You keep failing to understand the vast number of possible combinations. There isn’t a single storage device on earth that could store that amount of data, even with server farms.
I already made a simple example using only 5 items slots and it’s already a much bigger number than can be handled. The reality of the actual number is magnitudes higher. It’s astronomical.
If you can’t grasp the complexity of combinations and chaotic systems and why they’re impossible to predict, I can’t make you see it any better.
What you want is impossible. You can (and should) set up a lot of test cases to try to catch these things before releasing them.
But you can never actually test anything other than a very very very very very very small percentage of the possibilities. You just try to set up the ones that seem most likely to break and hope for the best.
But it will inevitably break somewhere else. It’s impossible to avoid that.
Why do you think this has happened in every ARPG to date? Blizzard has thousands of people working on their games and yet exploits still happen regularly. Like they do in any similar game. Are all developers in the world incompetent?
Wha?..
Then the game wouldn’t function since it also automatically works on the interactions.
It’s a program, it does the stuff on the fly and offloads it into the memory while simply checking the values.
If nothing in the world can handle the sheer amount of combinations then obviously the game itself wouldn’t be able to exist since it falls into the limitations of being on a storage device… so obviously EHG has done the impossible!
What are you even talking about? That’s a really ‘out there’ argument.
Did you know that for example PoE had (or still has) a system implemented that every single hit on an enemy checks for every… single… unique in the game and hence seeing if their effects should be added to that hit?
It was mentioned during a dev talk about ‘developing for the future in mind’ and how it caused issues for them with the increasing unique item count.
This also included DoT ticks like poison which led to crashes with poison as the game basically exploded with data, having to check for 10k+ times a second for all of those uniques and hence simply breaking.
And you wanna tell me that a debug program which only has to check for specific things one after one and go through the notions once to make sure everything works fine isn’t a ever possible thing?
That’s… fairly wild to even think.
Exploits don’t usually include direct interactions between synergies but from multiple synergies getting to a stage where something goes ‘off’. Like for example the aforementioned poison related crash in PoE. Why did it happen? Because PoE got to the point where attack speed became so prevalent and high that the stacks actively started to break their servers with some builds… that’s the stuff you can’t test for reliably, that’s something which nonetheless could’ve been forethought but is more of a fun happening and not something developers generally get flak for… it’s stuff that’s so ‘out there’ that yeah… people are fine with it, just fix it and it’s fine.
In comparison we have LE’s node which works 10 times the magnitude it’s supposed to be. So… with a proper testing environment that wouldn’t have happened. Not to mention that it’s not a isolated case but a repeating thing. It’s fundamental level quality control. Making sure all nodes to exactly what they should do, tags being properly applied to skills… all of that is 100% basic crap which shouldn’t happen.
It’s a sign of a bad testing protocol or shoddy work, no way around it. Why even defend that? Their task is to do better in that regard simply.
I’m not even talking about things like for example a skill synergizing with another skill that has a secondary synergy which gets converted through some means and hence affected by a tertiary synergy which can get out of control. Even that can be handled with a testing environment that has enough program-support behind it… but I don’t even expect that.
But stuff like a tag-checking, node checking and things like that? Or even simple things like fixing the terminology used inside the game and adhering to that properly? That’s basic stuff… there’s simply no excuse for that.
Are you being serious or just trying to deflect the argument? The game doesn’t need to calculate every single combination. Just the combination you’re currently wearing.
Why would the game need to calculate the interaction of your build with Exsanguinous when you’re not using it? It just adds whatever you’re using.
That argument was made for “you generally make a database with the specific values and interactions”. Which requires that you save all combinations.
Again, PoE Scourge would beg to differ. The immortal build consisted of a simple interaction between 2 items: the new currency and a forgotten unique.
This I agree with. Both the PV bug and the ballista bug shouldn’t have happened. But in a system this big, stuff gets through the cracks eventually. But those should have been caught before releasing them.
And that’s because they don’t rely on interactions at all. It’s a single test case. And single test cases should exist for everything in the game. Node should give X. Does it give X? Good, otherwise fix it.
But this only works for single items (items meaning passive nodes, skill nodes, affixes, etc). If you simply want to test all possible interactions between 2 items alone, the number of combinations is already exponential.
For context: you create tests for every single item in game. Let’s say 1k because it’s an easy number to work with, even though the value is much higher (you have to consider each passive node, each skill node, each affix). The total number of ways to combine 1k items in groups of 2 is 499,500. And that is simply groups of 2 and we’re already lowballing the total.
If we increase it to groups of 5 we’re already in the trillions (US) or billions (rest of the world).
Yeah, and so does the testing environment. It offloads any item not currently under scrutiny, it offloads any value not currently in the interaction.
Why the heck would I load all the data at once in the same moment? It’s not necessary and does nothing.
What? No? Obviously not!
You save the items and make a framework to check for value combinations, then run it.
Which madman would ever do what you said there? You save top and low values at best to have them readily available outside of the testing environment to make more informed decisions on future implementations and possible changes.
I couldn’t find it anywhere by the way. Which build are you exactly talking about? I’ve really grown curious by now.
Yeah, and they’re already making regular mistakes there, so there’s definitely a lot of things to improve on clearly.
I do. Even when we have 100e combinations available then a program can piece… by piece… by piece do those. It just needs longer.
We got 3-4 months between each league, we can imagine at least 1 week of pure ‘polish’ before a week releases I would say. Should give the program enough time to at least check the first few layers of interactions and hence reduce the scale of bugs by a massive magnitude.
You don’t need to make a perfect product, nobody cares about bugs/exploits and so on existing… people definitely do though when those become prevalent. And whole LE is not a buggy pile of crap like for example… the Creation Engine of Bethesda and the games they make with it… it’s definitely there with having a good chunk of avoidable ones.
Even then, running all the possible combinations would take longer than you can imagine.
Another variation fighting ubers:
It made it so they had to hotfix negative resistances to have a cap.
Section EDIT: mind you, this was way before the current power creep made immortal builds the norm, rather than an exception. And this was a “don’t actually need to do anything or use any skill to be immortal”.
Yes, I already agreed on this.
It needs a reaaaaaaaaally long time. Computers aren’t magical. They need time to go through things.
I know what I’m talking about because we also make quality testing in our company. And a surprisingly small amount of tests can take a surprisingly large amount of time to run through.
This I agree with. But to be fair, the problem with 1.0 was imbalance, not exploits. Those were a smaller number.
I think it’s safe to say that they do have automated testing for some of the most common and expectable things. It’s just that new broken things will always happen where they least expect it.
PV bug? Should have been caught before releasing. HH ward abuse? Should have been caught by the community testing. Other stuff? Harder to catch in time. It happens in every game.
Yes, exactly. And the harder stuff isn’t as much of an issue.
See it, understand it, fix it.
No biggy.
And with a proper testing environment that’s expanded (like PoE did over the years, theirs is mental by now, they got a really really good one) it becomes less and less likely to have issues. Learning from experience and improving simply.
EHG is still catching up by trying to handle the stuff which hasn’t been addressed for at times more then a year now though, especially as you mentioned in terms of balancing.
Ahhh… a Doryani’s Prototype build. Ok, now I understand, sure.
Well, it was nerfed to reduce the maximum damage you gain, not the resistances, defense-wise it’s fairly high up definitely but not ‘unkillable’. It was nerfed because of the massive offensive bonus.
Nowadays 90% chaos res + ele conversion to chaos is fairly common, those builds are quite strong, and that’s after all capped.
But yeah, with the avian twins talisman + divine flesh it’s a massive defensive bonus, can agree, but that has never been removed to date, especially since the lightning damage conversion doesn’t include things like Baran’s runes… which hence are the probably deadliest effect in the game for such a character
Scourge only added a bit more negative res to it, nothing major, Lake of Kalandra also had such a mechanic possible. The limitation now has a max of 200% negative res which limits the damage potential for it since it was one-shotting bosses before in extreme setups.
It was actually because of not being able to die. I don’t think I can find the actual video of the build used, but there was one where someone showcased facetanking Sirus and Ubers without doing anything at all. Not moving, not using any skill. Just sitting there and not dying.
It was also possible to get high amounts of damage, but the videos I posted didn’t have insane damage, just their eHP barely moved.
Hm, no? At least not at the time. You could stack a little negative res, but get nowhere near -200%. And they hotfixed it so that now you can’t go below -60%. Or did at the time.
Well, obviously. This was before the huge power creep of the last 2 years. It was even before the passive tree rework and the spell suppression addition.
