Okay, “they haven’t fixed anything” is provably false. Go read the patch notes. In fact, I’ll save you some time: go read these patch notes. The list of bugfixes in that one is particularly long.
Now, have they fixed anything “significant”? That depends on what you consider significant. For example, in the patch notes I linked to above, I’m pretty sure that the people affected by the Black Galleon crashes would have called that bug significant.
No offense, but I suspect that’s the literal truth: you probably can’t imagine their team, because you probably don’t know enough about what they do.
I’ve personally been in situations where I’m assigned to investigate a bug that has happened in production, for which we have logs and telemetry metrics, and there just wasn’t enough information to diagnose it. I would stare at the logs and the source code all day long, I would fiddle with the way the metrics are graphed to try to figure out some pattern, but there just wasn’t enough info. I would ask my colleagues to pair with me and see if they could come up with something, but there just wasn’t enough info.
Here are some truths that people don’t like to hear, but they’re true anyways:
- Bugs can be extremely hard to diagnose.
- Assigning more people to a bug won’t necessarily help solve it faster.
- C++ is a nightmarishly complicated programming language.
- Bugs aren’t prioritized solely by severity.
- Sometimes low-hanging fruit will be prioritized because we know how to fix it and we still don’t have enough info to fix the high-severity bug.
- Sometimes the fix for a bug will have to wait until we can rewrite a certain part of the system.
If you’ll forgive me for indulging in a little bit of that “grandpa’s telling war stories again” behavior, here’s a fun little thing that happened to me at a company I worked for more than a decade ago. I was told that one of our customers complained that a competitor’s product produced files that were on average 2x - 5x smaller than our files and that we had to beat that. I looked at the source code and figured out that a certain algorithm wasn’t detecting stuff we could have compressed. When I told that to my boss, he said I couldn’t touch that algorithm, because another team was working on that same section of code, developing a feature for a much bigger customer. So I had to figure out a different place in the code where we received the output of that algorithm and somehow detect that different bits out that output should have been just one bit with compression in it. (This is all very vague, but I don’t want to go into the gory details here.)
Long story short, this shіt is fuсking hard sometimes. So unless you have professional experience working on a large C++ codebase, you probably can’t even imagine what these guys are dealing with. And unless you have inside knowledge of how Conan Exiles dev team works and what Conan Exiles source code looks like, you don’t actually know what is causing these bugs to remain unfixed.
I’m not saying the end result doesn’t suck. I’m saying that the process of making this video game is complicated enough that you can’t know what exactly went wrong just by playing the game.
To put it another way, you don’t have to work in the movie industry to know that a movie sucked. But you do have to work for the studio (or have an inside scoop from someone) to know what led to the decisions that screwed up the movie.