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Is PBE lacking to do it's job or Riot is ?

Namazu Ebisu··46 votes·2,348 views

Before everyone goes madness and downvoting, keep calm and read, it's just a statement i make after some posts i saw.

I don't know about you guys but most of the time i browse reddit or the boards, it always comes to this :

  • Some guy gets to front page upvoted by pointing out a bug that was found out on live servers
  • Another guy comments and gets upvoted that this was pointed out on PBE but nothing happened. proof

For the recent exemples i can find, there are 3 :

  • Jhin's ulti that is not working correctly with some fps caps
  • Shen's taunt hitbox that is bugged
  • Most of the game's mechanics forgotten when everything started 15 seconds earlier

And a LOT more of course. Every single tiny bit of this stuff was indeed pointed out and explained on the PBE boards by people that actually do their purpose. But what i find really shocking is that those people get totally ignored every single time and that all those bugs gets pushed in live until some guy whines about it on reddit or boards and then we get a fix next patch...

Am i the only one bothered by this ? I'm actually part of the PBE crew and it's really frustrating. I'd really like to know Riot's opinion on that and how they work.

30 Comments

qetzel28 votes

The PBE makes Riot aware of the bug, but sometimes they can't get the fix in before the end of the PBE cycle.

Fixing bugs isn't always straightforward. Some bugs take longer than a patch to fix. Some bugs have a low level of reproducibility, so confirming that the bug exists and developing fixes takes longer. Additionally, without proper testing (on the PBE) you can't be sure that your fix won't actually break the game in certain circumstances. There is therefore a window before patch release in which you can't change anything.

For the vast majority of bugs it is better to release the new content and fix it in the next patch rather than delay the patch (indefinitely, because we don't know how long it takes to fix) or disable the champion affected.

It seems as though Riot is ignoring the PBE, but the situation isn't as simple as it appears.

EDIT: For completeness of explanation, somebody else mentioned what I missed. Loads of bugs actually are fixed. We are just seeing what falls through the cracks.

Speedphoenix5 votes

It would be nice if we could know when a rioter has "seen" the post...

Saianna3 votes

better "acknowledged bug existance"

PiVoRx15 votes

PBE is for teasing skins. It should be called STE (Skin Teasing Environment).

Namazu Ebisu4 votes

Yea, it's kinda like that sadly. It's also funny when i see people having borders on PBE, what the hell is ranked queue even doing there ?

CIit Yeastwood3 votes

It's really not though. You just don't seem to know how the PBE patches actually work.

We get a new patch what.... every 3 weeks? 4? Around there. This equates to about a patch a month. Since you claim to be "part of the PBE crew" then you'd notice how things cycle around there.

For example, since skins are brought up:

  1. Skin gets released, it's playable but has no splashes.
  2. Lots of balance changes happen at the same time. This can include items and champs.
  3. Week 2. Skins have splashes. Some reverts. Some bug fixes. This is the LAST week that they have to patch bugs. This is generally the last week that changes and major bug fixes are pushed out.

Everything after week two is very small TINY buffs, nerfs, skin changes. This is literally how ANY piece of software development cycle works.

Research into how things work instead of saying people aren't doing their jobs helps arguments.

Sightless6611 votes

It isn't actually true that "all those bugs gets pushed in live". You aren't aware of the bugs that are fixed. Most major bugs are actually addressed on the pbe. For example, just in the last pbe cycle, jhin and shen were both crashing games, nami's q particle was twice as large as it should have been, and there was a store bug. You aren't seeing any of that on live.

Protroid2 votes

Not to mention the fact that Jhin had an interesting bug where he could not cast abilities until he reloaded Whisper.

HeadHonchkrow1 votes

That would make sense thematically

Speedphoenix6 votes

He IS from the pbe What he meant is that some posts on the pbe boards are not paid attention to

Sightless662 votes

The largest problems are paid attention to, and most problems do get fixed on a PBE cycle. Smaller and/or more complicated problems run don't get immediately addressed, as well as problems that get identified late. Given the time involved in bugfixing, that's expected.

From my experience with other games, Riot is preforming up to expectations. I don't see a major problem here.

legionnaire994 votes

... i hate the fact you think 1000ish player can fix it for all the player of league IT A GAME THERE GOING TO BE BUGS if you don't think that should be a think gaming isn't for you

SoMNia4 votes

You assume that being aware of a bug makes it easy to identify and fix the cause? Undesirable behaviour in software can be caused by all sorts of unexpected things. If it is not very frequent and/or damaging, it may not be worth it to delay a launch for an undetermined amount of time in order to address something you may or may not be able to fix. Even if you can fix it, the solution may require a lot of work to completely change how a problem is approached, and programmers do not generally work for free.* Furthermore, the programmers you do have on staff have other work that they need to do. A producer needs to prioritize and make choices about how to allocate resources.

On top of that, the person who originally wrote a problem piece of code might have done it years ago and not documented it properly, making it very difficult for someone else to come along and read it to make changes. So, it might not be feasible to identify the cause of a bug at all. It's very easy for changes or new code to introduce a bug based on some obscure part of the code base that hasn't been seen by human eyes in the better part of a decade, and then that bug can remain a complete mystery for a surprising amount of time.

That's the gist of why certain bugs may be deemed not important enough to be fixed immediately (if ever), and why software products are usually launched containing known bugs that are fixed at a later date. It's not a case of the PBE not serving its purpose. This is a normal thing in large scale software development. It's unfortunate, but if there were something to be done, it would have been done.

In Riot's particular case, less game-breaking bugs are often addressed one or more patch cycles after they are identified. This is just how it works. Others here have mentioned that live servers provide orders of magnitude more data than the PBE, and make it much easier to observe bugs. This is especially important for rare ones that are difficult to reproduce.

*Arguably, there are even more volunteer open source developers than programmers collecting a paycheck, but it's difficult to get numbers on this. Even major open source projects collect donations to pay programmers (and lawyers). In any case, those people are not fixing Riot's bugs.

Guy Fox Teemo3 votes

I'm sorry but fixing bugs isn't so easy, they can't just go on ther and click "bug fix". Do you code sir? Do you know how much dam code you have to look through? An granted it's not very well organized since the client was made awhile ago. Meaning it's incredibly dam difficult to fix shit quickly .

Llanite3 votes

They're mostly aware of the bug, but choose to ignore it, as most software developers.

Why? Because you don't wave a magic wand to make bugs go away, some bugs might take literally hundred man hours to solve, at $30 an hour, it costs money, a lot of it.

Unless it caused real damages (game crash, exploited, etc) or really high reproducibility, the product is still released. They will fix smaller bugs as part of their work routine, but not at the expense of new products.

So this one time2 votes

riots opionin is " we dont give a fck unless it affects LCS or skin sales"

Stellafreyja2 votes

I still can't believe that it took like 2-3 patches for Riot to adjust everything affected by games starting 15 seconds earlier.

However, I'm assuming that Riot is aware of many bugs, but can't fix them before the patch goes live. They don't have to post in every bug thread saying they're working on it. With every change, Riot (and their internal testers) need to go through the entire game to make sure their changes didn't break something and in a game like League, that probably takes a while.

It sucks, but all we can do is wait. :/

TallyZrg2 votes

You do realize that within the first hour of "X" champion's release that X champion has been played tremendously more by the live player base than the pbe player base, right?

According to NBC news players rack up more than 1 billion hours of game time per month. If we take that base value we can figure out approximately how many games and hours happened in the first hour of Jhin's release.

First we need to figure out how many hours are in a month. Average number of days in a month is about 30, for math clarity I will use the value of 30.

30 days x 24 hours = 720 hours each month 1,000,000,000 hours / 720 hours = 1,388,888.88 repeating (Rounding up: 1,388,889 hours logged within the first hour of the month) 1,388,889 hours / 10 people = 138,889 games per hour if the games last 1 hour each (But wait! games are only lasting about 30 minutes on average so...) 138,889 hour long games x 2 = 277,778 games per hour if the games last 30 minutes each.

Roughly Jhin appeared in 277,778 games and had a play time of 1,388,889 hours within the first hour of his release assuming he was in every game played in that hour. This isn't an exact value, but pretty close.

In that time more people used Jhin in more ways than were ever used on the PBE considering that only a small fraction of the player base plays on the PBE.

Bugs are almost certainly going to end up in the live environment since you can't test everything and deliver content in a timely fashion. Test environments are there to make sure the entire game doesn't break by introducing new code into the game. Bugs can be fixed in later patches when they get more data on them.

Be grateful to Riot that you still have a game to play.

RyzeRework2 votes

There's some bugs that are so situational that u can't find it unless super specific conditions are met but also pbe is a small sample size of maybe 5 thousand people and when you realise a product to millions of players there's a higher chance of bugs being discovered

LF Annie1 votes

better thought, pbe is like a place where anything they do is going through, maybe with different numbers, but its coming.

there is no cancel button for riot, once they put it on the pbe, its locked and going to live.

Sypher The Poro2 votes

Not true at all. Look at the recent So rake changes, or even the mini-rework Riven got a while ago. Sometimes it's just the debs experimenting with how something feels and getting play feedback.

Joanna JQueen1 votes

RIOT NEEDS TO STOP PUSHING OUT PRODUCST WITH BUGS!!! SLOW THE FUCK DOWN AND FIX YOUR BUGS, THEN RELEASE THE FKN SHIT

Erockandroll1 votes

Riot certainly doesn't talk about a lot of things. especially when they are things people don't want to hear.

I'm going to take a stab at in the dark. I would bet Riot did find these bugs, on the PBE, but had no time to fix them by the next patch. Yet the bugs wern't game breaking, so they didn't stall the champion release, or pull this from the patch. And it may not be worth doing a hot fix.

So what do they do? They put it out on the next PBE Cycle, the bug fix probably can't be data mined, so it does not show up on PBE Update sites. And it's only after they have a fix ready and testing, that they come out about the bug. And by that time, people on live servers are already suffering.

SpongebobIsLife1 votes

The pbe is on a different environment then the servers we play on, so a bug on the pbe might not transfer over to a bug on live .

Iqqi1 votes

It is great the PBE finds the bug. Typically Riot has a decision to make. They can delay the release of the champion changes in which case reduce revenue, or they can release as scheduled. If the bug is not game breaking, they move forward. Hence all of your examples. Sure they knew. It just wasnt bad enough to warrant stopping their money train.

NostolgicSkies1 votes

I would rather riot fix the bugs and delay the release of those parts of each patch tne just releasing the bugs and causing a bunch of unfair/unfun games leading to constant complaining on the boards for 3 months before they decide they should fix it. . .if theres a problem with jhins ult i would rather they just not release jhin till he isn't bugged, if shens hit box is fucked up. delay shens rework (its not like you haven't delayed a rework before and the game survived) instead of just releasing shen and say oh well for the next month. thats just my opinion and i believe many will agree we are all willing to wait for healthy game play instead of rushed chaotic bugs and glitches through the game everytime a patch comes out.

Jalkan1 votes

If the PBE really didn't do its job, there would 10 times more bugs getting to the live servers. Some bugs slip by once in a while, and some can't get done in time.

The Loveless1 votes

I don't think there's enough staff monitoring PBE and checking feedback. They release so much shit that's bugged, dumb or otherwise broken. All could be prevented if they listened to feedback.

Quantum Lotus1 votes

•Jhin's ulti that is not working correctly with some fps caps

This is extremely annoying. I cant believe this wasn't fixed... I'm trying to snipe someone and it looks like they are flashing all over the place. It doesn't always happen but it does sometimes and if I could have killed the individual or slowed them for my team to kill them, which would cause our team to be able to get an objective, I would consider it game breaking. BUT WHATEVER.

MrWasjig1 votes

That would explain why Shadow Dash isn't hitting 90% of the time when I clearly hit someone =_=

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