To be fair though this problem needs some serious man hours of playtime putting in to it before it rises like a necromancers skeleton to poke you in the backside with an Ancient Nord Sword.

I never reached the 'gamebreaking lag of legend' status with even a good 80 or so hours of play (that's a good 2 weeks of big sessions) and perhaps neither did a QA team.

from my own experience with the game i get constant frame rate stutter. now that can range from minor skipping every 3 seconds (like when I run) or constant frame drop (like when Im in a city). And i'm only 30 hours in at level 24. QA depts can easily put in that much time, 8 hours a day, for my play session is just 4 days and for your play session is two weeks. Unless their QA team only worked for one week or 3 days in my case there is no way they didn't encounter this problem

I am a QA tester, yes (not for Bethesda though).

QA testing works well, but things are missed. It happens all the time. Bugs that are found are also prioritized (typically as p1, p2, and p3). If a bug is major and easy to fix, it will typically always be given highest priority. If the bug is major but difficult to be fix, it may be delayed or put off because 30 major/easy bugs may be able to be fixed in the same amount of time the 1 major/hard bug could be. A fatally major bug is always given priority to the point that the release is typically pushed back. The PS3 version required additional work and so once the computer/360 version was done, work on the ps3 went on. This meant that there was a time crunch. Even if they knew about this issue, they may have prioritized a hundred p1 bugs in the time it would have taken to fix this one. This is because they may not have understood the scope of the issue before release (that 20 hours of gameplay would cause this fatal issue to start the death march).

So, even testers are human and make mistakes. Project managers can also make mistakes based on the information they've been given and subsequently prioritize the wrong things ahead of a potentially worse problems.

That being said, they could have been working on this for a long time and the developers could have thought they were just a week or two away from solving the problem (which they were), the project managers and marketers then acted according to that information.

QA testing does not mean nothing will get through. Someday I'd like to work with Bethesda. Considering how much I enjoy crushing the work of developers, I think I'd be an asset for them. But until that day, I couldn't tell what happened with this particular piece of software. Then again, I certainly wouldn't even speak on here if that ever happened! haha.

Woa woa woa! Wait......what?! You don't think they ran into this problem because they didn't get that far into playing the game?! That's there JOB!! NOBODY creates a product, packages it, and releases it without testing it fully first.

What you're implying is that they didn't even beat their own game (which IS possible by the way). Although the game contains a TON of content, THEY created all of it, and there IS a finite amount of content. EVENTUALLY, as gameplay testing continues, all content will been tested. There ARE actually people whose sole purpose on the development team is to ONLY play the game for testing purposes. That's their job, and that's all they do. Now, that doesn't mean they'll find every tiny little bug because I'm sure a TON of them are extremely rare cases (such as getting your character stuck in some random crevasse on a mountain somewhere) and are even quite negligible, but this isn't some little tiny negligible bug. This is game-ruining/game-breaking! These types of bugs are ALPHA-TESTING bugs/issues (FYI: comes before beta-testing), not at all RELEASE-DATE ISSUES! Bethesda has NO room for any possible redeeming argument that will even come CLOSE to justifying such a mistake. This is not some bug that only pops up after some complicated/rare pattern of events that the player as taken part in. This bug is found simply by PLAYING THE GAME!! That's all! EVERY single one of the game testers should have run into this problem.....UNLESS the PS3 community was deemed not important enough to test their product on PS3 systems.

For a game to be released with such a HUGE bug says only one of two things: 1) The game was tested very little on PS3 systems (due to the fact that we, the PS3 community, are quite negligible), if any at all, OR 2) they knew d@mn well the bug was there, kept it *hush hush*, and allowed all of us to throw down $60 of our hard earned money for a broken game. The ONLY thing that would have made #2 acceptable is if we, the consumers, were given forewarning, and assured that the issue is being worked on and WILL be fixed, which we all well know was NOT what happened. None of which (#1 or #2) show ANY dedication or care towards the PS3 community and that's the way it HAS been for almost 5 years now and I'm sick of it just as many others are.

There is absolutely NO excuse, or redeeming argument anyone can make for Bethesda, or even given by Bethesda themselves, that will convince me that this issue was legitimately a simple human mistake, and that we should all feel bad for complaining so much because they've been working tirelessly trying to help out the PS3 community, whom they appreciate so much. Nothing excuses such a mistake unless somehow every member of Bethesda was held up at gun-point during development and were all forced to ignore the PS3 community.....only then would this be excusable. However, I really doubt that was the case.

I have no idea why so many people here continually back-up and defend Bethesda here and keep making up excuses for such incompetence. We're ALL in the same boat, and we've ALL been screwed. Why would anyone in this boat stand up and say, "Hey, maybe they just had no idea!" Considering the 2 ONLY possibilities I listed above, there's no way.....let alone the fact that this issue has been a problem since day one (release of Oblivion for PS3). Stop allowing yourself to be screwed and get upset for crying out loud.

Lets say you program a dog to yip and do back flips when you talk to him. You send the NPC doggy to the playtesting team.
The team sends back a report that the dog didn't have any problems. The NPC dog gets pushed into the final project.
Two weeks later after the game is released- people are saying that the dog disappears suddenly if you cast certain magic
on it. How is this possible? Maybe because the NPC doggy had a specific label that was left checked/unchecked during coding.

Do you blame it on the programmer? Or the playtesters that didn't run into the problem? Or if they did, do you blame the programmers
bad clean up work? What about the head programming manager? Do you blame the game company entirely? Or do you blame the one
person who wanted to push such an early release date?

This is such an argument. Pointing out blame doesn't really do anything for us, as human a reaction as it is...

Generally the first few days after a patch is a time of continuing to work on known issues and gathering data for any issues for the patch. Until much information/data is gathered there is not much to say but hey, "we're looking into it" which they have said quite often.

And no data is ever gathered from rant threads since there is no data to gather in them.

Re-read my post.

I'll reiterate in case you don't feel like it. This isn't a RARE bug that occurs after a player happens to perform some task that could have easily been overlooked or just completely not even thought of to test such as, casting some spell during a particular moment, canceling out of some conversation while casting a spell, opening up the character menu while holding down R2+Triangle+X+Up (trying to make a point)......this bug is run into simply by PLAYING THE GAME!! There's nothing complicated about running into this bug. There isn't some weird or rare task that has to be done in order to STUMBLE onto this bug.....all you have to do is play the game. That's it!

It was just an example of the process of bug elimination. I've said in previous threads that play testing could have
been done by a process like instancing: spawning preset characters in preset scenarios for stress/bug testing.
It's also possible that they had more play testing focus on one console than another. And lastly, it's possible that
the people who did play were "one of the few lucky individuals" that didn't run into the crippling lag.

Again, don't get worked up. I'm not disagreeing with you. Just explaining what is all involved when developing a game.
There are even more advanced steps taken when issues like this arise. My biggest speculation is that the game is
accessing the save data incorrectly (which is the source of our lag), and NOT what is actually saved. Depending on
how much data is there, the process of saving/writing/accessing can cripple a game if not done correctly.

Cheers

Well I wasn't TRYING to come off as jerk and I apologize if I came off as attacking you. I'm just tired of this as all I've done is support Bethesda by continually purchasing their products and yet am always let down and disappointed with my purchases. My only fault is putting my faith in the company, and I'm always let down.

It's just gotten ridiculous.

No no! It's okay, mate! We're all brothers here.

This is my plan. The next Bethesda game I get will be a used copy, so $0 for Bethesda.

Just posting to say that I appreciate the insight that lightknight is bringing to this thread. I'm at work now so I haven't tried the new patch yet, but will be trying it tonight. I don't want to start my game over (at Level 25 with a +6MB save file) because I already started over once and really like my character this time. The game has started to stutter and lag for me within the last couple of game hours so hopefully this patch fixes it without requiring me to start over.

That won't achieve anything. You and everyone else at these forums know that you'll be buying The Elder Scrolls 6 on release day. Because that's what people do.

I didn't buy Fallout: New Vegas after playing Fallout 3, don't insult my intelligence.

Calm down. So much bitterness around here! It's only a game, remember!

He definitely sounded so upset he warranted a "calm down"


I always find it humorous when someone gets caught in their own "logic" and resorts to the pseudo intellectual tactic of making themselves sound calm and collected.

"Calm down. So much bitterness around here! It's only a game [that everyone here got screwed out of $60 for], remember!"

That's what you meant.....right?

I'd say that DEFINITELY justifies the bitterness the PS3 community has been feeling. Not to mention the money paid for past broken games from bethesda. Yeah, I'd kind of expect everyone here to be a bit bitter about the situation at hand and the cards we've been dealt by the dealer as the dealer just so happens to continually hand us the same cards......kind of makes you wonder.

Please don't tell folks to calm down. It just serves to make them more angry and serves no useful purpose other than that. Just report problems and discuss things in a respectful way. It doesn't help anyone with problems to tell them to calm down if you don't have a +100 lock spell. People have every right to post about their problems.

Of course, ranting doesn't serve a purpose either so I suggest folks try a more helpful approach but still....don't.

I apologize for sniping at you, but this has happened to me with bethesda two times now, and I'm on the edge at this point. $60 and 4 days worth of cumulative playtime soured by this shoddy company. We have been lied to multiple times and yet there are still people pulling the wool over their eyes and calling this "a GREAT game!"