New game expansion kills Windows
Mikey 7 comments
Playing Eve Online? You may want to hold back on the new expansion pack. CCP Games recently released a new expansion pack which, amazingly, actually deletes the boot.ini file from your hard drive.
Many people have complained they can now no longer start their computers, and some people have even had to re-install Windows to get things back up and running.
One eagle eyed user noted there is also a boot.ini file contained within the Eve Online game directory, and that is probably the file the installer was meant to delete.
In gaming terms, this is what is known as a 'complete balls-up' by the dev team. They have frantically deployed some instructions to 'fix' the problem, and the important thing is to not restart your PC.
What ever happened to testing?
Is it worth the subscription? I play X3.
CT
Friday 7th December 2007 | 11:35 AMDefiantly, it is without a doubt the best PvP action I've seen. I've played EQ, SWG, DAoC, all of the BF series, and a few others. The BF games are close, but for different reasons/gameplay.
Rodney
Friday 7th December 2007 | 12:18 PMThat's a really surprising and unacceptable bug. While you could repair the damage at the recovery console, most home users aren't going to know about that.
This is one of the key problems with software developers these days (and this is the industry I work in) - very few of them understand much about operating systems, so the OS is a nuisance to work around, rather than something to work with. This is why there's an absolute plethora of insecure bad Windows applications out there. It's easier to make everything run as administrator than to think about what you're doing and what the flow on effects may be.
For some game installer to even have the capacity, during installation, to delete a file flagged as a hidden, read-only and system file beggars belief. The fact that boot.ini resides in the root directory makes it all the more amazing. What the hell did their script do? first it would have had to unflag the file from read only and system, then delete it.. That's no accident. That's either gross stupidity, utter negligence or malicious code.
andrew
Friday 7th December 2007 | 04:23 PMdo tests get done first to make sure all is well?..like an editor should first read what goes into a newspaper, are games done the same?
Absolutely software and patches are tested before deployment, which makes this glaring oversight such a rare oddity. I guess the only thing they never did was restart their PC after testing :-)
CT
Saturday 8th December 2007 | 03:38 AMIn the case of this game, that expansion had been on a "test only" server for about 2 months, for live beta testing and balancing. However, that only tested the game content, not the installer package.
Like I said though, it was a pretty small window that someone could have picked up this bug and it was fixed pretty quickly.
CT
Friday 7th December 2007 | 10:24 AMHeh, I actually play this game. Seems like only a limited number of people were affected, neither me nor any of my friends were, and only for a window of a couple hours before it was caught.
That said its a pretty rookie mistake for a programmer but the content of the expansion was so bad ass it was well worth it, even if I would have lost my boot.ini file for a bit.