That seems to be the case with most gripes people have in this thread
Unreliable software updates are nothing new and they are not consigned to history.
As for judging people based on their age. wow.
Not judging based on age. "old timers" is not meaning old people, but rather those who act like older technology is better and can't get with modern changes.
Ie grandparents saying "back in my day"
Last edited by TheCyberQuake,
I certainly miss something about those times when games were released and that was it.
They came with some (generally minor) glitches and bugs, but those glitches itself became part of the identity of the game.
Later exploited by gamers, or used in speedruns, or whatever, but they came to stay.
You were able to depend on the glitch to be there today, and also tomorrow, and you built your way of playing the game taking it into consideration.
EDIT: Perhaps this is a rant about SSB4 always being "rebalanced" in the early days, and your character getting sadly nerfed.
Last edited by sarkwalvein,
The original turok had a bug that makes it impossible to beat multiplayer. Just for anyone who wants to argue "past games were never released with game breaking bugs". And unlike that if a game does have one it can now easily be fixed.
Oh yes, they were released with game breaking bugs in many instances.
But that is not what I am talking about. (see previous edit note)
Some times it feels like they change the rules all the time, and you can't get used to how to play the game.
Last edited by sarkwalvein,
Yeah I know, just wanted to cover that base for anyone who would try to use it as an argument against updates.
Yes (designed to fail or not caring if it fails) and no (the old stuff is not better really).
Sure, things are cheap to produce, technology advances fast, and people 1) don't care to make a product durable because there will be one 10x better in the near future, 2) they want you to fund their research for new products, so they intentionally make their old products not very durable so you will have to buy the new 10x better one.
On the positive side this allows to cut cost and make products actually cheaper, it also allows to push the industry forward, and TBH you can push components harder if you don't care for them to fail in a couple of years, so the product you can make is more powerful because it is trading longevity versus power.
On the negative side you are wasting material resources, you are creating extra waste and trashing the environment, and your old PoS that was cheap anyway dies after a couple of years, so you have to take a couple of dollars from your pocket and buy a new cheap PoS that is 10x better than the previous PoS.
That is life, I guess? At least it has a big positive side.
Last edited by sarkwalvein,
Tell that to the nes with a poorly designed cartridge slot that is guaranteed to fail overtime with use.
Also, almost every old console that has not been maintained and serviced carefully will have exploded/leaking electrolitic capacitors (because they used cheap components), with the leak ruinning the motherboard and the console not working at all.
So much for the "old stuff is made to last" myth. If it was made to last they would use expensive high quality capacitors with good insulation.
And don't forget losing saves to volatile memory and dead save batteries. Because they could have used non volatile but didn't to save costs.
Didn't some (all?) of the old Sega Arcade machines have a suicide battery in them? As in, once this (non-replaceable) battery dies, the entire system is bricked? I think that is the very definition of "designed to fail".
The fact that old games seemed less buggy is down to two things: Nostalgia (you remember the good parts, not the ones were your old NES cartridges were acting up and you lost your entire game progress) and simpler technology. These old games have much simpler structure, code and much simpler graphics - therefore, there are less things to mess up. There IS still messed up stuff in them, of course. Look at the original Pokemon games - they are FULL of crazy bugs, some of them are even game-breaking. One of the Donkey Kong games for SNES (I think it was Diddy's Kong Quest) had a glitch in it that when triggered, it could LITERALLY destroy the cartridge. The original Metroid had a glitch that could potentially damage the NES.
Well thanks for clarifying that.
I think I have been clear, I was not saying something was better in previous times, in fact I clearly stated that WSUS needed updates to stop it failing. Both new and old tech has bugs.
But there is nothing wrong with striving for better standards. Why not try and build something that doesn't have bugs? Or are we all so bad at our jobs that this is impossible?
I am not going to out the route of why don't you try and learn from history or maybe your grandparents' life knowledge has taught them something. It is your call who you listen to you. I know my grandfather never wasted a minute of his life on hold for tech support, watching the egg timer of Windows or the spinning wheel of Apple. I have! Too much. I really don't want my kids to! That's all. x
But what part of the switch is really buggy in any major way? That is my point. You are trying to make a point that I can't see any way it correlates with the switch at this point.
I agree, striving for better standards is always admirable. Unfortunately, not having bugs is impossible. Like, literally. Even a simple "Hello World" programm can have bugs due to the complexity of all the other software and hardware that is involved. This has nothing to do with being bad at your job.
Let's stick with the hello world example; if you code that in C/C++/Java, you most likely rely on the standart library; even if YOUR code is bug-free, there MAY be bugs in there that can break your programm in certain situation. Then you need to translate your programm into bytecode or machine code using an interpreter/compiler, which also may introduce bugs. Of course, both your compiler and your programm will run on hardware, where the CPU microcode could be buggy.
TLDR: To have absolutely bug-free programs, you'd need to live in a world where nobody ever makes any mistakes. And making mistakes doesn't, by default, make you bad at your job. It just makes you human.
Nope, that's pretty common. You need to start manufacturing hardware (or discs, if we're talking about games with day1 patches) months in advance to get enough units to the shops on launch day. Therefore, while the first models are being produced, the devs still work on the software, which then leads to a day1 patch. I'm pretty sure most current consoles (and even most current games with physical distribution) did that.
Last edited by wvsgnovize,
Of course. We engineer to cover for failings but we need to accept them in order to compensate for them. We can achieve incredible things, like space exploration or human surgery where mistakes must be kept to a minimum and rolling out updates isn't an option!
I was only trying to present a contrary argument to 'if you don't like updates you must be a pirate'.
Old or new it's all poorly made crap that I don't need but I am not trying to fool myself it isn't...
That's a pretty grim perspective, but to each their own. We'll simply have to agree to disagree.
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