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Wi Flag (2002)

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Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#101

Post by voakbasda »

hinkley wrote: post #92
kypro wrote: post #82

What am I missing here? Unless all the devs were really bad at maths (unlikely if they're game devs) then this seems like a really easy bug to find all things considered? I thought maybe it was going to be some weird DB glitch or something far upstream from the algorithm selecting which player to attack, but it was literally the logic of the very algorithm you would first look at if you were aware of such an issue. T…

I'm missing something here and it has nothing to do with math. Why couldn't they reproduce the problem in testing? For what was it, years?

Likely because they tested with characters that were not affected. Sometimes reproducing bugs takes good luck more than skill.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#102

Post by johnnyo »

berkle4455 wrote: post #100
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…

Sorry, who is Wi?

"Wi" was An early player of the game that was the a victim of the bug. His character's name was Wi, and the bug was named after him.

I remember people theorizing it was due to a short name (only 2 characters), and so would create longer usernames to try and avoid the "curse"

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#104

Post by dmurray »

karaterobot wrote: post #8

So it's not really a flag, it's that the algorithm that determines who the monsters attacks had a bug. The bug made it so that when there were a group of players to choose from, the mob would always pick players whose (hashed) identifier was higher on the list. Since the hash of your ID doesn't change, those players would always get picked on first. Like if your name is Aaron A. Aardvark, you're always coming first o…

But it wouldn't always pick them, it would pick them with a higher probability that also depended on the players' relative distances to the monster.

So it's a stochastic bug where any given occurrence can be explained as "you just have confirmation bias, you don't notice all the times Zygy Zebra gets attacked" or "you must have been closer than Zygy even though you thought you were a bit further away". Especially if the game has a first-player perspective which makes it harder to estimate whether you or another player is closer.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#105

Post by tm-guimaraes »

GuB-42 wrote: post #76

It reminds me of the "charm tables" of some Monster Hunter games. Charms are equipment with randomly selected skills. When you create a character, you are assigned a random "table" and all charms you may get are selected from that table. There are 17 of them, 12 of them are normal with some slightly better suited to some play styles but it is a really minor thing, the remaining 5 are called "cursed tables", they are…

Yes, Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate had the permanent table. While 4 was for game session.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#106

Post by nevir »

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!

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#107

Post by hinkley »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #2

tl;dr: players get attacked based on monster targeting RNG that's supposed to take an interval [0,num_players], assign players to subintervals that are shorter or longer based on a bunch of factors, and then roll a random number somewhere in that full interval. Whoever's subinterval the number ends in, they get targetted. Instead, the code assigned subintervals and then rolled a number between 0 and 1, instead of 0 a…

> Writing tests is annoying, especially in a codebase that keeps changing

Only if you don't have a functional core.

One of the psychology tricks I've learned about unit testing is just how bad sunk cost fallacy affects some people (all the time, and most people some of the time). I've witnessed people pairing for two days to fix a couple of nasty integration tests. That's 3 person-days of work lost on a couple of tests. How many release cycles would it take for that test to pay for itself versus manual testing?

You want the tests at the bottom of your pyramid to be so simple that people think of them as disposable. They should not feel guilty deleting one test and writing a replacement if the requirements change. Elaborate mocks or poorly organized suites can take that away. Which is hard to explain to people who don't see the problem with their tests.

You also want the sides of that pyramid to be pretty shallow, especially if you keep changing your design.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#108

Post by [deleted] »

anyfoo wrote: post #44

Around 15 years ago, when casual little games on Facebook were still a thing (actually when Facebook itself was still a thing), I used to play Yahtzee on the site while watching TV shows or whatever. It was one of the most popular games on there. For me it was something to fidget with (there was no money involved or anything, just a personal high score), so I played it a lot. I felt more and more that dice values of…

[deleted]

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#109

Post by xmonkee »

yiuywieyrw wrote: post #93
xmonkee wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh, thanks for this. Will live in my head from now. Basically, in this situation, use (user_id, feature_name) for hashing, not just the user_id.

A better way is to assign some internal salt to the feature at creation time and use that, that way you are not dependent on something external that user (the creator of the feature flag) could change. I bear the scars of this design mistake from when I worked for a company that provided feature flagging. It was not my initial mistake, but I drew the short straw trying to work around it.

Solid tip, again.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#110

Post by thomasskis »

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 opponents created so much depth to duels it was incredible.

Even after all these years I can still remember the Arc cast I would do, it was the keyboard combo: Hold Left -> Hold Z -> X -> tap/hold up to control the radius Then Hold Right -> Hold C -> X -> tap up to reverse the arc to return to where you initiated the cast so the spell could go off.

Man I miss this game, I hope someone creates a wonderfully buggy remake someday!

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