Apr
I work on games. I know that bugs are an inevitability to our production model. There are just too many systems working together in unexpected ways to ever be able to chart out all the dependencies. In other words, we know that if you change the smallest thing in one corner of the game, you might get this totally crazy and huge-o bug that impacts everything somewhere else entirely, and it is really hard to anticipate that.
So I’m trying to be understanding and everything. I’m talking about World of Warcraft here. Yes, the game has bugs? “What? No!” you say. I say, “Yes indeedy!” Most of the time, these bugs are there and they have some small irritating impact. Like a bug mob that can hit you, but you can’t kill, those are fun. Or severe lag causing you to die while waiting for an update that contains a monster bashing you in the head for the 3 minutes you were waiting. That one I know has actual hardware issues associated with it, so I’m forgiving.
But last week I encountered a bug that drove me into a rage and made me want to turn into one of those psycho fangirls who gripe on the forums about everything. Oh, what was the bug, you ask? I died, and my corpse didn’t spawn. Yup. I appeared at the graveyard and there was no happy little arrow on my minimap indicating where my corpse was locating. “Curious,” I thought to myself. But I knew generally where my body was, so I started running and figured it’d be there. It wasn’t. I ran in circles for a good while looking for it. I know I got close because you can only see the monsters in the world when you’re in spawn range of your corpse, and at one point I saw mobs. But I didn’t get a popup asking if I wanted to rez.
Even more unfortunately for me, I was in Un’goro Crater, an area not especially familiar to me. Normally, if you can’t get to your body you can talk to the Spirit Healer at the graveyard to be resurrected there for a penalty of damage to your stuff and a curse for 10 minutes. Well, I was willing to accept this after being unable to find my body, but I couldn’t find the graveyard! I still have no idea where it is, even though I’ve spent several hours questing in Un’goro now. It’s somewhere on the east side of the crater, at least that’s where I spawned that one time. But I really don’t know where.
After probably wasting about 15 minutes of my time, I logged off to try to cool down. When I logged back in about 20 minutes later, my corpse was on my minimap again and all was well.
I spoke to some other WoW players who said they’ve experienced this problem. It could very well have to do with some sort of lag issue. I don’t know. All I know is that this was the first time while playing WoW that I felt really truly upset. It stressed me out, it raised my blood pressure, and it was really not good.
I play games to get away from all that crappy dappy stress of the real world. I don’t need any intrusions of painful circumstance into this fantasy realm. It made me sad. Very sad. Since then, there’s been some hardware restructuring - my server was down for maintenance for about a day last week. So maybe it’s fixed. I hope it’s fixed! But either way, I’m going to do my best not to die during peak time again, if I can help it!