Re: [MUD-Dev] players who "take away from the game"

[Adam Wiggins <adam#angel,com>]

On Thu, 11 Nov 1999, Ola Fosheim [iso-8859-1] Grøstad wrote:
> Adam Wiggins wrote:
> > On Thu, 11 Nov 1999, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
> > > Note 3: Some designers are inclined to call design flaws "bugs".
> > 
> > They are.  So are errors in the terrain (for example, a description of
> > a door which claims to have a large lock on it, but trying to lock or
> > unlock the door reports that the door has no lock), or anything else
> > which breaks the consistency and enjoyment of your game world.
> 
> A bug is usually considered (for historical reasons) to be a defect in the
> implementation, not the design.  It's when you didn't write what you
> intended to write. Or in the historical context, when a wire has been
> accidentally removed (by a bug :9.
> That's how I use the term anyway.

Ah, very true.  In that context I must agree with you.

However, since the rest of the post that all this came from was referring
to the perceptions of the end user, a design flaw and a bug probably appear
to be one and the same.  Whether it was bad design that caused that troll
to pay you $1M in gold for your mushroom, or whether it was just an overflow
error in the code, either way the result is the same to the player, and
when reporting it they would refer to it as a (potential) bug.

Adam W.





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