Why are bugs tolerated in MMO's?

[Gadgette]

And I don't mean the insect kind

I was looking over a discussion where someone raised some clear unhappiness towards a recent MMO being filled with problems, both minor and major (some of the issues raised apparently have been there long before release and were not fixed).
The responses were quite heated and with people flying into insult flinging tirades defending the game saying it's 'launch month', while a few others were on other side of the fence with 'no it's not acceptable'.

I started thinking, why are so many tolerant of a plethora of bugs when it comes to MMO's? Supposedly betas and ptr are there to catch the big ones at least, but many which have been brought up and reported via official forums seem to get filtered through and fixed at a later date. For the most part I have never really seen any form of tolerance for it in modern single player games (or anything that malfunctions irl), so what makes an MMO the exception?

[Valeron]

mmos are much, much bigger than single player games

[Noomz]

You simply CANNOT compare a singleplayer games development to an MMO. The very notion is preposterous.

Because you can never get rid of them all.

Fix one line of code and you've broken ten more things.

That and people are horrendously spoiled and whiny with a sense of entitlement that baffles me.
But ontop of that, companies are nowadays often pushed hard to make release dates happen.

It's a combination of all three of these things.

[notorious98]

And I don't mean the insect kind

I was looking over a discussion where someone raised some clear unhappiness towards a recent MMO being filled with problems, both minor and major (some of the issues raised apparently have been there long before release and were not fixed).
The responses were quite heated and with people flying into insult flinging tirades defending the game saying it's 'launch month', while a few others were on other side of the fence with 'no it's not acceptable'.

I started thinking, why are so many tolerant of a plethora of bugs when it comes to MMO's? Supposedly betas and ptr are there to catch the big ones at least, but many which have been brought up and reported via official forums seem to get filtered through and fixed at a later date. For the most part I have never really seen any form of tolerance for it in modern single player games (or anything that malfunctions irl), so what makes an MMO the exception?

Mostly because it's difficult to find the problems among thousands upon thousands of lines of code. It seems easy to everyone who doesn't program anything, but it's really not. The problem really comes in with game breaking bugs. Those shouldn't be tolerated and if they have to push back release, so be it. But then the issue comes in of how many potential customers do you lose if you do that vs. how many you lose because they hate the bugs.

But MMOs aren't the only games that have a bunch of bugs upon release. The problem is that patching systems have made developers lazy. They can release semi-broken content and just patch it later. The video game industry, as a whole, is guilty of this.

[Revi]

Not everyone tolerates them, but if you don't then you won't have any MMO to play.

[Sinndra]

job security.

im sure some bugs have technical limitations, and many can be difficult to reproduce the effects consistently enough to locate the problem. but when it comes to prioritizing which one to do first.. i feel some obvious bugs get left in till later dates for two reasons, how game-breaking is it? and job security. if every bug got fixed, there wouldnt be any work left for the devs to do.

[mickybrighteyes]

single player and multiplayer are apples and oranges when looking at the amount of shit to deal with (bug wise).


that and MMO's tend to get updates much more frequently than singleplayer (whyich might NEVER see a fix).

[Bad Ashe]

you also cannot call every strange function and/or reaction in a game a bug. many "glitches" or "bugs" that get hyped are intentional for whatever reasons.

[Deleted]

They are only accepted in a open world with very complex mechanics. Planetside 2 is an MMO but has a rather simple concept so it shouldn't have that many gamebreaking bugs for example. (I never played Planetside, just taking it as an example).

When you create such a complex world it's difficult to track down bugs. For example let's take a raid encounter where 1 item breaks a boss fight between 20-30% on transition, it's simply impossible to predict this until someone notices it by chance and then if the word gets out they can fix it. That's why it's hard to find duplicate exploits, because theres a million different things someone could attempt to find a way to break the game into doing something it's not intended to do.

[Kaleredar]

job security.

im sure some bugs have technical limitations, and many can be difficult to reproduce the effects consistently enough to locate the problem. but when it comes to prioritizing which one to do first.. i feel some obvious bugs get left in till later dates for two reasons, how game-breaking is it? and job security. if every bug got fixed, there wouldnt be any work left for the devs to do.

They'd have to continue to program things...

Game developers, especially those who work on MMOs, aren't hired as temps.


At any rate, let's look at a single player open world game... Skyrim. TONS of bugs. Notorious for bugs. I'd be surprised if you found one person who played the game without experiencing at least a half-dozen bugs. Now imagine that on server architecture, with ten years of code built up beneath it, and you're trying to find the one thing that's making everything screwy AND fix it without changing anything else. Oh, and a bunch of other people play it, too.

I remember GC saying that Blizz developers feared changing anything in the coding Alterac Valley, for fear of completely breaking it accidentally.

And at any rate, bugs in WoW specifically can be strange, but are usually quite minor... for example, raptor mounts are STILL silent, and have been since SoO released... but frankly, that's a pretty small bug. The skybox in ICC is broken, and now displays the stormy sky from valley of the four winds instead of the dark sky of icecrown... again, strange, but a rather benign bug.

[Remilia]

The more things you add the more likely hood it breaks. Chances are the code for WoW or any MMO after many updates look like a gigantic conglomerate mess.

I don't like em nor do I really tolerate them if it is really just stupid but it is understandable to an extent.

[Aucald]

It's impossible to remove *all* bugs from a complicated piece of software, the sheer scope and number of variables involved in the manifestation of some bugs would boggle the mind. Add time and multiple layers of updates, newer features, and changes to existing codebase and the number of errors that could crop up are multiplied exponentially. Playtesting to remove *all* bugs in pretty much any modern video game would take theoretically infinite time and infinite involved people, so we would never actually see a full released version that was bug-free. MMO's exist in a special case where we pretty play a Beta from day one of their live release - the number of factors involved in such a vast strata of user hardware/software and insanely complex client/server code ensure that some bugs will always be existence.

[SkagenRora]

Because they will get fixed "Soon"

[Mysterymask]

have you ever debugged something....I mean even game testing has it's limits I mean who would of figured out "If you talk to an old man in Viridian City then immidiately fly to Cinnabar Island and surf along the side of the island you will find a glitched out Pokemon that will randomly multiply your 6th item by 255 in pokemon" or "Crouch stabbing saved the damage of the last attack you did from Zelda" or that if you TAC into a cinematic super move that doesn't directly attack it will reset the combo damage causing insane damage in Marvel vs Capcom 3"

I mean seriously who in there right mind would of tried all those things in Normal gameplay

[xskarma]

MMO's are just so much bigger and complex and real time that tolerance for bugs is needed in them, cause they WILL occur. I think the tolerance for bugs in MMO's is in equal proportion to the company's speed at fixing those bugs, though. People will tolerate a lot if they know a fix will be coming soon, and a company is known for taking things seriously. When people start feeling like bugs are never fixed, or fixed way too late that tolerance fades. MMO's where bugs aren't fixed will get the same hate as normal games with bugs.

[May90]

I wouldn't say MMOs have more bugs than other games. In Starcraft 2 for over a year there was a bug when a Viper queuing Abducts prevented other Vipers from abducting units - not a game breaking bug since no one queues Abducts anyway, but it was there. Perhaps in MMOs there are more bugs because they are just bigger in size and because a bigger variety of people plays them and there is a bigger chance someone notices even a very well hidden bug, but I don't think "density" of bugs is different between MMOs and other genres.

[Mormolyce]

The responses were quite heated and with people flying into insult flinging tirades defending the game saying it's 'launch month', while a few others were on other side of the fence with 'no it's not acceptable'.

Well an MMO is a big release and bugs are inevitable. As long as they're swiftly addressed it's not a major issue IMO.

One problem is the way the hype train works, a new MMO's servers experience massive strain on day 1 as every man and his dog logs on at the same time. You really can't stress test for volumes on that scale.

[Radio]

With MMOs you are dealing with additional layers of complexity compared to your average single player game, so you do have to give the developers more leeway when it comes to accepting the number of bugs in play.

It's still obviously important to make sure the developers are on their toes and actively working on fixing their game though, some people do forget that. If people were not concerned about the Dark Shamans transmog set Watcher wouldn't have realised the flaw in the boolean logic dictating the drop rules between Flex/Normal at all. Bugs are allowed to exist, but they still must be acknowledged and fixed with a certain degree of priority depending on how game-breaking it is.

[Fencers]

so what makes an MMO the exception?

Nothing. Bugs are not tolerated in MMOs. They are just more prevalent and noticeable due to a variety of factors. Mostly the permanence MMOs tend to have as part of the genre.

For example, a single player game may have a bug that prevents a player from talking to an NPC of minor importance. That bug is fixed after X so many weeks or whatever. The bug was there, it was fixed but for players the encounter with the bug happened maybe occasionally. Because the game design of a single player game would likely not force players to interact with that minor NPC to a degree that is game breaking.

Players tend to "move on" in single player games. You get to the next level or area and forget about the sage in village 01 that wouldn't take your hard earned wolf pelts.

Now in the context of an MMO, one is much more likely to be presented with that malfunctioning NPC. You play an MMO longer, typically. You spend more time in the same areas, dealing with the same interactions and see the same content type more repeatedly. Thus the malfunctioning NPC stands out in your mind due the frequency with which you may encounter a minor script malfunction .

Game breaking bugs are addressed in all genres equally so long as a game has an active live development team.

[MMKing]

To me it matters little what type of game you're talking about. If they charge money for you to play it, the game should be relatively bug free to the point where the developer could genuinely miss it. Problem should also be fixed rather quickly. A much larger game, such as an MMO has more space for bugs where the developers can genuinely miss bugs.