How would something like this break? Generally something can’t come from nothing no? I would assume some thing else touched a code bit? Genuine curious
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Welcome to software, shit just breaks sometimes.
I think 1.1 (I think, maybe 1.0 or 0.9) re-introduced old bugs that had been fixed some time ago.
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I guess software defies the laws of physics and Newton’s first law. Explains also why bad devs don’t get fired like rest of world who do a bad job lmao.
We found a rip in the universe
I can give a non-game dev answer.
I was taking a class on Java Python and over the 5-week course we built upon each previous week to develop a functional employee management system.
In week 4 or 5, we added some functionalities and in the process, I added a line of code that would loop the menu until the user returned to the main menu. On the surface this worked flawlessly. Except… Once you got back to the main menu, the software stopped accepting any inputs. I didn’t touch the main menu code, and it took me over an hour of scouring the code to find out that while my functionality for returning to the main menu worked. It didn’t close the loop, causing everything else to display properly, but stop accepting inputs.
Basically, it’s very possible that something somewhere could affect something somewhere else either by reference or, as I call them, code goblins. They’re related to the dryer goblins that steal socks. You know when you put a pair of socks into the wash and only one of them comes back out of the dryer.
Edit: I could have probably added more detail and say that it took me an hour and the code was only ~300-400 lines, not something with potentially hundreds of thousands of lines (no idea how much code makes up a game like LE) and much of that code likely spread across multiple files that cross reference each other in order to work. and I need to correct that this was Python, not Java.
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Sometimes, yes. I remember a few years ago where I was getting an error for no explicit reason I could think of, but when I restarted the computer (not just Visual Studio) it started working properly.
I’ve also had a situation where a game was crashing randomly and eventually I figured out that it was a USB multiport adapter that was causing it to crash when it was plugged in one of the USB ports but it stopped crashing when I connected it to another. Why? Who knows. There probably was a reason for it, but for all intents and purposes it was unknowable.
As for how a thing like this could happen, it’s not that hard to figure out. You just have to change something that influences, for example, the way things proc. Or changing how melee works. Or how charges work. All peripheral stuff that for some reason breaks this specific interaction.
EDIT: I’ll add another way you could completely break this without touching either one, but I’ll add the disclaimer that almost certainly this isn’t the reason in this case:
Let’s say we have a list of uniques and a list of skills. When you have both Unique[5] and Skill[9], it does the thing. Now you add a new unique in position 1. Unique[5] is now Unique[6], so the code that checks for the interaction doesn’t work. You didn’t change anything in either the unique or the skill, but it doesn’t proc anymore.
Like I said, this is almost certainly NOT how it works, but it’s a simple example of breaking things with changing them.
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No, it’s because they’re sloppy.
You’re assuming LE is “big enough.” It’s 22 GB, DotA 2 is double that which doesn’t even have many interactions. If any, and usually it’s the art and models which occupy those parts, not the actual codding of skill interactivity.
To some extent yes. The more interconnection it has will result in more probable bugs.
There are many examples of games with complex interactions having little to no bugs. They weren’t sloppy.
I wouldn’t call Harbingers a “new feature.” or “content.” Truly. Not for a new cycle. It’s just dozen more bosses slapped behind the same mono grind.
And this is the most important part. What I’ll say next.
Why on earth would you release a cycle game with plethora of bugs with things that could’ve been found out by a proper testing QA team and taken care of before you start adding new content that will multiply the number of bugs exponentially? Even better, why not have the majority of your team on fixing the bugs and only a handful making concept art on the new content, writing the scripts, flashing out the details so once the main team takes over their work will flow naturally and quickly when everything is laid out and they know exactly what to do?
If they don’t break the cycle, this will remain LE’s future. Bugs, constantly. Fix 10% of old bugs, ignore another 10% because the bugged thing will be reworked anyway, and be plagued by phantom leftover code forever, and then when the outrage gets so high, go completely silent while you have every single person on your team scrambling to appease the players. Once the new content is added, now you have 80% more bugs.
Again, and again, and again.
Especially now at a time where players lose their temper with gaming studios over a color of the character, it won’t be long before they turn on EHG and say enough is enough, and then, then the game will truly die.
You assume file size is a directly related to how many lines of code there are, yet immediately follow that by talking about images and videos (which are largely what makes a game file size bloated.)
You’re also ignoring that games aren’t simply 1 file with everything running from that. Hell, Pokémon Red had 10+ “folders” each with differing files with varying lines of code that referenced and cross referenced each other and that game is… What… Not even 1 MB? (I checked, it was 373 kb)
Game size means nothing in regards to complexity of the code base
Edit: I misread your post, and understand that you’re saying that the code itself is not a large part of the file size. My bad. Either way, the point of my post being that file size is not related to the complexity of how the code is written is still relevant.
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Quantum mechanics (virtual particles) & relativity (mass increase as you approach the speed of light, though that’s not exactly "something from nothing) say hi.
Also quantum mechanics can be a bit iffy on Newton’s first law (entanglement, spin/quantum states).
Yeah, it’s not my cup of tea either, but some people do seem to like pinnacle bosses. I tend to get bored around early empowered monos though.
Size doesn’t matter. You have idle clicker games that have way more systems interconnecting that AAA games, even though one isn’t even 1GB and the other is 40GB+.
I don’t really know of any that had only a few bugs on release. Especially when they’re AAA ones. Maybe you can give some examples of a game that had less than 100 bugs on launch?
Along with a new faction. And a bunch of new items.
Because it would take a really long time to fix all the bugs (and all the bugs the new fixes introduce) and games, especially in live service seasonal models, can’t afford to not offer anything new for a long time.
Also because most bugs are minor irritants. Most players would rather have new content than have a minor bug fixed.
Also because even if you fixed all the bugs (which is impossible, no software ever managed not have a single bug in the history of computing), new ones would come with new content, so they then would have to stop again to fix those.
So, like any game ever that keeps releasing new content? There isn’t a single major patch in PoE that doesn’t have bugfixes. Or in D4. Or in CS2. Or in LoL.
It’s easier for games that are published and done. Like BG3. They released the game, it had literally THOUSANDS of bugs, but since the game was already in a finished state, they could then focus everything on fixing them.
And even then you have dozens of examples of games that had bugs that were never ever fixed. Ever. Bugs still around to this day.
The point is: It’s not that every single programmer in the whole world is sloppy. It’s that programming is an extremely complex task and mistakes will always happen.
This is true even if you only want to create a simple calculator app.
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There you go. The problem, and yet, the player numbers are screaming a different outcome. So much from the added content.
laughs in a bug that let’s you attack a wall with a deku stick and load into the final cutscene of Ocarina of Time.
Of course, that game can’t be patched as a cartridge game, and using Bethesda just isn’t fair. So a real example is Shara Ishvalda fight in MHW:IB, the monsters eyes track the player’s camera instead of the character who has aggro on it (like every other monster). You could argue this is intentional, but I personally don’t think it is, they just left it because the fans love it due to how creepy it is.
That’s correlation, not causation. You’re assuming a single point is 100% responsible for the effect, when it clearly is a sum of a lot of things. In fact, the player numbers in LE are much more likely caused by a lack of more diverse endgame content than because of the bugs that are being slowly fixed.
Which means that your tactic of simply wasting probably a year fixing bugs would actually be worse than just adding more endgame activities, even if they have bugs.
Which, when you think about it, is what happened to PoE. It also had a lot of bugs that lasted years (so much so that you even had players with macros to exploit those bugs to dupe items for a long time), and yet they kept adding more endgame activities while slowly fixing bugs and it worked out well for them.
Seasonal games always have a sharp dropoff after a month or 2. So if you don’t release new things and keep the players engaged with endgame mechanics, you’ll be left with 1k players for a long time, which will effectively kill the game, since servers are expensive to maintain.
So it’s all a balance between fixing the most important bugs (gamebreaking ones like stash tab freezing, for example) and still adding new stuff.
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If it takes you a year to focus on all the bugs then it’s a lost cause already.
Also to reply on your previous post further.
Yes, there is a patch fix in poe, and guess what it does? It fixes most of the bugs. Players aren’t roaming the forums constantly or as much as here complaining about the bugs or content.
AAA games that released with less than 100 bugs? Horizon. God of War. Detroit. LE is not AAA. It has less of a burden. Less expectations.
Look at the engagement in Grim Dawn on the bug reporting thread, and most are now from the mods. There’s no engagement on the bug reporting here. No thank you reply. You don’t even know if the bug you reported is actually a real bug or whether it was put on the to-do list.
You think player numbers are as they are because of the content? They’d rather have new content than be constantly irked by minor stuff? Not my experience. I’d rather have a complete working game where most interactions are in working order and wait 6-9 months for a fully immersive new content than dozen bosses that are locked behind the thing I literally spent hundreds of hours in.
Also, you as well are speculating, correlating, just as much a I am. Only you’re excusing bad practices.
NMS tried it. Cyberpunk tried it. 1.0 ff14 tried it. They all paid the price for it. LE is paying the price for it as well, and the remaining playerbase are suffering because of their desperate decisions.
Why do you think they cut the cycle and did this reset? Because of the gold dupe? Or they didn’t want to launch near the same time as POE2? xD hilarious. People aren’t drinking oil.
Also, All those polls, and not 1 had a question regarding the bugs.
Again, priorities and bad practices.
And as a direct confirmation of what I said earlier, check todays patch, and look at how many old bugs got fixed. Or are they all new bugs with the new content they added.
It fixes most bugs now. PoE had persistent bugs for years when it started. It was a long time until they caught up on the backlog and only had to worry about fixing new ones.
Searching the word “Fixed” returns 403 results.
492 results.
Doesn’t have a consolidated page like this one, but I’ve counted over 50 bugs, including a patch that fixed a bug the previous one introduced. And also a bug that they’re aware of in March 22 that was never fixed.
Not to mention the need for an experimental build release to fix several crashes.
This one is harder to quantify because they have 4 patches where the first one says:
Many bug fixes and improvements
Occasional blocker fixes
Various sequence bug fixes
Unlockable content bug fixes
Flowchart and relationship gauge bug fixes
Minor visual improvements
Text and localization bug fixes for various languages
And the rest just say “Many bug fixes and improvements”. So I’d assume it’s safe to say it’s also upwards of 100.
So of all those, God of War is maybe (but not likely) the only one that had less than 100 bugs.
This I agree with.
Yes. If you had 0 bugs but didn’t introduce any new mechanics, you’d have only 5-10k people playing, at best. The vast vast majority of players these days play games for 1-2 months, at most.
In ARPGs especially, players will constantly cycle between different games, including PoE, D4 (yes, D4 as well), Torchlight, Hero Siege, etc.
No, you just have to look at the trends. You have games with a low amount of bugs by this time, like PoE, and yet the vast majority of players will only play for 1-2 months. Then the content isn’t fresh anymore, so they leave while they wait for new content.
Also, I’m not excusing bad practices. There are some bugs which aren’t really excusable. But as a programmer I know that bugs are an everyday part of every software ever.
If it was because of PoE2 release they would have done the same thing in 1.1, which launched 2 weeks before PoE league started (actually, cycle 2 was delayed and still released even though PoE league would start soon).
The reason they did the event was because they were going to delay cycle 3 in order to reorganize their roadmap priorities. The reason they did the reset is because of the gold dupe. Different things with different reasons.
Except for the first one, you mean.
Also, why would they make polls about bugs? Bugs have to be fixed. The only thing that might have been voted is their priority and no one outside of EHG has enough of a global view to properly assess that.
You mean what I said (several times)? That they work on adding new content while at the same time fixing all the bugs? That they have a list of bugs that they constantly work on fixing?
Has anyone actually said that there are no old bugs? I don’t know where you’re getting that statement from.
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It’s not safe to assume. That’s just speculation. Many could be 50, 60, 70, it doesn’t necessarily mean over 100. Many is not a euphemism for over 100.
That’s certainly one way to look at it. Smh.
- “Work on adding new content.”
Result: harbingers. - “Never ending cycle of bugs while old irksome ones remain”
Literally what I said earlier.
But some people apparently are sniffing too much cope.
Also if you need your eyes opened at what the majority of people want, just go to steam, select recent reviews, and filter by negative.
First 10 results, none about content.
It’s all about optimization, crashes, bugs. bugs, bugs, bugs, and issues not being addressed.
If you have 4 separate patches that all say “Many bug fixes and improvements” and the first patch also has another 5 lines each of which say “fixes”, I’d say it’s pretty fair to assume that the overall of all 4 patches is over 100.
And it should be noted that these are AAA games that have a lot of money to dump into their teams, including huge testing teams, and for content that is released and done, meaning it doesn’t have anything added to it.
Because the amount of bugs increases with expansions, DLCs and other stuff.
So if “static” (let’s call it that, as opposed to continually adding content) AAA games all still have hundreds of bugs, why would you expect a live service game (AAA or not) to not have them.
And let’s not even go into AAA seasonal games like D4 or CS2. CS2 alone has had thousands of bugs over the years. Some of them have never been fixed.
And yet, CS2 is the most popular online game ever.
Also literally what I said. Bugs get put into a priority list and are fixed over time. You just have to look at every patch notes thread to see a bunch of people happy that bug X has been fixed and a bunch of people complaining that bug Y or Z hasn’t. And each player complains about a different one.
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I think they did go into a sort-of bugfixing mode. With the announcement that moved 1.2 to Q1 2025 and promises to focus on “key improvements”.
I could hazard a suggestion. And no, it’s not where you’re thinking of. 2 words, first begins with D, second begins with a K.
And Nemesises, the new faction & a pinnacle boss. And new shrines (not really content but they would have taken time to code and test) & the loot goblins lizards.
We can but hope, though I suspect it was more about retasking their people onto the studf that was slated for 1.3.
I mean, PoE has released an expansion that was just boxes, iirc. And a bunch of the early ones were just area mods + a bunch of items. So… 
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