I’m pretty sure they have different teams working on the bug fixes and new content. Just because they’re working on new content doesn’t mean they’re not working on bug fixes.
Actually, that’s a good point. If this is the case then therein lies a serious problem. If one team works on something that adds to the stuff into the game, and the bug fix team aren’t working with them in unison, these abundant bug problems are bound to happen because the two teams are so out of touch with each other.
No; it is the case, and is pretty much standard practice. The content team would have been working on producing new content for post launch releases before the game was launched.
For example, to release a patch like the November one with large content updates and a large amount of bug fixes and class balancing isn’t just the work of a single team. It’s the work of a whole cohesive unit, made up of lots of smaller teams. (Dungeon team, the entire new zone team, the script team, the QA team, the class balance team, the bug fixing team and so on and so forth).
All new content and bug fixes will have been put through QA, thus tested several times before release.
What you cannot account for is the sheer volume of different circumstances that can arrive and not be tested for. Players and indeed software customers will always do something totally unexpected. You can only test for so many different eventualities, in the end it becomes a balancing act of risk vs. reward.
You can run a dungeon (for example) ten times, start to finish and not encounter a single bug. Given a dungeon takes 45mins-1h + thats 10 hours to test it (per person). That is almost 2 ‘working days’ your QA team has lost testing a very small part of the content.
In the live patch however a player could run around jumping at walls for as many days as (s)he likes until he finds a spot he can fit through to trivialise an entire encounter. Multiply that player by a few thousand and bugs and exploits start to arise.
On top of that, an MMO is a constantly changing beast, that requires constant work, and more importantly; updates. Whilst some players would happily wait for content updates at the expense of more man hours working on fixing and testing, the reality is, people will leave once they feel they have “completed” a game.
An MMO that must survive from box sales and consistent cash shop purchases in the long run, must continually offer the player things to do and spend money on, hence; updates.