Why does it take so long to fix bugs?

Darknes21

I think Thanos (5*) court death and Phoenix resurrection tile has been broken / buggy for 3 updates now. Why does it take so long to fix these problems?

bbigler

Darknes21 wrote:

I think Thanos (5*) court death and Phoenix resurrection tile has been broken / buggy for 3 updates now. Why does it take so long to fix these problems?

Because they don't know what causes the problem or the proposed fix will break something else. It's software, it can be mysterious sometimes.

HaywireII

As someone who's been working in Software Development for a long time I'm willing to bet that there is a lot of code in MPQ where the person who wrote it does not work there anymore. If the person who wrote the code didn't document it well and wasn't concerned about readability or test-ability it can be a nightmare to work with.

We also don't know how many people are actually working on it and how the work is getting prioritized. They may let bugs slide to get those new releases out on schedule. It's not like they can tell an Artist or a Customer Service rep to hop in and fix bugs. There's only going to be so much development bandwidth. I'm not saying it'a an optimal situation but it's the way business works.

Fenfire

It doesn't matter. Bugs have to be critical and provoke an outrageous amount of support tickets or it's just hours of work which could be filled with coding the next character release. Which generates money. Fixing stuff doesn't as long as CS can sort through the messy mails they receive without losing much time.

mpqr7

There are two types of bugs: Show Stoppers and Less Important.

Show Stoppers would cause major problems such as: People unable to play, people unable to spend money. Some of those bugs would include connection issues, unable to process transactions, issues with Intercepts (fixable ones, not the more challenging ones such as getting them onto Steam), game crashes.

Less Important bugs are bugs that can be annoying but won't prevent people from playing. For instance, I've suffered through a bug that bothers me a ton, but they probably won't fix it any time soon. I have thousands of mpq fb friends, but it only lets me send gifts to around 40 of them. I want to be able to send gifts to all of them. I've discussed this with support for years now, but I'm sure they'll never fix it at this point. It's annoying to me, but it hasn't stopped me from playing the game or spending money on it.

Brigby

We've actually posted a thread about this very topic back in January. It goes into detail as to the process of identifying a bug, fixing it, and then implementing it into a future build.

You can check it out here: viewtopic.php?f=7&t=57469