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

[Adam Wiggins]

On Thu, 11 Nov 1999, Ola Fosheim [iso-8859-1] Gr=F8stad wrote:
> Adam Wiggins wrote:
> > On Thu, 11 Nov 1999, Ola Fosheim Gr=F8stad wrote:
> > > Note 3: Some designers are inclined to call design flaws "bugs".
> >=20
> > 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.
>=20
> A bug is usually considered (for historical reasons) to be a defect in th=
e
> 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 overflo=
w
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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