World of WTFcraft



  • Well it's about time to start a topic about one of the Curious Perversions in Information Technology that nobody dares talk about, afraid of being labelled lame: World of Warcraft. Why do I mention it? Because today it made a really big WTF,... well they did some stuff to the game that actually made me say "WTF" out loud.

    From time to time Blizzard releases a patch to the game that fixes several issues, introduces new content, et cetera. They have special servers ("Public Test Realm", or "PTR") to test their patches on, and actual players can log on to those servers and test the content. They report any irregularities which Blizzard should then fix again. Two major issues which I read about today:

    - On those PTR servers, all players who played a certain class (Death Knight) noticed that on of the spells they could use did not work as intended (in short, it did not give the player a certain amount of 'runic power', while it should). This issue has existed on the test servers for several weeks, multiple threads were made about it on the official forums of the game, and bug reports have been filed. Today when the patch was deployed to the live servers, the bug was still in it.

    - Another issue that's has apparently been going on for ages (since the previous expansion pack was released) and still has not been fixed, is a WTF in itself. Whenever is a specific area in the game world one of the two big factions ("Alliance" or "Horde") win a battle, the entire server would crash. Because of the win, all players of the winning faction would get an improvement until the next battle, and the improvement would be removed from all players of the losing faction. This was wrapped into a big loop of some sort and if there was a large amount of players eligible for the improvement, the server would just plain crash...if there weren't enough to let the server crash, everyone would experience severe lag issues for a few minutes.

     

    There are a lot more issues with the game, but also more WTFs like certain features going "live" while they had problems on the test servers and not being fixed before that... but I'll save you from that, as then this would just become a fanboy rant of which there are already enough on the official forums.



  • I wanted to edit my post, but apparently that's impossible. Just wanted to add to the first point that now I read a bit on the official forums a bit more, a lot of functionality has actually broken. Basic things like walking animations of player characters in a certain state has always worked and is now broken, even though unlike the sample I posted above, these were not present on the test server.... both a big WTF: letting slip major bugs from the test server, and breaking basic stuff that has been in the game for years and wasn't even intended to change one bit this patch.



  • Surely the WTF here is that people exist who actually give 2 hoots that when they are a Death Knight some of their spells don't give them the right amount of runic power in a video game. There's a whole world outside that window...



  • @the real wtf fool said:

    Surely the WTF here is that people exist who actually give 2 hoots that when they are a Death Knight some of their spells don't give them the right amount of runic power in a video game. There's a whole world outside that window...
     

     

    Well that's the flippant response to someone talking about a hobby that you personally don't find interesting.

    I don't play WoW or any other MMORPG, but if you're paying money for something and the QA is more than a little dodgey then I don't see why he can't complain about it.  Not sure it's sidebar worthy though, you could have flamed him about that instead...



  • Whoho, WoW keeps a bug for a few weeks.



    Ragnarok Online just fixed the "relog to reset guild skill delay" bug (guilds skills have a 5 minute delay before they can be recast), this bug was more then 3 years old.



  • @Cursorkeys said:

    @the real wtf fool said:

    Surely the WTF here is that people exist who actually give 2 hoots that when they are a Death Knight some of their spells don't give them the right amount of runic power in a video game. There's a whole world outside that window...
     

     

    Well that's the flippant response to someone talking about a hobby that you personally don't find interesting.

    I don't play WoW or any other MMORPG, but if you're paying money for something and the QA is more than a little dodgey then I don't see why he can't complain about it.  Not sure it's sidebar worthy though, you could have flamed him about that instead...

    I guess I was overly flippant. But if there is a bug in software you're paying for, just stop paying for it: I would take a game straight back to the store if there was a bug that made it unplayable. If enough people stopped paying the subscrption then the WoW makers would have to respond. The problem is that many people are so wrapped up in WoW they wouldn't consider that to be an option - it's a mission critical app in their minds rather than just an entertaining video game, so the makers can keep on shovelling crap out and the users will suck it up.



  •  My first reaction was "who cares about WoW bugs" but now that I think about it I've seen far, far more pointless OPs here so what the hell...

    Can't really say I've been keeping an eye on WoW. In fact it's the kind of thing I avoid like the plague because I know that if I make the mistake of joining I'll spend half my life in there and end up like Cartman in that WoW episode. It is interesting however how anything relating to video games is generally considered... shall we say... "childish", even though today's young adults are the very same people who spent countless hours playing the first video games.

    In any case I'm not surprised there are bugs in something as complicated as an MMORPG, although you'd think Blizzard wouldn't be making this kind of mistakes years later. Maybe it's the result of one of those infamous deathmarches of the video game industry?



  • Blizzard really used to be a great company with top quality products and very good support (they still update Starcraft and Warcraft III) but the World of Warcraft team has totally lost that. It seems like they're going by the philosophy of "those 11 million subscribers will pay anyway" and just push the development cycle too fast and falling into a typical IT WTF situation and releasing low quality content.



  • For a while, Tabula Rasa had an amusing bug. If you were the leader of a guild, but hadn't logged into the game for more than 30 days, guild leadership would pass to whoever, other than you, had been in the guild the longest. It would scan every guild every 30 minutes. If the two people who had been in a guild the longest had both not logged into the game for more than 30 days, and the guild leader was either one of them or himself had not been online for 30 days, guild leadership would alternate every 30 minutes, never going to anyone who was ever online.



  • What, are people complaining because WoW had a bug that lasted around 2 or 3 weeks?

    You should try out Taikodom http://www.taikodom.com/ which is a piece of vapourshitware

    The most funny bugs in this game are at least 2 years old, some even more. Imagine an MMO that you can change the client's clock, and it will cause desync on the server, making you invulnerable to enemy fire? Taikodom has it, for more than one year. Six months ago, you could advance your clock, and your ship would be teleported to where it would be pointing, based on your current velocity and how much you advanced your clock.

    Imagine an MMO where you can dock into a station, and later, when you undock, you may appear invisible, and invencible, to anyone, making you the king-of-the-hill? Taikodom has it for more than 6 months.

    The funniest thing about this bug is how it was purposely coded into the game:

    In early 2006, you where able to switch maps instantly, where you ship would appear into the map, but since it would be still loading content, you would be unable to move. Later, when more people started playing, they decided to implement a timed invulnerability to "solve" this problem, because a lot of players were getting killed while on load. Needless to say, they implemented it, bugged, of course, and now people are randomly elected with invencibility when they leave an station.

    Oh, and this game is paid, a crappy cashshop, like all the others crappy MMOs out there. And yes, some people actually pay it, and have their expensive items lost because of the game's neverending stream of bugs and programmer incompetence.

    I still remember when they had no GMs ingame, and to stop the 12 years old from bitching, they shut down the entire global chat. A lot of foreign players started wondering if the game had players, because there where no messages on the chatlog.



  • @the real wtf fool said:

    Surely the WTF here is that people exist who actually give 2 hoots that when they are a Death Knight some of their spells don't give them the right amount of runic power in a video game. There's a whole world outside that window...
     

     A few years ago in his "C Programming" column (Dr. Dobbs' Journal), Al Stevens gave this advice:  Shut off the computer. Go outside. Talk to girls.

     



  • @squeem said:

     A few years ago in his "C Programming" column (Dr. Dobbs' Journal), Al Stevens gave this advice:  Shut off the computer. Go outside. Talk to girls.

     

    Oh, how interesting! Surely we never ever heard that advice before...

    Funnily enough, there are actually a lot of girls in my CS classes. So what do they talk about usually? World of Warcraft...



  • @pbean said:

    - Another issue that's has apparently been going on for ages (since the previous expansion pack was released) and still has not been fixed, is a WTF in itself. Whenever is a specific area in the game world one of the two big factions ("Alliance" or "Horde") win a battle, the entire server would crash. Because of the win, all players of the winning faction would get an improvement until the next battle, and the improvement would be removed from all players of the losing faction. This was wrapped into a big loop of some sort and if there was a large amount of players eligible for the improvement, the server would just plain crash...if there weren't enough to let the server crash, everyone would experience severe lag issues for a few minutes.

     

    This is entirely incorrect. In fact it's borderline gibberish. After the patch applied Tuesday 1/21, the Northrend server would crash when wintergrasp finished due to victory, loss, or timeout. Anyone on that continent or in the zone of wintergrasp would be kicked off the server. The server reboot would take 2-4 minutes, after which everyone could log in again. The timer in Wintergrasp would reset, and the server would be fine until the game was finished 10-30 minutes later, at which point the cycle would repeat.

    People on other continents weren't affected. People in any instances weren't affected. Anyone who was affected could log in again and keep playing a few minutes later until the next crash. The cycle lasted at least 8 hours, during which many people participated in WG in order to take advantage of the rewards which were handed out at the end of the game in spite of the fact the server crashed just afterwards. 

    I'd rate this stability issue that affected players on one continent for between 8-16 hours as the worst they've had in 2.5 years. Conditions were MUCH worse in times nearer the game's launch, but things have been very smooth lately. I don't know why it took them so long to respond to this one.

     

     



  • @PSWorx said:


    Funnily enough, there are actually a lot of girls in my CS classes. So what do they talk about usually? World of Warcraft...

     

    Real women (and men) play Tradewars. 



  •  While there are many MMOs with far worse, and longer lived bugs than WoW...  WoW is a multi-billion dollar business.  Blizzard has more than enough money to allocate resources to QA.

    So, yeah, ignoring obvious bug reports for weeks, when you've obviously got the resources to address them, is something of a WTF.

     



  • @PSWorx said:

    Funnily enough, there are actually a lot of girls in my CS classes. So what do they talk about usually? World of Warcraft...

    Cast "Rohypnol", FTW! 



  • @pbean said:

    - On those PTR servers, all players who played a certain class (Death Knight) noticed that on of the spells they could use did not work as intended (in short, it did not give the player a certain amount of 'runic power', while it should). This issue has existed on the test servers for several weeks, multiple threads were made about it on the official forums of the game, and bug reports have been filed. Today when the patch was deployed to the live servers, the bug was still in it.

    My understanding is, they've been doing this since shortly after the inception of the PTR servers.  If I'm not mistaken, they have an automatic test window.  If nobody tells the computer to not update after x days, it updates after x days.  If they managed to fix all the bugs, fine.  If not, fine.  Oops.

    @pbean said:

    - Another issue that's has apparently been going on for ages (since the previous expansion pack was released) and still has not been fixed, is a WTF in itself. Whenever is a specific area in the game world one of the two big factions ("Alliance" or "Horde") win a battle, the entire server would crash. Because of the win, all players of the winning faction would get an improvement until the next battle, and the improvement would be removed from all players of the losing faction. This was wrapped into a big loop of some sort and if there was a large amount of players eligible for the improvement, the server would just plain crash...if there weren't enough to let the server crash, everyone would experience severe lag issues for a few minutes.

    Um, actually, I think that bug's been there since they *added* that area (which was prior to the first expansion, but quite a bit after the initial release.  It's just that it was very rare for them to get that many players in that area, as it generally took over two months of playing to get a character from 1 to able to walk two feet in Silithus1 without needing a corpse walk.  If I recall correctly, it first hit them a week or two before the first expansion.  Of course, since I was unable to walk more than about one foot in Silithus without needing a corpse walk at the time, I only heard about the cause of said crash from someone else.

    I'd like to say Blizzard's low interest in bug-free code was part of the reason I stopped playing, but it was really more their continued warfare on useful addons.  I never played a bot, nor did I ever come close; my system did not (does not - I haven't upgraded yet) have the horsepower for it.  Still, their continued removal of support of features that people were "exploiting" to bypass the more mind-numbing aspects of the game while opening their characters to amazing abuse from other players did force me to rewrite addons I was using whose maintainers had abandoned.  (For what it's worth, it appeared to me that the big problem with the economy was mostly people are stupid; without farming, I was easily able to use the auction house to make hefty chunks of cash.  Most of that cash was on the basis of people not apparently realizing that one magic essence at 16 silver is more expensive than three magic essence at 24 silver, or not realizing that after the first page of 50 strange dust auctions for 20s each, there's a page which has an auction of 20 strange dust for 10s total.  If the "Chinese farmers" had any effect on the game, it was to relax the economic constraints.)

    Edit: also their warfare on the casual gamer.  When I couldn't relax on WoW for half an hour after a day's work without 20 people I didn't even know asking me to come to their raid, that was it.  (And I was a mage...  admittedly, a well-geared, skilled mage.)

    1 Cenerian Hold excluded, of course.



  • @tgape said:

    I'd like to say Blizzard's low interest in bug-free code was part of the reason I stopped playing, but it was really more their continued warfare on useful addons.  I never played a bot, nor did I ever come close; my system did not (does not - I haven't upgraded yet) have the horsepower for it.  Still, their continued removal of support of features that people were "exploiting" to bypass the more mind-numbing aspects of the game ...

    I have never understood that logic of banning 'bots'. I used to play a game called xkings which you can be successful at by following fairly simple sequences of actions, and doing them frequently enough. I would be more interesting to write a 'bot' to do these actions, but they are banned. If these games just reduce people to following a set of mechanical actions, then where is the challenge and the ability to use the higher human skills of strategy, pattern extraction and dealing well with unexpected events?



  • @the real wtf fool said:

    If these games just reduce people to following a set of mechanical actions, then where is the challenge and the ability to use the higher human skills of strategy, pattern extraction and dealing well with unexpected events?
    The higher human skills of wha? I just wanna click the button, why do you want me to think???

    Social commentary on the prevalence of so-called "ADD" (as opposed to the real disorder) aside, so long as people (or advertisers) are willing to pay for people to do sets of mechanical actions, those games will continue to thrive. Boycotting xkings until the content improves or the bot restriction is relaxed would, if done on a large scale, either work or kill it. The thing is though, bots can be much more efficient than a human gamer and can operate 24/7, and bots don't look at ads; thus, games that allow bots lose all free-to-play financing and become reduced to a bot building competition while imperfect human players are forced out.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

     @the real wtf fool said:

    if there is a bug in software you're paying for, just stop paying for it

     

    So do you use Linux or torrent your copy of Windows?

     

    Just because a piece of software is a game instead of an OS or a workplace tool doesn't mean it's ok to slack off and write shitty code O.o 



  • @yamikuronue said:

     @the real wtf fool said:

    if there is a bug in software you're paying for, just stop paying for it

     So do you use Linux or torrent your copy of Windows?

     

    Yes Puppy Linux, XP at work which I didn't pay for.  Both have very few bugs now.  No way would I have paid for a copy of XP/vista wen they first came out and still buggy.

    @yamikuronue said:

    Just because a piece of software is a game instead of an OS or a workplace tool doesn't mean it's ok to slack off and write shitty code O.o 

     

    I think bugs are even less acceptable in games because many consumer gamers don't want to be downloading patches (and can't on consoles).  Workplace tools have dot releases, patches ad nauseum which people (or businesses) seem to put up with



  • @squeem said:

    Real women (and men) play Tradewars.

    Amen brother! And we like the "bugs" in TW when we play it, too :)



    Although, are you familiar with [link=http://www.eve-online.com/]Eve Online[/link]? I was introduced to it a few years back by others in the TW community and it's an extremely complimentary game.



  • @the real wtf fool said:

    don't want to be downloading patches (and can't on consoles)
     

    What's the last time you used one? At least the Xbox360 and the PS3, but I believe the wii too have patching mechanisms that are occasionally used by games. Also these consoles path their own software more regularly.



  • Another post a while ago indicated that WoW uses a database so poorly structured, that the help crew have to use thottbot.com to look up item stats because it is 100x faster than looking it up in their internal REAL database (thottbot is just second-hand information, but pretty accurate usually). To make things worse thottbot is run by a gold-farm group who blizzard is trying to shut down permenently

    The server crashing bug is a WTF. The ability problem is not really. They had to deliver a patch, not enough time to solve the problem. Developers DO need to sleep (regardless of what management thinks.) Maybe the entire patch was done by a dude who happens to be a part-time worker/college student?

    THE REAL WTF with everything though, more than anything ever posted on WoW ever before, is that blizzard can ask that you suck their dick as an additional payment and everyone will line up to do it. It does not matter that a bug is fixed, or server crashes, or dicks rain from the sky hitting people in the eye as they try to level up their druid causing them to die. People will keep playing and keep paying.

    You want to protest? Close your account, make a post on their form, thats it. If enough people do it the problems WILL get fixed and QUICKLY. But nobody will because they must get their farming in. So OP, quit whining, and go back to farming.



  • I have never understood that logic of banning 'bots'. I used to play a game called xkings which you can be successful at by following fairly simple sequences of actions, and doing them frequently enough. I would be more interesting to write a 'bot' to do these actions, but they are banned. If these games just reduce people to following a set of mechanical actions, then where is the challenge and the ability to use the higher human skills of strategy, pattern extraction and dealing well with unexpected events?
    If your game is so boring people would rather let a machine play it or, gasp, pay someone else to play it, maybe you should redesign it.


  • @joelkatz said:

    If your game is so boring people would rather let a machine play it or, gasp, pay someone else to play it, maybe you should redesign it.
    QFT



  • @astonerbum said:

    It does not matter that ... dicks rain from the sky hitting people in the eye as they try to level up their druid causing them to die. People will keep playing and keep paying.

    Hell, I'd actually pay to play a game like that.  Fuck mages and elves and shit.



  • @astonerbum said:

    Another post a while ago indicated that WoW uses a database so poorly structured, that the help crew have to use thottbot.com to look up item stats because it is 100x faster than looking it up in their internal REAL database (thottbot is just second-hand information, but pretty accurate usually). To make things worse thottbot is run by a gold-farm group who blizzard is trying to shut down permenently

    The server crashing bug is a WTF. The ability problem is not really. They had to deliver a patch, not enough time to solve the problem. Developers DO need to sleep (regardless of what management thinks.) Maybe the entire patch was done by a dude who happens to be a part-time worker/college student?

    THE REAL WTF with everything though, more than anything ever posted on WoW ever before, is that blizzard can ask that you suck their dick as an additional payment and everyone will line up to do it. It does not matter that a bug is fixed, or server crashes, or dicks rain from the sky hitting people in the eye as they try to level up their druid causing them to die. People will keep playing and keep paying.

    You want to protest? Close your account, make a post on their form, thats it. If enough people do it the problems WILL get fixed and QUICKLY. But nobody will because they must get their farming in. So OP, quit whining, and go back to farming.

    Funny that you blame me from whining and ask me to go back to farming, while in fact I didn't even whine and don't play the game anymore myself. Though I like your rant, it's very expressive. Seems as though you sucked one too many Blizzard cocks though and got pissed off by it.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    Cast "Rohypnol", FTW! 

     

    Don't play myself unfortunately, so we wouldn't be a good match. As for some of my friends though... hmmm...

    @belgariontheking said:

    @joelkatz said:

    If your game is so boring people would rather let a machine play it or, gasp, pay someone else to play it, maybe you should redesign it.
    QFT

    QQFT

     



  • (Curse you, edit timeout, curse you)

    @joelkatz said:

    If your game is so boring people would rather let a machine play it or, gasp, pay someone else to play it, maybe you should redesign it.

    On the other hand, if you got your userbase addicted enough that they will pay *additional* money just to get over the game's blatant misdesigns, you've obviously done somethind damn right.




  • @PSWorx said:

    (Curse you, edit timeout, curse you)

    @joelkatz said:

    If your game is so boring people would rather let a machine play it or, gasp, pay someone else to play it, maybe you should redesign it.

    On the other hand, if you got your userbase addicted enough that they will pay additional money just to get over the game's blatant misdesigns, you've obviously done somethind damn right.

    Especially if you've managed to set up sham companies which supposedly offer these services, but in fact they just instruct the server to up the stats on the characters in question...  Not saying Blizzard *has* done this, but it'd be almost a no-brainer for them to do it, and they've certainly spun the right PR to be able to convincingly deny having any involvement in those deals.


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