Attention Funcom: just what did the 'Age of Bug Fixes' achieve

[The_Hawke]

The ‘Age of Heroes’ update introduced a whole new raft of Bugs.
In January, Funcom assimilated themselves to ‘Bob the Builder’ by saying: “Can we fix it, yes we can”.
Did you fix it ? “No you didn’t”.

At log in: I’m still rubber banding and my thralls are still half submerged in foundations.
Knock a NPC unconscious and what happens, they still fall below ground/or are invisible.
You “fixed issue where the Dungeon Delver Journey for Exiled Lands would not progress upon entering the Dregs”.
Well done on that. Unfortunately, now when I enter the Dregs the sound disappears. Ergo: you have fixed one bug, but replaced it with another.
These are just some of the bugs I have personally experienced since the 25th.

No mention in the patch notes about the ‘disappearing thralls’ problem being resolved. Funcom forums say it’s still happening.
Great to see “Barachan Bonfire and Hammock now cast shadows”. Shadows or not, they are still there. When the game dumps a thrall, it is gone for good. A bonfire shadow is now cast, let us all rejoice, let us all dance around the shadow. But wait, you’ve lost a T4 thrall, oh well never mind, let us just marvel at the shadows.

Liu Fei recruitment quest is now broken. Confirmed by “AndyB” at Funcom.
Unfortunately we do confirm an issue with getting the drops you need for the Liu Fei recruitment quest, meaning it’s currently not possible to complete at this time. I’m so sorry for the trouble; we know what happened and are working on a fix.

Lets be honest here. The game has been running for 7 yrs and you have had total control of the game input for all that time.
The game is mechanical not magical. It is not some mystical apparition plucked from the depths of humanities history. It is a physical/electronic (data) entity.
You have made this game. You have total control over what is put into the game. You have made mistakes, and they have been accepted by your customers (to err is human). But you don’t fix them. You just blindly continue on ignoring your customer base.
You treat us like mushrooms. You continually promise us the Moon, but give us rancid cheese instead.
You then expect us to doff our caps and buy more Funcom products. Are you serious, “YOU ARE NOT ON SPEAKING TERMS WITH REALITY”.

I love this game. I have played 13,500+ hrs since 2019 (plus another 600 hrs on Beta) but there comes a time when you have to ask yourself: why am I playing this game when I know that the next “Update” is going to bore yet another hole in an already sinking boat.

The fact you didn’t release the Age of Bug Fixes on Beta speaks volumes. You knew the new bugs existed. By not exposing them on Beta you did not have to work out a way to fix them before Live release, or deliver a reason to your customer base as to why they went into the Live Release.

Funcom you really need to sort your s**t out, you are killing this game.

[Voc41]

It stopped players from leveling by the use of Stone Golem crafting.

It also stopped players from instantly leveling thralls via the purge and Kurak’s dungeon.

I’d consider both of those very well worth the March 25th update.

[Khaletohep]

@The_Hawke

The game is mechanical not magical. It is not some mystical apparition plucked from the depths of humanities history. It is a physical/electronic (data) entity.

Well written! You made me laugh (in a good way).

On a more serious side, though: To the current dev team, the game probably is more like magic. The constant failure in fixing bugs, the reintroduction of old, already fixed bugs and inablity to change some things strongly hints at bad, badly documented code afaik. The game probably was done as a quick hack job to grab some quick cash after Age of Conan, never excpeted nor build to accomdate later changes and updates. Everything is held together with hope and duct tape, and messing with one part has unforeseen consequences in seemling unlreated parts.

This is not how software should be developed. But in this case, it was. So, your criticism is “correct” when looking at the big picture, but the actual people working on CE probably feel as if working on a magic item - and probably throw the same curses on the original dev team as we do.

[Glurin]

@The_Hawke

The game is mechanical not magical. It is not some mystical apparition plucked from the depths of humanities history.

Clearly you’ve never worked in the IT sector before. I’m pretty sure the guys behind Warhammer got the idea for Tech Priests while they were trying to set up a few printers for the office.

[Keldy]

@Glurin

to set up a few printers for the office.

everyone here knows that you have to sacrifice a lamb and a virgin every month to get a working printer.

[Robarbarian]

Well, they were able to clean up a lot of dross, but didn’t fix any of the really annoying issues I was hoping for (thralls in foundations, dying for no reason, disappearing under the mesh etc). Crom only knows why those are proving such fearsome technical problems to solve.

To be fair to the devs, there’s a whole lot of game mechanics in this game. CE isn’t some streamlined AAA action adventure and has a lot of stuff going on that needs to function congruently, so bugs are going to be par for the course. From the consumer’s point of view, we just experience the current jank bonanza and want it fixed now. I’m in no position to judge how much of this is due to incompetence or is to be reasonably expected from a game this complex, given its development history.

Totally agree that it gets overwhelming at times, if I didn’t love the game so much I would have quit out of frustration years ago. Very fun but very frustrating game.