Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Squashing bugs

I played a game of Blood Bowl today in my turbo league and it did not go as it was supposed to.  Unfortunately the BB game I am playing is kinda buggy and regularly does things that make no sense.  In some cases when a game bugs you just have to suck it up but in this case we had various ways to handle it but no particular protocol for how that should be done.  There were three different bugs:

1.  I was not allowed to line up two guys in a wide zone.
2.  Multiple times the game placed 12 guys on the field instead of 11.
3.  My opponent crashed and he could not rejoin the game.

I ended up on the ass end of bugs 1 and 3.  My first drive was successful but would likely have been safer if I had been able to line up my dudes properly.  After 6 turns of the game I was up 1-0 and looking good to win but because my opponent crashed we had to start from scratch and I lost.  We both ended up with 12 guys on the field several times and when we caught it we ran one of our guys away to the side so that the play would not be affected.

It is frustrating to be in a situation where you have to decide how to handle something like this.  I really like optimizing systems and playing to the fullest and it irritates me to no end to deliberately not use all of my tools to win.  Normally the game takes care of that for me by enforcing all the rules so I can go all out and do whatever it takes but when bugs occur and we have to ad hoc rules things get muddy.  Should I get any kind of compensation when the game screws up my placement?  The competitive part of my brain shouts at me that I got screwed by a bug on the first play so I should be able to use a different one to my advantage on the second play.  Realistically I know that playing that way would be terrible and we should endeavour to never let bugs matter unless there is no way around it.  Winning just because of a bug would have little sweetness.

I do like the game a lot and playing football is being a ton of fun.  That said it is frustrating that these bugs exist.  They are regular occurrences and should be straightforward to find and squash.  I don't generally expect much in the way of quality from Games Workshop but their inability or unwillingness to fix these issues is a real irritant indeed.

1 comment:

  1. While I am not a fan of Games Workshop, they're not the ones at fault here. They just licensed the product out to a third party. You want to be raging against Cyanide. And you'll have a lot of company!

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