Patch 1.21 Issues / New Patch 1.22 Released - List Your Bugs

[Jason]

43 minutes ago, DadWojo said:

Jason not trying to be argumentative but what happened here isn't a bunch of small bugs that might go unnoticed by the casual player. The game was literally unplayable by anyone. Maybe I'm missing something about the process, and I admit I know nothing about it, but I find it hard to believe that these gamebreaking issues wouldn't show up in pre-release testing. Also, if these issues weren't the fault of the people who make the game, then whose fault were they? 

I'm not dismissing the fact that they literally broke the game. As I've posted in the thread earlier, I am bemused that it passed through Rockstar and Sony's certification process. I'm more so pointing the blame to better places, instead of memeing on Q&A teams like a lot of people typically do. Q&A teams usually know all the tricks and the broken sh*t and they report them as is it's their job. It isn't on them if it isn't fixed.

[docpain222]

Xb1: still unplayable for me. Can't stay in a game longer then 30 seconds before I get the disconnected error, which is what I was getting before the 1.21 patch... so they reverted back to the one issue not effecting as many compared to the game being unplayable effecting many. I respect that, but do wish they could figure out how to fix the disconnect error. It happens it seems, later at night though.

[DadWojo]

2 minutes ago, docpain222 said:

Xb1: still unplayable for me. Can't stay in a game longer then 30 seconds before I get the disconnected error, which is what I was getting before the 1.21 patch... so they reverted back to the one issue not effecting as many compared to the game being unplayable effecting many. I respect that, but do wish they could figure out how to fix the disconnect error. It happens it seems, later at night though.

Let's hope tonight's shutdown is in part to address that issue.

9 minutes ago, Jason said:

I'm not dismissing the fact that they literally broke the game. As I've posted in the thread earlier, I am bemused that it passed through Rockstar and Sony's certification process. I'm more so pointing the blame to better places, instead of memeing on Q&A teams like a lot of people typically do. Q&A teams usually know all the tricks and the broken sh*t and they report them as is it's their job. It isn't on them if it isn't fixed.

Well, yeah, I agree that if the people who are supposed to FIX the bugs aren't the same people who are supposed to FIND the bugs, then the blame could be on either of them.  Also could be on the people who made the decision to release the patch if they knew it had a raft of unfixed problems.  So yeah there's a lot of places the blame could lie.  Whatever.  I just hope they don't break it again tonight, and actually do something to improve it tonight.  Yeah, I know, I'm dreaming . . .

[Leftover Pizza]

Everything seems to work on my PS4 Pro again. Haven't seen a LA anywhere, though. My PS4 Pro still acts like a jumbo jet, which it never did that much before. I hope the upcoming reset will make a difference.

[AdamNortonUK]

The 1.22 patch is a patch in name only, they have basically restored the game to the state it was in after the Naturalist update, so all bugs from 1.20 will possibly still remain as no changes have been made.

 

The server maintenance is obviously being done to fix some of the disconnection issues as well as some other server issues that is effects the daily challenges and collectors cycles reset that plague the game since the 1.21 patch was such a failure.

 

I did have a post that explained how the failed patch got through, due to shorter certification or no certification windows for trusted developers and how without certification the responsibility for the issues fall on the developer and not Sony or Microsoft to explain, fix and resolve etc. but my son decided to be a dick and knocked my phone out of my hand and it got deleted and didn’t save and I’m not typing it out again heh!

Edited August 14, 2020 by AdamNortonUK

[AStiffBreeze]

1 hour ago, Jason said:

I'm not dismissing the fact that they literally broke the game. As I've posted in the thread earlier, I am bemused that it passed through Rockstar and Sony's certification process. I'm more so pointing the blame to better places, instead of memeing on Q&A teams like a lot of people typically do. Q&A teams usually know all the tricks and the broken sh*t and they report them as is it's their job. It isn't on them if it isn't fixed.

Clearly the 1.21 patch highlights the fact that their Online games need a drastic overhaul when it comes to QA. I don’t know how they test the patches in dev, but it’s clearly not working.
 

The 1.21 patch broke everything, for everybody; if it got through QA then they need to go back to the drawing board on their testing methodology. There’s no way that the QA team reports that the game is completely and utterly broken by the patch, and it gets put into production anyway. 
 

EDIT: Just wanted to point out that I don’t think that the QA team is incompetent, or lazy, or careless. Trying to test an online game of RDO’s scope and complexity is not something I envy, given how diverse the internet landscape is in terms of geography and technology. But at the end of the day Rockstar’s online games are drawing in a heap of money, so these are products they need to support. They need to figure out a more reliable way to test what the effects of these patches are going to be once put into production, because at the moment there is clearly a dramatic disconnect between what they see in dev vs what it looks like in production. 

Edited August 14, 2020 by AStiffBreeze

[XxGreyBushxX]

Anyone else unable to do the poker glitch to solo?

 

It keeps making the lobby full as soon as I'm invited to join my friend post glitching. 

[Jason]

It's probably worth highlighting too that Q&A is one aspect of the industry have has been and continues to be especially impacted by WFH. RDO has never been a great example of a bug free game by any means, but the Naturalist update introduced more bugs than usual and the hotfix was a trainwreck, both of those updates releasing in a time where Q&A continues to be difficult is not a coincidence IMO.

 

The best thing to do, honestly, would be to open up testing to the playerbase as who knows when the industry and the world will be back at 100%. Player testing would be able to reproduce the type of environments that internal testing may not as well.

 

They won't do this, obviously, but it would be a great move.

 

 

[AdamNortonUK]

Internal QA testing also most likely doesn’t have difficulty of everyone testing it having different internet connections / modems / routers setups that obviously impacts the game which probably wouldn’t show up internal testing as the connection they would be using should be the same so there are many factors as to why the game has so many disconnect issues that internal QA testing may not be able to reproduce to be able to fix before release.

Edited August 14, 2020 by AdamNortonUK

[netnow66]

55 minutes ago, XxGreyBushxX said:

Anyone else unable to do the poker glitch to solo?

 

It keeps making the lobby full as soon as I'm invited to join my friend post glitching. 

Still working but with a twist some people added (using the change appearance function). I'm not sure how myself but I think there is a YouTube video. 

 

Solos have become even more popular because some feel they increase their chances for legendary animal hunting (one/two players only on a server using the jeanropke map for the legendary spawn locations). They want those clothes from Gus!!

 

If you can't find the video, I'd recommend joining one of the communities. Players are usually pretty helpful. PSN

Edited August 14, 2020 by netnow66

[AStiffBreeze]

19 minutes ago, AdamNortonUK said:

Internal QA testing also most likely doesn’t have difficulty of everyone testing it having different internet connections / modems / routers setups that obviously impacts the game which probably wouldn’t show up internal testing as the connection they would be using should be the same so there are many factors as to why the game has so many disconnect issues that internal QA testing may not be able to reproduce to be able to fix before release.

If your testing (for your global online game) doesn’t take into account different internet connections / modems / routers setups, then it’s very ineffective testing. 
 

Also WFH might actually pose less of a challenge for testing an online game, because being forced to test outside of the same office only makes your testing environment more like production

[Jason]

7 minutes ago, AStiffBreeze said:

Also WFH might actually pose less of a challenge for testing an online game, because being forced to test outside of the same office only makes your testing environment more like production

On paper WFH Q&A sounds better, yes.

 

However one of the big challenges of WFH Q&A is that not everyone has the hardware or setup at home to effectively test the games, and some may have poor connections that aren't stable for online (unlikely, but possible) or they may have connections that are slow as sh*t and can't download new builds to test quickly. I believe some studios have been toying with cloud based testing and while that can potentially fix the hardware issue, cloud based testing won't reproduce a real world environment.

[AStiffBreeze]

26 minutes ago, Jason said:

On paper WFH Q&A sounds better, yes.

 

However one of the big challenges of WFH Q&A is that not everyone has the hardware or setup at home to effectively test the games, and some may have poor connections that aren't stable for online (unlikely, but possible) or they may have connections that are slow as sh*t and can't download new builds to test quickly. I believe some studios have been toying with cloud based testing and while that can potentially fix the hardware issue, cloud based testing won't reproduce a real world environment.

Poor connections should be an absolutely *mandatory* part of the testing. 
 

Sounds like maybe they need to invest in their QA processes and get the necessary hardware out to people in a geographically distributed network. You can’t argue that the returns from the product don’t justify the investment. 

[AdamNortonUK]

1 hour ago, AStiffBreeze said:

If your testing (for your global online game) doesn’t take into account different internet connections / modems / routers setups, then it’s very ineffective testing. 

 

 

I agree on this, but if Rockstar would have used some of their actual billions for Dedicated Servers they could avoid all the issues with P2P and slow internet connections, as if Rockstar maintained the server it would likely put you in a lobby that is best for internet connection so you’re with others with the same, so someone with a slower connection won’t bug out the entire lobby as we’ve seen in the past with both RDO and GTO.

 

Rockstar seem reluctant to maintain the online versions of their games, probably why they prefer P2P also. I expect GTA 6 to have the same setup, with lobby choices like RDO.

 

And I think the 1.21 patch got through due to on PS4, I don’t know what Microsoft do but Sony require a full certification submission on patches however its on an honor system.
 

Sony has different categories for patches that the publisher / developer can select when creating the patch in their system.
 

The only patches that require a full certification submission are Day 1 patches and Major Feature changes/additions.

 

They also have a Rapid patch system, but if they designate a patch as Rapid, there are no certification submission requirements.
 

Once the patch passes build checks the publisher / developer acknowledges a liability on the patch indicating that they opted to pass submission and, take full responsibility for anything that happens to the game once the publisher pushes the patch live.

 

Its very likely that they used the rapid patch on PS4 and nobody really tested it before it got published.

Part of the liability is that if Sony deems at some point that a publisher / developer lied on the patch submission or otherwise publishing straight garbage, they can and will disable the developers ability to use rapid patching and require all future patch submissions to go through certification testing.

 

I would assume since Xbox was effected too; they have similar system in place.

 

It is my own opinion that Rockstar were quick to Rollback to a previous build of the game, as they wouldn’t have had time to fix the bugs and it’s likely if Sony knew about the bugs the last patch caused, it would have to go through a full certification process since the previously patch was completely broken.

Edited August 14, 2020 by AdamNortonUK

[Jason]

Poor connections being part of the testing is not a bad thing, but it's a terrible thing if it means people with those connections can't get the latest builds to test. But yea, idk man. I think we might see a lot of changes to game development and testing in the coming months and years as studios react to the pandemic and lockdown and how it's impacted game development. Lot of lessons being learned this year.

 

Also, thanks for the info Adam. That explains how that update slipped through cert then lol.

[AdamNortonUK]

11 minutes ago, Jason said:

Poor connections being part of the testing is not a bad thing, but it's a terrible thing if it means people with those connections can't get the latest builds to test. But yea, idk man. I think we might see a lot of changes to game development and testing in the coming months and years as studios react to the pandemic and lockdown and how it's impacted game development. Lot of lessons being learned this year.

 

Also, thanks for the info Adam. That explains how that update slipped through cert then lol.

Yeah I know this is a such a cliché but my brother use to be a game developer up until a few years ago, obviously not as big as working for Rockstar..

 

Now he teaches game development or something related to it (I don’t keep track of the ins and outs of his life heh) in South Korea... 

 

Also when I post, I try to explain what I can in detail of what I currently know, but sometimes it’s hard to put it into words that isn’t complete gibberish to those reading. I have no insider knowledge, just try to use common sense too and I am in no way defending Rockstar for all the screw ups, just trying to explain why some bugs may happen cause Rockstar sure won’t!

 

I also think the patch slipped through, because of the pandemic and Rockstar probably wanted the RDO patch out first so it didn’t effect GTAO, which is why the patch came on a Monday and they usually do it from some previous updates to RDO when GTAO is to have a patch or update the very next day.

 

If the patch wasn’t so broke, Rockstar was probably thinking players of both games would get the RDO fixed on Monday, so they could play that first and wouldn’t be distracted enough to play the new GTAO update, if the RDO patch was meant to fix a lot of bugs and came on the same day as the GTAO update then people would be playing RDO instead of jumping right into GTAO to see what’s new..  
 

I personally haven’t looked at the past few GTAO updates though, as even though own PC and PS4 versions of GTAO, I haven’t play it in a year as I kept trying to whistle for my car!

Edited August 14, 2020 by AdamNortonUK

[AStiffBreeze]

23 minutes ago, AdamNortonUK said:

It is my own opinion that Rockstar were quick to Rollback to a previous build of the game, as they wouldn’t have had time to fix the bugs and it’s likely if Sony knew about the bugs the last patch caused, it would have to go through a full certification process since the previously patch was completely broken.

Every time the PS4 blue screens (which was probably every 5 minutes with RDO 1.21) the user is presented with the option of submitting the bug report to Sony, including video capture in the moments up to the crash. So Sony would’ve been absolutely bombarded with RDO crash reports, there’s no way they weren’t aware that 1.21 was a catastrophe. 
 

20 minutes ago, Jason said:

Poor connections being part of the testing is not a bad thing, but it's a terrible thing if it means people with those connections can't get the latest builds to test. But yea, idk man. I think we might see a lot of changes to game development and testing in the coming months and years as studios react to the pandemic and lockdown and how it's impacted game development. Lot of lessons being learned this year.

True. I don’t think people with identified bad connections would necessarily be testing daily builds, more doing extended testing of milestone builds. But hey, I’m not designing the QA process for one of the biggest GaaS offerings in the world. I don’t know who is, but I suspect they’re sweating a bit right now lol. 

Edited August 14, 2020 by AStiffBreeze

[AdamNortonUK]

3 minutes ago, AStiffBreeze said:

Every time the PS4 blue screens (which was probably every 5 minutes with RDO 1.21) the user is presented with the option of submitting the bug report to Sony, including video capture in the moments up to the crash. So Sony would’ve been absolutely bombarded with RDO crash reports, there’s no way they weren’t aware that 1.21 was a catastrophe. 

Yeah, it was most likely Sony and Microsoft that got Rockstar to rollback the patch, as it’s the first time it’s happened, as there we game breaking bugs last year that they didn’t fix until the Moonshiners update. So I’m guessing they were told to rollback or fix it fast, and seeing as they having maintenance on there servers that saves your progress and everything else for the game, is to prevent most the  disconnects, since we have to connect to that server before we get placed in a lobby, which is why we get instant disconnects sometimes.

[DuduLima]

Everything seems to be fine again, managed to see the Teca Gator, Sun Gator and the Cogi Boar in a spawn of 1:30~1:45 hrs,in 3 Sessions 1-1-1.

 

If another player didn't had killed a Sun Gator .... i would had sampled that Gator, it would be 3 samples for me. (start of my 3rd session,, hopping after FR event).

 

Got one 0x20010006 at the first time after ~25 min, but aside that it was fine, made one Bounty hunting mission, Legendary Animal Protection FR mission and a Trader Sell, it was okay.

 

Platform: Xbox One - SA/NA.

 

 

[AStiffBreeze]

6 hours ago, Kirsty said:

 

Did this actually happen? I can’t see any other reference to it, and it should be ending in around 35 minutes, but I haven’t seen any updates to Rockstar’s service status pages indicating that the servers were down. 

[AdamNortonUK]

5 minutes ago, AStiffBreeze said:

Did this actually happen? I can’t see any other reference to it, and it should be ending in around 35 minutes, but I haven’t seen any updates to Rockstar’s service status pages indicating that the servers were down. 

That’s cause they’ve not turn off the servers or the connect to them is lost, they cannot do maintenance on an offline server heh. Plus it usually doesn’t take very long, so it could be all finished. They have picked the times where I guess they know there isn’t many people play at those times. But usually if they still doing something, it’s usually done by the time the daily challenges reset or an hour after.

[AdamNortonUK]

It may be a placebo effect, but seems they've fixed some of the disconnects and some black screen and desktop on PC issues I was facing since the Naturalist update... I've not had any graphic issues so far, and I use to have it instantly when I go into the game and did something on another monitor.

However the Daily Challenges reset glitch hasn't been fixed, so I will assume the Collectors cycles bug will still be present. So looks like they may have just fixed issues with disconnects and the bugs for Dailies and Collector cycles must have to be done in-game, which is a shame. 

But I was able to switch lobbies a lot faster than before, less than 30 seconds, whereas before the server maintenance., it took up to 2 minutes somethings just to reload into a lobby to get the Daily Challenges to reset.

Edited August 14, 2020 by AdamNortonUK

[AStiffBreeze]

34 minutes ago, AdamNortonUK said:

That’s cause they’ve not turn off the servers or the connect to them is lost, they cannot do maintenance on an offline server heh. Plus it usually doesn’t take very long, so it could be all finished. They have picked the times where I guess they know there isn’t many people play at those times. But usually if they still doing something, it’s usually done by the time the daily challenges reset or an hour after.

You can easily take a service down without taking the whole server down - anything testing for the availability of that service will then report an outage, even if the server itself is still up

 

RedDeadNet was reporting that there’d be an outage, I just didn’t see one or hear anyone report it. 

[AdamNortonUK]

10 minutes ago, AStiffBreeze said:

You can easily take a service down without taking the whole server down - anything testing for the availability of that service will then report an outage, even if the server itself is still up

 

RedDeadNet was reporting that there’d be an outage, I just didn’t see one or hear anyone report it. 

Of course, but I think it was just the cloud servers that they did maintenance on and not the servers that are reported on server status page, hence why you're still able to connect to a session online, it just may not save your online progress.

 

As the last time they did it, I was online for the entire maintenance window, but Free Roam progress would save, but the money earned and gold bars earned didn't, then afterwards, it would save the gold bars and money earned, but not the free roam stuff I was doing, so was able to do the same Daily Challenge over and over and got gold each time until it started working again.

But even if I'm wrong, it could have just been a server update that took minutes, but they want to cover themselves for a couple of hours if it goes wrong, as I've experienced that many times with my own servers, when some packages won't update or it gets interrupted.

Oh, I'm not trying to be a Mr. Know it all, but from my posts in this thread, I think I'm coming across this way heh, so I'm gonna stop talking about it too much, as don't want to be known as a 'Mr. know it all prick' on here, haha.

Edited August 14, 2020 by AdamNortonUK

[Ghoffman9]

I am no better off, I play on Xbox One and having frequent disconnects. At first I could get in and play but always disconnect about five minutes later. Right now its not even letting me in at all, all attempts to log in are unsuccessful.

[Pocket Fox]

All this talk of bad connections, testing, QA, and etc etc...

 

 

 

Look man... I only need to know one thing

 

Invite Only Lobbies when?

 

 

 

Spoiler

They're not coming I know... funny though how R* designed their game so it'd ONLY work reliably with invite only lobbies, and struggles constantly to be played 'their way.'

You honestly think the much younger crowd who play GTAO would put up with endless loading screens and constant disconnects? I doubt it. GTA VI online will be a dumpster fire bigger than RDO, if R* tries to force public lobbies on us all.

 

[FuturePastNow]

6 hours ago, Jason said:

I'm not dismissing the fact that they literally broke the game. As I've posted in the thread earlier, I am bemused that it passed through Rockstar and Sony's certification process. I'm more so pointing the blame to better places, instead of memeing on Q&A teams like a lot of people typically do. Q&A teams usually know all the tricks and the broken sh*t and they report them as is it's their job. It isn't on them if it isn't fixed.

Aye, if you've ever spotted a bug in a video game, odds are QA saw it and wrote it up long ago and the game's producers just never scheduled a dev to fix it for one reason or another. Proper MMO QA also requires a test environment that accurately replicates the Live environment, and that can be very hard to do.

[Caffeination]

Infinite loading screen when making a distant sale still happens to this day lol

[AmyStone]

1 hour ago, Pocket Fox said:

Invite Only Lobbies when?

Never.

[Kirsty]

2 hours ago, AdamNortonUK said:

Oh, I'm not trying to be a Mr. Know it all, but from my posts in this thread, I think I'm coming across this way heh, so I'm gonna stop talking about it too much, as don't want to be known as a 'Mr. know it all prick' on here, haha.

You’ve been nothing but insightful and realistic in this topic, far from Mr Prick IMO