After several failed hotfixes, Blizzard ended the pandemic by performing a hard reset, and a later patch prevented companions from contracting Corrupted Blood entirely.
Note to the future: next pandemic, try a hard reset.
Seriously though, it’s wild they couldn’t hotfix it.
It’s wild that they couldn’t change the spread property of the debuff to be deactivated if you weren’t in the boss chamber. That should not be a hard fix…
That’s how the spells work in wow. The BUFF would get removed if you left the room, but the issue was that pets would get it in the room and resummoned in cities, and since the buff removal thing happened while the pet was desummoned the removal didn’t apply.
Doing a check each time the buff spreads is inefficient use of server.
Also, changing anything about the spell requires servers to be shut down, and they didn’t want that for each fix attempt until they saw no other way and had roll back the servers.
you didn’t understand. I know how the bug worked and was spread, using unsummoned pets and all. What I said is that it’s wild to me that they didn’t change the debuff to be unable to be spread at all for like a day. Like, change how the debuff spread works to temporarily disable it.
Doing a check each time the buff spreads is inefficient use of server.
WOW is server authoritative, meaning that who gets the debuff is decide by the server each time, doing a location check shouldn’t be that inneficient, the character object should have a cheap way to get the location it is in, including the name of the area, cheaply. IDK how the game is coded obviously, but that check should NOT be something expensive.
changing anything about the spell requires servers to be shut down
Are you sure they had no way to do hotfixes without server shutdowns? That’s been a thing for a while now.
They could have changed the effect of the spell from being spread to just being blank, but during that time people would kill the now super nerfed boss easily, basically exploiting the fact that it is disabled.
They probably thought that “this will pass, no need to risk players exploiting just because some low levels die a few times”, and therefore didn’t do that.
There is no easy way to add that location check on to the spell itself, so it would have to be a custom c++ code written for it, which requires way more publishing approval than changing the spell (sql). This would also require downtime for each server to apply the core code changes, and maintenence etc, which they used to have one day a week, and for planned things.
Once they had that code in place though they made pets immune, but too many players had lost a lot of gold in repairs etc, and the rest of the game lacked players due to fear, that rolling back was the easiest way to earn back approval of players.
Spell fixes required a server reset, yes. That was still a thing until Legion or something. Definitely a thing in wotlk client.
For the uninitiated/lazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident
Note to the future: next pandemic, try a hard reset.
Seriously though, it’s wild they couldn’t hotfix it.
It’s wild that they couldn’t change the spread property of the debuff to be deactivated if you weren’t in the boss chamber. That should not be a hard fix…
That’s how the spells work in wow. The BUFF would get removed if you left the room, but the issue was that pets would get it in the room and resummoned in cities, and since the buff removal thing happened while the pet was desummoned the removal didn’t apply.
Doing a check each time the buff spreads is inefficient use of server.
Also, changing anything about the spell requires servers to be shut down, and they didn’t want that for each fix attempt until they saw no other way and had roll back the servers.
you didn’t understand. I know how the bug worked and was spread, using unsummoned pets and all. What I said is that it’s wild to me that they didn’t change the debuff to be unable to be spread at all for like a day. Like, change how the debuff spread works to temporarily disable it.
WOW is server authoritative, meaning that who gets the debuff is decide by the server each time, doing a location check shouldn’t be that inneficient, the character object should have a cheap way to get the location it is in, including the name of the area, cheaply. IDK how the game is coded obviously, but that check should NOT be something expensive.
Are you sure they had no way to do hotfixes without server shutdowns? That’s been a thing for a while now.
They could have changed the effect of the spell from being spread to just being blank, but during that time people would kill the now super nerfed boss easily, basically exploiting the fact that it is disabled.
They probably thought that “this will pass, no need to risk players exploiting just because some low levels die a few times”, and therefore didn’t do that.
There is no easy way to add that location check on to the spell itself, so it would have to be a custom c++ code written for it, which requires way more publishing approval than changing the spell (sql). This would also require downtime for each server to apply the core code changes, and maintenence etc, which they used to have one day a week, and for planned things.
Once they had that code in place though they made pets immune, but too many players had lost a lot of gold in repairs etc, and the rest of the game lacked players due to fear, that rolling back was the easiest way to earn back approval of players.
Spell fixes required a server reset, yes. That was still a thing until Legion or something. Definitely a thing in wotlk client.
Huh, TIL. Neat.
Who else remembers learning this from Cracked articles (which they read at work)?
Man i really miss Cracked. It used to be so good.
Good fucking riddance! They made me believe if I don’t poop standing up, I will get hemorroids…for years.
I still credit my sense of humor to Cracked.
And who else didn’t need an article because they were there when it happened?
https://viruscomix.com/page599.html
you may or may not recognize the artist
Also, if you like videos: https://youtu.be/EB3jOD2wjUc
That was highly entertaining, thank you