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Wi Flag (2002)

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Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#111

Post by jdk »

nevir wrote: post #106
jdk wrote: post #90

Really didn't expect to see AC at the top of HN. Asheron's Call was the first game I worked on and I remember all the times we'd joke with Wi about it and watch monsters beeline for him. It seemed like one of those "Haha sure, player perception" problems and not something that was actually real. IIRC someone did a very cursory look at the code at one point but it never bubbled up as important enough to assign someone…

AC was such a fantastic game and community - props to all you at Turbine that worked on it. So many great memories for me!

Thanks! Glad it holds a special place for you :)

In retrospect, I give a lot of credit to the fact that we were young and dumb and didn't know any better. I've been revisiting a lot of the stories from back then and so many of them end up with us saying, "I dunno, let's see what happens!" and not being dissuaded by "best practices" or even common sense.

Also lots of credit goes to the early internet era when people were a LOT more forgiving of, well, everything.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#112

Post by thomasskis »

thomasskis wrote: post #110

The bugs in this game lead to some of the greatest gameplay of all time. I think the best bug was the movement possibilities during spell casting from breaking animations. It created one of the most complex and amazing PK (PvP) dynamics of any MMO to exist. The complexity of being able to move only so much to still get your cast off, and being able to slightly fast-cast or hold long delay-casts to "outplay" your oppo…

If anyone remembers the days when guys like "Rookie" or the UD's figured this out and mastered it, what a time to be alive! Good ol' AB wars... :)

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#114

Post by Naomarik »

jdk wrote: post #90

Really didn't expect to see AC at the top of HN. Asheron's Call was the first game I worked on and I remember all the times we'd joke with Wi about it and watch monsters beeline for him. It seemed like one of those "Haha sure, player perception" problems and not something that was actually real. IIRC someone did a very cursory look at the code at one point but it never bubbled up as important enough to assign someone…

AC was my first MMORPG, fond memories indeed. I remember the sheer adrenaline I got when "going red" and watching PK drama and battles unfold at the subway, dominated by a build called the "OG mage," slidecasting all over the place casting drain health until finishing with a missile spell. I would cast Blooddrinker 6 on monster weapons and giddily laugh as they sliced through new players starting out. I remember staying up the entire night during a school day when housing was released and being one of the first people on my server to claim one. I even remember being a vassal to a very generous asian guy in his mid twenties living in LA named Kyoto and my countless interactions with him and his brother under a specific tree.

Countless memories I could keep going on and on, but what an experience!

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#115

Post by dylanpyle »

Eduard wrote: post #88
dylanpyle wrote: post #3

I've seen a similar mistake in a rushed "feature flagging"/phased rollout system. User IDs were random UUIDs. Let's say we want to release a feature to ~33% of users; we take the first 2 characters of the UUID, giving us 256 possible buckets, then say that everyone in the first 1/3 of that range gets the feature. So, 00XXX...-55XXX... IDs get it, and 56-FF do not. This works fine. However, if we then release another…

> That first set now has both features, and 56-FF have none. It turns out you can't draw meaningful conclusions when some users get every new feature and some get none at all. 00—1A: have feature flags A and B 1B-55: have feature flag A only 56-FF: have no feature flag So the actual gotcha here is that there is no cohort for "feature flag B only", right? This setup can actually be desirable if feature B depends on fe…

> So the actual gotcha here is that there is no cohort for "feature flag B only", right?

Yep, exactly - by "that first set" I meant the 00-1A group, could have been clearer. Whatever the smallest rollout bucket is, that group is guaranteed to have every single feature.

This was quite a while ago, but I think the actual case we noticed this with was several features released to 50% of the userbase - so every single user either had all or none at once (unintentionally)

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#116

Post by claytongulick »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #43
EarthLaunch wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it so important? I think this made the community and game world more interesting. It's emergent behavior. As a game developer, I hope I can make things complicated enough to have emergent behavior, even if that's just from my bugs.

You know what would have made it even better though? Not having a bug that made your character cursed through no fault of your own without any recourse.

Would it have?

Now a player named Wi is still the subject of conversation on at least two major online discussion forms over 20 years later.

From what I've read, it introduced quirkiness and a bunch of unintentional community involvement, with likely much hilarity.

The goal of playing a game is to have fun.

Dealing with frustration can also be fun, in fact the Dark Souls series recognized this brilliantly.

This bug, while undoubtedly frustrating, sounds like it was also a lot of fun for a lot of folks.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#117

Post by thomasskis »

thomasskis wrote: post #112
thomasskis wrote: post #110

The bugs in this game lead to some of the greatest gameplay of all time. I think the best bug was the movement possibilities during spell casting from breaking animations. It created one of the most complex and amazing PK (PvP) dynamics of any MMO to exist. The complexity of being able to move only so much to still get your cast off, and being able to slightly fast-cast or hold long delay-casts to "outplay" your oppo…

If anyone remembers the days when guys like "Rookie" or the UD's figured this out and mastered it, what a time to be alive! Good ol' AB wars... :)

Wow I had to go on a nostalgia tour and I found a Rookie classic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwpujtVM6R8

Bugs really made this game one of a kind, it's sad it would be so hard to replicate. The way he uses strafing and delay casting on corners to fight odds is amazing.

I still remember my hands shaking when I was in PK fights like this in my youth. The consequences of death made fighting so much more intense in this type of MMO.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#118

Post by hinkley »

perlgeek wrote: post #95
SamBam wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A unit test could have caught this I've always wondered the best way to write tests for "This event should happen x% of the time." Obviously we could re-run the test 100 times and see if it happened close to x%, but not only is that inefficient, how close is "close"? You'll get a bell curve (or similar), and most of the time you'll be close to x but sometimes you'll be legitimately far away from x and your test wil…

This is pretty hard to black-box test. What would have helped in this case: * Test that all players can be selected by the algorithm at all * Test that the totals of the weights is the same as the RNG max range

Scatter plots are good when you can't exhaustively test.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#119

Post by hinkley »

hashkb wrote: post #24
SamBam wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A unit test could have caught this I've always wondered the best way to write tests for "This event should happen x% of the time." Obviously we could re-run the test 100 times and see if it happened close to x%, but not only is that inefficient, how close is "close"? You'll get a bell curve (or similar), and most of the time you'll be close to x but sometimes you'll be legitimately far away from x and your test wil…

You can mock the RNG. You don’t need to test/prove it’s random, you need to test your code which is not random.

unit tests are notoriously bad about testing n>2. I just ran into a problem with sorting recently that was caused by buggy comparators, but it didn't bubble up to the tests until the runtime switched to a different sort implementation. Most of the tests were doing n=2 so it was not visible under the old runtime version but was under the new one. This has been broken in production for months if not years. If the test had used n=5 I'm pretty sure the old tests would fail as well.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#120

Post by picowatt »

Naomarik wrote: post #114
jdk wrote: post #90

Really didn't expect to see AC at the top of HN. Asheron's Call was the first game I worked on and I remember all the times we'd joke with Wi about it and watch monsters beeline for him. It seemed like one of those "Haha sure, player perception" problems and not something that was actually real. IIRC someone did a very cursory look at the code at one point but it never bubbled up as important enough to assign someone…

AC was my first MMORPG, fond memories indeed. I remember the sheer adrenaline I got when "going red" and watching PK drama and battles unfold at the subway, dominated by a build called the "OG mage," slidecasting all over the place casting drain health until finishing with a missile spell. I would cast Blooddrinker 6 on monster weapons and giddily laugh as they sliced through new players starting out. I remember stay…

Some of my favorite memories as a kid were playing Asheron's Call. Incredible game.
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