Why are long-standing bugs not being addressed in every patch? Some bugs haven't been fixed for over a year.

Todd thinks that it depends on the bug. He uses the HUD bug as an example, where you look at certain bright backgrounds and then can't see your HUD, saying that it's something that just hadn't been prioritised because they know that they're re-doing the HUD and adjusting it. They've had initial talks regarding how to fix it, and for Todd it's a Quality of Life experience that will need to get fixed, ideally sooner rather than later. However, with Staggered Development, if they're building features that are intended to release within a certain time-frame, and their time building the features is half of that time, then that leaves less time to fix things, whereas if they spend three quarters of that time they have instead of half, then they have more time with which to fix the bugs and work on the Quality of Life. As such, Erin, Todd, and QA go through and look at the bugs, and pick out bugs that need to be prioritised (and this can involve working with PR too) which are typically related to the gameplay experience aspect, regardless of whether the bug in question is trivial, minor, or moderate bug, instead of only focusing on critical bugs and blockers. So this means that they've changed their pipeline to get these bugs fixed throughout the quarter as well, so Players will start seeing Quality of Life issues being slowly resolved. Brian adds that they're moving forward so fast and focused on the future that it's really important for them to stop and recognise that there are some bugs that have been there for a while that need to be dealt with. Todd continues by saying that with the Quality of Life stuff, when they take those bugs into account they know roughly when working on something that will cover the bug, such as with their UI reworks, so if they have an MFD bug but the ship UI is being reworked, they'll assess whether it's going to be fixed based off of that work, or whether they can live with it for a little while. Simply put, they don't want to waste time by fixing a bug that's going to be dealt with anyway by something like a rework, and therefore they want to be as efficient as possible. Typically they'll look at a bug and judge whether it's going to get resolved in the next 6 weeks or in the next 3 months, and if so then they won't fix it, otherwise they will, and that's a juggling act they go through every quarter. Jared says that that's a big part of why the new Staggered Development initiative is taking place, which is a desire to have more time to spend addressing bugs and Quality of Life issues, so if things go as they hope they will, it should lead to an overall improved experience with many long-standing bugs being addressed. Todd adds that he's never seen a Game Dev get it right the first time.