Scott Jennings: The Truth Behind Bugs
MMORPG.com columnist Scott Jennings focuses his column this week on the actual process behind bug in MMORPGs, having experience with the issue both as a player and as a developer.
Column By Scott Jennings on November 11, 2009
“Why doesn’t someone just fix these bugs already?”
This is a common complaint of anyone who plays MMORPGs Every game has bugs, great and small – the better ones only have ones that inconvenience you or perhaps block you from completing a quest unless you wait in line for a GM to fix it manually. The worse ones prevent you from playing the game entirely – anywhere from servers going offline and staying there to the client simply “crashing to desktop” and refusing to run at all. Probably the worst MMORPG bug in my memory was when during Anarchy Online’s beta, a patch actually wrecked the operating system. Crashing your own game is bad enough but when you trash Windows on the way out the door, there's some issues.
The best bugs, by comparison, are the ones that the users find to benefit themselves in some way. This has a long lineage as well – Ultima Online, the first mass-market MMORPG, had so many “exploits” at its release in the late 1990s that at one point game masters were instructed to respond to appeals by victims with the phrase that bugs were “creative uses of magic”. Among those creative uses of magic included stacking objects (like, say, mushrooms) on top of each other to break into people’s houses. (Ultima Online had so many exploits, patched and reappearing so quickly, that it sparked its own subculture of “exploiters” – which, in response, indirectly sparked my own writing career.) In the hotly anticipated and very, very buggy PvP MMORPG Shadowbane, released in 2003, exploits were refined to a fine art, when, among many other things, a guild somehow managed to move everyone underwater.
So, we’re left with the initial question – why doesn’t someone just fix all these bugs already?
MMORPGs are, actually, fairly difficult to make. This may seem self-evident (which is true). This may also seem like a fairly lame excuse for failure (which is also true). However, the core of what makes an MMORPG what it is – a server that can in real time process thousands of people having fairly complex interactions in the same “world” – is not a trivial engineering problem to solve. There’s no “MMO-In-A-Box” solution that developers can use to shortcut this (although a few are sold as such, none are yet used in a large-scale live MMORPG), so unless you can manage to hire some of the few hundred or so people in the world who have experience working on a server for a launched and successful MMORPG, you’re going to have to reinvent that particular wheel.
;)
If you see this, something went very wrong.
This isn’t as much of a problem with clients; many third-party 3D engines such as Unreal, CryEngine, Gamebryo and Unity have been used successfully as MMORPG clients, saving a good deal of development headache. But not always – many MMORPGs create a new 3D engine for their client as well. An optimist would note that this saves on licensing fees and in any event even the most heavily used third-party 3D engine such as Unreal requires a good deal of work to be turned into a useable MMORPG client. A pessimist would think that it is the thinly-veiled desire of every 3D programmer to write their own engine and become the next John Carmack on your budget’s dime.
Game production, like any other project, depends on finite resources. There are only so many programmers working on a game. There is only so much time before the money runs out, and you launch or close the doors. And the age old development quandary – “Fast, cheap, good – pick two” is a luxury many game developers wish they had. With the accelerated schedules made necessary by large budgets and larger development teams, many are happy to settle for one.
Once a game goes live, those finite resources become more finite still. Live teams are under fairly tight budgets, and many developers want to move on to another project (entirely understandably, given that most MMORPGs take five years or more to complete). And unfortunately, entirely too many executives at publishers fail to make the connection between support for a live game and how many subscribers that game keeps. Money spent on “maintenance” for a running game that gives you a moderate income now is seen as not as easy an investment as that for a new project promising much more income in the future. Combined with the difficulty in translating a budget into a programmer that is fully trained and up-to-speed with your by necessity unique server software, and it’s a wonder some of the older MMORPGs still run at all.
The ugly reality: triage. Given all the above, the reality of fixing bugs, in both initial development and especially when the game goes live: not all bugs can be fixed. Thus, it’s someone’s responsibility (usually a producer, sometimes a lead programmer) to determine what gets valuable programming time and what gets shelved.
The priority is usually fairly obvious. At the top are bugs that will destroy the game. This can be as simple as a bug that causes the server to fail to start, or the client to crash to desktop. It can also be more complex – a “dupe bug” that allows players to generate gold or items out of thin air will make the game’s economy worthless, and is a top priority for taking care of as soon as possible, before the game suffers critical damage. These are the sort of bugs that will get every programmer in a studio pulled in to fix, because, as I mentioned, left unfixed, they will destroy your game.
;)
Contrary to popular belief, fixing bugs is
not all about tightening up the graphics on level 3.
Below this are bugs that, while serious, are not game-shatteringly critical. This may be an ability that is wildly over- or under-powered due to a miscalculation in the game’s combat code, or a memory leak that makes the client eventually slow to a crawl and die. When found, they go to the top of the programmer’s queue (right below our-server-is-crashing-and-burning ones, anyway). If a game is plagued with game-destroying critical bugs (which tend especially to plague MMORPGs that have just been rushed out the door) bugs in this category may fall by the wayside. Needless to say, this is not conducive to keeping your players happy.
Still below this are “quality of life” issues. For a polished MMORPG, there may not be many of these; for an MMORPG that was rushed to market before it was ready, there may be thousands. They don’t block the user from playing due to crashes, or radically change the game through a broken spell or ability. They’re just annoying, like always ‘falling through the world’ (what happens when collision detection on a surface fails to work correctly) in a particular spot, or an item required for a quest that has a far lower rate of dropping than any sane person ever intended. These, unfortunately, for a busy team dealing with more critical bugs, are fixed on an “as able” basis. Many minor exploits which benefit the player, such as being able to shortcut a group of monsters by going through a crack in the world’s geometry, fall into this category. After all, few people complain about errors in their favor.
And below this are the “we’d really like to fix these, someday, maybe” bugs. Things like typographical errors in a rarely seen piece of text in-game, misaligned camera views during a cut scene, a quest which may not have an appropriate reward assigned – these are bugs that tend to pile up in the bug tracking database, forlornly, unwanted by any programmer. Ideally, these are able to be fixed by less technically oriented developers such as designers – unless they’re busy with more critical fixes as well. And if a team is starved for resources, everyone is going to be busy, which means that the bugs in this category will go unaddressed for, well, forever.
Until (and yes, this really happened to me) a producer sends you an email to please fix bug #308 because it’s been in the bug database for three years now and it drives him nuts to always see it on the list.
Well, this is all well and good, what can I do? Well, short of becoming a programmer and signing up for low pay and long hours to get dozens of single-spaced printouts of bug reports, two things, which are equally important.
- Report early, report often, report clearly. The great majority of bug reports originate from players -- QA testers are almost uniformly overwhelmed and only have a hope of finding critical holy-moly-this-is-so-broken bugs before a patch goes live. The best way to have your CS appeal become a functioning bug report is to write a descriptive report of what happened, where, and how. Avoid adding how the developers really should have known better than to let a stupid bug like that make it to the live servers – trust us, we know. Really.
- Don’t reward failure. If, in your opinion, a game is a bug-ridden mess, cancel your subscription. Cancelled subscriptions are a metric that no MMORPG can ever ignore. If you are given the option to list why (and most cancellation options do), write clearly, with a minimum of venom, that you are cancelling because you do not want to pay for an incomplete product. This will be read (most likely as part of a general report that says that X number of subscribers cancelled listing outstanding bugs as a reason) and if the company is committed to the game’s success, it will be acted on. And if there is no such commitment – well, there is even less reason to reward that, isn’t there?
Bugs are an unfortunate fact of life for MMORPGs – and how each team deals with them reflects, directly, on how successful that MMORPG will be in the long term. Hopefully, this article has shown you a bit of how it’s viewed on the other side of the bug report.
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Aside from this column, Scott is also currently contracting with NCsoft.
Every Wednesday he provides us an insider's look at the MMO industry.
I like how you say we shouldn't reward failure. The MMO business is the only one that can release unfinished products and not be crucified for it.
I like this guy, nice article as always. By the way wasn't today Dana's day to post?
Good article....
I think theres a big difference between people who played UO (when released) and people who played WoW as their first MMO. WoW was pretty buggy at end levels, but Blizz kept such a good live team rolling, they satisfied the hardcore players; and stomped out bugs fairly well.
However those of us who were there for UO got so many insane bugs and crazy shit that none of us take it as offensively as some others.
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You pretty much got it right =)
MMOs have been able to take bugs to new lvls cause aparently you can always "fix" things afterwards in MMOs... The truth of the matter tho... is that if you didn't get it right the first time - then you wont get it right at all. Or rather create 10 new bugs every time you fix one.
Look at a game like DA. It has bugs - but at least the big picture -the entire gaming systems and fundemental performance of the game is working. Compare that to AOC with huge number of memory leaks - billions of content bugs and worthless core systems in the game. You payed for both - But for some reason - its ok that one is total crap for an entire year... just because its marked as MMO. And it got 8,5 to 9.5 raitings at launch.... Ye ... right... Funcom had their forums closed for the first week for a reason.
Woud DA get 9.5 when if 15-25% of the players were getting memory leaks shuttdown every 5 mins ? Cause thats what happened at AOC.
There are no exuses for bugs. Never. Do we have a bug in the banking system that is leaking 500 millions into my account? Ofc not... They got the basics right.... Its all in the code.
So what MMORPG out there handles their Bugs the BEST in your Opinion?
WOW without a doubt. You do not see a patch come out from them that has very much to fix after. Compare that to WAR for example. Last patch that supposedly was good acording to Mythic brought out one class(Choosen) that had totally broken core aura system (took 6 days to fix) - a scenario map that froze when you put down flag at the bridge (took 2 weeks to fix) and a lion that ran with you through the air when you flew away from Altdorf (dont know if its fixed yet). This is just to name few...
You pretty much got it right =)
MMOs have been able to take bugs to new lvls cause aparently you can always "fix" things afterwards in MMOs... The truth of the matter tho... is that if you didn't get it right the first time - then you wont get it right at all. Or rather create 10 new bugs every time you fix one.
Look at a game like DA. It has bugs - but at least the big picture -the entire gaming systems and fundemental performance of the game is working. Compare that to AOC with huge number of memory leaks - billions of content bugs and worthless core systems in the game. You payed for both - But for some reason - its ok that one is total crap for an entire year... just because its marked as MMO. And it got 8,5 to 9.5 raitings at launch.... Ye ... right... Funcom had their forums closed for the first week for a reason.
Woud DA get 9.5 when if 15-25% of the players were getting memory leaks shuttdown every 5 mins ? Cause thats what happened at AOC.
There are no exuses for bugs. Never. Do we have a bug in the banking system that is leaking 500 millions into my account? Ofc not... They got the basics right.... Its all in the code.
You've never made a mistake? Amazing. "There are no excuses for bugs. Never".
Obviously written by a person who's never coded more than a "Hello, World" program, and maybe not even that.
Heck, just NOW at my work, I'm being hit by a "bug" in software I maintain that is crashing whenever a report is being run or a query being made on the database... yet it works in hundreds if not thousands of other places just fine. Why? Because the place where the crash is happening has people who have no idea how to use or manage a computer network, and the network crashed, and they couldn't figure out how to reconnect to it on one of their machines. Is it a bug in my code? Nope, but it is my code that is crashing because of their (bad) system configuration. So I get to work on a "bug" that isn't my "bug" at all.
Interesting article, it was a nice read....
But seriously, branding a game nowdays as an MMO is becaming synonymous to 'incomplete', 'Under construction' and whatnot. Somehow it has become the norm to release games that are either incomplete or full of bugs or both, like AoC or WAR to name just a couple.
Sorry, but I am with biofellis and the rest on this. Frankly I do not care what a company has to do to fix this issues and release a decent product. Maybe not pay millions of dollars for marketing/hyping a product 4 years before release and employ more people instead?... just a thought
I worked in the computer operations field for 18 years and reporting/fixing bugs was an everyday task. I think as long as there are no "game breaking" bugs people can live with that temporarily because nothing is perfect. There still is no excuse for not fixing anything at all though. How many games have we played over the years that is has taken developers over 6 months to fix simple issues. Some developers care about how their game plays while the majority do not as long as you keep paying that monthly fee.
So, I think the point in the article stands. We shouldn't accept bugs without complaints, just like we wouldn't accept any of the examples above without complaints. But given the MMO technology is so new, just like the early airplane technology mentioned above, bugs will happen in even the most professional of companies.
You've never made a mistake? Amazing. "There are no excuses for bugs. Never".
Obviously written by a person who's never coded more than a "Hello, World" program, and maybe not even that.
Heck, just NOW at my work, I'm being hit by a "bug" in software I maintain that is crashing whenever a report is being run or a query being made on the database... yet it works in hundreds if not thousands of other places just fine. Why? Because the place where the crash is happening has people who have no idea how to use or manage a computer network, and the network crashed, and they couldn't figure out how to reconnect to it on one of their machines. Is it a bug in my code? Nope, but it is my code that is crashing because of their (bad) system configuration. So I get to work on a "bug" that isn't my "bug" at all.
Mistakes are made ofc... thats why you have tests - after tests after tests.
I dont care what kind of crappy software you are using. Obviously its a bad one - or your a bad coder that cant create a structured system to work with.
Compare single player RPGs and MMOs. Would a single player rpg that doesnt play for more than 5 mins without closing because of memory leak be considered acceptable at release ? No ofc not - you would ask yourself who was actually testing that game before it was released.
If 1000 ppl all made mistakes that leads to a bug that is causing game to crash - then something is very wrong. It has nothing to do with mistakes. Nothing....
And explain to me why Games like WAR and AOC seem to have alot more of those "bugs" that are based on the user's (bad) configuration - compared to ... lets say ... WOW ?
You know it and I know it. It has nothing to do with mistakes... it has to do with quality control.
Why hasn't WOW released more battlegrounds ? Because creating a flawless map with minimised chance of expoiding is massive task. And they accept nothing else than "flawless".
Decent article...but no mention of EVE's infamous deleting of the boot.ini file? That's the most calamitous one I remember.
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Very good article. I been working in IT systems for 24 years. I can say not only games have bugs but code for regular bussines ssystems does too. However it was my job as well as the other programmers job to go about fixing these when they did crop up. I know that a lot of game companies dont have the staff after a huge push, but fixing bugs should be a priority when it causes a total stop to the gameplay of lots of players.
Some bugs are easy to live with, other bugs are not. I don't mind bugs unless they totally mess up game play and are so bad that it affecs every playrs ability to do the task.
For instance in LOTRO you had the spiders, that went invisible at for book 7. You also had a hole in the landscape that cause players to be stuck for hours on end in Rotten cellar. You had the entrance to Carn Dum Cassle that manullly required a gm to fix it. Otherwise you would wait for hours. It took months on end about 6 of them to fix most of these. However the spiders in dolen veiw instance are still invisable, it is still a playble instance but is not that fun. Instead of fixing these bugs, they went on a crucade to fix the bugs that were benifiting players instead of fixing the bugs that were causing players a hard time.
Like I said I don't mind bugs its how a company goes about fixing them. I cant only complain about LOTRO, one of the worst violators is SOE as well. I could write pages about the bugs that existed in SWG before it went to the NGE.
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The exact same thing happens to some mobs in WAR. They dissapear. Is it acceptable ? Compared to getting stuck for 5 hours it is yes.. but compared to a good solid released game - it is not. Is it acceptable because there are 10 tons of bigger bugs that got skipped before the game was released ? Ofc its not.
I dont know if you have heard of the missing boy quest in AOC. It was a quest soon after lvl 20 (not in Tortage) where you were supposed to find a missing boy. The thing was... early in beta this boy was really missing - he was underneath the terrain. And he was still there 2 months after release. Still the game was launched... How many missing boys are there in Dragon age ? Or how many dissapearing Mobs ?
Even WOW has bugs - and some of them were really annoying. Lets take the famous Anub'Rekhan bug for example. First boss in vanilla Nax - easy one but had a nasty habbit of reseting when at the door. It took quite some time to fix cause it needed extensive work on the map itself. The game mecanics were actually working as intented. There was an anti cheat code in the game that prevented you to be able to kill a mob when you were out of reach area. NOw.. again - lets compare that to AOC. I spent most of the time in the game exploiding the content - getting out of reach of the mobs and then killing them while they were not able to get to me. In WOW - that mob would have automaticly reset. In AOC... there was no basic structured code or even basic THINKING of a code to prevent the entire content to be expoided with out of reach trick. But then.. maybe it had to do with the fact that Funcom was changing the ability of characters to move through terrain all the time. Again... if you start with crap - u end up with crap. Get the basics right and build from there.
This is where MMO devs think they are able to fool pretty much everyone. They start with something half thought out and then they try to change it later when they see it doesn't work or when none likes it and they are loosing subs. If you actually create something good to start with - then there is less to fix.
Get it ?
You've never made a mistake? Amazing. "There are no excuses for bugs. Never".
Obviously written by a person who's never coded more than a "Hello, World" program, and maybe not even that.
Heck, just NOW at my work, I'm being hit by a "bug" in software I maintain that is crashing whenever a report is being run or a query being made on the database... yet it works in hundreds if not thousands of other places just fine. Why? Because the place where the crash is happening has people who have no idea how to use or manage a computer network, and the network crashed, and they couldn't figure out how to reconnect to it on one of their machines. Is it a bug in my code? Nope, but it is my code that is crashing because of their (bad) system configuration. So I get to work on a "bug" that isn't my "bug" at all.
Mistakes are made ofc... thats why you have tests - after tests after tests.
I dont care what kind of crappy software you are using. Obviously its a bad one - or your a bad coder that cant create a structured system to work with.
Compare single player RPGs and MMOs. Would a single player rpg that doesnt play for more than 5 mins without closing because of memory leak be considered acceptable at release ? No ofc not - you would ask yourself who was actually testing that game before it was released.
If 1000 ppl all made mistakes that leads to a bug that is causing game to crash - then something is very wrong. It has nothing to do with mistakes. Nothing....
And explain to me why Games like WAR and AOC seem to have alot more of those "bugs" that are based on the user's (bad) configuration - compared to ... lets say ... WOW ?
You know it and I know it. It has nothing to do with mistakes... it has to do with quality control.
Why hasn't WOW released more battlegrounds ? Because creating a flawless map with minimised chance of expoiding is massive task. And they accept nothing else than "flawless".
so you would rather a product never, ever release.
They will be bug, and they take time to fix. Hell i have a bug in one of my projects, ive iritated a thousand times, all the numbers spit back right, the tables and rows in the DB are created, but only 1/3 of the data posts into the row. Even though all the data is being saved locally it's not posting out to the db from the browser.
Yet i can edit the same entry and fix the problem fine its only inital creation that is flawed.
Bugs happen. Don't play high and mighty until you have to fix them yourself.
Mistakes are made ofc... thats why you have tests - after tests after tests.
I dont care what kind of crappy software you are using. Obviously its a bad one - or your a bad coder that cant create a structured system to work with.
Compare single player RPGs and MMOs. Would a single player rpg that doesnt play for more than 5 mins without closing because of memory leak be considered acceptable at release ? No ofc not - you would ask yourself who was actually testing that game before it was released.
If 1000 ppl all made mistakes that leads to a bug that is causing game to crash - then something is very wrong. It has nothing to do with mistakes. Nothing....
And explain to me why Games like WAR and AOC seem to have alot more of those "bugs" that are based on the user's (bad) configuration - compared to ... lets say ... WOW ?
You know it and I know it. It has nothing to do with mistakes... it has to do with quality control.
Why hasn't WOW released more battlegrounds ? Because creating a flawless map with minimised chance of expoiding is massive task. And they accept nothing else than "flawless".
so you would rather a product never, ever release.
They will be bug, and they take time to fix. Hell i have a bug in one of my projects, ive iritated a thousand times, all the numbers spit back right, the tables and rows in the DB are created, but only 1/3 of the data posts into the row. Even though all the data is being saved locally it's not posting out to the db from the browser.
Yet i can edit the same entry and fix the problem fine its only inital creation that is flawed.
Bugs happen. Don't play high and mighty until you have to fix them yourself.
Would you charge me for using that buggy projects of yours without fixing it first ?
see... there is the diffrence... You make the choise of what is acceptable when it comes to bugs. If you knew about it - didn't fix it and still charge full for it... then you are the perfect MMO dev. I bet Mythic and FUncom could use you !!
oh wait... Mythic just sacked 80 ppl....
Good article enjoyed the read.
kinda sorta, it's admins tools so i'm paid to design the system so other admins can manage workflow. It sort of like a mmo as the needs of the project are constantly evolving and new systems have to be added on the spot
A solid article, albeit fairly obvious I would assume.
The main reason why an MMO isn't going to ever release sans bugs is because of the vast operating systems that run rampant in the home computing marketplace. While you can label your product as being compatible with XP/Vista/Win7, you know some fool somewhere is going to manage via 3 workarounds to install on his aging Win2k OS. You can't forsee how his presence will influence the server-client, regardless of forethought and testing. On these issues, I can understand a need to 'catch up' to consumers after a launch.
Things like NPCs not interacting properly, not resetting, disappearing, camera angles, fatal errors with client, etc are all things that are really inexcusable. I have done enough MatLab programming to understand when things are truly beyond my control and where I just plain goofed.
Given the immensity of a project like an MMO, there are vast programming teams involved. I think the issue we see isn't an issue of bugs appearing due to lack of foresight, or testing, or coding, but due to poor programming team management. It's how each team interfaces with each other and takes steps in stride that prevent these sorts of occurrences.
Obviously, employing a proactive team of programmers who monitor the game constantly and patch bugs on arrival is going to be the biggest selling point in terms of 'bug termination'.
Not MMORPG but developer and it is w/o question Square Enix.
There games are virtually bug free.There has been some exploits by RMT but not exploits as you might think,just flaws in the design that allowed for making more gil than intended.Example making new players over and over to do the same quests over and over.The other exploits were done strictly by utilizing warp/pos cheats,pretty hard for a game to stay on top of that.
IN what 5+ years of FFXI or any of the other FF games ,i have never had a bug or problem prevent me from doing something in the game,i doubt any other developer can say the same thing.Sqaure is now utilizing a brand new game engine and i bet FFXIV will be released bug free,Square Enix is just that good at their work.They also claim they are armed and ready to stop RMT,most developers don't even care or bother until the player base is in an uproar.
well alot depends on whol you ask. Blizzard does a ncie job ofcourse. Myself, dare I say it, i have found SOE with eq eqII to do a nice job. Now that might be because from personal pratice I always send in as detailed a bug report as i can and usually would get follow up questions from the devs. A recent example of reports and workign with devs although not a MMO is bioware and DAO. I along with a few others players spend two days with two of the devs going back and forth to fix the dagger/dex bug. And when i say back and forth it was litterialy that posting in a thread getting a dev response 5 minutes latter back and forth then a fix beign posted we would try it out report back then get a new fix and so forth untill they had one that worked.
I would agree with the OP that one of the problems is the tone plus lack of detail in bug reporting by players. If you can give time date location what happen your system and such it makes it much easier for them to try to work on it. Just think how much effort is saved if you provide the time then can locate logs much easier than if you tell them heh a boss mob poofed BRD on me today. ( don't laugh i have seen reports that contained just that not even the name of the mob let alone when it happen)
On reporting bugs:
Developers - make it easy. Put a bug report function in your UI and leave it there.
Wizard 101 did this brilliantly in Beta - there was a little "Bug" button and you reported right there - no fuss.
Post release however - this function disappeared - and unless you are a subscriber I don't think you can post on their boards?
The Chronicles of Spellborn - if bugs could be reported in game (and reports stored in a Database) I am sure the new Devs would have a valuable resource when they take over.
PotBS had/has a reporting system that many people lost faith in. 48 hours after the report it seemed standard to get a generic "please test again and let us know..." - yeah - and how do I repeat the quest dumbasses?
Then, when you didn't reply, "we will therefor assume the matter is resolved...closed." So many bugs are never fixed.
WWIIoL does a good job with the simple ".report" - reporting who, and the position in the gameworld plaus maybe some other stuff?
On not rewarding failure:
The US needs to go further. It is my understanding that US Consumers can return any (faulty) product for a refund...except software?
That needs to change.
Many other countries have laws which allow the return of software.
In Australia, this comes under 'purpose of use'. That is, any product that does not meet it's purpose of use {when used as directed} may be retuned for a full refund.
Driv3r comes to mind here - so many copies were returned to EB they pulled it from the shelves.
Some people may claim this would make it impossible to release a game here?
Well, no. A minor bug that causes a graphical error or maybe stops a player completing a (non critical) quest would not violate purpose of use. A bug that prevents a client running or prevents a player completing a game would.
Dungeon Keeper 2 for example shipped with a bug preventing the player completing one of the later missions and stopped the player finishin the game. That is a purpose of use issue.
I-War 2:Edge of Chaos shipped with a bug preventing the completion of a side quest - but the player could still complete the main plot and finish the game - not purpose of use.
The US needs similar laws - it would really force many companies to sharpen up their act.
good point i know when POTBS was comming out all of a sudden after a patch a group of the people had graphics problems it got narrowed down to 1 set of drivers Nvedia had out for an older series of cards. Two days latter Nvedia posted new drivers for that series all was well.
Look at Microsoft, a couple of decades and billions of dollars later and they have to frequently patch their systems.
You've never made a mistake? Amazing. "There are no excuses for bugs. Never".
Obviously written by a person who's never coded more than a "Hello, World" program, and maybe not even that.
Heck, just NOW at my work, I'm being hit by a "bug" in software I maintain that is crashing whenever a report is being run or a query being made on the database... yet it works in hundreds if not thousands of other places just fine. Why? Because the place where the crash is happening has people who have no idea how to use or manage a computer network, and the network crashed, and they couldn't figure out how to reconnect to it on one of their machines. Is it a bug in my code? Nope, but it is my code that is crashing because of their (bad) system configuration. So I get to work on a "bug" that isn't my "bug" at all.
Mistakes are made ofc... thats why you have tests - after tests after tests.
I dont care what kind of crappy software you are using. Obviously its a bad one - or your a bad coder that cant create a structured system to work with.
Compare single player RPGs and MMOs. Would a single player rpg that doesnt play for more than 5 mins without closing because of memory leak be considered acceptable at release ? No ofc not - you would ask yourself who was actually testing that game before it was released.
If 1000 ppl all made mistakes that leads to a bug that is causing game to crash - then something is very wrong. It has nothing to do with mistakes. Nothing....
And explain to me why Games like WAR and AOC seem to have alot more of those "bugs" that are based on the user's (bad) configuration - compared to ... lets say ... WOW ?
You know it and I know it. It has nothing to do with mistakes... it has to do with quality control.
Why hasn't WOW released more battlegrounds ? Because creating a flawless map with minimised chance of expoiding is massive task. And they accept nothing else than "flawless".
well for one thing WoW intentionaly dumb down their graphics at release to insure their game woudl play well on the greatest mumber of rigs while other games are trying to use state of the art graphics . Sometimes they get it wrong like vanguard did in projecting the quality of the average machine their players would be using when their game was released. Also take into consideration that sometimes it is the OS not livign up to the standards the producing company claimed such as what happen with AOC and vista
Greets Scott and welcome to my list of favorite columnists!
One part of the article really stood out for me. Triage is incredibly difficult to do.
One I had recently was in the process of reworking terrain and tree population for efficiency, I had a loss of resolution on how accurately trees could be placed. This left a couple of clusters of pine trees growing at the bottom of a lake. Hard to fix? No, but with several zones that needed to be checked for the same problem it would take some time to do properly. Critically important? Nope. Triage decision: LOW PRIORITY, bottom of the list.
ZOMG !!! There's trees in the water !!! (I get this at least twice a week)
It's not that easy to explain that I'm not blowing off a report. I never ignore them when they're complete enough to determine exactly what is the problem. Just not going to happen right away.
I can hardly wait for wide beta
Ken
While you may be right, you're missing the big picture. As you said, airplanes need to stay in the the sky, so they are maintained to very rigorous standards. Bridges need to stay up and there are licensed professional engineers to make sure that they do with very very rare (if tragic and press-worthy) exception.
Let's not pretend that there isn't software that runs to those standards just as often. Life support systems run what is essentially bug free software. Avionics software that is essentially bug free keeps those airplanes in the air just as much as the mechanical maintenance.
So why doesn't all software run to those same standards? Basically it's the difference between a Life-Critical system and a Mission-Critical system. If someone is going to stop breathing because a life support machine stops, or hundreds of people will fall to their deaths, that's obviously a life-critical system. Similarly, if the space program has to restart years of work nearly from scratch, that's very likely a life-critical system.
Developers don't create bugs on purpose. There simply have to be realistic limits that you put on the architecture an testing process to any project. Is it realistic to expect someone building a doghouse to go through the same procedures involved in building a skyscraper that will hold thousands of people every day? Of course not. What it basically has to come down to is what level of validation is needed with a given piece of software. If a kid at school falls down and scrapes his knee then the school nurse will give him a bandage. If stitches are needed it will be handed off to a nurse practitioner. If major surgery is needed, a specialist surgeon will be called. That's just how things work.
What is acceptable then? Certain pieces mission-critical software are probably held to the same standard as life-critical systems (financial systems come to mind). Should games be? The question is what kind of validation is enough and where is the tradeoff. If a game takes an extra two years to develop, incurring the overhead cost of the process, would you be willing to pay a premium for that extra development time if it meant a bug free game? Should gamers be expected to at all, or should that just be considered the cost of doing business?
Another factor to consider is that technology moves quickly. If you take that extra two years, somebody who skips that step is going to release a product that looks two years newer and shinier than yours even if it's buggier. That's the sort of thing that comes up a lot in tech business decisions.
The article states it very clearly at the end. It's a balance. Vote with your wallet. If a game has too many bugs then don't buy it. Or better yet, wait until the price goes down to send the message very clearly: I like what you're selling but it isn't worth the cost you were initially asking.
Or if you feel that strongly and you ever find the opportunity, feel free to shell out the extra money for a game held to the same validation standards as life support software.
Bugs, in any software, is best found by a good and efficient testing process. A software that has many bugs, when released live, i just a sign that the testing process has not been adequate.
That being said, a software can never be considered "bug-free", however by having extensive internal and external (beta) testing you can assure that most of the bugs are found, and hopefully fixed.
So the excuse "every software has bugs" is not a valid excuse for releasing a game full of bugs. That just means that the devs have not invested enough into testing their software and just want to rush the game out of the door.
I agree with you in principle but where it is true that any bug can be fixed it is not true that any bug can be found. That is a common misstake people do to think that any bug can be found. There is no such thing as a bug free software for any software with any remote amount of complexity.
Bugs are no diffrence than spelling, gramar and typing errors. I do not expect a columist to write an article with such errors. It doensnt mean it doesn't happen.
Again - If you are a crap speller (like myself) then you will have loads of things to fix. And that means it takes longer to fix it. Specially if you dont have any software to check it for you.
Bugs are no diffrence. Quality counts - and if the ppl are not good at what they are doing there will be alot more to fix - And since the ppl are not good in what they are doing - fixing is actually much harder than if you had a qualitfied ppl doing the job.
yes i can understand mmo companies being under staffed, on a tight schedule and/or in short budget
but why do we see sometimes these companies, contrary to what people ask for, keep on adding new content for instance into the game and ignore the so called "quality of life" bugs?
is it because there are two different teams working on the project? or because the producer believes they will make more money from investing the manpower into content rather than fixing existing and sometimes old bugs?
Check out all the experts that think finding and fixing bugs in a complicated program like a MMO is easy.
That is quite an awesome assumption, especially given the article that came before all the posts.
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well "best" approach to the noncritical bugs have LOTRO (at least the european version, didnt play the US one) - to report a bug you have to first CREATE A SEPARATE ACCOUNT on codemaster's web. dont think many people go through this if the bug they want to report isn't really annoying/critical - i certainly didnt.
This should probably be published every other day, because forum dwellers seem to have the memory of a goldfish and keep forgetting this.
As always.... great article. Thank you Mr. Jennings for the links to the game engine companies. They will come in handy.
Keep up the good work!
K
Most bugs that make it into production code have little to do with code syntax. The bugs that make it into final code will be due to logic errors, miscommunication and invalid assumptions.
An MMO will often have a programming team of over 100 people. Getting a team this large to effectively work on a project is a major management and technical headache. There have been a number of large scale software engineering projects that have failed due to this problem.
Bugs due to invalid assumptions may not cause any failures during development yet cause systems to fail later in their lifetime as other fixes and changes are made. It is just not possible to exhaustively test for this kind of issues.
Like it or not MMOs are exceedingly complex systems and the customers are simply not willing to pay for the quality they seem to expect.
Many people have already pointed out the really relevant reasons why mmos are so buggy and poor quality.
Im going to only focus on a key one here:Ease of reporting and exploring the bug.
This like most mmo issues,this comes down to truly piss poor design.Devs fault entirely.
To report a bug, i should be able to just use the games chat system.I should enter the bug channel, and be instantly fed a series of questions,one at a time, asking for specifics about said bug.
Example:
Kieran enters bug channel
Bug collector: hello Kieran,what type of bug are you reporting ?
Quest bug ?
Character bug?
Skill bug ?
Map bug ?
etc...
Kieran: quest bug
Bug collector;What is the name of the quest ?
Kieran: "Beat the mmo dev with a big stick "quest.
Bug collector: which npc awarded the quest?
Kieran:The blue orc named giggles in generic orc town 1
etc....
At the end of the chat issued questionaire,the player should be asked.
Bug collector: Would you like to repeat the quest,so as to further explore the bug,and supply further information about it?
Kieran:Yes
Instantly the quest is re-added to the characters quest list,with added details of how no exp ,faction, item ,etc... rewards will be given for this quest.
The quest will be automatically instanced upon the entering,even if it wasnt meant as one originally, and the player will have certain GM like powers while inside the quest instance that allow him to pause npc and environmental action,see the structure of the terrian,travel in any direction in a flight like glide mode,etc...
The player should at no time have to level another character to experience a quest again,simply because hes trying to do work that should have already been accomplished by paid employees.
The player should never have to enter a new window seperate from the game, or relog in,in his attempt to help the game get fixed.
Anything a player does,within the rules of play,thats goals is too help discover and fix probelms,while exploring a bug in the game should be as easy as humanly possible for him to do, and praised to the high hills.Hes paying money to help the devs fix something ,they should not be putting insanely bad design issues in his way.
And yet they do.Piss poor design after piss poor design.Its just insane.The devs have got people willing to pay them money to help fix the devs game, and yet the devs thru lack of skill to design a reasonable sytem to allow this,or simply not caring enough to do so, waste that incredibale tool.
HAHAHAHAHAHA! I love this Article! And if you can't tell i agree. You don't go buying a NEW car , and then are told .Well the timing chain needs to be replaced, and the damper door doesn't close all the way, and not to mention the wiring is a little screwy. Yes us vets of MMO's are a little used to it. I dunno what game i've ever played that didn't need a little more work. But when you pay for the Game, and Then a monthly. When you really look at it your like WTF! But like everything else, nothing is perfect cause we aint.
Great article. Thanks for fixing bug #308.
Pretty good description of the quality of automobiles in the first 60 or so years of their history. All told the MMOs have not made it out of the Model T era.
Totally well spoken!
Ken
Good article, a nice overview in understandable terms. Thanks Scott.
@Biofellis; yea, some of us lawyers do try...
Maybe someone could help out NCSoft / Aion fix their bugs. It has had a crash to desktop (from a crysis dll) for almost everyone that participates in fortress PvP. Its been like that for almost a month. very sad :(
LOL, Wow, great article. As a lead designer/programmer on an MMORPG i'd have to agree on several fronts. I especially liked you're little tidbit of fast, cheap, good, pick 2...that fit's us to a T..we've been set on making it as cheap as possible and as good as possible and we've been sorely behind schedule from day one...fast we ain't... :)
Bugs are horrible and some like the one i'm working on right now are just impossible it seems to figure out...3 weeks now i've been working on this client problem where ui portions don't show up for certain people, keeping them from launching the alpha client but yet every time I and several others have no problems whatsoever and the dxdiag files just don't explain it, nothing does...yet...we'll tackle it eventually but jeez it just drives you nuts trying to figure them out sometimes...gimme the easy stuff like fix a quest giver.. :D
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God I remember using bugs to an avantage in shadowbane. Granted now always or by me in particular.
I think one problem with bugs in MMO's is normally if a player or group of players expoit a bug if not banished for abuse they may enjoy the benefits of that exploit for long periods of time. One reason why I enjoyed SB a lot when a old server was wiped and the server was fresh until a new bug or exploit was abused heavily.
Nice write up reminds me of a similar one done by Michael Russel
here is a snippet:
Originally wrote by Michael Russell
1. The bug may simply of not being found.
"Its true, that not every bug will be found by the testing department. Its hard enough to locate the ones that we do find. Most companies tend to employ an "ad hoc" testing strategy, where you go through the game and follow hunches to the bugs. A few companies now use a more engineering focused strategy to test the code side of things, but even that wont find all of the bugs in a game"
" Staffing concerns crop up as well. While testers are generally among the lowest paid staff on any project, it can often be impossible to bring on the number of testers necessary to fully test a game, either from a financial standpoint, or a logistics standpoint."
2. The bug may have been negotiated away to get a worse bug fixed.
"As games get closer to shipping the bar raises for how severe a bug needs to be in order to get fixed. At about 8-12 weeks before gold, certain types of cosmetic bugs are automatically set to “won’t fix.” Gradually, it gets to the point where unless a bug makes it so the game can’t be finished, it won’t be fixed."
"There are also times we might decide on a lower impact fix, or to ignore a bug because to cure would be worst than the disease. Any change could introduce new bugs, cause older bugs to resurface, or inadvertently unveil a bug that’s been hiding the whole time."
" Sometimes developers will leave in broken code or content and just block it off to keep the bug or incomplete code from being triggered. Other times, if the choice is between having a revolutionary feature that works 95% of the time or not having the feature, the 5 % failure rate is considered “acceptable.”"
3. You may have a less-than-common combination of hardware and drivers.
"Configuration testing is an exponentially difficult problem. With dozens of different video cards, sound cards, motherboards, controller chipsets and network cards released every single year, trying to make sure a game will work on every single hardware configuration released over the last 3-5 years is an exercise in futility."
" Generally, the top 40 to top 100 components (based on market share) get tested, but depending on when the game is ready for config testing, many of the fixes might not make it until there is a patch. Additional software on your machine may cause issues. Most testing is done on relatively clean PC’s, so software interactions are rarely, if ever, tested."
4. Unstoppable force (schedule slippage) meets immovable object (ship date).
"There are times when a ship date just can’t slip. A sports game sells extremely poorly if released after the start date of a season. A movie tie-in generally relies on being released with the film to capitalize on the marketing dollars."
" During this run up to ship date, there may be enough time to find the issue and document it, but there may not be enough time to fix the problems before it’s time to make the gold master. Generally you will see a day one or week one update in a case like this."
5. Not every gamer is an admin.
"Most developers and testers are admins for their own PC’s, but not every game-player out there is an admin for theirs. As a result there are issues with reduced permissions that many developers and testers will never see, such as many of the user-permission errors that you are now seeing with Windows Vista."
" Microsoft published guidelines as far back as 1996 for where developers should store temp files, files shared between users, per-user files, etc/., but very few developers have listened, partly because those guidelines can make it slightly more difficult to ensure a current, proper build on a development machine. It’s a lot easier to have one folder with everything that you can nuke at will than five folders spread out all over the machine that have to be individually deleted."
"Now, nothing in this article is here to justify a game shipping broken. While all of these are perfectly valid reasons why a game could ship in a broken state, it doesn’t change the fact that quality assurance is considered an unnecessary evil by many portions of the industry. Until quality assurance is able to get the game time and resources it needs to competently test games, don’t be surprised if things get worse before they get better. "
Nice article :) Very informative to read how a dev team must feel torn between the complaints of players and the bosses that wont let them do anything/enough about it.
I especially find this bit interesting ' And unfortunately, entirely too many executives at publishers fail to make the connection between support for a live game and how many subscribers that game keeps. Money spent on “maintenance” for a running game that gives you a moderate income now is seen as not as easy an investment as that for a new project promising much more income in the future.' Which explains a lot why the MMO's that lose momentum after launch, wont recover because instead of investing, the game will be just on lifesupport (Vanguard for example).
As a long time software developer (32 years), I have seen all sorts of software bugs.
The bugs that are hard to find are those that are hard to repeat or that you don't have enough information on how the issue / bug was caused or just have never seen or heard about in the first place.
For example, I had several people in my department tell me of a rare bug that had happened to them while using my software but they could never get me the full details. Then voila' one day, I found out how the bug was caused and could repeat it over and over. Once I analyzed what happened, fixing the bug was very very easy.
If you play a game and find a bug or an issue that is repeatable, make good notes and send the detailed bug report to the developers... it will help them quickly identify the issue then hopefully find and quickly fix the bug or issue.
In over 30 years of computer gaming, I have played a lot of games. Many good... some very well done... a lot of poorly implemented code.
Some just needed a little tweaking to fix major lag issues... others just weren't playable. For example, Freelancer... Great game... BUT no Joystick support for a Flight Simulation. I was all ready to buy that game but it was totally unplayable.
I see a very alarming trend these days... many games want you to PAY for the game before you can even play test it to see if it is a game that you would play. Sorry, but I have been burned too many times to just buy a game WITHOUT pretesting it for game play, graphics, fun factor, and other personal intangibles. If a game passes my strict requirements, then I add it to my "must buy list".
I have gone back and played some old MMORPG's that were graphically up to date but were much better than the new version that is not yet released. The whole idea was that the game was fun to play.
Then there are the games that lock out countries or whole parts of the world for no apparent reason. Sadly by the time they get around to opening the game to everyone, I have lost interest in their game.
Some games allow a ton of personal shops all over the game. This causes a LOT of excessive lag when people just try to walk through that town. Star Wars Galaxies, and many other games have a better way that they did this... The added a database to the game then allowed people to put their wares in a "shop" that people can search quickly and buy anything at a competitive price. This reduces a LOT of lag in MMORPG's.
Then there are games with issues where the game developers ignore ANY input from the community and take the game in a downward spiral... or they totally revamp EVERYTHING without looking at how it effects the game long term. A great example of this one is Rappelz... when I first played the game it played very well... then over time the developers in an attempt to fix a "PK grieving issue" where level 100+ characters were literally PK'ing newbies just because they could... instead of FIXING the issue by ONLY allowing PK'ing within + or - 10 levels of a players current level... they added what I termed the "death timer"... If you didn't exit the game in town, you couldn't logout for 10 to 30 seconds. Most of the time you would be dead before you could exit the game. Rappelz was notorious for tossing you to desktop then when you respawned unless you were in town... your character would be dead before you had a chance to move because they have no invulnerability timer at load of your character and your character is loaded long before you could "see" your character. Rappelz developers then caused bugs in the game and instead of FIXING the bug they JUST created, they pushed people to buy cash item crap.That isn't solving the bug but profitteering from their own ineptness. Next thing they did was change ALL character skills for ALL characters... this made my level 70+ archer useless. So finally i decided that Rappelz wasn't worth playing any more.
On the "death timer" issue, one of the Rappelz main moderators / game managers asked for the community input and stated that they would listen to the players about the issue. Over 75% of the people that posted on the board told this person that what they had done was a very bad for long term game play... so instead of FiXING the logout timer problem... they basically lied to the community and left that crap in place.
Rappelz had a nasty habit of shutting down the server and where ever your character was when the emergency maintenance was done, you usually were dead on respawning on the next time in unless you were in town.
A year before the massive adjustments, Rappelz was a very well done game but it deteriated very quickly.
9 Dragons did a great job on initial spawning of your character... you have a short invulnerability as you character is spawned and they took the time to spawn your character just before you entered the interface... Job well done on this one by Acclaim.
Hope this helps someone get a better insight of how things can be done well or poorly.
Games should be fun for everyone and play well for everyone.
I play for fun not for the unmerciful Player versus Player trash... if you like PVP, fine... but consider that others have a hard time just playing versus the environment.
I quickly deleted a game where my poor level 8 character was doing a quest and some yahoo that was over 30 levels higher than mine PK raped me for no apparent reason... to add insult to injury, my character lost experience... I was very ticked over that crap... so the game was deleted and I calmly explained what I liked and disliked to the developers of said game. The mob that my character was fighting was hard enough without the one sided PVP CRAP!
By the way, that makes me 52 years old... yes, I still play games and do a lot of other things... Older ain't dead.
Happy Gaming.
:)
It is amazing that so many games dies or goes on life-support because they were released as buggy messes and the studios still do the same thing all the time.
Very few companies work hard to try to release a game with few problems from start, Arenanet and Turbine comes to mind. Others like Blizzard spend a lot of cash after release to fix the issues ASAP.
The rest of the games will never become what they should have become and still are 90% of the games rushed out as a paid beta.
To me it seems like the companies are so cheap that they are stupid, the betas needs to be longer and all the priority 1 & 2 bugs needs to be fixed before you can sell a game or you will lose a lot of money. To release with little content isn't great but to release games in the crappy shape we see it now is a sure way to failure.
Nice article I did enjoy it a lot, thanks.
The photo related to the article is really nasty, you know, the one in the home page. Can you please consider changing it?, thanks!!.
I really enjoyed this article. Having also viewed games from both the player and the dev side, I really appreciate its efforts in trying to express the difficulty of bugfixing and why some bugs just don't get fixed.
I have to agree with other posters though that the section about triage definitely left out any mention of passing up fixing a bug simply because it can't be repeated. There are many reasons for this: sometimes the customer is at fault for not providing a thorough and legible bug report, especially if it's written in leet speak, or texting language, or lacks punctuation. Often, however, the devs make it difficult on themselves by either not providing a bug reporting feature, or making it obscure or limited. Other posters have already mentioned how LOTRO requires a separate account for providing bug reports. Aion's is difficult to navigate, since some of it is online, and it limits the number of text characters that you can submit.
Ideally, a bug reporting system would be designed along with the game, and not removed following beta. There are going to be bugs that come in at all iterations of the software development life cycle, and allowing the customer to help make them repeatable makes them easier to fix. From a customer perspective, for ease of reporting issues, this system should be a part of the game, somewhere in the menus, and it should allow the customer to report as much information as possible without making it impossible to submit an issue if some details are unknown (i.e., don't require an answer for each of an extended list of questions).
Lastly, for customers, appreciate that most devs don't want to release a buggy game. They're usually gamers themselves, and wouldn't want to create something that they wouldn't want to play. However, issues come up during development that delay schedules, and working 12-18 hour days to meet a deadline often means that the code won't be as clean as they'd like. Also remember that bug fixing is a thankless and disheartening job, intended mostly as a stepping stone to something better paying with more creative power. Please don't insult the person fixing your bugs, as they likely didn't write the code in the first place. Be as complete and neutral as possible in your descriptions, and take the time to make it legible.
Scott forgot to list a few options available to developers and players for dealing with bugs.
1. Deny, deny, deny. Take the SOE path and deny that the bug exists. Swear on your grandmother's grave that there is no bug and that it is all just the players perceiving an issue that isn't really there.
2. Cover the paper trail. Also, coincidentally, an SOE tactic. If a method exists to prove that a bug exists, remove that method from the game, e.g. Combat Logs.
3. If you are a player, start your own website/blog and explicitly list all the bugs and how to exploit them. Throw in a good number of rants detailing the shortcomings of the developers and community managers and site examples of poor customer and general game support; all in an effort to improve a game that you actually care about and want to see succeed.
Nah...number 3 would never work :p
Drev
The desire to avoid a licensing fee is really holding back MMO’s. So much of a MMO is reinvented from scratch it is absurd. Using the Half Life engine or the Crysis one, would not be a easy conversion, but would be a thousand times easier than starting anew.
Modders show how you can take a pre-existing game and create a new world, that is the way to drive down costs. If a HL licence is too prohibitive what about the engine for one of the twenty or so titles with perfectly decent graphics released each year. The companies that made them would be happy if someone bought their engine after a so-so release.
I thought Kingdom of Drakkor was the first mass market MMORPG anyways. It was the first online game I played for years then UO came along and blew everything before it out the water. Anyways, on topic there is alot of unfinished products out there and bugs may happen when 2 lines of code by themself which work in theory put down side by side may cause an unexpected results. So, they introduce another line of code which causes another bug while fixes the other larger bug untill they can fix it properly. I think there should be 99% chance of a known bug not to happen before it's considered acceptable otherwise there will be lots of maintenance to reset the server. MMORPGs arent' easy to make so of course there is going to be some with more annoying bugs than others.
The responses to this article show how close minded the player community is.
Let's start with the simple. Bugs have existed since before MMOs and will exist afterwards. There were bugs in Nintendo games and PC games before there was the internet and so you couldn't just download a patch. There were bugs after the internet but patches were now able to be released. Games that have been out for years STILL get patches with bug fixes in them, because as games became bigger and more complex it became more impossible to stop every bug.
MMOs do have the most bugs out there of any genre, MMOs are also by far the biggest games out there. The bigger the game the more bugs.
No not every bug can be fixed, I know some players responding hate to acknowledge this fact, there just isn't enough time in the day for them to track down, confirm, fix, retest every single bug that exists.
There are many factors that get worked in to the equation. If a company could spend an extra 6 months doing nothing but bug fixes and game tweaks they have to calculate how much that will cost vs how much extra profit that will bring in. The truth is it will cost a ton of money, and the resulting small extra profits from having a highly polished game do not compensate. Yes every MMO ever released will have some bugs in it.
Yes companies can make sure to release without major bugs. However extra factors play into this, 1 is that sometimes only certain systems will have the issue. That means their in house systems might never run into it. 2 there is a ton of stuff to test in a ton of ways and only a certain number of testers. And finally, now a days people don't join betas to help squash bugs, they join for their own gain. They join to learn the fastest way to level and the best items, they even join to find bugs and not report them so they can abuse those at launch. The beta is for finding anything that might have been missed but modern players don't help with that.
The responses on here made me sigh a bit that so many players are so clueless on how the industry works. They think there's time and money for everything and that clearly every company is just a bunch of jerks. Get realistic people and get outside of your bubble, it's a complex and huge industry and it can't be perfect.
Players shouldn't get bent out of shape when they come across a slow respawn timer on a quest they're trying to do, or even if they run into 1 quest out of a thousand that they someone get their character in a state that it can't be completed. Send in reports and move on. The only issues that should get you upset is if a game is released that just crashes, and classes are hugely unbalanced. Don't sweat the small stuff or you're going to get an ulcer.
"But not always – many MMORPGs create a new 3D engine for their client as well. An optimist would note that this saves on licensing fees and in any event even the most heavily used third-party 3D engine such as Unreal requires a good deal of work to be turned into a useable MMORPG client. A pessimist would think that it is the thinly-veiled desire of every 3D programmer to write their own engine and become the next John Carmack on your budget’s dime."
humm... often using or adapting something existing can be more expensive than creating it from scratch. So is not a easy decision from the tecnical view.
From the bussines view, if your MMO use the same tools as the competence, It could be hard to deliver a different experience. So, do it make sense from a bussine pov?
Is not a easy as you say.
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Great article; always nice to see things from a more informed perspective.
This is my first post/comment, so I'll give a little background before making further comments. I'm 22 and a journalism major, graduating this December. Though I will have my degree, I have an equal passion to pursue experience in Computer Science, specifically programming. I have taken an intro class, but that isn't saying much. I give comments based primarily from a journalistic standpoint, so please forgive my lack of technical expertise in the programming field.
That being said, I have to ask why, if MMO-developing companies (and everyone in them) realize a game and the systems supporting it require extensive time frames to ensure quality and minimize the life-threatening bugs, they still rush out a product? Okay, yes, money is the bottom line, but they just shoot themselves in the foot and kill their supporting communities by offering an inferior product. MMOs, from what I can see, are a long-term investment that requires patience and a quality control. A game that is well-programmed and has a level of polish to it has a greater potential (I think) to succeed in the marketplace, especially if it has a monthly subscription.
Look at Blizzard, and WoW, for example. In my opinion, they have produced the best MMO out there. Why? They took their time and sank a great deal of focus and resources into making the game stable and enjoyable. Why haven't other companies picked up on this? Five years running and the subscriber base is still running strong. I admit that Blizzard already had a financial base and dedicated following before WoW was released, and I think that contributes to why WoW is still a success, but I digress. That's another topic I'd like to cover on a later date.
Bugs will always exist. I think that's been proven time and time again in- and outside of this article. I think most of the burden falls on the programmer for the holes in their work, and some on the players for abusing the system (though that, in turn, help discover the bugs needing fixing). A portion of the blame also falls on executives that rush the product because they want to see money. From my largely uninformed view of the industry, it's a complicated mess.
I've played many MMOs; not as many as others have, but enough to have an idea of what I like and don't. I hope one day to learn enough about the industry, from an in- and outside point of view to eventually create a solid work detailing its life and processes. Bugs, I think, are going to be a part of that.
P.S.: I apologize for the meandering of my post. I have a lot going through my head, and not enough time or type space to cover it all. I think I'm going to go and plan out a few topics to cover in more focused detail.