What gets me is the game was released late 2004. Shouldn't most of the bugs already be dealt with?

For comparison sake, I think Madden 07 (last one I worked on) shipped with about 4,000 bugs. Not uncommon.

I don't know if Microsoft would think that was a large number or not. Operating systems and office suites are complicated things.

I also wonder that if that figure could be reduced by triaging their database. Some things may be bugs, some may be misunderstandings on QA's part on how things should work, and some may even be feature requests for future versions all lumped into "bugs" since it's taken care of in the issue tracking system. Just a thought.

I'd be willing to bet that Microsoft has considerably more known issues just in the current version of Windows, to say nothing of the dozen (or however many they're up to) apps in Office, all of the Visual Studio stuff, the Xbox, and a million other pies they've got their fingers in. Even if their culture were more conducive to building quality, bug-free apps you should be shocked within an inch of your life if they didn't blow away any and all competition on this front just due to their massive size.

Technophile: I bet Blizzard will release those numbers eventually, didn't they just say that 4,000 people have worked on World of Warcraft? I bet a full half of those are in QA. Maybe more. Which has got to be one of the worst jobs of all time. I got bored of WoW around level 42, I can't imagine what it'd be like to have to play it all day, every day in a test environment.

I don't play anymore, but I can tell you that I remember there were some parts of the game that have been broken for years that they still hadn't fixed. I'll bet you they're still broken...but it's a great game experience despite some bugs.

@hpv
Team size at Blizzard
Game Design: 37
Cinematics: 123
Platform Services: 245
Quality Assurance: 218
International Offices Population: 1,724
Game Masters: 2,056
Billing: 240
Quality Control: 67
Technical Support: 121
Online Technologies: 149

Some of these overlap.

after playing almost 5 years of wow i have seen and abused quite a few bugs, but in the end they have been fixed.
best one so far must been the one that im quite sure discovered on my own. so, at vanilla before bwl was open and only hc raid was molten core, i found that by using furbolg form item (only alliance) from ashenvale quest(mid 30lev q) you are totally aggro free as long as it stays one (only downside was if you take any dmg it will wear off and all the aggro will be dumbed back at you. horrible in old onyxia). and that time it lasted 3min, 1min cd. it was so awesome just nuke as warlock and not to worry about overaggro (any1 remember 5x sunder before dps? :D).
buut it lasted about 3 months cause others started using furbolg form aswell and raid members became suspicious.

good time :)

Not really surprised. Just hope they will have ironed out a good deal when I get around to playing again. For now, Scribblenauts.