We now have three German routes with malfunctioning level crossings, where road vehicles ignore lowered barriers and pass in front of or even through the trains. First on BBO, then West Rhine and there is even an example on the Niddertalbahn as I pointed out in one of the routes threads. I have no idea how the TSW editor works in respect of setting up car stoppers at crossings, but something seems fundamentally flawed for this problem to now be so prevalent. Surely the beta testers have pointed this out. So the bottom line has to be, what are DTG doing to investigate and fix the problem? Is it a core issue, has something been missed or placed incorrectly during the route building process or some other issue. Sorry to tag, but DTG Alex or DTG Matt can we have an assurance this is a live issue and a fix actively being worked on?
No disrespect to any beta testers who may be reading this, but I have a theory about the testing process. Either the beta testers are discovering lots of bugs and the DTG folks and their partners are unable or unwilling to fix them before releasing the product. OR, The beta testers are simply not doing a good job spotting the bugs and we players are the effective testers. Which it is I do not know but certainly the issue you refer to cannot have escaped everybody.
Of course the beta testers see them, but issues are triaged, and something like that, despite being something that can destroy immersion, is pretty low down on the list of fixes, it's probably a 'fix it when you can issue. This is in no way unique to TSW or DTG, it happens all throughout gaming, and other industries.
Beta testers are usally only paid to test the product to ensure it works. Depending on the companies used, many will either not know it's an issue or be told to only report game breaking/ CTD issues. Friend of mine was a beta tester, contracted to a major company... their role on one shooter was just to test whether certain weapons in a gamemode would allow the user to escape maps. That was all, for 8 hours straight.... trying to break one map... they hated it. I don't know how these ones work, but they are most likely not interested.... or not told to report things outside their given task. The person I refer too, again, found an clipping issue, reported it, but was told it wasn't on their remit and it wasn't passed up.
Not every company has beta testers (that's what customers are for). I haven't noticed cars going through lowered barriers, but I have noticed barriers that remain raised as the train passes by. I haven't bothered to report it since there's a lot bigger and more significant bugs that I'd rather be worked on.
Re: The usual misconceptions around testing. As someone with fairly extensive experience in QA and game development, here is some context: I have played Niddertalbahn for around 8 hours, the equivalent of a working day. I have seen the issue with level crossings once in that time. Let's suppose that in some galaxy far far away, a tester is tasked with spending a full day of their job looking only for this issue, they might find this one example of it. Now they have to write it up, and tell a dev about it. The dev has a pile of tasks, as well as bug reports, and needs to know how to prioritize things, and so the tester has kindly told them that out of the 10 full route runs they did, only once did they see this issue, so the issue will be considered as having a 1 in 10 reproduction rate, and the priority of it being fixed will be scheduled accordingly. Now let's assume that there's a big list of bugs with a higher reproduction rate, a 9/10 or 10/10 chance of occurring. And so DTG fix those for release. Nobody who plays the game will ever know how much or how many of those were fixed, and will instead just assume none of the bugs were fixed because they only see what they experience in the final product. DTG have the context of what was found and fixed, we do not, hence why DTG do not hold a crisis meeting every time someone on the forum angrily exclaims "how was this missed/allowed to be shipped!". Bare in mind of course that the build a tesrer may be using could be full of all sorts of janky graphical issues or work in progress elements that means they are distracted and miss the one example where it did happen. We can also add into the above mix the fact that numerous builds are generated and the problem may only be introduced at a particular point, it may come, disappear, then return, and at any of these points a dev might simply say they couldn't reproduce it, or it is only noticed very close to release, and nobody in their right mind could think something with a low frequency of occurrence like this should block the game's release. And even if every time a major change is made to a build you tasked one tester with repeating the process of just looking for this one issue, the above issues can still occur every single time which means it is missed, or simply considered low priority. Each DTG route DLC is basically a self-contained open world game, with many many moving parts, any one of which being slightly off can break numerous other things, for the price point there will always be a limit on time and resource (and let's not discuss the price point, DTG know what their sales will be depending on price etc so just saying what you think DLC is worth or how much more you would be willing to pay is irrelevant), and that means beyond a certain point development and QA costs are going to make a product loss-making, and that's simply not something any business is going to go along with, so yes, there will always be an upper limit on how much dev time, and how much QA is done, that is not unique to DTG. Now, the reality of any game's development is that when you release it, you instantly have thousands of people spending numerous hours playing it, and in the space of two days your customers have spent more time cumulatively in the game than your entire dev and QA team did during a 6 month+ development time, that is why things get found fast, it's literally because people want to play this game, and have an urgency to do so because the game is fundamentally good enough to generate that response from players, and in doing so they accumulate many hours in a short period of time and that means finding re-occurring issues is much much faster and likely than someone working an 8 hour shift, also considering players are highly motivated and in the case of this forum go out of their way to understand how exactly everything is supposed to work because it is a hobby they enjoy, not a task they do to get money to pay rent. You might say that many of these issues are re-occurring though, surely they can simply make a list of stuff that has been problematic in previous routes and at least ensure those things are checked. The problem will still be the experience of the testers, who rarely stick around for long (and in the case of third party QA companies, they usually specifically only hire people on fixed term contracts and prefer to get new blood in so their testers don't start developing their own autonomy or editorial slant in finding and reporting bugs). So a list of a basic set of stuff to check will still be at the mercy of how experienced those looking for the issues are, as well as all the stuff I mention above that can re-occur many many times and means issues that players find important simply slip through the cracks over a longer period of time. None of the above means the process cannot be improved, nor that the quality for release cannot be increased, it's simply to point out the complexity of the process, on top of the complexity of the game, means nothing is ever as simple as people on this forum want to believe it is, nothing is as simple as "bad DTG don't do enough testing".
Okay, don’t really think we need to get too distracted about the beta testing process, been there myself more than once and a developer was only interested in show stopping bugs. The point is, the problem with the crossings exists, it now affects at least three German routes and something ought to be done about it.
Can you please clarify, where and when you had a crossing on Niddertalbahn not working correctly? Please don't forget, not working crossing on Niddertalbahn are a feature, not a bug. They have a 1% chance of failure, so you need to stop before the crossing, and manually close it.
Eichen approaching the station in the Stockheim direction. The barriers were down and I had the correct flashing light on approach so would assume this was not an instance of a failed crossing. If a route dev is reading this thread, perhaps they could check the car stoppers at this location, please.
If the route were located in Florida I would see it as an immersion builder. But in Germany, it is very jarring. Cheers
I could not agree more with this post. I am a product owner for some NHS software and the effort put in by our beta testers, in user access testing (UAT) and QA is immense and I applaud their contribution every time we go through dev builds. However, they will not capture everything and, as product owner, I do not either expect them to nor do I agree with everything they raise as a ticket. Some minor issues always make it to release and I often know what they are but they are, as Luke says, the 1 in 10s and would be product defeating if you held back release until you fixed them all
As I said, let’s please not wander off topic about the merits of beta testing - it was a minor aside in my main point that DTG seem to be ignoring the issue of German route LC’s not always functioning correctly.
