Bioware Developer Blog: Busting Bugs and Fixing Exploits

[Tehfred]

I honestly don't think the OP has any idea about game development. Or hell, software development in general. They're doing what they should be doing: giving the client (us) a "Layman's as possible" explanation of their process.

[Mooji]

Eh what? I am not implying anything but I see you fishing and reaching again. Its a simple fact. Bioware does communicate all the time.. this post they made is just one of MANY examples of them explaining there plans, going on's and upcoming plans for the game. Oh and now that you have revealed your true issues (trying to turn this into a wow vs Bioware thread) I will respond with yes I believe that Blizzard does a good job of communicating too. However just like Bioware they have to deal with a lot of QQ'rs that make pointless complaint threads similar to this one.

So I've revealed I'm trying to turn this into WoW vs SWTOR? lol

Bioware doesn't communicate at all. This isn't a game you release, grab your $50, then never touch it again. This is a subscription game. If bugs/imbalances don't get fixed you lose your subscribers.

What were they trying to accomplish by releasing that blog? They want their customers to have better insight to the game development process.

Oh now why would they want that? Simple, because they think it'll get the customers off their case. In other words, it's an excuse.

[philefluxx]

Not so much a excuse blog as a "lets try and educate some of these idiotic vocal minorities" blog. Personally, I think it was a bad move on BW behalf because the result will not be what they intended.

This thread being a great example...

[Pulledtea]

We all know what he's trying to do. We are all aware that he's trying to find fault where there is none to be found. As stated before, BW is informing us of how they fix bugs. The blog states that it takes alot of time to do, so some bugs may be fixed earlier than others and so on and so forth. It's not as if they're doing nothing with the money we're paying them. They already fixed alot of the bugs. It is an invalid statement stating that bioware is trying to excuse themselves from the bugs when they're in the midst of fixing or already fixed them.
Please mods, close this thread.

[Dundebuns]

If you're expecting Bioware to tell you exactly what bugs they're fixing, when they're fixing them and how they're fixing them then you'll be eternally disappointed. Companies do not tell their consumers what is going on behind the scenes at all, especially when it relates to valuable source code.

Be happy that they at least talked through their methodology so you get at least some idea of what goes on.

[Alexandyr]

I honestly don't understand how that's an excuse and how BW doesn't communicate. Their CMs seem to post on forums just as much as the Blizz CMs do, and SR even goes through his twitter and reddit to communicate to the player base. You can argue that they don't post relevant info to what you want to hear, but they are there, and the do communicate to us. This blog gives excellent insight for some as to why "X" bug hasn't been fixed yet. These things take time, but many people don't understand that sometimes. Not pointing any fingers at all, but just saying, this does not come off as an "excuse blog" at all.

[Oneirophobia]

Its almost as if the same people from the WoW community play TOR! :'D

I'm sure its meant as an excuse blog, someone probably asked for them give more information.

[Dakia]

Are you implying Bioware is a good company that communicates with its subscribers/fans? Blizzard communicates with their fans, as all the blue posts show. Bioware doesn't respond to anything until it decides to release new patch notes, then a blog making excuses for their shortcomings that doesn't address anything specifically.

Check the Dev tracker on the official forums. They do plenty of communicating with the community on their forums, Reddit and various Q&As. If anything, the amount of communication is on a similar level as that of Blizzard.

[jearle]

Are you implying Bioware is a good company that communicates with its subscribers/fans? Blizzard communicates with their fans, as all the blue posts show. Bioware doesn't respond to anything until it decides to release new patch notes, then a blog making excuses for their shortcomings that doesn't address anything specifically.

Dev Tracker
http://www.swtor.com/community/devtracker.php

The devs actually respond to threads on the forums, this little link will let you read everything that a dev writes.
If you think the only time something comes out is in patch notes then that is your own ignorance.

You making this post and then pulling Blizzard out of your ass like they care so much is pretty hilarious.
You would think Blizzard has some Jedi powers since they implement huge class changes, feature changes that hurt the game, and not fully finished content with an extremely long dev schedule and then waves a hand make a blue post about it and weak minded people eat it up like they're geniuses.

The game has issues, they're being honest about the issues and telling you how they go about fixing it. A number of us are waiting to see if they follow through on what they promised and are going to fix the issues with the game and we are willing to sub/play the game in the mean time.

If you don't like waiting, that is your choice it is your 15 dollars you can go give it back to Blizzard so they can give you pandabearpokemon sometime "soon".

[Kronik85]

You just made my case.

What exactly did they communicate with that blog? How did they give us insight to how they're working to fix the issues with the game?

Imagine if the president of the US came out in a press conference and instead of talking about the issues he said "Well citizens, the reason nothing is being fixed is because it's a long, hard process to fix the country. Don't worry though, despite how it looks we're still busting ass." Any president would get RIPPED APART if he came out making excuses.

The world doesn't want excuses. I sure as hell can't use excuses where I work to fix problems. Bioware shouldn't be either. It's unprofessional.

Your definition of excuse seems to be different to mine. To me "my dog ate my homework" is an excuse, "heres how we triage game development (from bug fixes to future content)" is information. Theres no apologies, no imploring for patience and no excuses as to why some bugs made it through beta. I'm not gonna sit here and debate semantics with you but if you don't like being given an insight into how BW or Blizz are trying to develop theit MMOs then don't read them, I'm yet to view an excuse in either blog but you might find them upsetting.

What do you honestly expect to see them do? Companies present themselves as the company usually, if they had bad programmers who couldn't do the job then they aren't going to tell you in a dev blog that they just fired half the staff for incompetence, you just have to assume that a multi-million dollar compant knows it shit better than you. If you feel you can do better start your own company or apply for a job inside the company to try and improve it.

I'm sorry for being vaguely hostile but I think you need to manage your expectations of what BW can actually communicate to you, with PR comes the need to manage the information you give out to avoid confusion. At the end of the day the people making these games aren't corporate monsters...the shareholders are a completely different matter but when a developer gets the chance to take part in some managed PR then we should at least be grateful that they tried to interact with the community.

If you haven't seen the President making excuses it's because politicians don't apologise, they blame someone else. As far as I'm aware that's an excuse too. I don't want excuses either but the information in that blog was useful to me, unless you assume that BW aren't trying to fix bugs because they're all out on their private yacts spraying models with champagne and living the high life with your subscription then you might need to work on your common sense. It goes without saying that developers try to fix bugs, what also goes without saying is that if the bug isn't fixed yet it's because they haven't found a solution yet. That doesn't mean they aren't trying though.

It's easy to complain, it's a damn sight harder to go in and fix things.

[Linkedblade]

This is just the company trying to reach out and have a conversation with its players. To add to that, they are reaching out and asking for players to not only submit bug reports, but detailed bug reports so they can make your playing experience better. This is why Blizzard does PTR's and they allow a large population of players to test the content (although most of them probably don't).

So this isn't any form of excuse from Bioware. Hell they are probably trying to create a decent developer-player relationship so QA and playtime are used to their potential.

[Vexies]

Bioware doesn't communicate at all. This isn't a game you release, grab your $50, then never touch it again. This is a subscription game. If bugs/imbalances don't get fixed you lose your subscribers.

Its a pointless thread and he has no basis for his arguments. Its devolved simply into "I dont like the game and Bioware sux! thread" So let me get this right.. they have weekly bug fix patches to .. as you said fix bugs so they can have happy subs. Tell there community about it, there for er um.. communicating with the community and you say they dont communicate, fix bugs and that when they do its a excuse.. ok gotcha I see

Lol So when I type this to you im not actually communicating with you right?

[Necrolepsy]

That is expected and it generates talking about the game in the community. That is part of the plan. Weather it is an excuse or explimation (very blurred line there) you are just arguing over different sides of the same coin.
Don't defend the shit like you are an abused housewife, or attack it like it's a mortal enemy, just take it for what it is, communication. It's a hell of a lot better then locking the forums, rite?


Edit: not to be an ass but every fucking person who has every taking a shot at blizzard for the same thing who is now making excuses supporting the same kinda communiction, i hope you are aware you are doing that, and in the future, you might think twice before jumping on the, " we are working on means failure" bandwagon.

When you see 50 threads about the same thing, it's just bandwagon bashing and trolling, and not communication that gives any feedback to the developer.
Every time they make a blog, there's a whining thread about it, not a discussion about it. A week later, there's crying about no communication.

As for locking the forums, locking threads is fine, that's what moderators are for, to stop useless threads where there is little room for constructive criticism or discussion.

If you read the OP:

I can understand Bioware being overwhelmed since they probably weren't prepared for what comes along with running an MMO but wow, I can't believe they released this...if only I could write a blog making excuses for all my shortcomings at work and get away with it.

There is little room for discussion, he just states that he thinks Bioware is saying "oh here's our blog and reasons why we suck". He doesn't even say which part says what he refers to.

[Pulledtea]

@Vexis My mind=blown answer was better.

[abijax]

Excuse or not that blog is scary.

The balancing act of fixing bugs while ensuring we maintain a stable game is always tricky. We have to make sure that when we publish a fix to the live game it doesn’t alter the game code in a way that can make things worse. This is a normal part of complex software development, but it means we have to assess the risk on what we publish to the live game very carefully. The more bugs we fix with each publish, the higher the risk of breaking things, as we’ve changed more game code.

How can you be so dumb to publicly admit you rush band aid fixes that aren't thoroughly tested or thought out? The bolded part is just crazy talk, he basically admits their teams think the code is so fragile anything can cause ripple effects and if they change too much it might totally break.
Sure as hell he shouldn't be in a leadership position or be allowed to blog without PR department going over his words 10 times.

[Vexies]

How can you be so dumb to publicly admit you rush band aid fixes that aren't thoroughly tested or thought out? The bolded part is just crazy talk, he basically admits their teams think the code is so fragile anything can cause ripple effects and if they change too much it might totally break.
Sure as hell he shouldn't be in a leadership position or be allowed to blog without PR department going over his words 10 times.

Is that really what you take away from that? This admits nothing except stating the truth about ALL complex programs and MMO's its nothing specific to SWTOR. You go changing things add hoc and you get unexpected ripple effects through out the code. It was used as a example to explain why it can take a while to get a fix for some issues that may seem like they should be relatively easy to fix to the community. Do you guys just look for things that you can attach negative connotations to?

[Firehorse]

Nice post.

Anyway, if I finished a project for work and had as many glitches/bugs/flaws the customer wouldn't even pay for my product, and most likely I'd get fired also.

We know the process of fixing bugs in a program. This isn't rocket science. Bioware released that statement because they think it'll get some of the QQ/pressure off their backs. As I mentioned in the original post, it's making excuses. That's like me telling my boss "oh well it isn't easy getting the foundation of the house level so uhh yeah just deal with it."

You right you would be fired

If you came to your boss and said "can't get the foundation level because x, y,z and we are working to fix that problem with a, b, and c then chances are you would get to keep your job, or at least get more time to fix it

Your angry because they have a problem, and they are explaining how they go about fixing it and your trying to compare to "oh its hard so we are just gonna say fuck it"


Let me guess your one of the millions that bitch that the game is copy and paste of world of warcraft.... then QQ two minutes later about how its missing features from world of Warcraft that you consider to be industry standard.

Haters gonna hate i guess

---------- Post added 2012-02-01 at 12:04 PM ----------

[QUOTE=abijax;15307158]Excuse or not that blog is scary.

How can you be so dumb to publicly admit you rush band aid fixes that aren't thoroughly tested or thought out? The bolded part is just crazy talk, he basically admits their teams think the code is so fragile anything can cause ripple effects and if they change too much it might totally break.
Sure as hell he shouldn't be in a leadership position or be allowed to blog without PR department going over his words 10 times.[/QUOTE


You're right, what a bunch of ass hats for telling the truth.....

[Zeek Daniels]

This is what happens when you rush a game out because your Parent company wants some $$$. They didnt do enough testing and they didnt have experienced employees designing the systems that make an MMO an MMO.

Like having an auto kill upon entering an enemy base in a world designed for killing other players instead of having NPC guards or structures(turrets) that do increased damage to prevent factions camping near enemy bases. Really really poorly designed cant believe they let the auto kill thing launch, i could never play a game like that.

[OhpUldum]

Doesn't seem like an excuse blog to me, more of a 'What we do to fix bugs'. Working for a major IT company, it looks like they handle bugs the exact same way we do.

I was thinking the same thing. I don't see excuses being made I see a developer trying to give a mass populace better insight on the subject matter of exploits and bugs.

[Firehorse]

This is what happens when you rush a game out because your Parent company wants some $$$. They didnt do enough testing and they didnt have experienced employees designing the systems that make an MMO an MMO.

Like having an auto kill upon entering an enemy base in a world designed for killing other players instead of having NPC guards or structures(turrets) that do increased damage to prevent factions camping near enemy bases. Really really poorly designed cant believe they let the auto kill thing launch, i could never play a game like that.

Its star wars, they have force feilds all the time( i know cause i deactivated like 400 of them between 1 and 50).

So why from a story stand point, why would an auto death field not work for you.