Many glitches don't appear in testing because it requires a very specific action to enable them. I've seen games where on the release if you moved in a specific way you could enter the wall and begin firing on your opponents without fear of dying much to the dismay of the other players. Nearly all cheats are simple glitches that are exploited. When the studios first receive word of a glitch they have to examine the data and replicate the glitch to determine exactly what to fix. Then they have to find the problem in the code and correct it. Once they have a patch made they not only have to ensure that glitch is fixed but make sure they didn't create new ones. The reasons for this is simple math. 50 QA guys playing the game versus hundreds of thousands of consumers playing the game. Which do you think is more likely to locate and exploit a glitch? The biggest problem is most consumers will exploit the glitch to their advantage instead of reporting it to be fixed. Thus you end up with rampant cheating in many games.

Glitches and broken games are two different things. The most recent "broken" game I purchased was Socom Confrontation. The condition they released that game in was by far the worst I have ever seen. Server problems, people disappearing, dead bodies shooting at you and I could go on. Took them a year after the original date of release to get the game working like it should have when it was released.

I just played Call of Duty: Black Ops last night online. I was stalking a guy from behind. Suddenly I was shot and killed. The kill cam showed he had been facing me for some time and was waiting for the perfect shot. Often times what can be perceived as a game problem is actually a network problem. I've been shot by corpses before, its nearly always a lag thing. I'm not saying your problems are lag issues though. The people disappearing can be hardware. I've had NPC's completely vanish from my screen except for whatever object they were carrying (even during cut scenes). I turn off my system for an hour or two and turn it back on to replay the scene and the person is there. My system had gotten too hot. And sometimes the issue is coding. I've beta tested games in private betas before and saw very problems only to see that exact version get released with the problems fixed and find out there were a ton more problems that were never found. Unfortunately, the software companies cannot afford to hire enough testers and QA to ensure the software is glitch or problem free. The only option they would have is to provide thousands of copies for beta testing. The issue with that is that they would then lose sales because they'd be providing the game for free to people who would have bought it. The biggest problem is that the consumers have no patience. We hear about a game and we demand it be released right away. If a game gets delayed to fix a problem, we get pissed and they immediately lose sales. If we could be patient enough to wait for a solid version of the game to be released the software companies would have time to do more thorough testing. Instead we want it now and we pay the price of bugs, glitches, and problems. Then we sit and whine about how they released it "broken" instead of waiting til the game was fixed to release. Its a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation.

Black Ops isn't that bad when it comes to bugs or glitches but I expect little bugs and glitches here and there in any game. Believe me if you would've play socom confrontation on release you would understand lol. That game was broke when they released it. Just horrible. As for COD they need to fix that party system ASAP!