4 ms·

I think it's fascinating that this issue persisted for over a week with the developers seemingly unable to fix it – or not wanting to use "really hacky code" (q

by elaus 3y ago

I think it's fascinating that this issue persisted for over a week with the developers seemingly unable to fix it – or not wanting to use "really hacky code" (quote from the article). Even with distributed systems, I would (naively) think you could just add a bit of code to the server that resets the database field containing the "infection"? In the end they seemingly saw no other way than to roll back the whole game to the state before the "outbreak". This must have been an immense annoyance for players, to lose one week of progress.

danjoredd 3y ago
I agree. Couldn't they have just disabled the boss and the effect? It seems that just disabling those two things, making it so that you can't exit the boss arena with corrupted blood, then enabling them again would be a simple solution
aftbit 3y ago
Yeah I was also surprised that it took them this long to deal with it. Why not change the effect so that it was not contagious, or so that it did not do any damage? Or perhaps lean into the healers and modify a common healing ability to cleanse the effect and grant a buff that prevents reinfection for a period of time? Or make it so that a character could only be infected with the effect once they had entered the boss area? I clearly do not understand how these debuffs function in the codebase. I wonder why they felt the need to do a full reset instead of just nerfing the debuff.
- manquer 3y ago
  It is more likely they didn’t want to deal with player complaints and noise on lost progress or items because of the player deaths . It was probably easier to reset from a backup than any real difficulty to apply a fix . Same reasons we implement STONITH or just discard a game to restart from a save or use file from backup if it deviated a lot from where we want it to be, rather than fix the corruption so to speak even when possible .
input_sh 3y ago
I was there for this. Patches were fairly rare, as every patch required a rather long and annoying downtime. The player base was also split between the official server and a bunch of private ones (nobody I knew played on the official ones), so they couldn't really do anything server-side (I mean they could, but that wouldn't affect all of the players). There wasn't much of a progress during that week, you needed to be really high up in levels to be able to survive for even a minute after infection. IIRC max level was 70 at the time, and you needed to be in the upper half of the upper half to even be able to react to the infection. In-game deaths was more of an annoyance than a deal-breaker. You'd spawn back as a ghost at the nearest safe town and then have to walk back to your corpse to revive, so basically for the majority of the players that week I'd just die, walk back to the corpse, respawn, and die again far away after interacting with an NPC, as my line of thinking was that the further I am from bigger cities, the odds of an NPC being infected decreased.
- feoren 3y ago
  > The player base was also split between the official server and a bunch of private ones Weird, I played WoW for a long time and I was never even aware of private servers nor anyone who played on them. I'm almost certain it was against the ToS. When you say the player base was "split", how much of a split are you talking? I can't imagine it was more than 1% of players playing on private servers.
- Arrath 3y ago
  > The player base was also split between the official server and a bunch of private ones Really? I didn't think private servers came into their own until several years and expansions later. Color me surprised! During my time in vanilla I never heard many whispers of private servers. > IIRC max level was 70 at the time, and you needed to be in the upper half of the upper half to even be able to react to the infection. Still 60, to be pedantic. ZG was added in a patch about halfway through the lifecycle of Vanilla, prior to the release of the first expansion which upped the level cap. That said, it was still a death sentence.

by elaus 3y ago

danjoredd 3y ago

I agree. Couldn't they have just disabled the boss and the effect? It seems that just disabling those two things, making it so that you can't exit the boss arena with corrupted blood, then enabling them again would be a simple solution

aftbit 3y ago

Yeah I was also surprised that it took them this long to deal with it. Why not change the effect so that it was not contagious, or so that it did not do any damage? Or perhaps lean into the healers and modify a common healing ability to cleanse the effect and grant a buff that prevents reinfection for a period of time? Or make it so that a character could only be infected with the effect once they had entered the boss area? I clearly do not understand how these debuffs function in the codebase. I wonder why they felt the need to do a full reset instead of just nerfing the debuff.

manquer 3y ago
It is more likely they didn’t want to deal with player complaints and noise on lost progress or items because of the player deaths . It was probably easier to reset from a backup than any real difficulty to apply a fix . Same reasons we implement STONITH or just discard a game to restart from a save or use file from backup if it deviated a lot from where we want it to be, rather than fix the corruption so to speak even when possible .

input_sh 3y ago

I was there for this. Patches were fairly rare, as every patch required a rather long and annoying downtime. The player base was also split between the official server and a bunch of private ones (nobody I knew played on the official ones), so they couldn't really do anything server-side (I mean they could, but that wouldn't affect all of the players). There wasn't much of a progress during that week, you needed to be really high up in levels to be able to survive for even a minute after infection. IIRC max level was 70 at the time, and you needed to be in the upper half of the upper half to even be able to react to the infection. In-game deaths was more of an annoyance than a deal-breaker. You'd spawn back as a ghost at the nearest safe town and then have to walk back to your corpse to revive, so basically for the majority of the players that week I'd just die, walk back to the corpse, respawn, and die again far away after interacting with an NPC, as my line of thinking was that the further I am from bigger cities, the odds of an NPC being infected decreased.

feoren 3y ago
> The player base was also split between the official server and a bunch of private ones Weird, I played WoW for a long time and I was never even aware of private servers nor anyone who played on them. I'm almost certain it was against the ToS. When you say the player base was "split", how much of a split are you talking? I can't imagine it was more than 1% of players playing on private servers.
Arrath 3y ago
> The player base was also split between the official server and a bunch of private ones Really? I didn't think private servers came into their own until several years and expansions later. Color me surprised! During my time in vanilla I never heard many whispers of private servers. > IIRC max level was 70 at the time, and you needed to be in the upper half of the upper half to even be able to react to the infection. Still 60, to be pedantic. ZG was added in a patch about halfway through the lifecycle of Vanilla, prior to the release of the first expansion which upped the level cap. That said, it was still a death sentence.