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A Bit About Bugs
SimsLovinLycan
Posts: 1,910 Member
Game bugs are terrible. They keep us from playing the game properly and can seriously mess up our progress. The recent relationship bug, followed by the vampire powers bug that was introduced in the patch that fixed the relationship bug, is probably the most recent example. Sometimes, it seems that as soon as one bug is squashed, another crops up, and it's a pain in the behind for us players. Sometimes, we even feel like busting into the development studio and yelling, "What the heck are you guys doing in here?! Just fix the game, don't break it!!"
...But, it's easy to forget that bugs are annoying for the developers too. It's like being in charge of cleaning the house, and no sooner than you've gotten everything clean and smelling all good, the kids and dog track mud through the house or the spouse spills a food coloring heavy drink all over the couch, or someone heats up leftovers in pots and pans on the stove and doesn't clean up after themselves...and you have to run back and clean up that mess too. As soon as you think you can relax...you've got another mess to clean up, and anyone who's been in that situation can, I'm sure, relate to that. Yes, fixing bugs is their job...but it doesn't feel good to think you've gotten everything expertly straightened out, only for something else to go to heck right afterward. So, in instances like this, I kind of feel for them.
In short, when bugs crop up, we players have more in common with the devs who have to go in and fix them than we sometimes think. Bugs annoy everyone, both the ones who play the game and the guys and gals behind the scenes whose job it is to keep the game up-to-date and functioning properly. So, if there are any devs on bug fix duty reading this, thanks guys. I know your job is tough and often thankless, but I appreciate all your hard work.
...But, it's easy to forget that bugs are annoying for the developers too. It's like being in charge of cleaning the house, and no sooner than you've gotten everything clean and smelling all good, the kids and dog track mud through the house or the spouse spills a food coloring heavy drink all over the couch, or someone heats up leftovers in pots and pans on the stove and doesn't clean up after themselves...and you have to run back and clean up that mess too. As soon as you think you can relax...you've got another mess to clean up, and anyone who's been in that situation can, I'm sure, relate to that. Yes, fixing bugs is their job...but it doesn't feel good to think you've gotten everything expertly straightened out, only for something else to go to heck right afterward. So, in instances like this, I kind of feel for them.
In short, when bugs crop up, we players have more in common with the devs who have to go in and fix them than we sometimes think. Bugs annoy everyone, both the ones who play the game and the guys and gals behind the scenes whose job it is to keep the game up-to-date and functioning properly. So, if there are any devs on bug fix duty reading this, thanks guys. I know your job is tough and often thankless, but I appreciate all your hard work.
There is a song I hear, a melody from the past...
When I woke for the first time, when I slept for the last.
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Comments
I'm a rather lax person, so I'm not one to whine or complain about the bugs, but I can completely understand why these things sometimes infuriate people. There are definitely times where it's within the consumer's right to be disappointed by a lack of quality or care. Like after paying 40 dollars for City Living, being unable to use the content because of its associated performance bugs and patiently waiting a year for them to be fixed. Or after dropping 40 dollars on Get To Work and finding that all of the careers are broken, and have been broken for months now with no sign of repair in the near future. Or perhaps after spending 20 bucks for Dine Out to realize that restaurants are a poorly functioning mess.
C&D has basically been finished for months now. The patch, I don't know how long it took to prepare, but one would imagine sufficient testing would be done that MAJOR gameplay issues like the relationship glitch, the error 101 problem (or whatever it's called), and the breaking of vampires would be squashed before the patch gets pushed through... I, for one, have been looking forward since August, to moving my favorite vampire family into BB and exploring the new pack there with them- which now I can't really do without running into a bunch of issues with my vampires. It's just really disappointing.
This isn't all to say "shame on you, devs! do a better job" though. I'm sure the devs do the best job they can do with whatever resources they've been given. But I definitely do think that something is wrong with whatever model of maintenance EA is using to upkeep this game. Good job to the devs who finally manages to fix the speed 3 issue, and here's to hoping that all the other bugs (old and new) don't go forgotten or take nearly as long to fix.
*Shrug*
I'm somewhat amused by the concept.
I don't think the developers are at fault. I think it's more likely they're on a stupidly tight deadline with some things, causing things to be pushed out before they're quite done baking.
And you're right, every time they get things working right again, the next thing is pushed out, causing a bunch of unexpected things to get broken, and they're back to square one. Gotta fix the issues caused by under done baking, and all the glitches the new whatever has caused.
It's not the developers fault that they don't have enough time and resources to get things done better, sooner. It's whoever is poking them with sticks, is the one who is at fault.
The Sims 2 was known for its bugs, a lot of them were game breaking. Even though it got good reviews, critics found heaps of bugs.
This didn't change until much later in the game. But we all know the devs took careful consideration with that one.
I honestly think that Simulation has so many different variables, so it makes it hard to figure out. Even without DLC, players were finding mountains of loopholes in The Sims 2 base game.
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I don't want to sound harsh, but do you know what is really confusing me ? It look like modders are better in bug fixes than the devs. I mean take a look at this clothing bug (this festival thing there). One click with MCC and it's gone. Since MONTHS ! So if Deaderpool can handle this so fast, why not the devs ?
If anybody here understand something about programming, it would be nice, if you could explain it to me. I'm really curious
However, there are plenty of bugs that developers are aware of even, that have been around since the base game came out and nothing has been done about it. Like Faridah said, if modders are out there able to fix these problems quicker than developers, what does that say about them? EA needs to stop worrying about spitting out another shoddy bug riddled expansion pack two months after one another and start fixing the game itself. The sims 4 has been so buggy that it is almost impossible to play at times and the more content that you have in your game the worse it gets. I'd much rather wait a longer time for expansion packs to come out and have harsh problems smoothed out than have a hundred packs and a game that can't even run them. I'm at the point where I am refusing to purchase another expansion until some of these problems get fixed
Basically when I have my CC on and i edit a sim, the thing to edit it/tabs aren't there, i cant click anything and i have to close it through windows task manager.
But when i have it turned off, it works perfectly fine. This all started when the new update came out and I'm extremely confused
I couldn’t accept that, loving my family the way I did, so I googled and bumped into this very forum, where I learned uninstalling Generations for a few sim days and then reinstalling it was the solution. And indeed, it worked. How come that EA employee, especially hired to help people out, didn’t know this? That’s just bad service and not caring. To me it felt like they didn’t appreciate what those characters mean to us players. “Yeah, too bad, you’ll have to start a new family, bye bye.” I still have to jump through hoops in order to play at times (like with the firefighter career, and Pangu’s axe, important collectables that are part of a quest that disappear from your inventory when travelling) and it’s always been other simmers that had to help me out. I just don’t understand why it wasn’t EA themselves who had a site like Crinric’s. That it all came down to enthousiastic and technical players helping out other players (and still does, though I am under the impression they are much more serious about bugs than they were in the past).
Here are just some more random experiences and thoughts that ponder this concept from someone who has played every version of The Sims (and even The Sims Online when it was out).
The life cycle of The Sims for me typically starts with strong enthusiasm, deep immersion, expansion and stuff pack purchases, and playing more hours than I should, and ends a few months later in frustration after bug after bug creeps up. I try to fight them for a while, to troubleshoot, but it dampens my enthusiasm and takes my time to where I spend more on trying to find solutions for, or work around, the bugs, than I spend actually playing. No matter how hard I try to beat them, the bugs inevitably win. Then I wait for a few months or a few years and I start all over again, until the same thing happens.
For people who have also had this repeated experience with The Sims they may try to understand different reasons this is happening and end up blaming different people, sometimes even the developers.
Not everyone has the same bug - replicating it. Everyone sees it and everyone smells it and if there is unpleasant enough to everybody, somebody will fix it. I do think that most people don't really blame the developers, and if they do, it's not for long (I hope). I think we do try to keep in mind they things you write as well, and it helps us feel better when bugs are crawling all over us. Several things make it difficult to keep the things you wrote in mind, though. I'm not saying they are not good points, I just want to point out some other perspectives.
Unfortunately, and this is nobody's fault, it just comes with the territory being that this is a game, people specifically seek out to play games to escape from all that real life mud and the children and animals (or the adults that act like them) in their lives who bring it and fling it. When the game doesn't work, when they already have 99 problems and now The Sims is one, it's hard to be understanding. I think this applies to most activities that are supposed to be recreational though. It's just a little bit harder to cope with something that's not working when it's the thing you prefer to do that helps you cope with everything else.
And then there is speculation about how things are done and what could be done better so this sort of pattern of playing a game from a franchise over the years doesn't have to be the way it is.
For example, some might wonder if there are too many cooks the kitchen or too few, or the ones with the right kind of expertise. The sims has a lot of components that overlap especially as interactions and dependencies get more complex with the additional expansions. The company might have enough developers who deal with the actual programming, but maybe not enough employees who plan, anticipate, and prevent problems from happening. Companies with separate departments often run into that situation where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. Players may wonder about the communication within a company that may permit bugs. Especially since The Sims has so many expansions and packs, there might be different teams that work on each and there may be a disconnect between them. I think people typically refrain from blaming developers because the developers have little power over decision making in a company. I worked in IT for a while, and just because I could see how some thing could be done better didn't mean they were. In fact, I remember one time when I mentioned potential improvements to co-workers I was given the speech about stepping on toes. Players might then look at executives and how they run the company, and what their priorities are, and I think people get frustrated if things don't work well and it seems like the company is prioritizing money. One question players might have is whether the company would choose to deliver a game in a more streamlined way that supported better inside communication and more flexible and steady delivery of content if it wasn't as profitable as the packs but resulted in a better game, with less bugs and more stability. Selling content in packs might be a business model that the company has discovered makes the most money, but it may also not make for the most stable product. Over the years I think people get frustrated to see that they continue to pursue one thing that maximized their income but time after time the more packs the more bugs and neither them nor the developers can keep up with them before they overrun us. Then it's off to the next version with the exact same model.
I think it would help if some more things were done to recognize the bugs and help players cope with them and still enjoy the game while the developers make their effort to address them. But sometimes it seems like the company acts like it doesn't know the players and maybe even the developers are struggling like we are (I'm not sure what the corporate culture is but I bet it's an interesting one). For example, it would help if we could access more saved games from longer ago (I save too often for the few that are available to do me any good, exactly because I am so afraid of something happening). It also doesn't help that not all bugs happen to all players. I don't know about other players but there is a stronger sense of helplessness when I get the impression I'm the only one, or one of the few people, who has a certain bug. Who knows when they will get to it, if ever. I agree the system for transparency they have going on for this version is better than in the past. But it would be really nice if we had some kind of bug fixing agenda published instead of only the patch notes after the fixes are done. This agenda would include what bugs are on the priority list to address, although I understand they can't predict with certainty when exactly they will be implemented. It would be also nice to be able to roll back patches. Sometimes they cause problem and you literally cannot go on with your saved game that you invested a lot of time in and are attached to without having to scrap it and start over if you want to keep playing. Or wait who knows how long to see if and when it will be fixed. If it's not a problem for everyone, well, you might just wait and wait.
So yeah, in summary, it's hard to be as understanding of issues when it's a game. Devs do what they can to fix the bugs but they have little control over the factors that perpetuate them. They might feel frustrated too because like players, they may also feel like they are not acknowledged and like the higher ups are not making decisions based on their feedback. I think for me the most adaptive factor is that I kind of know what to expect before I start playing The Sims again and I ask myself if the gaming life cycle I'm used to experiencing is one that I want to once again go through. But even though I know what I am getting myself into, it still sucks when bugs make it impossible to continue at some point because it is more difficult to try and keep playing than fun to play. And usually no matter how much I prepare myself for it, I am never quite ready when it happens and I am disappointed all over again. I don't blame the devs though, but I do think the company could make some executive decisions to make this pattern of play where bugs win in the end less pervasive. This would likely make both players and devs happier.
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> I couldn’t accept that, loving my family the way I did, so I googled and bumped into this very forum, where I learned uninstalling Generations for a few sim days and then reinstalling it was the solution. And indeed, it worked. How come that EA employee, especially hired to help people out, didn’t know this? That’s just bad service and not caring. To me it felt like they didn’t appreciate what those characters mean to us players. “Yeah, too bad, you’ll have to start a new family, bye bye.” I still have to jump through hoops in order to play at times (like with the firefighter career, and Pangu’s axe, important collectables that are part of a quest that disappear from your inventory when travelling) and it’s always been other simmers that had to help me out. I just don’t understand why it wasn’t EA themselves who had a site like Crinric’s. That it all came down to enthousiastic and technical players helping out other players (and still does, though I am under the impression they are much more serious about bugs than they were in the past).
Yes! The last time I tried to use EA's tech support chat they literally told me to search the forums to see if someone else had the same problem that got fixed. That they had no idea what was wrong and wouldn't be helping me, and they ended the chat right afterwords. Even went so far as to get mad that I implied it was a product of the new patch they released the day I contacted them. I could go on a completely separate rant about EA's shoddy customer service but I'll stick to this topic lol.
Gosh that's awful. I'm sorry that happened to you. We get attached to our creations. I liked sims3 better than this too, but after a while I had to start over because of some problem and it would no longer load. We could do so much more with it, I miss cars, bikes, swings, my casino, my houseboat, lots of things.
this is not weird
CC breaks with every new patch, that's the normality of TS4
& that means cc scrambles your game
here's what you can do
http://modthesims.info/wiki.php?title=Game_Help:Finding_Problem_Custom_Content
Well, that's not true either, mods/cc have more of a chance to break when we have big game-changing patches but do not break with every patch, same with cc, I have gone through many patches with nothing breaking at all. The reason some buy cc became broken with this patch is because of the new pet animations and their interactions with pieces of furniture.
Most of the big mods have already been updated as well as S4S having a batch fix for most of the broken cc. I have been using mods like MCCC since it first came out and have a lot of cc in my game so I know to pull my mods/cc before each patch and play my test save if it seems like there is something strange going in my game but I have never had my game "scrambled" because of broken mods/cc.
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By all rights many mods are patch specific - especially Script mods and even if they seem okay chances are they probably are not.
Also by all rights anytime any recoding is done in a game both patches and CC is very subject to issues because those mods and CC were made to meshes and specifics to certain meshes and code in the game - they use the same code and mesh but when the game is recoded and meshes are altered like in Pets for instance suddenly the game is working on different code and different meshes that no longer is in the game - which then make your CC with changed meshes, and mods with changed code, no longer fully readable by the game.
In Sims 3, all, and I do mean ALL the store content was even broken by Sims 3 pets and we had to uninstall every single piece of Store content - redownload it all - and then reinstall. I owned the store up to that point - so just uninstalling and redownloading just that content took me over a full day - and then another couple of days to go through all my builds and and change out all my store content - then remove all my content from the exchange and redownload it all fixed, then back to the exchange and my library.
Needless to say I did not even get to play my pre-ordered pets for an entire week - and I did not even have any mods or CC. I can just imagine had I had any on top of it all. So recoding patches - can even mess up content of any kind even Maxis when it is not made by the same team that makes the ep. Believe me you have no idea if you think you can play a recoded game with any CC or mods you already have - when it can even break your store content. Believe me - it is why I have learned to not even bother with CC and mods while a game is being developed. I had already decided if they ever add another Sims store I won't even buy from that next time until the game is finished. It's too much of a headache.
But any recoding - (beware Seasons always has some recoding too) is sure to break CC and mods - that is pretty much a given. Even if the stuff still looks okay - the game no longer sees it as being properly programmed if it does not match exactly all the new programming, code, and meshes. It is understandable though.
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