A View From The Road: Fail to the King

[Randvek]

It's hard to understand if you've never messed with programming before.

What happens when these edges are destroyed is that their HP is set to 0. IE, the edges "die" and fall off from the rest of the platform. When the Saronite bombs are used by the rogue they put out aoe Siege damage. This Siege damage hits the edges even though they are dead, effectively sending the HP of the ledges into the negative. Since you obviously can't have something with negative HP the game effectively resets the destroyed edges back to 100% HP, which "ressurects" them and brings them back up to the rest of the platform.

In other words the bombs doing siege damage and pushing the edges into negative HP screws with the game and the only response the game has to that is to put the HP of the edges back at 100%.

I doubt this is the case. If Blizzard has to program every. piece. of. landscape. individually. to not come back after taking damage below 0 health, they are doing it wrong.

Then again, with how many bugs that show up in that game that are just plain weird, maybe they are setting attributes like this individually. That's some serious bloat, though.

 

[Ororon19]

Don't worry John my guild is still stuck on Rotface and Festergut too, well Rotface we finally downed Festergut.

 

[Unholykrumpet]

Now, I don't know anything about the guild, seeing as I quit a while back, but this kind of thing bugs me. If they had gimped themselves and not used the glitch, someone else would have used the glitch and gotten the fame. It's not like they were the only ones using it. Punishing them for utilizing a tool is silly.

 

[sunpop]

Meh I don't see the problem if you can find a way on your own to manipulate the game then you earned the right to use it until blizzard fixes it. It's not there fault that blizzard missed such a big bug although who would have thought a siege device would spawn floors instead of destroy them faster. This doesn't really effect anyone as it doesn't make the game unfair to other players because they killed a boss faster.

I always say if you can find a bug you earned the right to use it, it's the companies fault for not fixing it before release.

 

[Bigeyez]

It's hard to understand if you've never messed with programming before.

What happens when these edges are destroyed is that their HP is set to 0. IE, the edges "die" and fall off from the rest of the platform. When the Saronite bombs are used by the rogue they put out aoe Siege damage. This Siege damage hits the edges even though they are dead, effectively sending the HP of the ledges into the negative. Since you obviously can't have something with negative HP the game effectively resets the destroyed edges back to 100% HP, which "ressurects" them and brings them back up to the rest of the platform.

In other words the bombs doing siege damage and pushing the edges into negative HP screws with the game and the only response the game has to that is to put the HP of the edges back at 100%.

I doubt this is the case. If Blizzard has to program every. piece. of. landscape. individually. to not come back after taking damage below 0 health, they are doing it wrong.

Then again, with how many bugs that show up in that game that are just plain weird, maybe they are setting attributes like this individually. That's some serious bloat, though.

No no no this doesn't happen to every piece of landscape, just specific destructible environments in raids. The same bug occured to the colliseum floor in ToC. These are environments where normally you shouldn't really be seeing any siege damage done at all, so Blizzard designed these 2 raids with destructible environments that are script driven. The Saronite Bombs just fudges that up by allowing payers to deal siege damager when they shouldn't be able too. Honestly it's an oversight by Blizzard. After the ToC bug happened they should have planned ahead for the Lich King fight and caught the same bug before it went live.

Edit: I forgot to mention that apparently since these things were script driven and designed to "die" on cue they have to be coded differently then the destructible environments you find in BGs or in Wintergrasp. All this information comes from Blue posts/MMO Champion by the way.

 

[SilverKyo]

I had read about this a while ago and checked out their guild site in curiosity. For progression runs you have to be available all the time. No ifs ands or buts, or you're out. This is why I quit WoW and later learned to resent it. The ridiculous demand for you to meet your guild's schedule, which can very well be absurd hours, no matter what.

That's only if you join the elitest twat guilds who can go suck one. There are plenty of other people like you (myself included) he have other things to do besides WoW, lives that are more important. that's why you find weekend guilds, people who do the raids at reasonable times and know when it's gone on too late and pick it back up again at another time. you might never get a "world first", as if that stuff actually matters, but you still get to go have fun.

 

[w1n5t0n]

I don't play WoW but these people sound like they're no better than the modders and glitchers in any online game and it ruins the game for everyone else. I see lots of "What's the big deal" comments about Blizzard overreacting, but I'd like to see other online game companies punishing people for exploiting glitches (Javelin or carepackage glitch in MW2 are the most recent examples where people are getting away with glitching)

 

[benbenthegamerman]

How do these kinds of bugs exist? How badly would the programming be that a aoe attack heals the destructable floor(at least, that's how I interpretted it)?
It's people like that that ruined Guild Wars. They keep using cheap tactics and bugs to farm everything so that everyone else's real achievements look worse by comparison. That guild deserved it.

Blizzard doesnt let people test the final bosses of raids on the PTR, but they do allow people like Ensidia to test it, so god only knows how long they have actually known about this bug or not. And yes, having read the statement of their guild leader announcing their suspension, they are total douchebags.

 

[oneplus999]

For progression runs you have to be available all the time. No ifs ands or buts, or you're out. This is why I quit WoW ...The ridiculous demand for you to meet your guild's schedule, which can very well be absurd hours, no matter what.

You are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It's entirely possible to raid ICC on your own schedule. The trick is this: don't join a hardcore guild! Find a casual one and you can still see Arthas, eventually, while dedicating only 4-5 hours a week, and if you can't make it one week, you don't have to come.

One relatively new feature is the ability to extend raid lockouts. This means that even really long instances, like Ulduar or ICC, can be cleared over the course of several weeks instead of having to start fresh every Tuesday. I've used it a few times in Ulduar and it's been a great help in seeing later fights, once we had all the gear we wanted from earlier ones.

Of course, if you attitude is that you must be in a "progression" guild and that if you don't see it first, then its not worth seeing, then you're SOL.

 

[internetzealot1]

Wait a minute. There's another article on the escapist saying that "Blood Legion" was the first guild to bear Arthas. I are confused nao?

 

[Loop Stricken]

Once you have beaten a god/ultimate boss (like the lich king), what is the point in trying to continue a game? Nothing can be stronger or more challenging.

Neltharion disagrees with you.

Spoiler

[HEADING=1]Hi.[/HEADING]

 

[JaredXE]

I thought world first went to Blood Legion?

 

[StriderShinryu]

I thought world first went to Blood Legion?

As I understand it, they beat the easy mode 10 man version of the boss first. Ensidia "beat" the hard mode 25 man version.

 

[snowman6251]

For progression runs you have to be available all the time. No ifs ands or buts, or you're out. This is why I quit WoW ...The ridiculous demand for you to meet your guild's schedule, which can very well be absurd hours, no matter what.

You are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. It's entirely possible to raid ICC on your own schedule. The trick is this: don't join a hardcore guild! Find a casual one and you can still see Arthas, eventually, while dedicating only 4-5 hours a week, and if you can't make it one week, you don't have to come.

One relatively new feature is the ability to extend raid lockouts. This means that even really long instances, like Ulduar or ICC, can be cleared over the course of several weeks instead of having to start fresh every Tuesday. I've used it a few times in Ulduar and it's been a great help in seeing later fights, once we had all the gear we wanted from earlier ones.

Of course, if you attitude is that you must be in a "progression" guild and that if you don't see it first, then its not worth seeing, then you're SOL.

I quit pre-Ulduar so I was unaware of that feature which I must say I am a fan of.

The problem was I could never really find much middle ground in my time playing. It was either "you will be on from 3-12 every weekday and all day weekends and you will like it *****" or "aw dammit. Our healers aren't on today. Sorry guys no raid "

I actually managed to find a decent guild where I got to be pretty active raids and they had a relatively lenient schedule but it blew up over guild drama (I believe it started with us giving some big tier piece to a relatively new resto druid because that was best for the guild then he quit the next day leading to rage). After that I couldn't find any balance. It was either "be the best" or "wanna do another heroic dungeon".

The reason I quit was I did arena matches trying to get really pro for an entire weekend then Sunday came around and I was kinda like "fuck I am bored of this I'm going to go do something else" and I never logged in again.

 

[JugglerPanda]

This article is incredibly misinformed.

There was absolutely no way that Ensidia knew Saronite bombs from a single rogue were doing ANYTHING to change the fight. They knew that there was a bug. That's not very uncommon in a fight that was never released to the public before.

Making Ensidia look like the big bad criminals is really easy to do when you don't bother to state that there was no siege health bar on the Frozen Throne, so it could have easily just been an environmental effect from Ensidia's perspective, instead of bugged siege health bars.

Furthermore, the rogue who committed the "offense", Naihiko, uses Saronite Bombs during every possible encounter. Why? They're free damage. An additional 1k damage off the global cooldown every forty seconds is what makes Engineering the best profession for a rogue. It's not like he decided to throw Saronite Bombs just because, in whatever possible scenario this can occur, Ensidia hypothetically figured out that Saronite Bombs prevented the Frozen Throne from reconstructing. Parses on several other fights (http://ensidia.com/media/upload/saronitebomblogs/wol_rotface.jpg) (http://ensidia.com/media/upload/saronitebomblogs/wol_putricide.jpg) from that raid also indicate that the rogue uses bombs frequently in his rotation, adding to the evidence that Ensidia shouldn't be held accountable for something Blizzard should have forseen and prevented.

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

You know, Funcom handed out hundreds of bans for exploits during the early days of AoC, and they always accompanied such bans with a strict policy that refused to disclose any details on what the actual exploits constituted. Their slim justification was that telling anyone about it would encourage more people to do it. I'm going to have to side with the players on this one: if you don't do your QA testing properly and don't inform people what they can and can't do, you only make yourself look like a facist jerk by handing out bans when they just use every means at their disposal to try and beat the game. Let AoC's fate be a warning.

 

[JaredXE]

You know, Funcom handed out hundreds of bans for exploits during the early days of AoC, and they always accompanied such bans with a strict policy that refused to disclose any details on what the actual exploits constituted. Their slim justification was that telling anyone about it would encourage more people to do it. I'm going to have to side with the players on this one: if you don't do your QA testing properly and don't inform people what they can and can't do, you only make yourself look like a facist jerk by handing out bans when they just use every means at their disposal to try and beat the game. Let AoC's fate be a warning.

*Cough* SOE and Galaxies. 'Nuff said.

 

[Shadowtalon]

This is one of the reasons I've become annoyed with Blizzard as of late. Here's a snippet from an article by David Sirlin at http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20060222/sirlin_01.shtml that pretty much sums up my feelings.

Spoiler

6) The Terms of Service. The very idea of using the terms of service as the de facto way to enforce a certain player-behavior goes against everything I've learned. A game should be a system of rules that allow the player to explore. If the player finds loopholes, then the game developer should fix them. It's never, ever the player's fault: it's the game developer's fault. People who currently make deals with enemy faction (Horde or Alliance ) to trade wins in battleground games are not really at fault. They are playing in a system that forces anyone who wants to be rank 14 to do exactly that. A line in the Terms of Service saying that you shouldn't behave this way changes nothing, and teaches nothing.

Or consider the humorous example of Lord Kazzak. He is an "outdoor raid boss." That means he's a big monster that wanders round the world, and you need 40 people to kill him. You don't get to go into your own instanced dungeon to fight your own personal copy of this guy; there is one wandering around the server and you all compete to kill him so you can get his good loot. When Lord Kazzak was added to the game, Blizzard also added a list of Terms of Service rules that would make your head spin. None of these rules were hard-coded; they were all "squishy" rules added on top of the actual game rules. And now for your reading enjoyment, the Lord Kazzak Official Rules of Engagement (I did not make these up; they are real!):

This policy is an extension of the current in-game harassment policies.

PvE Ruleset.

When a group of players has engaged Lord Kazzak, any other players interfering in the encounter may be given a warning, regardless of faction, as in the examples below:

A group of Alliance characters has legitimately engaged Lord Kazzak and a Horde character engages Lord Kazzak as well (Horde player receives a warning).

A group of Horde characters has legitimately engaged Lord Kazzak and a Horde character engages Lord Kazzak as well (the second Horde player receives a warning).

PvP Ruleset.

When a group of players has engaged Lord Kazzak, any same-faction players interfering in the encounter may be given a warning as in the examples below.

All other possibilities to join the battle are allowed.

A group of Alliance characters has legitimately engaged Lord Kazzak and Alliance character engages Lord Kazzak as well to disrupt this raid without any PvP solution for the Alliance group (the second Alliance player receives warning).

Here's some more things that will get you banned:

?Playing too much," using a rogue/warlock combo to lure bosses too far from their spawn points, fighting on rooftops, entering unfinished areas (why are they accessible at all?), buying gold or items on eBay (eventually the courts will probably overrule them on this), collaborating with the other faction in battlegrounds, "using terrain exploits to your advantage," player-created casinos (that merely use the in-game "/random" command), player-created bingo games, profanity (even though there is an in-game language filter, to say nothing of free speech), posting on forums about whether a guild is full of Blizzard employees, posting on the forums about why you were banned for posting about something seemingly constructive, advertising a gay and lesbian friendly guild that's a safe haven from the endless use of the words ?gay? and ?fag? in the general chat channels, having a name such as "JustKidding," "CmdrTaco," "TheAthiest," or "roflcopter"... and a whole lot more things, too.

These examples go on and on, but the basic idea here is that Blizzard treats the players like little children who need a babysitter. There are mountains of rules in the terms of service that tell you that you shouldn't do things that you totally can do in the game if you want. Why they don't just alter their design and code so you can't do these things is beyond me. But this mentality is drilled into the players to the point that they start believing that it's ok. They start believing that it's not ok to experiment, to try out anything the game allows in a non-threatening environment. Well?that's a dangerous thing. That's the point at which the game stops being "fun" by Raph Koster's definition, and it's also the point at which the game can no longer teach. The power of games is that they empower a player to try all the possibilities that he can think of that the game rules allow, not that they have pages of "rules of conduct" that prevent you from creative thinking.

The problem is, this "exploiting" is a part of human nature, and one of the reasons the human race has become so advanced. You can't tell me you wouldn't feel the least bit strange for deciding to ditch the bombs due to the glitch. If you did.

 

[TechNoFear]

What happens when these edges are destroyed is that their HP is set to 0. IE, the edges "die" and fall off from the rest of the platform. When the Saronite bombs are used by the rogue they put out aoe Siege damage. This Siege damage hits the edges even though they are dead, effectively sending the HP of the ledges into the negative. Since you obviously can't have something with negative HP the game effectively resets the destroyed edges back to 100% HP, which "ressurects" them and brings them back up to the rest of the platform.

In most programming languages a number data type (integer, float) is not linear but more like a loop (there is one difference between the min value and the max value).

Unsigned integers have a value from zero to MAX_INT (defined by the OS environment and in most 32 bit systems/languages ~16 billion).

If you set an unsigned int equal to zero and then subtract one, it will overflow and be equal to MAX_INT.

unsigned int iMin = 0, iMax = MAX_INT;

iMin = iMin - 1; // iMin now equals MAX_INT
iMax = iMax + 1; // iMax now equals zero

You know, Funcom handed out hundreds of bans for exploits during the early days of AoC, and they always accompanied such bans with a strict policy that refused to disclose any details on what the actual exploits constituted. Their slim justification was that telling anyone about it would encourage more people to do it.

Many MMOs have this policy of not disclosing exploits. It is because these exploits point to general failures in the code (and code is always reused if possible).

In this example; the previous raid with the same degrading terrain (that was exploitable through a know means) could have been a clue to finding this exploit (ie "bombs worked on the last raid with this mechanic, wonder if they fixed it in this one. Ohhh...they didn't....[push EASY_WIN button]")

 

[danosaurus]

What happens when these edges are destroyed is that their HP is set to 0. IE, the edges "die" and fall off from the rest of the platform. When the Saronite bombs are used by the rogue they put out aoe Siege damage. This Siege damage hits the edges even though they are dead, effectively sending the HP of the ledges into the negative. Since you obviously can't have something with negative HP the game effectively resets the destroyed edges back to 100% HP, which "ressurects" them and brings them back up to the rest of the platform.

In most programming languages a number data type (integer, float) is not linear but more like a loop (there is one difference between the min value and the max value).

Unsigned integers have a value from zero to MAX_INT (defined by the OS environment and in most 32 bit systems/languages ~16 billion).

If you set an unsigned int equal to zero and then subtract one, it will overflow and be equal to MAX_INT.

unsigned int iMin = 0, iMax = MAX_INT;

iMin = iMin - 1; // iMin now equals MAX_INT
iMax = iMax + 1; // iMax now equals zero

C:/Dos run