wayninja said:
While I see where you are going (sort of), I can't agree. A broken product has a show-stopper that occurs on all systems. A bug is a more accurate word for what you are describing.
Well, then it's a matter of definition, but to me, a software with a serious bug is broken, even if I don't notice the bug right now, because I may buy a new graphics card or other components soon, and who knows - the bug may appear then.
As for the 'tolerant' system, I have no idea what you are talking about.
I'll give you an example: Let's say you develop software for an operating system that automatically initializes all data with zero when a program starts. While developing, you forget to initialize some variables with zero, but it's no problem, because the operating system does it for you. However, when you port the software to another operating system, it may not work, because uninitialized variables may contain any random value on such an OS, so the software that works perfectly fine on one OS won't work at all on another OS. One OS was simply more "tolerant" than the other, but the bug was still there, and it's 100% the developers fault for not following the rules of the programming language. If the whole point of the software was that you can run it on different operating systems, then ultimately, you can say that it's broken.
Running software on different system configurations is similar in that regard to porting it to different operating systems. One graphics card may do certain initializations by default, as a kind of "undocumented feature", so if the developers forget to do these initializations, it works fine, even though in theory it's not supposed to. If you use that software on another system with a different graphics card, you may get a garbled screen or even a crash. Again, one system was more "tolerant" than the other. So it is indeed quite possible for a piece of software to be buggy, but to work perfectly on some systems and not at all on others, but it's still a problem with the software, not the system.
Although I concede that I simply may not have run into the issue yet. I find it very unlikely that all the beta-testers were 'lucky'.
That scenario happens all the time. For practically every game that is released nowadays, patches are released that fix issues which occur only on some systems. Based on your argument, that shouldn't ever happen. But it does.
So there are two possibilities: The less likely one that yes, indeed, the beta testers were just lucky, or the more likely one that the game was simply released as-is, because a release deadline had to be met.
Also, if you change to a system configuration that does not support the game (and is documented in the specs), how does this make the game broken?
I was talking about changing to another system configuration that meets the game's system requirements, but the game doesn't work on them.
Again, folks are jumping to the conclusion that because it doesn't run on a particular machine, that it's 'broken'.
No, you are jumping to the conclusion that because it runs on yours, it's unlikely to be broken. It's like my car analogy: You just haven't crossed the 50mph threshold yet. You just don't have the system configuration that causes the bug to appear.
How many systems are affected? Oh, you don't know?
My apologies for not having done a complete survey of all people who have bought the game.
If you want to know which systems are affected, just wait for the patch and look in the release notes for something like "Fixes crash-to-desktop issues on systems with ..." or "Fixes problems with the wonder movies on systems with..." Then you'll know.
Then why is the word 'broken' applicable? If only 1 machine in the world (that met the specs) couldn't run the game, would it be broken?
I think we can safely say that there is more than one machine that meets the specs and can't run the game or has a lot of trouble running the game.
Heck, a new diplomacy bug has just been reported in the bug reports forum which - if true - ultimately makes multiplayer games pointless until a patch is released which fixes that problem, so from a multiplayer perspective the game is most definitely broken. At this point, you can not play a multiplayer game (unless you're willing to accept that your opponents may be exploiting this bug). I would guess that most players never play multiplayer games, so perhaps they should say "No, the game is not broken, it works perfectly for that vast majority! There's no need for a patch!"