Lady Vashj down

[LochnarITB]

I mean she was dead, and dead is dead, right?

Apparently you don't watch a lot of horror movies, right?:P

But, yeah, that is the kind of thing I am talking about. In a complex encounter, there are a large number of conditions, "if this then that". Each of those conditions is like a digit in a binary number. The more conditions, the more the digits and the larger the number. One of those possible numbers indicates a heal event that brings the HP back to positive, bringing life to the dead.

Making this point, however, only gives the teams an out until the bug has been observed. Once it has been seen, then there is a basis for hunting down the interactions that lead to that condition. Not fixing it at that point is where they can be faulted. There is no excuse for having bugs that have existed forever. Of course, fixing one bug changes conditions that interact in other places as well and it is to be expected that more bugs will appear from the new combinations, possibly even harder to anticipate because the new code is interacting with old code that is not even being looked at.

In the past, I have earned a living as a programmer, but only in a small department. Even with smaller pieces of code, I have learned that there are two types of programmers. There are those that grind out large volumes of code that works but contains bugs. Then there are those that are good at determining the cause of, and fixing, the bugs that are found in testing. I tended to be the fixer and I can't even imagine how much there is to dig through to discover the cause of some of the things that can happen in something like WoW. I also know that the glory tends to go to the guys that pour out the code and fixing their code tends to be fairly thankless. Some praise should go to the bug teams for the things that do get fixed. Blizzard is obviously not dedicating the resources (man hours) needed to do all the bug fixing. Either they are being tight fisted with the dollars to pay them or it is hard to fill the desired number of positions, but there apparently are not enough people working on the bugs to add up to the number of man years that are needed.