Patch 3.0.8: Bugs und Bugfixes

Nachdem Patch 3.0.8 live gegangen ist geht es nun wirklich heiß her.

Direkt in der Nacht von Mittwoch auf Donnerstag wurde der Misery-Bug, der die Shadow-Priester zum Top-Damage Dealer gemacht hat, anscheinend gehotfixed, denn bereits am Donnerstag-Abend hatte sich der Schaden der Shadows wieder normalisiert. Auch wenn es hierzu kein offizielles Blue-Posting gab.

Ebenso wurde der Cooldown vom Warlock Spell „Ritual der Beschwörung“ wieder aufgehoben, auch wenn der neue Portstein noch immer nicht den Weg in Spiel gefunden hat. Zumindest können die Hexenmeister nun wieder wie gewohnt einzeln die Leute (ohne 2 Minuten Cooldown) porten.

Die Schlacht um Tausend Winter wurde auch wieder aktiviert, auch wenn sich die Lags nicht merklich verbessert haben. Hier kann ich aber nur für den Server Blackrock sprechen, keine Ahnung wie es auf anderen Servern aussieht. Hier hat das Deaktivieren und der nun neu implementierte Hotfix kaum Besserung gebracht.

We have found a solution for instability issues that were occurring in Wintergrasp. In order for this fix to go out to all realms, we will be issuing rolling restarts during off peak hours. Once the rolling restarts have concluded we will continue to monitor Wintergrasp and realm stability closely.

Eine weitere Baustelle ist das neue Arena-Matchmaking System, für das es erstmals eine Erklärung gab, warum es überhaupt eingebaut werden sollte:

The team/personal ratings and the hidden ratings are related to each other. Your team/personal ratings essentially drift toward your hidden rating, so if you deliberately lower your hidden rating and remake a team, your team/personal ratings simply won’t get up to high ratings until your hidden rating does. His exploit as proposed simply doesn’t work because his assumptions about the relationship between the visible and hidden rating are incorrect.

– Yes, a group of good players could still deliberately stomp nubs by intentionally losing lots of games to lower their hidden rating. A rating system won’t stop that, but it still solves most cases of high rated players beating up on lower rated players. First, many of the cases where high rated players were being matched against low rated players wasn’t because the high rated players were deliberately trying to stomp people, it was often accidental as high rated players had normal/natural reasons to change teams on occasion (helping friends, trying out new players, new comps, new strategies, etc). Second, it takes far more effort to deliberately deflate your rating down to low levels than it did to simply create a new team.

– Something that many of you have mentioned is that the rating adjustments are now not always „zero sum“. However, a rating system doesn’t need to be zero sum in order to prevent inflation. The new system uses a bayesian prior distribution in order to prevent inflation, which in simpler terms means there’s math that enforces that players won’t have ratings outside of some range (when working without bugs, of course). For the population size we have for arenas, this means we should see ratings range from around 600 to 2400 (again, assuming no bugs).

– There were two bugs with the system that we’re in the process of fixing before we reactivate arenas (should be soon) that were causing serious problems (and distorting everyone’s perspective on the system). One was in the functionality that seeded everyone’s hidden rating based on their pre-3.0.8 patch performance, causing players to „drift“ toward wildly inaccurate ratings, the other being in the way that personal ratings were adjusted.

Effects of rating changes in the middle of the season
I think you say that with the assumption that if it had been the start of the season, the bugs wouldn’t have been there (not a good assumption in this case imo). The new system (when working) doesn’t significantly change how hard it is to get the gear or who you have to beat to get the title/mount/etc (that’s still entirely relative). It also tends to be mid/late in the season when the problems with the old system were the most exposed (with highly rated players starting new teams, helping friends, etc).

„Hidden“ rating
It is not like personal rating. The hidden rating uses a different approach to determining player ratings. It’s more complex, but it tends to figure out a player’s skill level far more quickly/accurately than an Elo system does.

However, changing player’s actual team/personal ratings extremely rapidly isn’t exactly what we want. So, we’re using an approach where we use the hidden rating (internally we refer to it as the GDF rating since it uses gaussian density filtering) for matchmaking since it creates better matchups than Elo and we use it as an anchor to figure out where the team/personal ratings should be moving toward.

Rollback
Yes, I’m implying that we hope to roll back team/personal ratings back to what they were right before 3.0.8 went live.

Da das ganze aber nicht so funktioniert hat wie es sollte, führte es zu einer temporären Abschaltung der Arenen, sowie einem Rating-Rollback zum Stand prä 3.0.8. Eine Notfallwartung in den frühen Morgenstunden soll dann das Problem beheben:

Earlier this week the Arenas were temporarily disabled while we investigated rating calculation discrepancies. After thorough research, we have identified and created a solution to the issue, and we will be bringing the Arenas back online following off hours maintenance with the fix in place. Please be aware that because the rating issues were extensive, we have decided to reset Arena team and personal ratings to last week’s status. In addition, items and achievements which were gained illegitimately with incorrect ratings will be removed, and the spent arena points refunded. We thank you for your patience while we worked through these issues related to the Arenas.

Als lustig kann man den “Bug” einstufen, der sich in die offiziellen Foren eingeschlichen hat. Denn hier präsentiert uns Blizz seit neustem Goldwerbung:

http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/news/2009/january/goldsellersforums.jpg

Mir war schon immer klar, das Blizz mit den Goldverkäufern gemeinsame Sache macht. 😉

Recently, there was a temporary error with our forum advertisements that caused a gold-selling ad to be displayed. At this time, we have resolved this error. Our stance, which is fully explained in the statement below, remains firmly against the buying or selling of gold, and we may take action against accounts that are involved in these activities.

Last but not least gibt es eine Entschuldigung von Ghostcrawler für all die lustigen Bugs mit Patch 3.0.8:

Yes, bugs are bugs. It is not necessarily the most efficient way to get them fixed to mention them in the role forums, though I note them when I see them. We actually have a pipeline in place in the bug forum to make sure those issues get to the proper people. I don’t mind you bringing up bugs in here though, especially when they color perceptions or have huge effects on class balance.

As for why we can’t always fix bugs in a timely fashion, it’s just the nature of software development. Sometimes it is technically difficult. Sometimes getting the bug to reproduce consistently is a challenge so we can’t isolate what is causing it. Sometimes the change is so risky that it is better to live with the bug for the time being. Sometimes we need new tech to fix the bug and that time might even come at the expense of a more important feature. Several of the bugs we introduced in 3.0.8 were things that were working perfectly on our servers or in some cases even on the PTR. What happened to them in between that and live deployment? (I actually know the answer in most cases, but I’m trying to illustrate what happens in developing a game as large and complex as WoW.)

I don’t mean to suggest that we don’t test our content. We do and we have an oustanding QA department. Almost all software has bugs, especially complex applications. I am perhaps more forthcoming about the state of the game than you are used to, which may make it appear that we have more problems than we used to. But I don’t honestly think that is the case. I remember how insane patch day has always been, especially a patch of this magnitude.

[…]This was a massive patch in terms of number of changes. It fixed several hundred bugs of all sorts. They are not all reported in the patch notes or the patch notes would be pretty unreadable.

Ulduar is a large patch from a gigabyte perspective, but that is mostly art. It will have many class changes too of course.