good read!

[[D]est]

good read about bugs and stuff from Tom's Hardware. It's about EA and DICE in this article, but KK is an huge example of this! And I dont play NC anymore for like MONTHS but still wanted to post.

http://www.tomshardware.com/column/20050813/index.html

[Morganth]

Yeah, wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if 10T had bullied KK into releasing NC2 early. When did MJS give up his position at KK and hand it over to Holger out of interest?

[Kierz]

MMORPGs are completely different, we expect patches for new content and such, and it's enevitable that the new content will bring new bugs which will also need patches to fix them.

[Asurmen Spec Op]

Yeah, wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if 10T had bullied KK into releasing NC2 early. When did MJS give up his position at KK and hand it over to Holger out of interest?
IIRC it was in the days before NC2 launch, maybe a month or two if my memory is correct(Wich, is reaallly bad btw)

[Riddle]

Good points really, as a consumer we expect things to work but we let games slide as an exception??

Would you accept a car with square wheels only later to be fixed with round ones when they find it doesn't move as it should?? :rolleyes:

[Asurmen Spec Op]

A game is more complex then a car

[Argent]

And one must always remember that the gaming industry is still in it's childhood, I doubt the first Fords were exactly perfect....

[hegemon]

From the article:
"Tight deadlines are imposed by accountants and businessmen with no comprehension of what it takes to make a videogame."

Let me put it from the other perspective:
"Whining about deadlines, removed features and cutting corners comes from nerds with no comprehenshion of where money comes from."

Every software product will be exactly as buggy as the publisher can get away with. If it's buggier, the product will go under because customers will not pay. If it's less buggy, it either costed too much to develop and the customers will not pay for such an expensive product or the competitors already published a similar product earlier and saturated the market.

That's the big picture. The details are in having programmers that are cheaper than they are worth, enough marketing to sell a lot before everyone realizes that your product is too buggy to finance the development of patches and enough luck with your first product so that you can get investors to pay for the development of the next one.

Actually, the place where I work right now is a perfect example of how a surviving software company is created. We run and develop a web service. Never mind what or where it is, it doesn't matter. The interesting part here is that the more paying customers we have, the more visitors we get and the more visitors we get, the more paying customers we get. We're the biggest on our market, we have an 85% market share (never mind where). There are a few tweaks that make us better than the competitors, but the only important thing is that we are the biggest. The bigger we are, the more popular we are and the more money we get.

The code for this web service was utter and complete crap. It was horrible. It was actually beyond horrible. I was hired by a phone call on a saturday morning (they woke me up) and asked to jump into a cab and help them clean up their code because they got cracked and they needed a security audit of their code. Since that happens to be one of the things I'm good at, I worked for them 30 hours non-stop (every minute downtime costs us a very significant amount of money) and fixed over 200 exploitable bugs.

After that incident, when the smoke settled, I talked to the president of the company, told him that the code was crap and he told me that he knew. They knew that the various services crashed every few minutes, that up to 1% of the transactions they made failed for unknown reasons, that they were randomly loosing data, that the customer support had to handle 20000 complaints a day. He knew that their service was unreliable, slow, buggy, incorrect, horrible, but... They were first on the market, so they saturated it, became biggest and made a shitload of money. And that is the money that paid me when we were working our asses off during that weekend and that's the money that now pays me triple the industry average to teach them how to write less buggy code and how to reengineer their service so that it's not buggy, not horrible, maintainable, correct and fast. Because now they have the money and time to do it right, because they won and they no longer need to struggle to stay alive (only people who started a company understand how much trouble and fighting it requires to stay alive until you're profitable, my ulcers know).