MMORPG.com EVE Online Correspondent Andrew Wallace writes this report on the recent bugs that have cropped up in EVE updates and CCP's speedy reaction to them.

Change is quite possibly one of the best things about the MMO genre. Through patches and expansions, they are continually expanded and refined; to the point that you might not be playing the same game you started subscribing to six months ago. EVE Online is no exception, and every new expansion ushers in a new age that the players must adapt to; whether it's a change to existing modules, or the opening of a new frontier to explore, in the form of wormhole space. Change is good, except when it's not.

Read There Will Be Bugs...

Too bad that every patch since Apocrypha has had a bad patcher. At least the ones I tried up until a month ago when I tired of downloading the full 2Gb client for 2Mb patches that failed to apply on no less than 4 machines.

Well, I don't know what kind of machines you have. I've been playing this game for over 4 years now and my patches autoload install and restart the client flawlessly.

Best MMO game at this moment, imo.

Yeah, through multiple installs of the game, I and the various friends who I've gotten to try this game have never had issues with the patching process.

Eve Apocrypha Corrupt Patch

First several hits tell the tale. 3 machines when I was down visiting relatives and my main machine here. Every single one hit with the corrupt patch bug. Even worse is that they offer a torrent download. I could live with it... if I could use my own torrent client instead of the one they put together. Their client doesn't throttle bandwidth. ktorrent does (and utorrent, vuze, deluge....)

First off, did not encounter the bugs he was talking about and I did a long jaunt to 0.0 in that timeframe as an escort.  Of couse I don't use a cloak much at all so it did not bother me much.

I don't know anyone that had the upgrade problem mentioned above either.  Even the download for a friends machine went very fast the other night.

You want bad download speeds, try Wow.

Ah, yes, the ol' "go to WoW, nublet" defense. Funny thing, I do play WoW as well. Never in the 4-5 years of playing it had a corrupted patch and the patches download speedily enough with their torrent client. Which, of course, wasn't my point since I was complaining about the EVE torrent client using up too much bandwidth not using too little.

Whatever your position, mate, it's a fact that the patching process in WoW is one of the worst in the industry.  The only other game with a similarly convoluted, inefficient, and time-consuming patch process is Anarchy Online (but is fortunately a much better game, making it far easier to tolerate the inconvenience.)  Do a fresh install of WoW from the batllechest.  Even before the pre-patches for Wrath of the Lich King, it would easily take a full night, since it downloads each and every patch incrementally (and that's on a 15Mb/s downstream connection).  Now compare this to, for instance, any SOE game (setting aside their depressing habit of destroying really good games by listening to whiners and jacking up game balance to coddle them), or Final Fantasy XI, all of which have had consisted patch times of approximately 3-4 hours from a clean install, and have maintained that from launch day of the core game, up to and including their latest expansion.

That being said, I'll happily take almost any of the bugs we've had in EVE, no matter how serious, over the server stability on WoW alone.  I've never seen an MMO with less stable servers, more server crashes, latency issues, etc, and that's including games still in the beta testing phase, than I have seen in WoW.