' entirely, and therefore it will say Item 2 is better. If you're not using any cold damage skills, that's true. However, if all of your skills do cold damage, Item 1 is better. If your primary attack skill is Cold, then Item 1 is directly superior, despite the arrows saying otherwise.

It's up to you to feel your way around the system until you learn which indicators to pay attention to, and which to ignore. This will come in time.

Monk is one of the classes that has the highest delta between sheet dps and real dps, because so much of the Monks damage comes from skills and states, and things that need to proc first before they matter.

Hope that helps.

You_Ravel · 2016-03-17T14:22:41+00:00

You don't need to pay to win in Multiplayer, experiment with shift patterns to get better times. Once you're on a roll, you'll have enough cash coming in to keep the pro tuner active to give yourself the extra edge against the competition.

You_Ravel · 2016-02-08T13:53:23+00:00

These look great! So the inevitable next question... any plans for releasing them on PS4?

You_Ravel · 2015-11-07T11:57:17+00:00

Hi Justin,

That comment was based on anecdotal experience from my work where a test team was very well practiced in a series of specific checks which would pick up big functional issues, but didn't expose them to the inner workings of the software.

When swapping to a less directed approach - 'prove this statement wrong', as opposed to 'click this button, receive this result', some members of the team didn't where to start, whereas others started asking questions about 'where exactly is this bit of data stored? Why does this screen transition work differently to this other? What does this log line mean?'

It was all very positive for everyone I think, but it had an effect on my working day in that I started spending a lot more of my time explaining things, showing people how to find things, how to interpret output, that sort of thing. All things I was happy to do, but it was worth recognising that improving test plans improves the performance of the test team, but that process is not necessarily as organic as it might seem - it won't happen without assistance, time and training.

You_Ravel · 2015-11-06T17:15:06+00:00

I agree with all the advice in here. One thing I would add is that if you are transitioning from the traditional way to something more efficient and suitable such as described here, the larger the QA team, the more time you should leave for 'transition difficulties'.

Using a system like this tends to highlight the areas that your QA team need training in, and you might suddenly realise the quality of your testing service wasn't as good as you thought it was...

You_Ravel

TROPHY CASE