How do bugs this obvious not get fixed before a game ships?

Miscellaneous Topics
#1

Q: How do bugs this obvious not get fixed before a game ships?

My wife bought Sims 2 Pets yesterday. She created a cat.
You can play with it, feed it, buy it toys, buy it a litter tray.

When the cat uses the litter tray, it gets stuck emptying its bladder for hours and hours until it eventually starves and the ‘Pet Welfare’ guy appears and tells you that you’re not allowed to own a pet because you’re not treating it well.

So then you’re left in a house without a pet.

Great!

What’s the name of the game again?

#2

welcome to ea products.

#3

The most likely (i.e. without reading the source and finding out) answer is: because it wasn’t that obvious.

You don’t understand the nature of bugs, in general, if you think that was necessarily “obvious” - the only guarantee is that it was obvious only for YOU on YOUR machine.

A fair question is why does the engine allow bugs of that nature to happen in final release without being noticed on other machines, but that’s a much more complex problem; it may simply be that they have too little determinism in their backend systems.

OTOH, sims-online has a testing system that should have had a 99% chance of detecting this bug, so … either they’re not using it, or you’re a one-in-a-million case. I would guess the former.

Finally … EA doesn’t give a flying f*** in a thunderstorm what you think: you are one in a million customers, and that they have a million customers is more important than that 100% of them are happy. This is merely basic economics; you may hate it, but in a capitalist society, it’s exactly the right thing to do.

#4

[quote]How do bugs this obvious not get fixed before a game ships?
[/quote]
I often ask myself the very same question when working with j2me handsets; VM implementors get the most ridiculous of method implementations wrong.

Graphics.drawRect(x,y,widt,height) for example.
Its function is well defined by the javadoc, its the simplest of rendering functions imaginable, and it is core to so much basic functionality - how then, can the implementation be broken on almost all Samsungs, some Nokias, and a great many other handsets?!?!

#5

I just have this idea in my head that there’s a method like this in the game code:


boolean isPetFinishedPeeing ()
{
    //  Dave: remember to implement this later  - I'm off to the pub
    return false;
}
#6

Haha… but with such a big product… fixed 100% of the bugs is not possible…

I have ever come across bugs producing more bugs…

OR is it just me? -.-