by Moorgard on 2001-08-08
From the Developer's Corner:YoodenVranx wrote:
In your last post a player made a comment about how it takes player exploit before you fix a bug. I found it unreasonable that you dodged the underlying question. I believe the intent of that player was to complain about the fact that existing bugs are almost entirly ignored until people find a way to use it to their advantage. There exist many bugs that have no exploitable factors (because they are broken beyond use) that have been around since the creation of the game. If we found a way to exploit the ability to agro Pain and Suffering in certain zones it would be fixed next patch. If penalty levels caused people to /petition hundreds of times a day you would pay attention. If the bug that makes your hat dissappear when an illusion wears off caused you to become invincible there would be an emergency patch. However, instead of fixing these things we get updates to the manual and silly games like gems.
The accusations of you of acting like an out of control gm is because most exploitable bugs are discovered when rare encounters are pulled off more easily then you intended and you take action. If this problem was only being exploited in West Commonlands then it would never be discovered and if it was there would most likly be no action because its low on the radar.
Why not give us some legitimate bug fixes instead of new buggy code that nobody asked for.
That's a hard appearance to avoid or to dispel.
You are right, most notable exploitable bugs are discovered when rare encounters are pulled off more easily than intended. That is because most bugs are caught in-house and never make it to a live server. The ones that do tend to be the ones that can only be discovered by the intense scrutiny of a few thousand dedicated players. And when we fix those bugs the fix is usually accompanied by a reaction similar to the one we're seeing now about Kael.
The reality is a little different than the appearance.
We've known about and have been working on the pet aggro thing for a while, long before our change to Kael. Our schedule for fixing it hasn't really changed because of anything done in Kael. It's a bug, and it's being fixed.
We are just as likely to take a similar action for a bug that is causing problems for the player. But nobody talks about those. If charming things in Kael was causing the charmer to suddenly explode, we could do something similar to what we did here and make it so that charm can't be cast in the city. But players would stop charming things in Kael even if we didn't change the code in that case. And if we turned off charm in the zone to keep player characters from exploding there wouldn't be a big ruckus about it. Most players wouldn't hear a word about it (except from those that had exploded - they'd have a right to complain...).
If a bug like this was being abused in West Commons and we heard about it, we'd take the same action. But you are right, if we don't hear about it, we can't fix it. There is a tendency for folks to not tell us about things that are broken in their favor. I guess that's human nature. And maybe that's where the sense of conflict comes from. We want to fix all the bugs. But people are more inclined to tell us about the ones that affect them negatively and not the ones that make things easier for them.
I understand that it's probably easier to see a bug that affects you negatively than one that helps you. And most certainly in this case there was plenty of poor communication on our part to make things worse. Again, I'm sorry about that.
But that doesn't mean that this isn't a bug. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't fix it. And that doesn't mean that we should allow people to use a bug to their benefit. Though maybe it's really the last part that some players disagree with us about, and maybe that's where the accusations of pettiness come in.
But we feel that it's important that bugs don't affect the game one way or the other. We're always going to be upset when we let a bug into the game. But we're not going to be upset when someone accomplishes something in game. I can't stress this enough, but we build these encounters to be used, not to be impossible. And we want people to do the hard things in game. But at the same time we want those things to be accomplished without the use of bugs.
I don't know that I can explain it any better than that.
And, well, Auric and I put a lot of work into that manual...
speaking of pet agro, when will it be fixed? i'm still going trough about 10 times more malachite than i once was. honestly my pet got me DT'd in PoA yesterday because of pet agro. I was /assisting the Keeper of Souls to DS whoever he happened to be hitting, and out of about 15-20 tanks almost all of which were 50+ the KoS was beating on my poor little air pet Jabober. As much of a help as this is becuase pets are easier to replace than tanks are, i'd like it to be fixed so in a seb group i'm not using the 15+ malachite per day that i'm using now.
Falkahnhan Righteousfire
55 Conjurer
Azure Sky
ps. when i got DT'd my pet was taunting, i forgot to tell him not to but in all my seb groups my pets never taunt.
Hopefully we'll get it with the patch next week.
"There are times when we aren't aware of a bug until a few hundred thousand people start looking for them."
Not to be hyper critical, but I think this statement in a nutshell gets to the heart of why people are frustrated with Verant. We're not looking for bugs, we're just trying to play the game. Everytime something doesn't work out like you thought it would, doesn't mean someone was trying to thwart your efforts.
~ Calahad, 39 Cleric, Innoruuk
~ Shadowrain, 20 Enchanter, Vazaelle
That's absolutely true, when something doesn't work like we though it would that doesn't immediately imply that someone is trying to thwart out efforts. And we're not saying they are.
There are, however, people that would rather use a bug than report it. Those people are trying to thwart our efforts. Our 'efforts' in this case are to eliminate bugs.
But there are also plenty of people that are just playing and when something works well they have no way of knowing that it is a bug that makes it work so well. And we don't expect players to know everything that is and is not a bug.
Your message seems to imply that we've taken some sort of action against players that were using this bug. We have not. We've prevented it from being used in one zone until we can get it fixed, that's all.
-D_man- wrote:
Though it may not pertain to many of us, we sometimes want to kjnow what the heck you are talking about. Can you explain what the exploit and bug were? Since its gone now anyway.
I don't really want to detail any bug that still exists in game. It's not gone yet, and Kael isn't the only place it could be used, it's just the place where it can be used most effectively.
Alan
So, Verant is saying that the change in Kael is not due to the Avatar of War being killed through the use of an unknown "bug." Rather, it addresses a general problem that has manifested itself in other ways within the city of the giants.
Tormax and Vindicator/Statue have had charmed giant pets used against them for a long time now. It's only been lately that pet aggro has been changed to allow 25-person raids against these ubermobs to be carried out successfully. Fixing such an obvious exploit is, without question, a good idea.
However, the timing in this case--as in other "bug fixes" by Verant--is certainly suspect.
Are we really supposed to believe that, had the AoW not been killed twice within a week, that this change was scheduled to happen anyway?
Okay, enough with the conspiracy theories. What's done is done, and guilds will have to adjust their tactics accordingly if they want to take out the ubergiants.
But the fact remains that Verant doesn't feel obligated to provide players with a list of known bugs or any kind of timetable for them to be fixed. Well, that's supposed to be what the Quality Assurance - Testing board is for, but you can see from the lack of updates how much weight Verant places upon it.