Rich Vogel Talks Bugs & Exploits

For fans of the MMO genre, Rich Vogel needs no introduction. He spent his early career working on titles such as Meridian 59, Utlima Online and Star Wars: Galaxies – three of the most genre-defining MMO games of our time. Today however, Rich wears the hat of Executive Producer on Star Wars: The Old Republic at BioWare Austin, and as such has some pretty big boots to fill down in Texas.

This afternoon, he posted a developer blog for fans and players of Star Wars: The Old Republic to let them know how BioWare goes about prioritizing (and fixing) bugs and exploits, and how that meshes (and doesn’t interfere with) new content development:

Let me start by explaining how we go about determining when to fix an issue in the live game, whether it is a bug or an exploit. Let’s begin with exploits – those cases when we determine that a bug in the code can give an unfair advantage to a player. (Remember, not all bugs are exploits!)

If an exploit is discovered that threatens players’ experience in the game or the in-game economy, we will usually try to create an Emergency Patch to fix that exploit. Before we declare something an emergency though, we have to validate the issue with our internal Quality Assurance, or QA team. They gather data working with our Customer Service, analytics, and development teams to determine the extent of the exploit and the steps needed to reproduce it. Once we have the steps, we work on a plan to fix the issue. Depending how long the issue will take to fix and how risky it is, we will decide if we need to temporarily disable the cause of the exploit in the game.

Head on over to SWTOR.com for Rich’s full blog entry – it’s well worth a read for any TOR fan!