Community Relations Archive
Thread: What would you rather see, one publish with new content or two publishes full of bug fixes?
WilfBrim wrote:
How about a bug free (or minimal) publish? As a programmer i know this is possible.
Overwhelmingly - two publishes of bug fixes.
They should follow what law enforcement agencies have done: Have a two week spree every quarter of having every man on deck step forward and capture the most wanted.
An idea would to fix the top ten or five bugs per profession. That would pleas a lot of people.
oh yeah, I'm on the bug fix craze right now. =)
I really am not iking trying to help newer players and always having to say "well right now that is a known bug" It seems to be my most given piece of knowledge =(
Wow, such ignorance in here regarding programming, especially one from an alleged programmer.
I for one would also take the bug fixes, but let me explain something:
There are 2 kinds of bugs, logic bugs and syntax bugs. Syntax bugs are easy to fix, because that is what the compiler catches.
BUT, with logic bugs, the compiler will say everything is ok, because the code is just fine. What is botched is some data somewhere, and the only way to fix it is by checking the effects it has - logic bugs are a pain in the arse to nail down.
Case in point,sayyou havea program that is set to do a count, starting with 1, and going +1 each loop through, and quitting at 4. Now say that you set the data to 1 in this module, but in another module, something is accidentally set to override this one, and sets the data to 5. Now you got a program that is NEVER going to hit 4, and thus, be stuck in an infinite loop, the bane of all programmers.
Now YOU try to find which module out of the complex thousands that make up this game is the one overriding the other module, and correct the issue. And now imagine it isn't a number, but a setting. Starting to get the hint?
Now, I am not saying that is any excuse to release bug-ridden materail, nor am I saying that the bugs should not be corrected - they should be dealt with ASAP. In fact, any reported bugs should be dealt with on the TC before release - the playerbase cares little right now for new content when it compares to bug fixes.
What I AM saying is that you have no idea how hard it is to troubleshoot something this complex, and as such, show your ignorance when acting like fixing the bugs is some easy task.
I have my doubts if the supposed programmer above has done anything harder than "Hello World" (any programmer will know what I am talking about when I say this); even if he has, I doubt he has any idea how difficult something like this is - a friend of mine and I programmed our own simple graphics engine in High School, and we had all sorts of issues getting THAT off the ground with the logic errors, and that is just one component of this game, and nowhere near the complexity - ours didn't even have built in driver support.
