No, you wouldn’t.
Since you care about establishing credentials, here are mine. I’ve been programming since I was 7 years old, and I’ve worked as a programmer since 1999. I’ve worked at 12 different companies, including my current job.
With that said, I have yet to see a company that will fire you for writing buggy code. Companies fire you for being a risk to their bottom line, i.e. the money they rake in. If a company can get away with buggy code without impacting their bottom line, they’ll do it and nobody will care.
Like it or not, bugs and software go hand in hand. I agree that the programmers should do their best to avoid introducing bugs, but this pretense that “things used to be better back in my day” is laughable, and I know it, because I remember what it was like “back in my day”. The stories I could tell about the code I’ve seen – some of them about the code I used to write – are a peculiar blend of horror and comedy.
But we don’t even need my stories, really. There are stories everywhere. Back in 1984, Jet Set Willy was the best-selling video game in the UK, and one of the most popular games for micros back then. I remember playing it on my ZX Spectrum 48k. The only problem was that the initial release had a bug that made it impossible to finish the game.
Now, that was a game that was distributed on tape cassettes, for those who still remember what those are. You bought the tape, you popped it into your player, you hooked the player up to the computer, and you waited several minutes for it to load and to start playing it from scratch. None of this “let’s continue where we left off” stuff that we are used to now. So imagine paying money that you could’ve spent on a book, just to get a game that you can’t finish because of a bug.
What did the devs do? They initially claimed this was a feature, that the bugged rooms in the game were filled with “poison gas” and that this was intentional, to make the game more difficult. Eventually, they admitted it was a bug and “released a patch”, in the form of several instructions you would have to type into the computer yourself before you could play the game.
Despite these bugs, the two devs directly responsible for developing this game were not fired from the company they worked for, because the game was just so damn fun. It spent weeks on top of top game charts across Europe.
I hope this little rant was both entertaining and informative, but in case it wasn’t, let me get back to the topic at hand: the prioritization of Orb of Nergal bug.
Let’s start with your claim about how you know it’s easy to fix because you’re a programmer. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to work in the game development industry over the course of your long career. If I had to guess, I’d say you haven’t, because those who have worked on a big enough game know how much of a flaming mess it can be.
Out of 20+ years of my career, I spent only 2 at a game studio, but those 2 years were both immensely fun and also horrifying in a way only a programmer can appreciate. Unit testing is virtually non-existent, except maybe in the engine code for some of the engines. Hell, automated testing of any kind is virtually non-existent. QA people are used to being treated like shіt. Seriously, I once thanked a QA guy for helping me nail a bug and he was flabbergasted, because devs normally don’t thank them, they get angry at them.
And the code! Gods, the code in a video game like Conan Exiles can be a total dumpster fire. And I’m not just talking about the low-level C++ code, I’m also talking about the diagrams-as-code stuff that all the game engines like to offer these days. In Cryengine it’s “flowgraphs”, in Unreal Engine it’s “blueprints”, but whatever each engine calls it, it looks something like this:
That example above? That’s tame. It’s relatively simple and well-organized. I encourage you to download the Conan Exiles Dev Kit and explore it. I remember one blueprint that made me want to scream and run away.
Long story short, anyone who has worked in the industry knows that the words “this bug should be simple to fix” are more likely to come from either ignorance or cockiness, rather than experience. Yes, I’m sure there are game devs who could look at a bug and say it should be simple to fix, but I also know it’s not gonna happen as often as you and I would expect it to.
But let’s suppose it really is easy to fix. They still have to decide which bugs to fix at which point in time. You say you’ve been a programmer since 1995, so you should know how these things work: there’s a backlog of work to be done, the development is timeboxed into “sprints” (or iterations or whatever), and in each sprint, the team has to “pull in” the work from the backlog into that sprint. There’s always more work in the backlog than the team can accomplish in one sprint, and so they have to pick what gets pulled in.
Even in a non-game company, an easy-to-fix bug can stay open for quite a while if there’s more important work. And when I say “more important”, I don’t mean “if you ask our users, 80% would say they want this fixed first”. (And let’s face it, Orb of Nergal doesn’t even meet that criteria.) For better or for worse, that’s just one input into the prioritization process. Game development adds a further complication to that, because everyone has to have some work, including artists, which means that each sprint and each release always have to include some new content.
And that’s how you get where we, as players, are right now: “fighting” over which bug is more important. It will be a cold day in hell before Funcom decides they will stop all further development until all bugs are fixed, so we don’t have to “fight” anymore. They won’t do that, because that just doesn’t work. They’ll keep on developing the game and fixing bugs at a pace they’re capable of, and we’ll keep clamoring for them to fix our pet peeves.
TL;DR: Is Orb of Nergal an easy bug to fix? No idea, it might be or it might not. Is it the most important for players? I sincerely doubt it. Is it the most important for Funcom? Obviously not. Should someone “get fired” over it? No, get over yourself.
