Blizzard is tracking 180,000 bugs in WoW
by Adam Holisky 
Sep 17th 2009 at 1:00PM
During the keynote today at the Austin Game Developers Conference, Executive Vice President Frank Pearce and Production Director J. Allen Brack spoke at length about the internal workings of the WoW team and how they get their jobs done.
One of the more stunning things to come out of the keynote, which we'll have fully written up for you later today, is the fact that there are just under 180k bugs Blizzard is tracking in WoW. That means their bug database has 180,000 entries which are in some stage of being fixed (have been fixed, have not been fixed, or being worked on).
To me this number seems very large for a video game. I can understand an operating system like Windows 7 having an unreasonably large number of bugs in it like this, but for a video game -- even one as complex as WoW -- that number is quite astounding.
It does raise the inevitable question: what is Blizzard doing to fix all these? And how does this relate to the extremely long wait times for GM contact in game? We also learned that Blizzard only employs 2500 worldwide in Customer Service. That includes things like phone bank operators, GMs, forum mods, etc...
One of the more stunning things to come out of the keynote, which we'll have fully written up for you later today, is the fact that there are just under 180k bugs Blizzard is tracking in WoW. That means their bug database has 180,000 entries which are in some stage of being fixed (have been fixed, have not been fixed, or being worked on).
To me this number seems very large for a video game. I can understand an operating system like Windows 7 having an unreasonably large number of bugs in it like this, but for a video game -- even one as complex as WoW -- that number is quite astounding.
It does raise the inevitable question: what is Blizzard doing to fix all these? And how does this relate to the extremely long wait times for GM contact in game? We also learned that Blizzard only employs 2500 worldwide in Customer Service. That includes things like phone bank operators, GMs, forum mods, etc...
While those 2500 people might seem like a lot, and in many ways it is, the recent customer service level of WoW shows that these resources might not be enough.
On that note as well, I'm quite surprised that Blizzard actually released these numbers. I loath what the forums will look like in a day when people start quipping to Nethaera or Ghostcrawler about the 180,000 bugs. But it was Blizzard's decision to put that number out there. Here's hoping it doesn't skyrocket to 200,000 when Ony starts to spawn more Whelps in patch 3.2.2.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Bugs, Blizzard, News items
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 5)
Luis Sep 17th 2009 1:08PM
Squish 'em
Grock Sep 17th 2009 1:08PM
Well bugger...that's more than I would have thought.
shawnmgraham Sep 17th 2009 1:08PM
180,000 bugs doesn't seem like that much to me for a game that has been running for over five years, as gone through two expansions has thousands of quest and items, and has new non-expansion content added on a fairly regular basis.
Considering a bug could be anything from a tree clipping the side of a hill, to instances not being launched and that this number contains the fixed bugs, it's not surprising to me at all.
AndremedaSC Sep 17th 2009 1:26PM
I agree completely, shawnmgraham. Having done some QA and user acceptance testing (and thus had to report and track bugs) for in-house software, I can barely imagine how complex the code needed to run WoW must be, and so that many bugs sounds quite reasonable. And for all we know, 60% of them could be resolved already. I know I personally have seen bugs as minor as a mob halfway inside a tree, so something like that would probably be tracked in the database, while still having little or no impact on the way anyone plays the game. Not a top priority, certainly.
Also note, the number of GMs and customer service reps needed doesn't necessarily correlate with the number of bugs. While they do get bug reports from customers, most of the time they are likely just recording them and passing them on to the developers and QA testers. I expect that they spend a lot of time dealing with hacked accounts and loot issues etc etc etc, and those are probably NOT bug-related.
outdps Sep 17th 2009 1:27PM
Yeah, I think it's fairly normal for any 5 year old product to have had 180k bugs in its lifecycle. Of course, I'm sure that a much smaller number are active currently.
micgillam Sep 17th 2009 1:59PM
I fully agree the number of bugs is perfectly reasonable.
My question is this: how many of these bugs have been open, unresolved, and still applicable for 4+ years?
Because I know there are some evade-glitched mobs that have been sitting there, evading, for as long as I can remember. Or quest mobs in the WPL that, when they get down to 20%, disengage from combat, return to their patrol, recover their health because they're out of combat, and potentially (depending on where you were standing when you were fighting them) immediately aggro on you again. Eventually you manage to get them on a big crit that skips over the bug or something, but we're talking about some of the early content here that is still frustratingly screwed up.
It's not like I'm threatening to quit over it or anything, but a fix really should have been rolled out for some of these somewhere along the way, and it's probably a relatively small tweak in their behavior code.
Tordre Sep 17th 2009 3:10PM
Everyone is forgetting one point, to me it is not a big number when you look at how many registered users there are, and how many of those bugs might be repeats of the same bug by different users (we don't know if their system checks for this)?
Still in 4+ years of running software for millions of users i consider it a testament to blizzard, look at firefox they currently have 500,000 bugs in their tracker. I am also sure that some os's have had that many bugs to.
Thumbs up for blizzard.
android8675 Sep 17th 2009 3:20PM
Coming from a former life in QC, there's something else to consider, that this 180k bugs is probably the TOTAL number of bugs ever entered into what I am sure is a very robust database of "bugs" or "Issues" some of the earlier bugs are probably from the first build of the game or even going as far back as "Concept bugs".
In other words, go back 3-4 years before the first games came out, or whenever they started developing the game, and that's when they started the 180k count. That sounds about right for a game as big as WoW.
Look at Madden, EA for the first several years tracked a lot of the older Madden bugs on paper, my friend working on that project as an associate had to report on what they called "legacy" bugs at the start of each new itteration of the game. So even before the project for the year even started out, there was like 4-5 thousand bugs that still existed, or were there to remind devs where they could run into trouble.
180k big number, but not when you consider the man hours put into this game. figure out the man hours spent developing WoW, or the $ paid to devs working on WoW. Those numbers should be rather staggering. You'll never see them published, but I imagine in some cave of some CEOs office on the corner of his desk is a digital counter with like 20 digits just ticking away.
Shionia Sep 17th 2009 3:22PM
I also agree. Having done QA and managed software testing departments, I concur with the other posters who guess that this number includes both fixed and "non-bug' reports - duplicate bugs, deferred bugs, "bugs" that are really system enhancement (e.g. feature requests).
The more informative number would be the number of active/open bugs.
Garviel Sep 17th 2009 3:23PM
I agree, working in development for past 10+ years, bug databases tend to contain bugs that some people can't seem to let go of, and bugs that are so obscure or edge case that they will only occur in very rare circumstances.
Xtian Sep 17th 2009 4:46PM
More than the fact that the number of bugs seems legit, this should be an eye-opener to other companies and their MMOs. Wow is by far the most polished AAA MMO on the market, and while this number represents 5 years of bugs, it hammers home the point that part of being a top-notch MMO is spending a lot of resources on polish.
Sleutel Sep 17th 2009 7:00PM
Exactly. They answered their own question, right there in the article. There aren't 180k ACTIVE bugs... there have been 180k bugs TOTAL, including resolved issues ("have been fixed," as you say above). I'm guessing this also includes bugs on content that never made it to the live servers. (See an issue in the PTR? Add it to the tracking database! Had an issue back in the alpha of the original release? Good bet it's in the database!)
stabbington Sep 17th 2009 1:10PM
So WoW is pretty huge. Comparing it to something like Windows isn't really off base. It has also been in development for a long, long, long time. Finally, a lot of those bugs are for purely cosmetic glitches that don't affect gameplay in the slightest. Read the list of bug fixes in any set of patch notes, they're almost always full of trivial BS I've never even heard of along with one or two items that matter.
Given all that, I don't think they have an unreasonable amount of bugs in their system.
Aureliusz Sep 17th 2009 11:05PM
I agree. Checked your WINDOWS folder recently? Mine says about 4.5GB (thats for XP). My WoW directory is about 18GB. Ofc, that's including downloaded patches... Maybe 12GB or so?
Eisengel Sep 18th 2009 5:06AM
Well, while the size of the program directory does have something to do with the complexity of it, but how much of that disk space is taken up by media versus code that does honest-to-goodness computation? Most of the space under Windows is going to be taken up by all the program executables that make up Windows, Most of the space taken up under WoW is going to be the media files that really have nothing at all to do with the functioning of the game. Sure, you could have graphics glitches, but that often isn't caused by a corrupted media file, but by the code improperly using the media file. The media under WoW is just the presentation, the important part is really your control input going down the wire to the server, the computation that happens there, and then the update info that is sent back. I'd hazard a guess that about 80% of those bugs have very little to do with the client program, or if they did, that they required some massive fix on the server end and a relatively minor tweak on the client end.
Arrav Sep 17th 2009 1:12PM
were gonna need one big fly swatter..
Shadowspawnd Sep 17th 2009 1:12PM
Keep in mind some of if not most of these bugs may just be a mob stuck underground or a resource node that is unreachable.
Nick S Sep 17th 2009 3:25PM
I'm guessing "oddly placed mob" is a super common bug. Evaded, stuck in things, flying without wings, things like that. I see 3 or 4 of them in any given play session, and considering how big the world is, it wouldn't surprise me if most people had this problem.
drkripper Sep 17th 2009 1:13PM
I work in Software QA, and I just want to point out that *everything* goes in the bug tracking system-feature requests, new files being added to version control, documentation changes, code re-factoring etc. Basically whenever any change is made to something in the system a "bug" has to be written to describe why that change was made, even when it isn't a visible bug to the user.
Simon Jia Sep 17th 2009 1:18PM
That depends on how your bug tracker is defined to be used. Not all corporation do it the way you mentioned