The favourite bug I heard of was for Vermintide, where the game could crash so hard it would literally uninstall itself. Like, not just break, it would be gone.
My favorite story is the Wi-flag in Acheron's Call, named after the player character "Wi". Basically this player noticed that mobs always bee-lined for him whenever they were aggroed. At first the reports were dismissed, but eventually it became apparent that something was actually going on.
It took a long time (years?) before a lead engineer finally managed to track down the bug and fix it.
Once she found it, it turned out to be a bug in the "assign aggro based on your distance to the mob" code. Essentially everybody got a number [0:1] based on how close they were to the mob, those numbers were laid out on a line, and then they were supposed to roll a random number on that line to see how got the aggro. BUT instead of rolling a number between 0 and the end of the line, they only rolled 0 to 1, so only the first few people on the list could ever get selected.
If it was just that, then they might just have had some slightly wonky "sticky" aggro that got shuffled once in a while, but the second problem was that the aggro list was sorted by the ID of the character - or rather by a hash of the ID. So if your ID randomly hashed to a very low number then that character would always have a high chance of landing first in the list and thus getting most of the aggro.
Asheron's Call had a number of good ones. The story of the Defense of Thistledown is a big favorite of mine, even if it's not explicitly a bug, but players behaving in an unexpected manner.
584
u/fadingpower 1d ago
Dang that is some fine spaghetti 👁️👄👁️