Of bugs and fixes

preevious

I see much negativity about a "problem with the quality" (to stay polite) of ESO's dev team.
Most of the time, it's about bugs not fixed, or the lag, most notably in cyrodiil.
Since I believe that such a feeling stems from a misunderstanding of application development and maintenance (believed to be "as easy as a few keystrokes" by many), and since it's my everyday job to develop applications as well, I thought I'd make a little post explaining what it entails.

Once an application is developped and running in production (as ESO is), there are 3 kinds of maintenances happening.

1. Evolutive maintenance : very important, that's the new content, new functionalities the application is getting update after update. This takes a lot of time, and most often cannot be ignored.
2. Technical maintenance : very important as well, that's basically upgrading the version of the (very) many technologies such a complicated app depends on (servers versions, operating system, dependencies versions..) . Sometimes it's easy as pie, but sometimes, incompatibilities turns it into an absolute nightmare. Yet, it's important for performance and security.
3. Corrective maintenance : Those are the bug fixes, mainly. I'll elaborate on it below.

What the community feels, is that that 3rd item, corrective maintenance, is botched. Let me explain why it's more difficult than it seems with a few (former and existing) bugs examples

1) THE LAG

1. Impact : Huge, it's very annoying for the players
2. Difficulty to fix : sometimes, an easy tweak is enough, sometime, all the core of the code is to redo. However, people tend to forget that the cause is oftentimes client-side. Your cpu might be too weak, your connexion might be to weak, you might have a malware (coin miners come to mind).
3. Should they fix it? : if they can, and if it's their fault, yes

2) ITEM DUPLICATION :

1. Impact : That one is very nasy. It's a game breaking but that justify a maintenance, even on prime time. If it goes unchecked, it will essentially remove the incentive to play the game for a large chunck of the playerbase. Everyone will get everything freely, get bored, and leave.
2. Difficulty to fix : Irrelevant. It HAVE to be fixed ASAP.
3. Should they fix it? See above.

3) Porting in another dungeon when randoming

1. Impact : next to none. Some people will xp easier, and might have a slight impact on the price of some reward items.
2. Difficulty to fix : probably easy, but It might cause more problems down the line.
3. Should they fix it? Absolutely not. It's so far down the priority list that's it's considered unimportant. Beside, it's not an annoyance to anyone.

4) Players glitching trough keep walls/doors in Cyrodiil

1. Impact : next to none as well. Since all alliances are equaly exposed, it does not unbalance anything.
2. Difficulty to fix : probably very hard, since it's related to the graphical engine .. those are very complicated things.
3. Should they fix it? Absolutely not. While it's a direct annoyance for some players, it's too time-consuming to invest too much in that one.. if they do, one day, great.

Since a bug free application does not exist, nor will it ever, the development team in charge of the game have to make decisions. Of all the anomalies that their integrated testing digs up, they'll only be able to fix some.
They are making decisions players wouldn't have made, and they are fixing things that the players may find les simportant than some issues that'll go unfixed, but it's because they are better suited to make those decisions.
it's a job vastly more difficult than most players might suspect, especially when working on a game this large and complicated.

Instead of complaining, let's all thank them for an hard job well done, if not perfectly. They are really doing what they think is best for the playerbase as a whole.

Mayrael

Nice, but its not like you describe it, we are not ignorants, TBH many of us understands this pretty well, what concerns us are:
Bugs that are being reported multiple times BUT WE DON'T GET EVEN AN ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. They refuse to see problems we report them. They refuse to listen to PTS players who report bugs 3 weeks before launch and then they still let those bugs go live without even a single word. They fix something without testing on our end and they think that problem is solved while sometimes it gets only worse.

Sanctum74

I always love hearing the client side arguement. So it's just a coincidence that a large majority of the player base all of a sudden start having client side problems the same day a new patch is released?!

Never ceases to amaze me the lengths people will go to defend poor business practices.