Consider for a moment.

In my time modding Oblivion, I put out a lot of stuff. While doing so, I wrote, played, fixed, retested, fixed again, and tested again and eventually got to points where I said "this is done". Only to turn it over to Dwip or Hanaisse or whoever and get back reems of bug reports for things that were utterly broken. Sometimes I'd be scratching my head wondering what went wrong, other times outright frustrated that it didn't seem obvious how it was supposed to go. This process repeated itself over and over, with each QA run turning out less and less bugs until eventually we all got to a point where we weren't finding any more. Upon release, it is inevitable that the players found yet more bugs, some of which were STILL mod breaking bugs. Why? Players are completely unpredictable.

So devil's advocate here for a moment. Magnify my experience here 1000 fold. Bethesda has a bunch of people writing up the equivalent of 10,000 mods all at once. They played it, tested it, fixed what was obviously broken, and when each person could find no more, they gave it to their Dwip's and Hana's for further QA. This process went on for 5 long years until they could find no more bugs. They released the game. Players found yet more bugs, some of which are quest breakers, and I'm sure folks back at Bethesda are going through the same head scratching and frustration on a level NONE of us can possibly imagine.

One can only spend so much time fixing things to a point where they work most of the time before getting completely sick of looking at it, or becoming so intimately familiar with it that they just can't see the problems anymore. It may come off as insulting, but I honestly don't think non-modders can ever understand this.

That said, if the company is made aware of the problem, much like modders are told their mods have bugs, they should be willing to accept this and incorporate the actual fixes to the problems in an official manner rather than just ignoring it and hoping for the best. Much like we modders don't like it when folks make unofficial fixes for our work, I suspect the content developers have a bit of the same wounded pride that the company tolerates unofficial patches to their work rather than giving them the chance to fix it properly.

Remember, deadlines are set by management and the publishing arm of the company. There will come a time with Skyrim that they declare themselves done and no more fixes will be forthcoming. IMO, THAT is when the unofficial patch creation should begin in earnest.

the simple fact is, 3 million players are going to be able to spot more bugs than any quality assurance team in the world. The fact they let people mod things and fix things they miss is a massively good thing.

They do provide support (hence the 1 day skyrim patch) but they cannot find everything that we, as players and modders, can.

The unoffical oblivion patch took years to get all the bugs out the game and most of them were only visual. Frankly I don't care if they leave bug fixing up to modders, allows them more time to work on other things and allows us to fix what we want to fix.

Indeed. Until then we just have quick fixes.

Without CK, Bethesda.

The issue with that is that Bethesda never fixes them fast enough, or enough of them. And that is something that I just don't understand. One modder can create an unofficial patch with a hundred times the fixes in less time than Bethesda's professionals can release a patch. That shouldn't be the case. Give me eight hours a day to work on something, and after a month I'd be releasing a lot more than what Bethesda tends to release in a patch. The fact that with Morrowind I kept at it, and kept fixing the bugs that I and other people were finding (I mostly found these myself, which makes me wonder how Bethesda's staff can't find the bugs) and Bethesda gave up after fixing a handful makes no sense to me. Once they've fixed the engine problems, all they need is one guy working on the patch, fixing bugs as they are reported. Just like the Unofficial Patch modders do. You can't tell me they can't spare one guy to make their game better.


3 million players find the bugs... One or two modders fix them. Why can't it be one or two Bethesda developers?

Because people are paid by the hour, not by their output.

Seriously, my summer job was a nightmare because I was chained to the desk and I needed the money. It was technical work I had no direct previous experience in, but I picked it up well enough after a few weeks, to the degree that I could have gotten things finished pretty quickly. However, like pretty much everyone, I'm lazy, and I'm smart enough to realise that I could do the same amount of work over a longer period of time, therefore making it easier, and get paid more than if I actually did a good efficient job of it.

I hated that. It totally destroyed what little respect I had for the office workplace, and undermined my normally good work ethic. Instead of laziness being something to fight, it became something to embrace in order to make the most money. Yes, I know I'm a terrible employee for how I worked, but I was given no incentives to do anything else. Anyway...

I'm sure Beth's employees are also intelligent people, and as I said, pretty much everyone is lazy. I don't see why they wouldn't do what I did during my summer job. Bug-fixing isn't exactly a crazy fun party (though everyone is invited!).

The mods are made over many months/years.

We don't report bugs directly to bethesda, where as modders actively ask us to report anything to them.

Modders make the mods because they have the time, bethesda employees most likely have another game or project to work on

ONLY if you consider a rock/tree/bush/whatever 2 units over the ground as a BUG !

Or

Tons of FIX'S listed as bugs between itself (A MOD) and other Mod's which are by definition NOT BUG'S they are mod conflicts !

Or

It also FIX'S other things such as Meshes that had a flipped normal or something similar, Maybe I might consider meshes exported with flipped normals as bugged but their presence is not detrimental in any way.

But

I'm sure somewhere hidden among its many want to be Bug's there might be something it truly helps but seriously its a MOD not a patch it can not fix the actual game in any way that isn't superficial.

Superficial is fixing game-breaking/quest-breaking bugs? My wife is beginning to get annoyed with the game because she has run into a few major bugs... things that I could easily fix if I had the construction set. For example, about mid-way through the Thieves' Guild quest, if you have already picked up an item required for a later quest, when one quest ends the next doesn't actually start. The involved characters revert to an earlier state and refuse to talk to her. Luckily she was able to work around it be loading to a save previous to finishing the previous quest, drop the item and then complete the quest, but she had to redo everything she had done since that point.


That's because things slow down over time. In one month's time (when a bunch of bugs have been reported), it would take maybe a week of 8 hour days for one person to fix 90% of them. Why does Bethesda only fix 10%? My issue is with companies deciding that they don't need to fix their games. Buggy games shouldn't be good enough. They could even ask the unofficial patch makers if they could incorporate their fixes into their official patches. I know I wouldn't have said no with Morrowind. Their games should be officially fixed.

Bottom line:

People need to be patient. This stuff doesn't happen overnight. There is a QA process *ALL* development houses have to go through, and Microsoft is involved in this loop due to the 360.

People need to realize then that these QA people cost money. Money that the company will not be willing to invest for as long as it would take to fix every little nit pick people are finding. Yes, I said nit pick. 95% of what's being reported are *NOT* game breaking bugs. They just aren't. They're glitches and annoyances, that's all.

Some of them are funny of course, like the hammer in a field I found today that started rising off the ground, and just kept going and going until it faded out of sight and vanished. Game broken and can't play? Nope. There's just one less mundane hammer in the world now. It'll reset in 3 days time.

Even the duplicate of Louis Letrush I found isn't going to break anything and is highly amusing since you can speak to either of them and they both move their lips, but you don't get voice overlap. No idea how it happened, but one of them is a spawned form ID and not a normal reference.

I'm 40 hours in and have yet to encounter anything that stopped the game in its tracks. I think people need to let go of the notion that the game is rittled with bugs just because Bethesda made it. This simply isn't the case this time. What is broken will get fixed, but flooding the bug tracker with nonsense won't help.

No, I would not have objected in the least if Bethesda had wanted to take UOP fixes I worked on for the Supplementals and merge them officially. I doubt Quarn and Kivan would have minded either.

I can forgive them for not spotting all the bugs. The problem is their response *after* the 3 million players have alerted them to the bugs.

I also have a problem with with second part, that they "let" us fix things they miss. It often feels more like they ignore things *knowing* we'll fix them, so why should they? Our fixes our free; theirs affects the company's bottom line.

Business 101, for any industry rather than just game development: Time is money, and you pick and choose what is worth investing in. I'll highlight an example from another field. My car has a problem with the hood, in that it isn't well supported and depending on various conditions the hood can flex/shake/wiggle while driving. Doesn't happen to everyone and the hood itself is still secured in place when properly closed so there is no safety concern. I'm told the car manufacturer has acknowledge the problem, but the solution is a simple "we're not going to fix it." Why should they, it just isn't worth the money or time to release a TSB. However, on the flip side, a few people online have posted up how they've fixed the problem and instructions to replicate the process, even going as far as sending one solution to the manufacturer who agrees its a viable workaround that will solve the problem. They're still not going to do jack about it though.

It's a simple cost ratio, and Bethesda is going to work the same way because its how every company that releases a product or executes a service works. There is no grand "Modders will fix the problem for us" conspiracy, its basic business/financial management for everything, regardless of whether your customer can fix it themselves.

Modders will. I like Bethesda games because they let people fiddle with [censored]. I absolutely love CDProjektRed because they: fix their [censored], don't follow DLC model, and really hardcoe support their games.

I buy them both on the same date (release). Who do I have more respect and love for?

CDProjektRed

What's really entertaining is that the only way to get a game company (or industry) to actually QA their products is to stop buying them until they do - which TES fans don't seem to be able to do. Until you do that you're hosed as far as quality goes.

(edit: it's an 'eat your own dogfood' situation - until someone at the top of gamesas sits down and actually plays their games the way players would you won't see quality products at release.)

On a related note, I've wanted to do an IAMA request on reddit for a gamesas QA tester for the last few days, but if anyone was brave enough to answer he'd probably get roasted.

ye seems to me bethesda have done a grab the money and run trick on every1

hype hype hype
then leave it to modders to fix

I can't argue with the concept, however it doesn't work very well in the real world. Why? Because companies lose paying customers that way. Any company that looks *only* at the cost and without a cost-benefit anolysis is run by people that don't know what they are doing. Gaining customer trust and loyalty, and then keeping it, costs money. But they gain a lot more than they spend in the end, from repeat business and referrals among other things. I've had my car manufacturer fix many things for free at the dealership. Things that weren't a huge deal, and of course it cost them to do it. So why would they do that, since it contradicts what you just said? Because they know I'll remember that the next time I go shopping for a car. And I will. More and more companies are doing less and less for their customers, and a lot of people notice. The ones that go that extra mile and do something they didn't necessarily *have* to do, just to make sure their customers are pleased, are the ones that customers stay loyal to.

I can't say for morrowind and earlier games, but Bethesda has demonstrated with Oblivion and fallout 3 that support is going to be a limited thing and once they are done (probably budget related) - they are done.

It is about making money.

They have a strategy. Their secrecy combined with short bursts of advertising and then short support cycle - it seems they are about maximizing profits in the short run then on to the next thing.

Compare to the first neverwinter nights which had official patches up to 6 years after release. Or more recently TaleWorlds mount and blade Warband game which is now 2 years of having updates and I think more are planned. These game's have the philosophy that they want to appeal to long term players and modders. Likely they also very much like and are proud of their games.

At least Bethesda gives us the ability to fix things - and yeah they do then mine mod ideas for the next game. That is very obvious looking at the last few games and this one,

Yes, Bethesda gives us the ability to fix things, but it makes me wonder if knowing that, has caused some sloppiness on their part?
Say someone on the team is placing an object and can't get the object placed 'quite right', so do they fix it and get it right, or do they just leave it
knowing that some Modder will come along and fix it, while they move on to something else?

Couldn't have put it in better words. I realize if there is a problem, some obvious mistake, even though it may not be game breaking (as in you can continue to do the quest) it very much destroys the whole point of playing this game - which is to role-play an epic fantasy. We are not following scripted orders in the game. How can I role-play fantasy, the central concept of this game product, if something arround you breaks it? Sure, once the CK comes out we can all look at the scripts and the logic and the math behind it. But the point is to make it a game to role-play, not fiddle with programming.

That is the Todd H. culture being pulled up again and people fall into it every time they call any modders to pay attention to bugs and mistakes. Be reasonable. Call Bethesda support. Fill in complaints. Fill their Support staff with posts instead of coming here to the forums asking for a fix for a bug. Surely, support staff must also be paid.

How can talented people make such beautiful game and not get sick of seeing mistakes and not be able to correct them. Sure, they are paid to stay put, working on another thing. However, what is even worse is that Bethesda owns the assets. I doubt developers can freely distribute their high quality fixes; those textures that didn't get borked in compression, those animations that loop better because the animator got a few minutes to tweak that little detail; that sound loop with a tick, that even though is "just fine", the dev can take five minutes and clear it up in his home computer.


There are games from other companies, like mentioned earlier, that have put commitment into their work. And it shines through. Why? Perhaps they don't have such big community of people willing to glue whatever boiled up patch they have invented into the game.

It is hard not to see that deep commitment present in Skyrim. It is just a shame that, for business reasons, developers are not allowed to pour out any kind of improvement they envision. Perfection is fleeting, after all. It is impossible to have zero bugs. However, it is possible to point them out and correct one by one. Just what the modders have done in the past. And I believe it is not a normal map patch (or animation, or quest, or texture, or item patch) that will make your hardware explode if not tested by QA.

Either that or everyone that works at Bethesda are very good, arrogant, con artists.

Probably the most disheartening thing about this is that Bethesda doesn't seem to have anyone watching the support forums. On the day of the game's release there didn't seem to be anyone pouring over the data to catch the bugs being reported.

Whether or not Bethesda listens to customer feedback is a complete mystery. If there WAS a team reading over complaints like many game dev forums have, they ought to make themselves more visible.

People , you have to read between the lines:
Bethesda ain t a PC company, they don t care about PC, all they care is console, PC is just a sellable spin off, hence the:
"We knew there was technically stuff we still wanted to do with that tech" (platform, more specifically XBOX)

Thats why PC doesnt get attention. It has beiing sayd clearly:
"PC is suh an headache" Whoever sayd that admited they dont have a PC capable team.

So they ll fix the bare minimum inside the console envelope. And thats what we see in Skyrim, it sweat console only by all pores.

I agree its sad when a company crap upon 40% of its playerbase.

No clue about NV, but I can tell you the numbers of patches for the other games:

Morrowind: Two (up to 1.2)
Tribunal: One (from 1.3 to 1.4)
Bloodmoon: One (from 1.5 to 1.6)

Oblivion: Two (up to 1.2)
Shivering Isles: One (1.4.something)

Fallout 3: One (up to 1.1)
The Pitt, Broken Steel, Point Lookout, Mothership Zeta: None, but each updates the game (to 1.4, 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7 respectively) adding the achievements for those DLCs and not fixing much if anything at all.

Don't expect more than two official patches for Skyrim. We'll be very lucky if we get three. We are probably at 1.1 right now just because they had to ship at 11th November no matter if the game would run at this point or not.

That is why I said its a cost ratio. They'll fix things worth the time fixing, especially items which receive a lot of attention. There is a certain point where addressing problem A through X just isn't worth the potential lose of customer good will. Of course, that can sometimes backfire on the company. Your counter-example/general assumption is based on the idea of Bethesda not doing anything to fix bugs, which they've got a well proven record of at least fixing some things and that there is some unrealistic situation where people will walk away from a product/company that doesn't fix everything when there are a ridiculous number of factors to consider when it comes to customer satisfaction. Hell, some of the games which top the charts of "Favorite games of all time" are buggy messes from companies who had a track record of buggy messes (Troika, I'm looking at you!) and yet people continued to support and love the games for a long time. Even here, this very thread is talking about how Bethesda doesn't fix problems and how it is bad thing yet you're here aren't you? Why is that if Bethesda has shown in the past that if people highlight bugs, even publicly fix them, they won't go back in and release and official patch for the issues?

It's their game they created.It's their product they sold us with flaws.It's their [censored] job to fix the game as good as possible.

We payed 50 euro for it so.....

I just laughed when I read this:

https://twitter.com/#!/DCDaecon/status/137296293772013570
https://twitter.com/#!/DCDaecon/status/137296701621932032
https://twitter.com/#!/DCDaecon/status/137297487772909568

...

Trolls.