Originally Posted by Octopuss
I don't think they listen to feedback very much 
I know some stuff is not matter of life and death, but damn, five years after launch you'd think they'd fix improve certain things that had been brought up over and over. And the list is almost endless.
I know they primarily need to make money, but the amount of new content they release (half of which doesn't seem too interesting anyway) starts to feel ridiculous to me, and at some point they should simply go back to the base game and focus on doing something about the ancient and/or bugged systems. |
Originally Posted by Akopian Atrebates
You know what I think about some of the really old bugs? I have played in games in Ultima Online beta onward. Programmers come and go on these games. Every year they add layers and layers onto the coding they have before. They might start with good organization, but every time somebody new comes in, they misunderstand the importance of this or that at some point. Eventually, the game becomes extremely hard to fix. Some seemingly innocuous changes have far reaching effects that nobody there can really understand. They know how to tamper with things they change often, but certain difficult bugs that were hard to fix in the past become even harder in the future when people understand them even less. It would probably take tremendous devotion by certain parties to fix and text certain seemingly simple bugs. I remember a couple of times Ultima Online simply shutting down because of what were supposed to be simple fixes. Nothing has changed since then. Every game has been like that. Dark Age of Camelot, EVE, WoW, Rift, Lord of the Rings Online, Warhammer ONline, and more.
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Yes, I'm sure that 99.999% of any long-lived software project gets like that. A well-run project should have an architect who keeps that kind of thing in check but there aren't too many of those.
As a programmer, I take pride in my projects and would not like to see people complaining bitterly about the same bugs over a long period of time so I, personally, would spend a lot of time trying to fix things. I suspect that at companies like ZOS there is really no pride of accomplishment or embarrassment when things are broken. Programmers are probably focused on things like adding dragons and are possibly even chastised if they try to spend any time trying to figure out, e.g., why players are running on top of their horses.
And, the people at the top probably don't really worry about non-gamebreaking bugs since fixing them does not bring in revenue. They also likely don't have any pride in their finished product. It just has to be good enough to get people to buy it.
I guess that's just good-old capitalism at work.