More bugs than patches
by Mike Schramm 
Jul 11th 2007 at 5:00PM
By now you've heard of the Orc shoulder problem (and maybe you've even confronted Azeroth's Greatest Male Orc about it), but as MMO Champion shows, that was definitely not the only major bug that showed up in 2.1.3. There's a huge list of things going wrong-- Dwarf females' offhands are huge, Blood Elf males can walk through chairs, Cyclone can prevent players from getting their BG marks (!), and ghost wolves, when attacking, can now be seen carrying weapons. What happened?!The problem becomes even stranger when you consider the patch notes-- almost nothing got changed compared to previous patches. All we saw were a few graphical changes, an added interface option, and some high level raid tuning. As someone asked yesterday, how can all of this seemingly unrelated stuff be breaking? If all Blizzard is doing is updating the mail system, what does the size of shoulderpieces on male Orcs have to do with it at all?
The answer is probably more complicated than we can know. As commenter Okoloth said yesterday, object-oriented programming (which Blizzard uses to code the game) is full of parent/child relationships, which means that a change in one class ("wearable items in the mail") can have strange effects all across the game ("Orc shoulders shrink"). And then there's the whole fact that even though the patch notes for 2.1.3 are small, that most likely doesn't mean Blizzard is slacking-- they could be implementing more subtle changes on the system (in preparation for future content that we don't know about yet), and those changes might be having an effect on the actual game we play.
Of course, just because we aren't being told why these things are happening doesn't mean we should give Blizzard a pass on fixing them ASAP (in my opinion, they shouldn't wait until the next patch to fix my shoulder size, thank you). But just because seemingly unrelated bugs are popping up doesn't mean they don't know what they're doing.
Filed under: Orcs, Analysis / Opinion, Bugs, Blizzard, News items
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
innajunglestylee Jul 11th 2007 5:20PM
Cyclone causes people to not get BG marks? Working as intended!
OutlandishTrendz Jul 11th 2007 5:31PM
"ghost wolves, when attacking, can now be seen carrying weapons."
Some are little behind, I noticed this a month or so ago. It was definitely not this patch that made it show.
dmoz Jul 11th 2007 5:46PM
"But just because seemingly unrelated bugs are popping up doesn't mean they don't know what they're doing."
I beg to differ. These bugs should be caught in testing and fixed before the patch goes live, especially when the problems are as obvious as smaller shoulders or wolves using weapons. After all, MILLIONS of people are paying to play this game. Bugs are (most often) a bad thing which make paying customers upset.
While I'm not an expert programmer, I have done a bit of coding, and it truly boggles my mind to imagine what WoW's code must look like for some of these bugs to come up. Structured, organized code should go a long way to prevent such bugs, or at least make it much easier to track the source.
OrangeMini Jul 11th 2007 5:49PM
I noticed last night after the patch that my human rogue moves the same speed whether she is stealthed or not. Made for some quick instance takedowns.
Scadam Jul 11th 2007 6:02PM
Another undocumented bug fix - the Abyssal Flamebringers in blade's edge, at the forge camp south of ogri'la, have a lootable corpse now. No more trying to loot it before it falls underground :)
Baluki Jul 11th 2007 6:26PM
I think that any bugs that affect gameplay should be fixed ASAP (like the Cyclone bug), but I'm ok waiting until the next patch to fix cosmetic bugs. It's a bummer, but at least it doesn't affect anything.
Surince Jul 11th 2007 6:38PM
@3
Coding projects on your own is quite different from doing projects on an enterprise level with multiple engineers, teams and resources. You have to write and iterate through thousands of test cases for every release, and to be honest, you can never release a 100% bug-free product. Now, say you have 2 weeks to QA a release, I'd rather have those resources allocated to testing core functionality, such as making sure that servers don't crash, that environments aren't exploited, etc. It's really easy for us to say "QA needs to do a better job", but in the end, that would essentially cause the release cycles to delay even further.
Addon Jul 11th 2007 6:42PM
i know some people think its not a big deal, but if i wanted shoulders this size, i would've just rolled a belf female. yes i rolled an orc for the shoulders bigger than your head.
RogueJedi86 Jul 11th 2007 6:44PM
Not necessarily a big "Fix tomorrow". Smaller shoulders? Weapons on a wolf? Cosmetic changes, no big deal. Your shoulders don't actually have reduced stats from their visual size decrease. You don't get lower dps because your weapons are now visible. A hotfix for convenience would be nice, but cosmetic bugs aren't exactly game-breaking. Hell, half the BC Helmets screw up my Dwarf beard(either shaving it entirely, or the beard entirely poking through), but I'm not crying for a fast hotfix.
franz Jul 11th 2007 8:33PM
"object-oriented programming is full of parent/child relationships, which means that a change in one class ("wearable items in the mail") can have strange effects all across the game ("Orc shoulders shrink")"
Haha, no... more likely that someone is commiting changes to the patches that they shouldn't be. Naughty interns and new employees FTW
Grimtar Jul 11th 2007 10:02PM
Okoloth is full of crap. Im quite sure Blizzard have better software developers than that. Decreasing the time on wearable items in the mail should not be able to produce the effects of the other bugs, unless there is some seriously screwed up code in there.
Its far more likely that someone accidentally merged some changes from the trunk into the release branch and it wasnt caught by QA.
Mel Jul 11th 2007 10:36PM
High heavens, the way some people whine and bitch one could get the impression that smaller shoulder armour equals castration.
OFF with the e-peen! *harr-de-harr*
Matt Jul 12th 2007 2:07AM
"doesn't mean we should give Blizzard a pass on fixing them ASAP (in my opinion, they shouldn't wait until the next patch to fix my shoulder size, thank you)"
That's fine but the fix should be applied over the course of a 5 hour outage from 8pm in YOUR timezone. Those in the oceanic region already loose out on too much game time for the same price everyone else pays, its only fair you start dealing with the downtime that you are demanding.
Smid Jul 12th 2007 4:19AM
Well, you are lucky, given the lack of mention of my problem here...
I can't log on. Huge amounts of people can't log on. It might be a european problem, but since the patch I've been on 0 times.
The forums are full to the brim of people with same problem.
If it were only just smaller shoulders...
Thijz Jul 12th 2007 4:35AM
The weapons that appear on Ghost Wolf when attacking were there long before this last patch... :/
martin Jul 12th 2007 1:42PM
Not sure if this is a recent bug, or has been around for a while -
I have the improved thunderclap (talent boosted ability) on my warrior which slows enemy attacks by 20% (from the normal 10%) When I highlight the skill on my action bar, of course, it says "so much damage, slows by 20%" but when I actually cast it and look at the debuff on the creature, it only lists slowing by 10%.
Not sure if it is actually doing 20% and just saying 10%, or if its actually doing 10%.
Danbalk ( Firetree-H )
rodpad Jul 12th 2007 7:21AM
You can't add any group quests in the LFG tool either now.
awender Jul 12th 2007 7:59AM
You can duel now inside Ironforge.
RogueJedi86 Jul 12th 2007 10:37AM
In 2 places too. One right by the bank, another between the Military Ward and middle. But that's been around for a long time.
crg Jul 12th 2007 11:10AM
Yeah - if your object model has a connection between item scaling on specific models and mailing objects, then something is seriously baked in your code base or data files.
Seemingly unrelated bugs popping up and not being caught by QA is a pretty good sign that somebody doesn't know what he's doing. Now, it may not be the developers - it might be the build people or the QA manager, but there's definitely something odd going on here.