They may have have had it for years but has it been running well for years? Most would say no with how poor the mm has been.
D: They have a large set of automatic and manual tests that they run every release, but all the tests passed, because the underlying issue was not tested for.
Making MMR visible wouldn’t have exposed it, though. Tactician, you really need to take some programming classes before spouting off (or better yet, work in the field) before spouting off on such matters).
For reference, this is what it takes to write bug free code: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff. No game company is going to spend those kind of resources.
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So they didn’t test it
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We’ll test it in production!
From experience, there’s actually a fourth option - the production environment is different from the staging / QA environment.
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So what you’re saying is they tested it on staging but not on production. But in the end that’s still just a roundabout way of saying C: they didn’t test it. Testing on production environment should always be the last step before release.
Despite your obvious intellect, you really come off as a Blizzard shill.
Entirely failing to integrate past MMR into the live season is not something that should have passed any sort of testing. We aren’t talking NASA precision, as nice as that sounds, we’re talking about basic competency.
If it’s as you said, and MMR is just stdev to the average player, everyone being a flat 0 would certainly have been visible. This isn’t a valid argument for it being public, but to say it wouldn’t have revealed the mistake is absurd.
Ideally (and this is what I do as a software architect at my company) staging and production environments are identical and staging uses copies of the production databases. However, even if this is exactly what they do at Blizzard, there’s no practical way to put the staging environment under a production-level load.
Even if they do literally test in production (and I’m certain they have a suite of smoke tests they run before making the servers publicly-accessible again after an upgrade), it wouldn’t be representative of live production servers under load.
I appreciate where you’re coming from, but it’s not an accurate picture.
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When you change the title and content in your post, the replies don’t make sense.
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I think that’s his new “tactic” for when he gets thoroughly shut down and doesn’t have enough echo chamber participation.
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You say that, but the truth is this isn’t an issue of load. Past season MMR wasn’t integrated, this is something that should have showed up in staging even if the test was only using a subset of the production data.
Realistically, this is a single small mistake by a single person. The issue isn’t that a person made a mistake, it’s that there was no oversight to catch and correct it before reaching live. Failing to link an entire dataset that’s crucial to the game’s performance is not acceptable at the level Blizzard operates at.
- I didn’t say that it is an issue of load.
- What’s your source for what you’re positively claiming it actually is?
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well if I could delete the topic I would
I guess I will quote, quote, quote from now on.
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Combined with the numerous reports of placements being ±600 from the accepted median of 2350, it seems to be pretty clear that is what happened.
Extrapolation and inference are not the same as proof for a claim.
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I’m not sure why you’re so inclined to defend them, but as a fellow programmer, can you honestly tell me it isn’t the most likely scenario? Everything appeared to be fully functional aside from MMR being treated as the default value, their developer outright said that the system was failing to integrate past matchmaking values.
There are limited explanations for this, and I can’t think of any that shouldn’t have showed up in a staging environment.
I’m not defending anybody, I’m just pointing out that you’re arguing based on assumptions. We don’t have the information needed to determine cause. We likely never will.
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Since I don’t go get a pitch fork any time a mob is forming, I must be a shill, right.
I’m pretty sure the issue is more subtle than that. It wasn’t just a MMR reset, as top players were only getting 2 SR for a win after placements. So it’s like they were getting matched as golds but gaining SR as GMs (who just stomped a bunch of golds). I’m guessing there is a factor in the matchmaker that was very wrong, but MMRs were correct. But that’s just a guess.
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I’d imagine it’d only decrease the work they need to do as they dont need to worry about people gaming the system as much.
Not like we all work for Blizzard, so they dont exactly stand to gain by us knowing their exact formulas.
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