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Wi Flag (2002)

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Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#81

Post by kevingadd »

nyanpasu64 wrote: post #67
iamdbtoo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My theory for why people think they are being "shadowbanned" or otherwise targeted by a social media company is often because of bugs like this. They are weird and almost like gaslighting in the way you experience them and people who don't understand how these bugs can exist assume sinister motives.

Shadowbanning is a very real phenomenon; my current Reddit account was shadowbanned twice because I had created and posted memes which got unusually high upvotes for a new account, and the algorithm thought I was a bot reposting images to farm karma for future spamming. And from time to time I see HN users whose posts are flagged by default. I'm less sure if/how shadowbanning occurs on Twitter.

The problem is that while shadowbanning is a real thing, there are lots of bugs that also appear to be shadowbans and might just be a momentary glitch or an unintended interaction between systems. In Twitter's case, there are multiple different penalties that can apply to account and people refer to them all interchangeably as a "shadowban". And some people claim to be shadowbanned when as far as anyone can tell there's no function in Twitter's system to do it, there's just something weird happening in the infrastructure or algorithms (or it's all imaginary, who can say)

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#82

Post by kypro »

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.

This was a fun read though. Finding and fixing bugs like this is some of the most satisfying work we do imo, and no one outside of tech understands =)

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#83

Post by rcme »

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…

The RNG was supposed to generate a random number in [0, sum of weights] not [0, num_players].

It's also possible to write a test for this where the behavior in the test accurately tests the wrong behavior. The error is pretty subtle. There was even a “bug” in your summary of the bug ;)

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#84

Post by mabbo »

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…

It's game code that was written in the late 90s. Unit tests aren't very likely. And a quick glance at the code probably looked completely sane.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#85

Post by marcosdumay »

phreeza wrote: post #38
tmoertel wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One easy way to avoid this problem is to give each feature its own independent space of “dice rolls” by hashing the user ids with feature-specific constants before interpreting them as dice rolls: feature1_enabled = hash(user_id + "-feature1") / HASH_MAX

If you suspect some flag effects interact with each other (e.g. one flag increases button size by 10%, and the other decreases it by 10%) you can go one step further and define feature groups and hash by user-id + group-id and then assign non overlapping ranges to the flags.

Or you can cut and redistribute the non-performing changes, increase the distribution of the well-performing ones, and let evolution take care of disentangle correlated behavior.

But if need that kind of analysis for usability A/B testing, you most be doing something very wrong on a previous step.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#86

Post by mistermann »

kevingadd wrote: post #81
nyanpasu64 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shadowbanning is a very real phenomenon; my current Reddit account was shadowbanned twice because I had created and posted memes which got unusually high upvotes for a new account, and the algorithm thought I was a bot reposting images to farm karma for future spamming. And from time to time I see HN users whose posts are flagged by default. I'm less sure if/how shadowbanning occurs on Twitter.

The problem is that while shadowbanning is a real thing, there are lots of bugs that also appear to be shadowbans and might just be a momentary glitch or an unintended interaction between systems. In Twitter's case, there are multiple different penalties that can apply to account and people refer to them all interchangeably as a "shadowban". And some people claim to be shadowbanned when as far as anyone can tell ther…

Or it is actually real and it is those who are imagining it to be only imagined who are mistaken. Almost everything we do is composed of substantial imagination, the whole system runs on it.

What I find interesting is the substantial curiosity and effort people will put towards solving questions in video games, but when asked to solve problems in the game of life that we are embedded in, people often seem to have opposite instincts.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#87

Post by Thaxll »

bob1029 wrote: post #51
loganc2342 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MMOs are just so expensive to develop now that innovation is almost dead. You either make a WoW-like or you die (and many times you die anyway). They really don’t make MMOs like they used to.

> MMOs are just so expensive to develop now that innovation is almost dead. I look at this differently. I think the extreme cost of an MMO should force innovation. Take the constraints for what they are and run with them. Accepting that you can't do it the "traditional" way is the first step to figuring out a better way. There is nothing that says a high-quality WoW killer absolutely must cost 10 figures to produce.

It does though, MMO are very complicated to do and there is a lot of tech to build by specialized people. The content is an other issue. You won't build anythinng close to wow bellow 100M.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#88

Post by Eduard »

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 feature A.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#89

Post by kvark »

anyfoo wrote: post #69
phailhaus wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You stopped playing because they listened to you and fixed the bug for everyone?

After I (happily!) did their work for them, a simple "thank you", or even an acknowledgment through a closed ticket, would have entirely sufficed to make my day.

Or maybe the bug was closed as a duplicate of one they were already aware of? Still impolite of them, of course, but we shouldn’t assume the worst.

Re: Wi Flag (2002)

#90

Post by jdk »

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 to to actually investigate.

Wi came to one of the player gatherings with little printed out cards and would hand them to people and say, "You've been Wi flagged!"

The fondest of memories.

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