Hello fellow botters! I am making this thread to give everyone a status update on the Tankleader project and everything that is going on right now.
At the end of last year, Buddy management was made aware that the Tankleader project was in need of some help. After the last game update, the team realized that the project's tools were broken due to game changes. The team did their best to update as usual, but this set of changes would require additional help to get everything back in working order. I should mention that things like this happen in the bot development world quite often, and Buddy has dealt with similar things before. As a result, additional help was added at the start of this year.
The original task of updating the tools took about a week. We can't go into technical details of the changes, but it was a pretty substantial game change which also broke a lot of existing public tools for WoT. Once that task was done, we began a complete revaluation of the project to see where it was, how it compared to our other products, and what we could be doing better.
Looking over all the feedback the past year, and taking a fresh look at the bot (I myself had never used Tankleader before), we realized there was a lot of work to be done. We understand that customers are not happy with our current offering, and the bot has a lot of unintended issues that have been unresolved for a while now. We've received a lot of negative feedback on the forums recently letting us know just how bad Tankleader is performing, and our reassessment of the project confirms exactly what these users are saying.
Bossland GmbH is fully committed to standing behind all of our products, so we'll try our best to provide users with the best possible bots they are paying for.
One of the main questions users have right now is, "are we actually working on improving Tankleader, and if so, why isn't much being said on the forums"? The answer to that question is yes, with the addition of the new help, we've been working really hard on improving Tankleader since the start of this year. The reason not much has been said on the forums yet, is because we don't want to excite users with a lot of new promises or planned changes, then disappoint them if things don't go quite as planned.
For example, it was originally expected that after the tools were updated, we could next focus on making improvements to the bot itself, to make it more than just a suicide run bot. However, that did not end up being the case because of all the observed issues with navigation. As we began tracking down the issues with the navigation system, more and more problems became apparent. As each of these problems was then solved, even more problems were found as to why navigation has had the issue it has had for a while now. We're still going though all of the code and fixing things as we speak.
This leads to the nest question users might have, "if all of these things are getting fixed, why aren't any real improvements being seen yet?" Simpy put, the problems users see with the navigation stem from issues that span all aspects of the project. From the custom tools we wrote and use to generate the navigation meshes, to the server sided path generation itself, and then to the way the bot then interacts with the game. All phases have had significant bugs and issues that are contributing to why Tankleader is in the current state it is in.
The good news is that these problems are finally being found and fixed, one by one. The bad news is that it's nearly impossible to give ETAs on when certain improvements can be deployed. The criteria we're using now to let users know of big changes and improvements is when we can see them from using the bot ourselves. If we run Tankleader, and see it get stuck on a rock or stop working in the first few minutes, then we know users will see the same exact issue. We need to look at such problems, figure out why they are happening and what we can do to solve them, rather than put out a bunch of changes we think should fix them and let users tell us things are still broken.
At this point in time, a significant number of issues have been fixed in the tools and server aspects of the project. We originally thought this would result in major improvements for users, and had planned an announcement yesterday about the new update. However, upon doing more testing this time around, we saw more issues in how the bot handles navigation that would effectively negate most of the other improvements. Had we gone ahead as planned, users would still see most of the issues they currently do, and it would look like we didn't actually fix anything, even though we've fixed quite a lot. As a result, we have more problems to solve first before giving anything new to users.
Hopefully things are much more clear now. Forum communication will continue to be 'light' in the mean time as we continue to crush the bugs the project has, and work on revamping things. Once again, this is simply because hardly anything works out as expected, and once we set a hard deadline, and aren't able to make it, delays tend to start to pile up and even more disappointment results. It's nearly the end of February already, and we're still (unexpectedly) working on fixing bugs in core systems, as opposed to doing bot logic updates.
We're going to leave this thread open for any discussion on what's been said. We know users are anxious to have a better working bot, much as we are to be providing one, but it's going to take some time. Rest assured though, we'll do everything we can to try and meet our users' expectations.
Thank you for reading.
At the end of last year, Buddy management was made aware that the Tankleader project was in need of some help. After the last game update, the team realized that the project's tools were broken due to game changes. The team did their best to update as usual, but this set of changes would require additional help to get everything back in working order. I should mention that things like this happen in the bot development world quite often, and Buddy has dealt with similar things before. As a result, additional help was added at the start of this year.
The original task of updating the tools took about a week. We can't go into technical details of the changes, but it was a pretty substantial game change which also broke a lot of existing public tools for WoT. Once that task was done, we began a complete revaluation of the project to see where it was, how it compared to our other products, and what we could be doing better.
Looking over all the feedback the past year, and taking a fresh look at the bot (I myself had never used Tankleader before), we realized there was a lot of work to be done. We understand that customers are not happy with our current offering, and the bot has a lot of unintended issues that have been unresolved for a while now. We've received a lot of negative feedback on the forums recently letting us know just how bad Tankleader is performing, and our reassessment of the project confirms exactly what these users are saying.
Bossland GmbH is fully committed to standing behind all of our products, so we'll try our best to provide users with the best possible bots they are paying for.
One of the main questions users have right now is, "are we actually working on improving Tankleader, and if so, why isn't much being said on the forums"? The answer to that question is yes, with the addition of the new help, we've been working really hard on improving Tankleader since the start of this year. The reason not much has been said on the forums yet, is because we don't want to excite users with a lot of new promises or planned changes, then disappoint them if things don't go quite as planned.
For example, it was originally expected that after the tools were updated, we could next focus on making improvements to the bot itself, to make it more than just a suicide run bot. However, that did not end up being the case because of all the observed issues with navigation. As we began tracking down the issues with the navigation system, more and more problems became apparent. As each of these problems was then solved, even more problems were found as to why navigation has had the issue it has had for a while now. We're still going though all of the code and fixing things as we speak.
This leads to the nest question users might have, "if all of these things are getting fixed, why aren't any real improvements being seen yet?" Simpy put, the problems users see with the navigation stem from issues that span all aspects of the project. From the custom tools we wrote and use to generate the navigation meshes, to the server sided path generation itself, and then to the way the bot then interacts with the game. All phases have had significant bugs and issues that are contributing to why Tankleader is in the current state it is in.
The good news is that these problems are finally being found and fixed, one by one. The bad news is that it's nearly impossible to give ETAs on when certain improvements can be deployed. The criteria we're using now to let users know of big changes and improvements is when we can see them from using the bot ourselves. If we run Tankleader, and see it get stuck on a rock or stop working in the first few minutes, then we know users will see the same exact issue. We need to look at such problems, figure out why they are happening and what we can do to solve them, rather than put out a bunch of changes we think should fix them and let users tell us things are still broken.
At this point in time, a significant number of issues have been fixed in the tools and server aspects of the project. We originally thought this would result in major improvements for users, and had planned an announcement yesterday about the new update. However, upon doing more testing this time around, we saw more issues in how the bot handles navigation that would effectively negate most of the other improvements. Had we gone ahead as planned, users would still see most of the issues they currently do, and it would look like we didn't actually fix anything, even though we've fixed quite a lot. As a result, we have more problems to solve first before giving anything new to users.
Hopefully things are much more clear now. Forum communication will continue to be 'light' in the mean time as we continue to crush the bugs the project has, and work on revamping things. Once again, this is simply because hardly anything works out as expected, and once we set a hard deadline, and aren't able to make it, delays tend to start to pile up and even more disappointment results. It's nearly the end of February already, and we're still (unexpectedly) working on fixing bugs in core systems, as opposed to doing bot logic updates.
We're going to leave this thread open for any discussion on what's been said. We know users are anxious to have a better working bot, much as we are to be providing one, but it's going to take some time. Rest assured though, we'll do everything we can to try and meet our users' expectations.
Thank you for reading.
