Quote:
Originally Posted by LyricalAura
Anyone who thinks that a game developer can magically think of every possible bizarro combination of things a user will try ahead of time, or that all of the things they do think of will get fixed before the first release, has obviously never worked on a big software project.
At my workplace, a problem like this would have been classified as "Priority 5 - Unlikely set of steps to reproduce" and promptly buried under a mountain of other issues that were actually worthwhile to fix.
|
I totally agree. And that aside, the special nature of this situation plays into it too. It's actually kind of impressive that there aren't
more post-launch bugs considering the game apparently has not been getting any patches (since no one could logout to update). In any modern game these days, despite beta tests, you still expect a lot of bugs/exploits to be discovered post-launch and to be fixed later. If it weren't for the unexpected high stakes of death in this case, it is indeed quite likely the development team would have considered this bug not a big deal at all. (You have to imagine that our criminal mastermind wasn't the only person programming the entire game, but the rest of the team presumably had no idea about his master plan, so they weren't exactly worried about the odd hard-to-reproduce dual system bug. It's only become a big deal now to the players given the critical change in the game conditions; any bug/exploit now can be literally deadly.)