Games have bugs in them. Big games have lots of bugs in them. The world's biggest game has a sh*tload of bugs in it. Blizzard has revealed a rather astonishing figure for its ludicrously successful MMO, revealing that its database has around 180,000 glitches that are in some stage of repair. If you don't understand numbers, suffice it to say that WoW has a lot of bugs being ironed out.
It's somewhat understandable, of course. MMOs are large, unwieldy beasts by their very nature, so a game as colossal as WoW is sure to be packed to the gills with issues that Blizzard could not have foreseen. Even so, that number is absolutely staggering and beyond my mortal comprehension. Those are the kind of bugs Microsoft can only dream about.
What's more surprising, though? The fact that WoW has this many bugs, or the fact that Blizzard was actually open enough to reveal them?
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1:00 PM on 09.18.2009
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Also, if you consider that a bug doesn't have to be something gamebreaking, it could be totally insignificant from the players POV, it's really not that big of a number...
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.
There are 180 000 bugs that have either been fixed, noted or actively worked on.
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've seen quite a few as Nerdy Suit has mentioned, but none of them were actually problematic.
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.
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 :)
What surprised me most is that their core programming team (including backend, client, and all the internal tools) only has about 32 people, and that their cinematic team has like 100.