Why are bugs tolerated in MMO's?

[Duronos]

Bugs... Touchy subject, I personally don't mind bugs that much as long as they don't destroy a save file of sorts (that is the worst bug possible) along with not destroying a key part of the game such as being able to move on to the next point.

Some bugs are actually quite hilarious and I applaud them even if they were accidental or some developer thought it was funny enough to stay. Example you might ask, upside down flying dragons, while I've never personally seen this bug in Skyrim I have watched videos of it on Youtube. Coding is a mess, the entirety of it is a bloody mess and while I haven't really delved into much much past extremely basic stuff I shall look deeper into it starting this fall at my first year of college... May the coding gods of mercy on my soul.

[Lyese]

MMO's often have multitudes of working parts, and deal with the worst of all worlds (singleplayer, multiplayer, online). There was once a bug a long time ago in WoW where a certain Hunter pet skill was buffed. However, this move was also used by certain NPC enemies, and the algorithms that determine player and enemy damage are a lot different. Therefore, the mobs were suddenly one-shotting people left and right until they uncoupled the abilities.

[Doctor Amadeus]

Because in America we are conditioned to accept sub par products.

[Graeham]

If nothing else it's worth noting that when you create an account or sign up for a service you typically agree to the terms of service which usually include a paragraph along the lines of 'Although we strive to have the game running as smoothly as possible some issues may arise. We will attempt to fix any problems as swiftly as possible, though in some cases this may prevent progression.'

Which strikes me as pretty fair. Bugs are usually fixed rather quickly and whilst some may persist they're usually either difficult to smooth out or minor annoyances. I guess I'm not ruled by MMO's to the point where I get angry if I can't log on to play due to an unfortunate bug, though. When I encountered a progression blocking bug in Wildstar I saw countless people screaming and raging yet I simply logged off, played something else and went out for a meal with some friends.

I pity those who don't operate on a similar level or feel they have nothing else to pass the time with.

[Herecius]

They generally aren't tolerated, but it's also generally understood that some bugs are unavoidable in MMOs. They are huge games, bugs happen. So long as a developer makes an honest effort to fix them, it's all good.

[loki504]

and singelplayers are bug free? or get fixed instantly? yea right......

[Post]

Because in America we are conditioned to accept sub par products.

This is the most hilarious and wrong statement I've read in this thread.

[Azrile]

The number of items and scripts in MMO´s is staggering and you can never predict the interaction of everything when thousands of players are doing them at the same time. In a SP game, the player can only do one thing at a time, it is fairly easy to predict and test outcomes.

And really, this all started with UO. In early UO, there weren´t just bugs, there were gamebreaking bugs that you could abuse to do nasty things ( completely steal another players house etc). I am guessing nearly 75% of all patches came with a 2-7 day roll-back shortly afterwards. On the day after a patch, you NEVER did anything but goof around because you basically knew any progress you made with your character would be rolled back.

[WintersLegion]

There is also the fact that a lot of bugs only appear if certain weird conditions are met and sometimes those bugs can be pretty hard to trigger. So like in your example your going from a beta that had a relatively small number of people playing it and a bunch of those not actually trying to find problems so they can be fixed and then you go to live where you have tens of thousands of players and a lot of these bugs will suddenly come to light. But just because it's found out about doesn't mean they will necessarily find the cause of the problem anytime soon as it could be the thing that triggers the bug may not have anything to do with what the bug did and it may even of been something that was done long before the bug even happens.

[kail]

Video games in general are released with bugs. Pokemon Red was released with bugs. The difference is the the community noticing the bug more in MMOs and wanting it to be fixed. Single player game bugs don't get this much volume unless it is rather severe.

[stellvia]

I think it's a little bit of both: An MMO is so massive in scale, that bugs after launch are going to be common. By that token, MMO companies quite often take this for granted to release a shitty product because people "expect bugs". Encounters are unfinished or untested, many things are known bugged and the game is released anyways, etc.

[SodiumChloride]

They aren't. Fanboys of the said MMOs are the only ones defending the bugginess.

[Deleted]

If every bug got fixed, there wouldnt be any work left for the devs to do.

With a typical MMO containing hundreds of thousands of lines of code and more, and being added to almost constantly, you could never solve every bug. Even in project much smaller this is not realistic.

The coder's poem:

99 little bugs in the code,
99 bugs in the code,
Fix one bug, compile it again,
101 little bugs in the code.

[Robert3620]

If your talking about ESO, it's not really being tolerated. People are quitting in droves and it's being commented on a lot.

If ESO makes it to console they better have most the bugs worked out and the balance issues are well or it's going to be a total flop. Tho by the time it does go to console it should be worked out since anyone playing ESO is taking part in a paying to beta test the game.

ESO a game that had a lot of potential, that failed is going to be what it goes down as. So many of it's problems have been experienced time after time and they could of avoided most of them, they chose not to and launched a sub par unfinished product.

[SodiumChloride]

With a typical MMO containing hundreds of thousands of lines of code and more, and being added to almost constantly, you could never solve every bug. Even in project much smaller this is not realistic.

The coder's poem:

99 little bugs in the code,
99 bugs in the code,
Fix one bug, compile it again,
101 little bugs in the code.

Not an excuse I'm afraid.

You are suppose to at least fix all of the "show stoppers" before you release.

Rushing to market your unfinished fucked up product and having users live with all the glitches that you "will patch later" is BS.

[loki504]

Not an excuse I'm afraid.

You are suppose to at least fix all of the "show stoppers" before you release.

Rushing to market your unfinished fucked up product and having users live with all the glitches that you "will patch later" is BS.

but it looks like your the only 1 with that problem. and instead of whining on a fansite forum. meybe give them feedback on a proper way instead of saying fix all your bugs before i buy your fucking product you son of a b*tch. and because we want the newest stuff right away we should live with bugs.

[Aliessil]

After 15yrs of working in Software Development I can assure you there's virtually no bug-free software anywhere on the planet. This isn't likely to change anytime soon without a major technology shift. The bigger, the more complex a piece of software is, the more bugs it's likely to contain, and I'm betting WoW runs to tens of millions of lines of code by now.

That small, simple bug you've found? It could be caused by a single line of code, or it could be from the interaction of dozens or even hundreds of lines in entirely unrelated areas. It's not uncommon to find that it's easy to fix that one bug but in doing so, you create one or more others, and maybe they're worse. Then there's the bugs that only become visible when you use specific hardware - maybe you've upgraded your system, or maybe Blizzard have upgraded to more powerful servers with the latest Intel chip, and it's that chip causing the problems.

Maybe it happens at some weird combination of events - it has to be within two hours of noon, you have to be on Pandaria, there needs to be a mage casting fireball within 100 yards and there must be a virmen within vision range. I bet that specific scenario happened a lot at the start of the expansion, but good luck finding that bug!

Software testing is a balancing act between minimising the effect of any bugs that get through, and getting your software out in a timely manner. If you want e.g. Warlords of Draenor to be released 100% bug-free, be prepared to wait years, and don't upgrade anything in the meantime.

As I said, this isn't going to change soon without a major shift in technology, and I've no idea what that will be.

[SodiumChloride]

After 15yrs of working in Software Development I can assure you there's virtually no bug-free software anywhere on the planet. This isn't likely to change anytime soon without a major technology shift. The bigger, the more complex a piece of software is, the more bugs it's likely to contain, and I'm betting WoW runs to tens of millions of lines of code by now.

That small, simple bug you've found? It could be caused by a single line of code, or it could be from the interaction of dozens or even hundreds of lines in entirely unrelated areas. It's not uncommon to find that it's easy to fix that one bug but in doing so, you create one or more others, and maybe they're worse. Then there's the bugs that only become visible when you use specific hardware - maybe you've upgraded your system, or maybe Blizzard have upgraded to more powerful servers with the latest Intel chip, and it's that chip causing the problems.

Maybe it happens at some weird combination of events - it has to be within two hours of noon, you have to be on Pandaria, there needs to be a mage casting fireball within 100 yards and there must be a virmen within vision range. I bet that specific scenario happened a lot at the start of the expansion, but good luck finding that bug!

Software testing is a balancing act between minimising the effect of any bugs that get through, and getting your software out in a timely manner. If you want e.g. Warlords of Draenor to be released 100% bug-free, be prepared to wait years, and don't upgrade anything in the meantime.

As I said, this isn't going to change soon without a major shift in technology, and I've no idea what that will be.

No one is asking for bug free. Just no obvious "show stoppers".

When you have multiple quests not working, the game crashing, shit not spawning, ...etc., ya maybe you might want to delay it a couple of months.

[ComputerNerd]

And are single-player games free of bugs ?
No, they aren't.

There can be a variety of causes, not least the vast amount of hardware that has to be supported on a PC.
Even on consoles with fixed hardware there are bugs.

Ultimately it is human error, and the inability to test for absolutely everything.
Developers think and play differently to the masses.

Games are simply getting more and more complicated, and we are not evolving at the same rate.

[Gwiez]

I interviewed for a company that does medical equipment software. Now that's software where the tolerance for bugs should be really low. For an MMO, you've got something that's ever changing and with many different imaginative things happening, with many users, and people don't die in real life when there's bugs. With so many moving parts in an MMO, more bugs will inevitably crop up. Some of them that can't be noticed until the code goes live for the massive audience. The priority is to create fresh content with few bugs, not completely bug free content no matter how long it takes.

And bug testing takes humans to test it. It is literally impossible for a computer to catch every bug. And I mean literally literally, not figuratively literally. Be happy that game developers know this and are willing to examine bugs that players run across instead of pretending bugs can't exist in their released products.