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EverQuest II plans bug bash and preps Frostfell celebrations
The EverQuest II team isn't going silent during the last month of the year; on the contrary, a new producer letter outlines several events that are scheduled throughout December and into January. The holiday event of Frostfell will go from December 11th through January 8th and promises "new content, rewards, gifts, crafted, and merchant items." The team's also coding in Ethereal armor adornment drops into Altar of Malice instances starting on December 6th and will be making past expansion house items available on loyalty merchants beginning January 6th. While it's not the sexiest item on the list, a December 9th Bug Bash is planned to stamp out pesky issues and implement player feedback, such as creating shared bank space for exile characters.
Vanguard goes on a bug bash with a new update
If you're rubbing your eyes in disbelief, fret not, you're hardly alone. After a sea of silence from the Vanguard team, the struggling MMO is getting its first update in a very long time -- since January 2010, as a matter of fact. This "bug bash" update is precisely what it says: a patch dedicated to fixing a number of troublesome errors in the game. These changes will impact the UI, repeatable events, items, abilities, and quests. While the patch itself would be seen as a routine update in any other game, the fact that Vanguard players are seeing something after all this time is cause to celebrate. A month ago Sony Online Entertainment promised the community that it hadn't forgotten about Vanguard, so hopefully this patch is an indicator that the company plans to make good on its promise to support and expand the game.
Bug Bash testing Xbox Live on the PC
The other day beta testing for the upcoming Xbox Live and Windows PC integration started with a bash ... a Bug Bash. Xboxic got the details and found out those who signed up for the PC version of Xbox Live were invited to test the service with a free "game" download called Bug Bash. Once downloaded, beta testers could start up the "game" and be signed into Xbox Live via their PC. What's most interesting is that all the Xbox Live features were enabled and running including their friends list, text messaging, and even voice chat. Though, all the Xbox Live functionality was only accessible through the Bug Bash game and wasn't a stand alone application, something that'll hopefully be fixed when the service goes live this May. Was anyone bashing bugs the other day and if so (ignoring your NDA) what did you think?[Thanks, Dan Rogers]
Is Bug Bash a game or something else entirely?
Gamingtalkhq stumbled across a person playing Bug Bash while floating around Xbox Live. They were curious to know what game this was and if it is the name of a secret project. The player's gamertag had a Windows symbol in the bottom right corner and informed them he was part of the "G4W Live Beta." So, bug bash, was exactly that -- an attempt to find and bash bugs in the Games for Windows Live Beta.Wikipedia defines bug bash as a time "where all the developers, testers, program managers, usability researchers, designers, documentation folks, and even sometimes marketing people, put aside their regular day-to-day duties and pound on the product to get as many eyes on the product as possible." The term is credited to a Microsoft blog post from 2004. So if you ever run across someone playing "bug bash" they may be Microsoft employees just testing the system. Then again, if you run across someone playing Bug Bash Beta 1337 -- that might be a game.[Thanks Alex]
