Overall Suggestion

As a software engineer with many years of professional experience I always have to smirk a little every time I see this kind of thing suggested in any context.

I understand the relatively naive desire behind the suggestion and in a perfect world it would be nice if it could work like that. Unfortunately in reality there will never be time when the Devs of a MMO will ever sit back and say "let's do nothing but bug hunt". The reason for that is very simple: there is no such thing as "bug-free" when it comes to applications of this size. You could have 100 programmers working on this code for 100 years and you still wouldn't eliminate every significant bug in the system.

Most people seem to think that software companies should only release software that is "done" or "bug-free". This is a collective pipe-dream. In reality software is always released when its "close" enough. It's always a tradeoff between schedules and finding enough of the bigger bugs to make it work most of the time for most of the users. There is no such thing as software perfection. If any Devs waited to release things only when they were "bug-free" then they would never get around to releasing anything.

So no, there will -never- be a time where the Devs of this game will put new development on hold to focus 100% on bugs. There are so many reasons why that will never happen that it literally amazes me that this idea keeps coming up over and over again.

Considering I know of a bunch of people who have been long time players who are sick of the bugs, getting overly frustrated with Lag, and possibly new minimum hardware requirements that we are never informed of directly, you are not going to maintain player population anyway. you now get a spike when new content comes out and then it drops off to a certain level. The game for a great many is more about community at this point, friends they have made etc...

the code itself needs to be optimized. The performance degrading on my machine has increased expoentionally over the last few issues, to the point where I not only have to turn off Ultramode, but still see lag, rubberbanding, and game freezing even in modes which had always run properly on my machine, and I am not the only one that has been experiencing this.

The game has a memory leak, which needs to be addressed.

There are a bunch of things, and I'm not even talking about the problem with the in-game e-mail system where you have to open message to jsut be able to read the whole thing, where you can't scroll on the individual e-mails in the preveiw anymore.

I don't expect this to be Bug-free, nor did I say bug free in my initial post, but let them have a 4 month period to just go on a bug hunt and fix what they can instead of trying to fix while putting out new content.

As a Network engineer, When designing or upgrading networks, I do things one step at a time. Every programmer I know (including myself back in the days of my coding) knows that the more you layer, the more bugs there are, and the more you add on before looking for bugs, the worse it is finding them.

I watch the Beta boards, and while there are people out there who do bug hunt, there are more that don't and use the beta as a way of getting a sneak peak at new content. Also I have seen issues brought up in beta in the past that raised a lot of concern but were never addressed, and then created problems at launch or shortly thereafter.

I don't expect miracles, but having a 3-4 month cycle with no new content, just to go through, optimize and fix what can be so the game runs smoother and is more able to accept new content easier is something that while a pipe dream, would be beneficial to the game as a whole.

You are right, they won't. but it NEVER HURTS TO ASK! This is a suggestion board and to tell someone something like this is stupid to ask, well you just are of no help to the game or to anyone in an instance like that.

Good thing nobody said that, then.

To be clear I never said that this game would not benefit from more effort being put towards tracking down bugs. For instance you are right that there are some fairly serious memory leaks in this game and they do affect a number of people with less-than-optimal computers. But to be fair you could probably apply more bug-fixing towards just about -any- software application, not just this game.

The main point I was trying to make was that in the overall scheme of managing an online game/service like this there's is never going to be enough justification to refocus the entire development staff of the organization towards working on only bug-fixes.

For one thing marketing would never agree to it - the idea of a MMO offering absolutely -nothing- new to their customers for 3-4 months would be a virtual death sentence to any game. Second (and this was the point Aett_Thorn was alluding to) there's not only no guarantee that you'd be able to fix any significant bugs based on -any- set schedule but there's always the possibility that the changes made to fix some bugs might actually introduce new bugs that never existed before. Any code changes can introduce new bugs no matter what their purpose.

Basically the fight against bugs is a never ending battle that every set of developers out there face every day. It's something that needs to be dealt with, but there's a very real set of diminishing returns if you try to focus on it too much. I do not feel that asking for the Devs to focus 100% on bugs is a strictly "stupid" idea and I didn't intend to imply anyone was stupid for suggesting it because (as it's been pointed out) you are certainly not the first to suggest this over the years. But I will definitely stand by my presumption and profession experience that this kind of thing will never actually happen, again for many reasons both engineering and marketing related.

Bottomline it's a nice idea in theory, but one that's never going to happen in practice. *shrugs*