When “playable” Is Not Actually “Playable”
Started by bluetack123




5 posts in this topic
bluetack123
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09-01-2017, 02:28 AM -
#1
Hello

This post will leave some if not many people feeling aggrieved but what is said must be said. It appears some game testers misunderstand the ‘playability’ requirement of a game to satisfy the status of being “Playable”. Let us first recap the definition of “Playable” as given on the official website and this thread:

Playable: Games that can be played from start to finish with playable performance and no game breaking glitches.

Note that I have capitalized the term “Playable”. This is done to distinct the term from its ordinary dictionary meaning. For example, a game may be playable but will not be “Playable” if it, due to game breaking glitches, cannot be finished. For a game to be “Playable” it not only requires to be playable but also be beatable, that is it ‘can be properly played from start to finish’.  For a better understanding of such distinction, it is necessary to look at the definition of a game achieving “Ingame” status:

Ingame: The emulator can go past the main menu, and you can actually "play" it, but glitches and random crashes, or even low performance, make it impossible to reasonably finish the game.

From the definition of “Playable” and “Ingame” we can see that whilst a game may be playable, even after a long session without crashes or glitches, it will not qualify for the status of being “Playable” until the tester/s has played the game from the start to finish absent any game breaking glitches, regardless of the number of sessions it took. Otherwise the game can only satisfy the lower “Ingame” status requirements.

I have read one too many threads that request a game’s compatibility status to be changed to “Playable” with the reason that they have played the game for a few hours and during that play session, no crashes were experienced. Whilst it is understandable that testers, like most of us in modern society, lead busy lives and are keen to encourage others to try out the same game they are playing without having to finish the game themselves first those reasons should not be sufficient to justify the lowering of the set compatibility standards, intentionally or otherwise. 

Developers, either create another category to ameliorate the confusion caused by the definitions of the two “Playable” and “Ingame” statuses or otherwise strictly enforce the standards you have set by way of requiring proof of game completion prior to moving a game to the “Playable” status.  

This post is not written with any intention to put anyone down. It was written to encourage the meeting of set standards. Those standards were not defined by myself but the developers themselves. I do not purport to fully understand the intention of the developers, I am merely attempting to gauge those intention by what they have written.

TL;DR: You need to have finished a game before stating that the game has reached “Playable” status. 
Ani
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09-01-2017, 02:20 PM -
#2
We don't require actually finishing the game for obvious reasons. Most games take a long time to finish, and testing those every time until they're Playable is not feasible, unless we had hundreds of testers willing to do that. There are thousands of PS3 games and updates to RPCS3 come out regularly.
However, if you can play a game for a while without any issues at all, it can be considered Playable, as it's very unlikely it will face issues later on when it didn't before. If that does happen, the game will be moved back to Ingame.

Adding more statuses to Compatibility is already planned, but it can't be deployed right now as a lot of time will be needed to normalize it, re-evaluating hundreds of threads.

If you have any suggestions, let me know. Also I usually pick random threads and review them myself to make sure Moderators aren't incorrectly moving stuff.
This post was last modified: 09-01-2017, 03:11 PM by Ani.
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LinkHimura
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09-02-2017, 03:52 AM -
#3
That's what I was wondering when I read the compatibility list. But I don't kinda understand the current state of the list from your post.

What I mean with that, and want to ask, is this: If a game is "playable" in the list, it means that the game is really Playable? (30FPS or w/e it's locked, no glitches, no crashes, stuff like that) Or when a game is playable in the list, it means that yeah, you can play it, but at 5FPS (or w/e, meaning that you in reality can't play it, even if you can "play it")

That's what I don't understand in the post. What option is it? I'm just asking with genuine curiosity, I don't mean to offend you or nothing like that.
Ani
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09-02-2017, 02:12 PM -
#4
No, if the game has poor performance it never goes to Playable. It has to have Playable performance.

This depends on the type of game too. Rhythm games require steady 30fps for example, but games like Persona 5 can be played at 20-30fps (I played the whole game myself on a laptop) instead of steady 30fps.
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Kravicka
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09-02-2017, 05:13 PM -
#5
btw: U cant say that it will work for everyone at 30fps, and one person with low cpu cant retest every game to be sure it is playable at 30fps for 90%+ players.
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LinkHimura
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09-02-2017, 07:43 PM -
#6
No, of course, not everyone is going to have 30fps if they have a bad PC, but maybe the emulator isn't polished enough in that specific game and no one has "perfect" performance, that's just what I meant. Just a technicality, sorry.

But hey, thanks for the answer. That clears my questions.


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