I tested cellphone games for a studio [...]
At one point I was testing the “online” version of a Breakout/Arkanoid clone. The only thing setting this game apart from the “offline” version released the year before was an online leaderboard. Everything else about the game was exactly the same. Same brick layouts, same powerups, same everything.
Obviously, it was important that the leaderboard be working correctly.
The problem was, it wasn’t. Like most online leaderboards, it was a one-score-per-player affair. But it wasn’t showing my BEST score, just my most recent one. [...]
Worse, the ONLY way to see the leaderboard was to submit a score. There was a “Leaderboard” option on the main menu, but to contact the server it had to submit a score of 0, so if you ever chose this option, that would be your new “high score”. [...] You couldn’t even scroll up to see if anyone beat the score you remembered getting, because to cut down on data transmission you only received a small portion of the list immediately above and below you.
I sent the bug, but we couldn’t fix it because the bug existed in the “master version” that had already been released; our studio wasn’t ALLOWED to fix bugs that existed in master versions. I proposed that we could fix the bug on the server side: still submit scores, but the server checks if it’s actually higher before overwriting. For whatever reason, this wasn’t possible either.
So we shipped a game which had one feature differentiating it from an already-released game on the same platform, and that feature didn’t work.
Quelle