Rich Vogel, Executive Producer and member of the original development team, posted a lengthy blog post today entitled “Busting Bugs and Fixing Exploits”. As you can imagine the post is all about how the team at BioWare goes about fixing bugs in their system; what gets prioritized, how they attempt to discover them, and more. It is chock full of great information on how the team at BioWare works.

 

More after the jump.The process starts with BioWare looking at several factors to determine where and how players are encountering bugs. This includes looking at their internal game metrics, player submitted tickets, internal quality assurance teams, and more. They then try and determine what exactly is causing the problem, generally by looking at the source code and trying to recreate the bug in game. At times the recreation is not possible due to the unique circumstances that may have caused the bug, so BioWare encourages players to be as detailed as possible when filling out customer service tickets.

 

After the source of the bug is determined it is classified as either a bug or an exploit, exploits being bugs that give players an unfair advantage in game. Exploits tend to get higher priority to fixes than other bugs, and the team will try and roll out a patch to fix these problems as soon as possible. Other bugs can be trickier, as even simple looking bugs can be caused by a myriad of reasons. Priority is given to what is known as “blocker bugs”, which are bugs that will halt a player’s progress through the game. Like exploits these bugs will often get an emergency patch, unless there is a work around available that will allow players to continue their progress. In this case an emergency patch may be temporarily postponed so that it can be tested to ensure it does not cause additional problems.

 

The final item that Vogel mentions is that the content development team is still hard at work developing new things for players to experience in game. Bug fixes are a constant process, but that is not stopping the team from working on new content.

 

I highly recommend that everyone heads over and reads the full post, especially if you have been one of the players experiencing some of the current issues within the game.

Tags: bugs, community, dev blog