What kinds of idiots are making these games, eh? They can’t seem to put together a world with a thousand-plus players at a time each with dozens of items and skills interacting with tens of thousands of NPCs and other objects, dynamically and in real time with a playerbase across several continents using a range of hardware with a random pastiche of software, duplicated across dozens of servers scattered across the country or world and dependent on an international communications network entirely beyond their control. NOOBS!
There are only a dozen classes each with a half-dozen specializations that each vary in value across different circumstances that may vary in abundance and prominence across the levels, in solo or group play, in groups of different sizes, or in PvE and PvP. I swear, there is a conspiracy to keep my class down, with the way that everyone else gets money hats while I get nerfed every patch. l2balance NOOBS!
It’s not like they have dozens of people working with a sprawling code base where a mistake or typo can be multiplied in effect across the entire game. Every other workplace in the world has perfect documentation of all changes and accurately predicts the third-order effects of what are ostensibly small changes to the way some operations are calculated on the back end. It’s like you NOOBS are trying to ruin the game!
: Zubon
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say… I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE!!
A minor counterpoint… having a tricky job doesn’t mean you’re not dumb. ;-}
YEAH!
Er, wait….
A note: There’s a difference between high level decisions and implementation. I’m far more forgiving with the latter precisely for these reasons.
Stop bashing Blizzard just to generate blog traffic X-game fanboi!
Pfft… L2P a real game… Ultima Online for life.
;)
How do you people replying seriously miss the sarcasm?
Sarcasm?
DIAF noob, blogging is srs bsn!
ORLY?
As a developer who has worked in MMOs, I’m just going to say that it is amusing to see people-who-don’t-know-what-they-are-talking-about mocking other people-who-don’t-know-what-they-are-talking-about.
Giving a developer the “benefit of the doubt” simply because you *think* their job is complicated is just as ignorant as the raging forum trolls bashing developers for arbitrary reasons.
Exactly.
Any business application system is equally or more complex than an MMO. The software company I currently work for develops software incredibly similar to an MMO, in that we have hundreds of thousands of users simultaneously connecting to our servers using our software.
The difference is, when we have *any* downtime, or when the customer (in this case, other businesses) run into glitches or bugs – it translates directly into lost revenue, either through cancellation of service, refusal of payment or contractual fines. Every issue that hits the market can be put into real money terms immediately – Programmer B created Bug X that didn’t get caught by QA and cost the company Y amount of dollars.
The same isn’t true for the video game industry. Bug X translates into 30 seconds of extra work the CM intern to write it in the “known issues” forum post, because the customer isn’t going to demand better service because, well, making games is so complicated and hard and stuff.
So either us business application developers are Einsteins compared to games developers (which isn’t entirely inaccurate) or game developers just realized that their customers are just gullible and ignorant and they can do whatever they want and you’ll still literally throw money at them.