Quote:
You would think this is one of those things where it would be easy enough for them to fix after the first person that told them. It's probably a bit on the item that just needs to be flipped and yet it has been this way for entirely too long. It's not a programming issue, it's a simple flag on an object so it can be fixed in a matter of a few minutes. So sad that it has not.
While I actually believe that this is the case (the fact is that the game is run by an Oracle database and a bit flag is the most likely case for flagging an item) I also don't think you understand the development process. If developers went all willy nilly and flipped flags any time they saw a problem there would be much bigger issues in the future. Development takes time and process. When you find a bug or a problem you have to open an SCT or SCR or whatever acronym you use for tracking bugs. Then the bug needs to be figured out, a plan to fix the bug needs to be developed, and then finally it needs to be executed. Of course it doesn't stop there because then you would need to test to ensure that the bug fixed the problem and possibly do regression testing to ensure that it didn't break anything else. Even tiny little things like this need to follow a process like that because if they don't then down the line when you are doing more development or fixes for related things, you need to know what has changed. A good comapny will follow their own process for the smallest bugs to the largest, its just stupid not to. So even though it seems and probably is a small change there is still a lot of work involved, and it's not simply flipping a true/false flag.
Quote:
If WoW doesn't use an object-oriented tag system for item properties, then they're more retarded than they appear (which really is saying something).
I don't know for certain how they do things, but my best guess based on what I do know (Oracle backend) is that each item is in a database with all of its specific attributes. That item probably has flags for whatever it is intended to do, for instance a Unique identifier. It wouldn't be object oriented, but rather database oriented. Things like BoE, BoP, Unique, Item Level, and the such are all within the database record for that particular item. So it is safe to assume that flipping a flag would be the fix, but see the aforementioned paragraph for reasons it would take so long.
Edited, Mar 13th 2007 12:46pm by kyansaroo