How long is too long? Bug fix Service Level Agreements
As monthly paying customers, if you reported a bug, how long would you say is an acceptable amount of time for a bug to be fixed?
UO historically has had fix times ranging from a matter of days, to over 5 years. (normally depending on the "severity" bearing in mind it's a game so nothing is "severe")
The industry standard for exploits (not bugs) is considered 90 days.
I tell you the truth, tis better to do 10 damage on the right target than 100 damage on the wrong target.
Breaking in the young since 2002
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Comments
Why do you change topics suddenly to exploits? Where is this industry standard posted?
Totally with you that it's highly frustrating with the current team. But we all grown ups.
Their obligations to handle your bugs reports are the same as your obligations to pay money for this service. Stop being illusional to yourself, the team won't change. If you don't think that 10 bucks is well spent, dont do it. But it looks like those 10 bucks are well worth your forum time already.
Wish you the best for getting a response LOL.
I'd ask myself
1. is it a real bug or just something that doesn't work the way the bug reporter wishes it did?
2. What impact does it have on game play?
3. What is the cost in man hours of fixing it (when compared to the impact as above)
4. What is the cause? This is the biggy, if they can't track what's causing it, they can't fix it. Not all bug reports give enough, or even any, detail.
Something else I keep in mind, just because someone hasn't posted, doesn't mean they haven't read. People lurk on forums, even devs.
And another one - if they answered every email and post addressed to them, how would they ever have time to actually work on the game at all?
Oh wait, they don't anwser public questions here but lots of private mails each day.
Your argument might be valid sometimes, but in this case, their actions show it's just an excuse.
Im a people so I can answer. With most of the things YOU call bugs I think we should wait 30 years to get the "fix". And that short of wait is unreasonable in my opinion.
I go with the 4 step method proposed by Petra.
There isn't enough testing by the team itself, the players should not be the testers cause it just leads to more bugs not being reported. Lets face it there is dishonest people who purposely take advantage of bugs for their own means, which is where the term exploit is defined.
Another is the team doesn't really understand the game as well as its players cause they don't play. They just manipulate code for new patches and don't realize that changing certain code can affect things elsewhere. Such as the taming revamp that everyone loves so much caused every mob in the game that has over 100 wrestling to gain parry, making those mobs harder and longer to kill.
I also believe that this game needs more help and money on the team to fix these type things faster. But they would have to police the game better and clean up all the mass cheating in order for the game to get enough players back to warrant hiring more people.
Lastly as a side note, the game itself can only have bugs, the players who knowingly take advantage of said bugs are the exploiters.
Having worked in software development for the past 28 years I have some insight into this discussion. Bugs are generally rated per their criticality. For example on a scale of 0 to 5 with 0 being most important and 5 being super minor and does not affect use at all. Examples of 0 would be crashes, hangs, violations of regulations in the countries in which the product is used, free use of product, character dies without cause. A level 5 bug would be something like "misalignment by 1 pixel" or this color uses rgb value 127, 58, 129 when it should be 126, 58,129. Yes, I have seen those two bugs reported. The less critical a bug the less chance it will be fixed.
So ask your self how critical is the bug on a scale of 0 to 5. And be realistic about it.
You do realize that in the first paragraph you said testing shouldn't be done by players and then in the next you say the programers don't play and they don't know the game? So who should do the testing?
Note from their posts they obviously do play and know a small change here will have a ripple effect.
I do agree the game needs more help and money but what doesn't. As for stopping cheating from what little I know of programming that would require a full rewrite to prevent ANY other program from "assisting" UO and only one client so everybody would be on a level playing field. Good luck with that one.
As to your last point whether something is a bug, exploit, unintended good thing, or working as intended is up to the chief referee Mesanna and only her. All Hail the Great Producer
PS I would really like to hear from someone with knowledge of the program about the wrestling/parry thing. I haven't noticed any change.
Bamboo tiles act like stairs and show items without people stepping onto the house, big deal. But scale that up and you have the whole of Luna doing it, the smallest things get out of hand.
Let me tell you about how I came close to shard transferring shard bound items from a pet eating meat instead of fruit..
So on test centre Kyronix asks us to test this new pet Triton. And as we all know things new on test centre are always buggy so I set about testing little things. Animal lore says it eats fruit but I gave it meat and it shook it’s head but I noticed the meat disappeared. I think hmm, I start feeding it random objects and sure enough they disappear!
oh dear i thought, it’s eaten all my stuff. Then after a while I got a message saying it’s backpack was too full. So I figured it hadn’t eaten it, it’s in it’s backpack. There was no open backpack option on the pet however I know there were 2 ways to extract the items from it. Kill it or just tell it to “Drop” and sure enough it dropped my goods.
Next phase is to escalate.
So now we have a pack animal, well we all know you can’t stable pack animals with items in. Well let’s try stabling this with items in cos the backpack is kinda hidden. Sure enough it stabled and when I retrieved the pet from the stables and told it to drop, it still carried my goods.
Further escalation:
So then I thought, hmm I wonder if the items will survive shard transfer and also if I could put a shard bound item in it. Now we can’t shard transfer off of test so i thought hmm I wonder what pet the triton’s properties has been copied from. And using logic I found the pet (not disclosed) on a live shard and sure enough i have a secret pack animal on live shard.
I place items in it and shard bound items too and attempt shard transfer. Now normally if you’re carrying shard bound items you get a message that prevents you transferring. But the shard transfer actually went through. However fortunately for UO the list of items that got transferred was inclusive and not exclusive, so the items in this animal actually got destroyed on shard transfer. But it was close.
So you see even the smallest little things like a pet eating meat not fruit can potentially escalate.
@Mervyn Sad that you do not know how the game works but you think you see bugs in all phases.
Because we can have fun with it.
Who gives a care if someone is putting items in a stable. Really?!
This is a category 0 bug.
Better page a GM I am exploiting this horrible bug!
I know when my beetle was gaining weight, that it could be stabled.
Pawain I made no suggestion of this bugs current severity. The point I was making is that small insignificant bugs have the potential to escalate. I’m not sure why you’re raging, just because you were wrong about something. Everyone makes mistakes. Suck it up buttercup.