Ok, there is a major bug in the system occuring since chunk 2. So far I can only verify it is with level 97 players. I was in a a match against a mage..wearing cloth..using no bsol..mana dumping unlimited it seemed..who stood toe to toe with me and i(as warrior) could never move his health below 90%. The player was (name removed) and after the match he told me that his character is bugged. He can have up to 480k hps as full end mage..less of course if he dumps into intell, and with all points in agility he has 240k as a ranger.

Later I fought a group who had (name removed).also level 97, who i could not seem to damage in a 4 vs 1 match..again..all cloth, no bsol, tanking and dumping.

(Name removed) has admitted his toon is bugged stephen. (Name removed) didnt but she is level 97 too. (Name removed) said he would be happy to tell you about it. Please fix this asap.



Edited by Crickette (12/17/07 03:32 PM)

Thanks for the info. We will look into it for sure!

You guys are the best, and fast to boot.

480k hp?! LOL there is some bug indeed. I want to see a screenshot with someone having 480k hp

We've found the bug, it seems. Boo for bugs. Now, the question is... should we ban folks that take advantage of it? The fix won't be ready until January, sadly.

steve

i can only speak about sexynitro as that is the only lvl 97 i consider my friend. I seen her in world 4 before you even posted stephen in ratty so its a tough call. Sure anyone could lvl a 97 in days and exploit it but those like sexynitro who has spent many, many days lvling and many hours in pvp to ban them.

I disagree with that. She is a fan of pvp has been every since i met her. And i also know you just cant ban some and not the rest, but honestly its up to you.

I will say sexynitro and daydrainger (her fiance) have spent alot of time lvling and also pvping to be banned she cause is lvl 97 and she wouldnt of been in Ratty lvling this morning if she wanted to take full extent to this exploit.

However for those that do, you cant really blame them as no harp or negatively thing about the test team this should of been caught. In pvp you want the upper hand at all costs why you farm resist gear and such, they had an exploit and used it well.

Btw stephen i would like to talk to you or Mark about PvP tourny so tell me whats the best way?? PM either or ya or wait till i catch you online which has been my only shot.

To ban all lvl 97s so they cant exp and get to 100 till next patch seems a bit harsh IMO. Then again next patch isnt for a month and people could lvl to 100 in days so its a fine line.

To ban those that arent that lvl and stop at lvl just for pvp then maybe a ban should be done but this is a HUGE bug, and you all basically telling everyone it wont be fixed for a month. So if you love to pvp and lvl slowly like hdol which can take days you cant take apart of PvP.

Fine line there and i say fire your testing team as this shouldnt be put on the players.

Edited by clamm (12/17/07 02:19 PM)

We won't be banning anyone as this "exploit" is unavoidable. Terrible bug on our part. No special skills or activity is needed to take advantage of it. I'd post the details, but they're really really boring...

steve

well I for one think you all do a masterful job. Even the ones you miss make life exciting. Besides in this case it was missed only affecting a very small insignificant minoirity of players. No big deal in the grand scheme of things.

Clamm,

In support of Mark's statement... let me say this:

This bug affects any player from level 93 to 99. If any player from level 93 to 99 plays PvP, their health will be absurdly large. This is caused by an overflow issue in our code. In fact, it's my fault because it's my code -- and this bug has been in the game since PvP has gone live. If anyone is to be fired, it should be me. I'm pretty sure the game would be worse off with me being fired.

Now, think about how hard this would be to find for our testers. They would have to make a character of each level (1 to 100) and test them in PvP. To be completely accurate, they would have to test each one with a variety of builds. 100 levels of testing with a variety of builds would take FOREVER.

So, don't be so hasty to call for the heads of employees.. it's just not fair.

If any player from level 93 to 99 knowingly and repeatedly takes advantage of this bug then we are within our rights to temporarily ban them from the game. Let's hope it doesn't come to that...

steve

Okay, here's the boring details:

We have a curve table that defines the maximum health allowed for a player at each level of the game.

The way this works is that we lookup the two closest entries for your level and linearly interpolate between them to find what your actual maximum health is.

It turns out that if two values in a curve table have a difference of more than 32767 then the system can go crazy. Our health table has two suspect entries (between 50 and 100). At precisely level 93 the interpolated difference exceeds 32767. At level 100, this is no longer an issue.

So, anyone from level 93 to 99 will have excessive health in PvP. The closer to 99, the worse it gets.

The problem stems from the fact that we can't use floating point math in our game logic. So, we use a fixed point system based on 24 bits for the whole number and 8 bits for the fraction. To keep our curve table system working with small numbers, we scale up the values to interpolate between by 256. This reduces our curve table interpolation range by 8 bits, down to 16 bits for the whole number. So, any value range that exceeds 16 bits will cause problems.

Whoops?

I've just added error detection to the game to catch these issues automatically in the future. Problem solved.

steve

Stephen and MarkT you both need to lighten up a bit. As fire the test team was a joke. I figured you both by now would of known my sense of humor by now. Just like i said to fire crickette, then to make her president.

yea i can confirm that clammie is found of doing jokes on ppl she likes. Er btw clammie stop putting prizes for my head or saying i gotta [censored] posters in my room... or i fear ya

hahaha viper

This is totally relevant to this thread: How programmers react to bugs

I've been working on Interactive Fiction games and I had a bug where you could bypass the beast in a room and the puzzle involved by picking up the beast! LOL!

Anyways, Thanks to all the Dev team and testing team. If you need anyone to remotely help test the game, give me a shout. I'll test it for a cookie.