Maybe don't release it until you fix the bugs?asked by Heavy Bob
TL;DRThey argue every release tier is a testing environment and that fixing all bugs wouldn't help, because ongoing feature work keeps creating new ones until features are complete.
This is a good chance to remind folks that every tier of Star Citizen Alpha is a testing environment. You've got the Evocati at the base, the testing environment. Then you've got the PTU, testing environment. But even when we release it, it's still Star Citizen Alpha, which is still a testing environment. So it is all for testing. The whole pyramid there, or the whole ladder, as it were.
The other thing to understand, I think, is: imagine I could click my fingers and we went to zero bugs. So I just did that, right? Zero bugs. That's it. With three months development of a 500-man dev team adding new stuff, we would generate loads more bugs, because generally, I remember hearing somebody say game development is you're basically working on a broken game 95% of the development until the end, where you fix everything and then that's it. But then the game comes out, they stop adding more stuff, right? So for us, we've still got fundamental systems going in, like inventory and healing, and they touch a lot of systems. So even if we fixed all the current bugs, we'd still generate new bugs.
More bugs every single patch.
And that's why we're trying to get all the features in there, until we can get to where we go, okay, we're content complete from a feature perspective. Now let's close that out, polish it, 1.0, and then go from there, the full release. But until then, that's the nature of live releases.
And there are things you can discover with this many testers, and things that you can discover with this many testers. And there's things that you can only diagnose with all of the available testers that we have in the Star Citizen community. Again, that's why the live environment is very important. Never forget it. The live environment is still Star Citizen Alpha. It's still a test environment. It's why we have the wonderful Issue Council, so folks can still help us identify these things and repro these things and help us to determine the actual cause of these things. Because just like the wind knocking you over and you dying, you go, oh, the wind just killed me. But it's actually not the wind. It's the thing that it knocked you into.
And we get a lot of good feedback on the features that we can react to and help make the game better. So it's win-win.