AmazingAveryAge of Conan AdvocateMemberUncommonPosts: 7,188
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.
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.
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
Drev
"If MMORPG players were around when God said, "Let their be light" they'd have called the light gay, and plunged the universe back into darkness by squatting their nutsacks over it." -Luke McKinney, The 7 Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Online Gaming
"In the end, SWG may have been more potential and promise than fulfilled expectation. But I'd rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity." -Raph Koster
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?
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.
Comments
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
Drev
"If MMORPG players were around when God said, "Let their be light" they'd have called the light gay, and plunged the universe back into darkness by squatting their nutsacks over it."
-Luke McKinney, The 7 Biggest Dick Moves in the History of Online Gaming
"In the end, SWG may have been more potential and promise than fulfilled expectation. But I'd rather work on something with great potential than on fulfilling a promise of mediocrity."
-Raph Koster
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.
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
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.