Price lists?

[Ura Hero]

3 hours ago, Without_Pause said:

Didn't they use Excel instead of an actual DB?

 

It wouldn't surprise me.  

[Ukase]

On 1/7/2022 at 6:57 AM, Ura Hero said:

 

It's pretty bad.  As has been said multiple times, the original devs hated relational databases.  So much stuff is in flat files it's not funny.  There is a lot of the game that needs a full rewrite to actually fix the underlying issues.  That takes time when you only have a few people and the code is a bowl of dropped spaghetti in the first place.

I can't wrap my head around this. I've never worked as a programmer, but I have programmed in grad school a bit. Nothing exotic, just some data structures and a few java projects. And what I find really tough to absorb is why the poor documentation (or lack of) that I've heard about in regards to CoH was allowed, and further, why code that was so bad was allowed to proceed in the first place. 

I can wrap my head around deadlines, and profit driven decisions. But decisions are generally made with the idea that the business will be an on-going concern forever. You have to think long term about these things. And clearly, either they didn't or newer languages and software engines now allow for a superior implementation. I'm not in the space enough to know either way. 

But what would be really strange is to get a pop-up when logging in - "All players remove all your items from the AH by Friday at midnight eastern time. Wentworth's is being bought out, and all the inventory must go, or be lost forever. Business will resume Monday 8AM Eastern"

Or something like that. And what about players that didn't get the memo? I'm sure there would be other ways to implement such a solution, but it's all beyond me to ponder it more than just as a thought. 

[lemming]

14 minutes ago, Ukase said:

I can't wrap my head around this. I've never worked as a programmer, but I have programmed in grad school a bit. Nothing exotic, just some data structures and a few java projects. And what I find really tough to absorb is why the poor documentation (or lack of) that I've heard about in regards to CoH was allowed, and further, why code that was so bad was allowed to proceed in the first place. 

I can wrap my head around deadlines, and profit driven decisions. But decisions are generally made with the idea that the business will be an on-going concern forever. You have to think long term about these things. And clearly, either they didn't or newer languages and software engines now allow for a superior implementation. I'm not in the space enough to know either way. 

But what would be really strange is to get a pop-up when logging in - "All players remove all your items from the AH by Friday at midnight eastern time. Wentworth's is being bought out, and all the inventory must go, or be lost forever. Business will resume Monday 8AM Eastern"

Or something like that. And what about players that didn't get the memo? I'm sure there would be other ways to implement such a solution, but it's all beyond me to ponder it more than just as a thought. 

I worked in the corporate field from the 80s on.   It's amazing what code is out there in the wild.  It would turn you gray.

From a personal standpoint, I had a project that I built to do a major link of automated testing for a company.  They got me to do another project and I left it in the hands of someone else.  Two years later, I went back to my old project with more experience and knew there were areas to improve on.  Found out, the guy who I had left it with was so afraid of breaking it, he did very little to it and just tacked on bits here and there.

I wound up fixing a bunch of actual issues with it and wound up speeding it up a lot.  Though never did get to finish the DB version of it.

 

Compared to the code of the companies main product, my code was easy to read and modify...

[Ura Hero]

44 minutes ago, Ukase said:

I can't wrap my head around this. I've never worked as a programmer, but I have programmed in grad school a bit. Nothing exotic, just some data structures and a few java projects. And what I find really tough to absorb is why the poor documentation (or lack of) that I've heard about in regards to CoH was allowed, and further, why code that was so bad was allowed to proceed in the first place. 

I can wrap my head around deadlines, and profit driven decisions. But decisions are generally made with the idea that the business will be an on-going concern forever. You have to think long term about these things. And clearly, either they didn't or newer languages and software engines now allow for a superior implementation. I'm not in the space enough to know either way. 

But what would be really strange is to get a pop-up when logging in - "All players remove all your items from the AH by Friday at midnight eastern time. Wentworth's is being bought out, and all the inventory must go, or be lost forever. Business will resume Monday 8AM Eastern"

Or something like that. And what about players that didn't get the memo? I'm sure there would be other ways to implement such a solution, but it's all beyond me to ponder it more than just as a thought. 

 

Some of it has to do with management.  One place I know of the President was adamant that there would never be a true business system in place.  "We have programmers.  It can all be done in house."  Even saying SAP or Oracle was strictly verbotten.  Bear in mind this place has a fairly major online presence, it's not like they couldn't afford anything they wanted.  The entire "database" system was ran off of Excel sheets until it was on the verge of collapsing from the number of entries.  It was so slow that customer complaints were through the roof.  He finally caved when they brought in a database expert after the Vice President of IT complained enough. The expert told the President how many years they had until the whole thing was completely unusable due to size constraints (it was less than three years).   It's now all SQL and there is a major CRM system in place that ties it all together.  It's fast and reliable and there are not nearly as many issues that crop up.  It's not always the programmers fault.  A lot of times there is someone else stopping progress.

Edited January 8, 2022 by Ura Hero

[Andreah]

2 hours ago, lemming said:

It's amazing what code is out there in the wild.  It would turn you gray.

Can confirm.

 

A lot of it I encountered was due to unexpected success -- you plan for a throw-away tool or short life system, but end up keeping it for a decade or more. And there's sunk-cost logic all along the way. It's easy to fall into that trap. 

 

And there's incremental funding. On a project I was on, we had short-term results based funding, and at best we could only use a small amount of it to do short term bug fixes and add critical new capabilities required for the current work. Additional work was not only not in the budget, it was contractually not allowed. Rinse/repeat twenty times, and you have a truly amazing mess. And at no point along the way could you have done it differently, even in hindsight. 

[Andreah]

2 hours ago, Ukase said:

But what would be really strange is to get a pop-up when logging in - "All players remove all your items from the AH by Friday at midnight eastern time. Wentworth's is being bought out, and all the inventory must go, or be lost forever. Business will resume Monday 8AM Eastern"

Or something like that. And what about players that didn't get the memo? I'm sure there would be other ways to implement such a solution, but it's all beyond me to ponder it more than just as a thought. 

You build a new, parallel auction house -- /ah2. Then start up /ah2 and you do a soft retirement on the old auction house. No new adding items to store, no new postings of items to sell. You can buy things that are already there, cancel orders you've posted, and pull things out, but not put things in. Maybe you warn folks it's going to be deleted in a year; maybe you just keep it forever.

[Bionic_Flea]

3 hours ago, Ukase said:

why code that was so bad was allowed to proceed in the first place. 

I have been told that the team occasionally subcontracted or hired a team to handle a discreet project (e.g. arena, /ah, etc.).   If you are crunched for time you want to get the code to work and then worry about documenting later . . . and later never comes because the project is over and you are out the door.  And now the long-haul devs are stuck with what you did.

[Yomo Kimyata]

55 minutes ago, Andreah said:

You build a new, parallel auction house -- /ah2. Then start up /ah2 and you do a soft retirement on the old auction house. No new adding items to store, no new postings of items to sell. You can buy things that are already there, cancel orders you've posted, and pull things out, but not put things in. Maybe you warn folks it's going to be deleted in a year; maybe you just keep it forever.

 

Something like this makes the most sense to me.  There will always be people who will have a fit unless things are backwards compatible forever.