Dirtside's Journal: Why do MMO patches go so poorly?

Why do the periodic patches of massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) tend to go so poorly? No matter what, there's always at least one new major bug after each patch. Why does this happen?

1) Recompiling the code, executing the server, and loading up a character can take a few minutes, depending. Doing this for every tiny little change would probably take forever.

2) Nobody's perfect; the small (but paid) in-house testing team is never going to be able to catch every bug.

3) Communication problems. The programmers fix a certain set of bugs, but the person who writes the patch message either misunderstands some of the bug fixes (or the flipside, where the programmers explain themselves poorly), or is going on old data (i.e. the programmers said that certain things were slated to be fixed, but that changed, and nobody told the patch message writer), etc.

4) Incompetence/laziness/stupidity (and, occasionally, malice). If anyone in the chain falls in this category (programmers/designers, QA, patch writers), then bugs will get through.

5) A "community contact" person whose job it is to take the players' concerns (usually voiced either via messageboards or via email), distill them (eliminate the poorly-worded, incorrect, redundant, or otherwise useless messages), and then tell the design/development team what the players are saying. The problem with this is that the CC person is usually not a technical person -- they are chosen more for their social or "people" skills than their ability to understand game systems. As a result, you get non-technical players poorly explaining technical issues to a non-technical person, who then has to explain them to the technical people.

I'm not proposing solutions for this, of course; I write (mostly) single-player PHP games for Neopets, a kids' website, and I'm the entire design, development, QA, and community contact staff, all rolled up into one (except for artwork, someone else handles that -- but I handle integrating it into the game). So I don't really have experience in terms of a large team of people who all have very specific, well-defined roles; I'm sure there's a lot more to it that I'm not aware of (politics and pride, for example; if the lead programmer is pissed off at the CC person, then he might not fix things just to be a jerk). Even I fall prey to this. A poorly worded bug report from a player will more often than not garner my disdain, the idea being that if they won't bother to communicate effectively, I won't bother to care about what they're writing. I really wish I didn't do that, but it's an emotional reaction, and difficult to overcome.

Sometimes, though, I just can't tell what the hell they're talking about...

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(No PFADAA tomorrow -- going to D.C. to participate in the Godless Americans March on Washington. Back Monday. Yeah, I'm sure all three of my readers are going to be broken-hearted. Can I ask anyone who reads this to post a reply, just letting me know that you read it? Curious to see how many people get this far. :) )