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Why are so many serious bugs never fixed?
Beardedgeek
Posts: 5,520 Member
Two bugs I have encountered in the last month:
1. The Colliding Festivals bug, a bug that the devs have reported as "fixed" three times since the arrival of City Living, but still pops up, and now the devs have admitted they honestly don't know how to fix it. Not encouraging?
2. The Bills Arrives At Dorm House bug. Less severe, because money is easy to cheat. But it has been reported in the beginning of November 2019, and still open, not fixed. I suddenly got billed 1800 Simolions out of the blue but chose to pay then cheat the money back.
Btw, a tip: I saw several people getting the dorm's power turned off in the bug report because they can't pay... paying on the computer works. The mailbox just cancels the action because well... it's not your mailbox (since it's a dorm. duh).
1. The Colliding Festivals bug, a bug that the devs have reported as "fixed" three times since the arrival of City Living, but still pops up, and now the devs have admitted they honestly don't know how to fix it. Not encouraging?
2. The Bills Arrives At Dorm House bug. Less severe, because money is easy to cheat. But it has been reported in the beginning of November 2019, and still open, not fixed. I suddenly got billed 1800 Simolions out of the blue but chose to pay then cheat the money back.
Btw, a tip: I saw several people getting the dorm's power turned off in the bug report because they can't pay... paying on the computer works. The mailbox just cancels the action because well... it's not your mailbox (since it's a dorm. duh).
Origin ID: A_Bearded_Geek
3
Comments
Things definitely NOT priorities at EA - why bother when modders can (and have continued to) take care of most issues?
1. Modders will fix it, sometimes within a few days even
2. People will still keep buying the next pack anyways
Our sims would be going to Oktoberfest more?
The developers don't know what is causing these issues.
The developers don't have time to fix these issues because of their release schedule.
The developers don't get paid enough to fix these issues, only to release more packs.
If you are unhappy with it, then I recommend that you do not buy their packs to show that you are unhappy. I never bought Tiny Living because I thought that the Hair Swatches being out of order was frankly insulting towards people who buy their packs.
The Colliding Festivals bug has been around since the release of City Living and on the bug report they have officially said they can't fix it. So... my suggestion (and yes, I got flak for that before) is to delete one festival from the game until they have figured out what causes it.
Some bugs only seem to occur for some people, so that's why they do not want to disable features. I have not experienced any festivals colliding myself.
As for having the option to disable certain features ourselves...that is something that people have been asking for years. Only Deaderpool have been able to provide solutions for it.
The game would be carefully thought out, well executed, QA would be relentless, and it would show the same care and attention to detail -even the little ones - that characterizes TS2. Think Mercedes Benz or BMW instead of Yugo. BTW Munich folks say skip Okoberfest and come at other times. Just as much fun but much cheaper and no crowds. Can even find a place to stay, too.
That "don't spend time on bugs, the modders will fix it" attitude continued into TS3, and now TS4. Instead of having a dedicated bug fixing sub-team that can put out a patch in a few days or weeks after a bug is reported, they toss content out AQAP, then let the modders fix the mess unless enough people continue to badger them about it. I don't think it's because the devs themselves are lazy, though. It's because that's just how capitalism operates. Capitalism incentivizes cutting production costs by any means necessary for the sake of a bigger profit. This often comes at the expense of worker welfare and compensation and even the quality of the product or service they provide. If a company has a monopoly or near monopoly over a market, they are free to downgrade the quality of their product or service and jack the price up at the same time, because the people who need or want that product or service have no alternatives (or, at least, no suitable alternatives, like with cable vs. satellite here in the U.S.) to abandon it for.
And it's not just EA leveraging their monopoly over life sim lovers with how they've been doing The Sims dirty. Adobe, knowing that they had a near total monopoly on the creative software market, moved all of their products to an anti-consumer subscription model some time ago. Creative professionals groaned and paid up, as did students studying to be creative professionals, but they lost much of their hobbyist market due to their new "rent to work" business model. As time has gone on, other companies (like Affinity) have been putting out software that does everything that Adobe's does, but for a one-time purchase price instead of a cash-sucking subscription model and now, even professionals and students who once grumbled but gave in have been starting to drop Adobe for more cost-effective alternatives. Adobe still practically owns the market for now, but the more people become dissatisfied with what Adobe provides for their insane prices, more people ditch them and look for more cost-effective, professional quality alternatives. For example: Adobe Illustrator costs $239.88 U.S. per year before tax is applied, and is clunky and unintuitive for people who actually draw to use, let alone learn. Affinity Designer costs $49.99 U.S. before tax forever, does all the same things as Illustrator, and is more intuitive to learn and use for people who are used to physically drawing than Illustrator is. Both get regular updates, but one is a one-time purchase and you own it forever, while the other is an overpriced rental that you can't access if you don't fork over the dough. Which is the better deal to you?
I suspect that this will become the dynamic between The Sims and Paralives. As when Paralives comes out, you will see unsatisfied simmers begin flowing over toward it to see if it's a better alternative. At first, it will be a trickle of more experienced simmers who've been burned by TS4, curious game journalist, and YouTubers and Twitch streamers trying to scoop each other and snag some views. As time goes on (and if Paralives turns out to truly be a superior game to TS4 and eventually TS5), that trickle will evolve into a steady stream, and eventually a torrent of players dropping The Sims for Paralives. People don't like paying more for the same thing, let alone paying more for less. If a monopoly can be successfully challenged by a company with a better product or service, the same product or service at a better price, or even (Gasp! Shock!) a better product or service at a better price, then the monopoly has to either up their game or go down...which could create another monopoly and start the cycle all over again in a few more years. Capitalism, everybody...
Thanks for the word on Affinity Designer. I'm going to try that.
Jules
Simmer since 2001
Yeah, I got that. I was just being sarcastic.
Also, I don't think Sims 4 is a Yugo. It's a Skoda. Perfectly serviceable, decent quality... problem is that this Skoda is sold at the same price as the BMW, for some reason.
As in the Czech steelworks that used to make armor plate, excellent artillery, and tanks? Not heard of the car by that name. If TS4 was a car, I'd rather get an Edsel.
Yes, though bought by WV since decades. It's all WV parts but looking slightly cheaper (cheaper plastic in the doors, not as good a GPS system, whatever).
Agreed
Capitalism is great. If a company doesn't meet the demands of a customer they have dozens if not hundreds of other choices that will. Unlike someone who is stuck with Only One choice, and must accept the staus quo...oh, wait, there is only one Sim Franchise, that's why we need more and more capitalism to give us zillions of choices.
Two words: City Skylines.
Yes, but the one flaw in capitalism is that, without strong anti-trust regulations, it's prone to eventually creating all-consuming monopolies, just like a state-controlled economy that only offers one choice to the masses. If you have competition between two companies in the same business and one massively out-competes the other and causes the less successful company to go under, or one of the companies becomes big and wealthy enough to consume the other through a buy-out or merger, that creates a monopoly in that business. If the business itself also is very expensive to get into in the first place (by default or thanks to legal and/or regulatory requirements, for example), or the monopoly manipulates or abuses the legal system or the government to hinder or ban competitors (which is incentivized by the profit motive), then no new competition can rise up and force that company to keep prices reasonable and quality of goods and services high. Pure capitalism (where companies and markets do their thing unchecked by proper legal limitations to keep competition going strong so that consumers have more choices of higher quality to pick from) is fine in the hypothetical, but it fails to take into account human psychology, which is why pure capitalism leads to robber barons and super-powerful monopolies in real life. Capitalism augmented by proper regulation, however, can be good so long as the wealthy company owners are not allowed to undermine the system by purchasing politicians whose sole job is to dismantle the safeguards that keep companies from becoming all-consuming monopolies.
Without a way to prevent monopolies from forming (either on purpose or simply by accident of how markets function), capitalism can devolve into either A) a system where you have one private company in each field ruling over the whole economy and squeezing it for all it's worth, with no room for any competition at all (or any significant competition) to nudge its way in and challenge the monopolies, because the monopolies are rich and powerful enough to either crush or consume any possible competition that comes along before it becomes a real threat to their dominance; or B ) an endless cycle of competition, monopoly, greed, consumer dissatisfaction, new competition, and monopoly again. Neither of these is particularly healthy for the economy because monopolies (state and private alike) are not particularly healthy for the economy. Of course, companies that are not competitors can still conspire with each other to fix prices and divvy up areas into territories where each one is "allowed" to do business (rather like common street pushers)...but that's a whole other can of worms entirely. Economics is WAY more complicated than supply, demand, and competition...