Bugs are annoying, until you are put in a situation where you must choose between new content and bugs or stagnation and polish.
When I was confronted with the reality that Funcom is taking a vacation before bringing out the 500+ patch because they were afraid of ■■■■■■■■ it up, I was/still am mortified at the idea of spending the whole month of July playing the same game I’ve played for the last 2 months.
“One misses not a luxury unknown”
Players who aren’t actively “maintaining” something, or can’t imagine what they are missing out, can wait for polish without problem. Prime example is Star Citizen. No timers or dangers are running. Same with Elite: Dangerous. It’s a “static” thing. You can leave for a year and then come back to continue where you started.
Survival games with official servers with decay timers is a whole different issue. It builds a lot of “attachment” with the player, who has invested 500+ hours on all he or she has legitimately achieved. It all has not only intrinsic value, but also sentimental value. One cannot just go on vacation and come back a month later… there will be nothing left with a 144 hour timer. It would simply be pointless to return, because player are a fickle lot, once they lost the anchors of attachment, because they refused to do something boring in a game. It creates resentment.
Two of the most important ingredients of all survival games are 2 things:
- Other people, to add value and legitimacy to all that you are (to them) and all that you do.
- Hope for new content, to give you the sense that you’ve made a good investment, and can live in an evolving world that lives and grows as you do. Without new things, one starts to question one’s purpose in these lands once all has been attained and experienced. Stagnation does not mix well with a question of the existential sort.
If a player is having so much fun, that they don’t ask why they are doing what they do, a game has succeeded.
Now…
I’ve always been quite forgiving when it comes to inconsequential bugs. Inconsequential bugs to me are bugs that have a work-around.
Examples would be the perpetual blood splotch effect upon log-in. Or the blood decals not going away. Or floating thralls - all that sorta stuff. They can be fixed by yourself and don’t stop your game experience or halt your progress.
It’s the bugs that get in the way of one’s progress that bother me the most. Examples are: Missing Armorers and recipes, missing thrall spawns, purges not working properly.
For me… those things are like half the game missing.
If even HALF of those fixes to those progress-inhibitors (most of which i haven’t even listed in the example) were released, i’d be fine, cuz it’d give me something to do.
I wish Funcom would not bundle so many superficial bugs with the progress blockers, then consider that a factor aswell into releasing a “buggy mess”.
I wish players were more forgiving when it comes to inconsequential bugs in favor of having the progression blockers fixed.
“In order to know what you really want, you must first know what you don’t want.”