I’ve spent a session in Garradan Fields squashing spiders, grubs and wasps. Very cathartic for someone who hates bugs in real life, I spent far too much time on my sylvari attempting to wipeout the mosquito population of the sylvari starter zone. That said there are some bugs that players cannot zerg to kill. An increasing number of events seem to bugged, there’s a complaint thread about this on the Guild Wars 2 Guru website.
I hope that ArenaNet will make bug-squashing a major priority, even over and above balancing. The very wonderful sense of dynamism, of “something always going on” around us is pretty quickly soured if you can’t complete the tasks at hand. Of course the first rule of computer maintenance, reboot the servers regularly, is the first thing they’ll probably have to institute through schedule maintenance windows – that will at least reset bugged events with some predictable regularity. I’m reporting any bugs I find using the simple support tool in game, it’s important that players report bugs as first priority before moaning about them on blogs or forums.
I’m not bothered by this at this stage. MMOs like all computer software is generally still beta software when released, that’s certainly the case for most Microsoft products. The paying customer is part of an implicit mass-beta tester group. I can cite Rift as the most stable and reliable MMO launch I have experienced – the servers went down once or maybe twice in the first week but beyond that it was rock-solid to play with very few bugs in game. SWTOR faired pretty well as well though there are more noticeable bugs in that game.
