Warning: Monsters can enter town

[kandrathe]

What they ^^^ said. I've been involved with developing software systems since the late 1970's. Some of my early work (way back at the advent of C++) was on consumer packaged games. There is usually a separation of concerns between writing the code, and testing the code. Programmers (myself included) seem to develop blind spots for where their code breaks. That leaves the responsibility for finding the bad stuff to the Software Quality group. They tend to rank problems from critical (crash), to game breaking, to annoying, to minor, to cosmetic. I could easily see where from a testing POV, this really didn't come up as any type of issue on the radar for software testing. These days, testing isn't having bunches of player testers attempt to level one of every character from beginning to end in all modes. It is much more ordered, with a list of checks for Pass or Fail. I wasn't in the Beta, but it might have come up as an issue then if someone found it, reported it, and any developer was in a position to listen. I don't know.

For a product, like Diablo III, they focused on squashing all the critical, and game breaking bugs before release, leaving quite a few annoying, minor, and cosmetic issues to deal with as subsequent patches. Consider the major issues of the past three weeks, and that they are certainly focused on fixing those bugs first where the entire server crashes, and our character data gets rolled back to the last physical disk save.

I'm sure they will get to this annoyance eventually.