Breakfast Topic: The fun and frustration of bugs

Bugs are a fact of life in video games. As game worlds grow bigger and more complicated, there’s ever more places for things to go wrong. Sometimes these things go wrong in hilarious ways, sometimes they go wrong in horrible ways, and sometimes it’s a mix of both.

If you played in vanilla, you’re likely to remember how ships used to occasionally (or sometimes more than occasionally) despawn in transit, dumping you into fatigue water instead of your destination. You’d make a frantic swim for land, but usually you’d end up rezzing at the Spirit Healer anyway. Ugh.

This was frustrating at the time, but then Blizzard added Captain Placeholder. This helpful sea captain would offer to teleport you from dock to dock, avoiding the perils — and repair bills — of ship travel. But when they fixed ships and got rid of Placeholder, we kind of missed him. A bug we missed when it was gone? Weird!

With the Legion alpha full of bugs — some of which Alex talked about this week in the Queue — it seems like a good time to reminisce over our favorites (or least favorites). Personally, I’m not sure anything could beat Captain Placeholder, but let’s give it a try.