Breakfast Topic: Buggy encounters
by Eliah Hecht 
Apr 12th 2007 at 8:00AM
Recently I was doing a half-guild/half-PuG Arcatraz run, trying to get my Sha'tar rep up for heroic Mechanar (free Badges of Justice FTW). It was all going very smoothly, up until the last encounter. If you haven't been, the Skyriss fight is more of an event than a straight-out fight. Four creatures spawn before Skyriss finally does, one at a time, although one of them is an awesome gnome who helps you with mad DPS, and you get drink breaks in between so it's not that bad. Anyway, we finally get to Skyriss himself. It goes pretty well for a while, although our Mage got double-mind flayed and thereby died. Eventually the tank (Druid) went down, and then the Hunter. At this point it's just me (Priest) and the Rogue left, and I've been mind-controlled. Rogue does a very impressive job staying alive, gets Skyriss down to 2% before dying, and then...the encounter reset, because I was still mind-controlled -- there were no "friendly" players left.The trigger mob to start the event over eventually respawned, we fought the first mini-boss again, but then the gnome, who spawns second, refused to spawn! This halted our progress through the encounter and, after opening a ticket and waiting for a while with no response, we had to call it. It was pretty frustrating. A similar thing happened to me at the chess event in Karazhan last weekend. The guy who was controlling our king disconnected, so we lost; however, you can usually restart again after a short break. Not this time. We waited around for a while, walked in and out of the room and even the instance; no joy. Frustrating again. What have been the most annoying bugged moments for you?
Filed under: Bugs, Breakfast Topics, Instances, Features, Bosses
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Falgorn Apr 12th 2007 8:24AM
Similar bug occured on Big Bad Wolf for my guild where we had to wait for GM support to restart the event. Was quite frustrating to say the least but we did eventually manage to get it sorted.
There is no real way I suppose for GM's to prioritise these problems and I suspect a bug has to occur enough times before it gets fixed. I had considered though that if a ticket is submitted, all group / raid members should be able to /sign it somehow and the more people on a ticket the quicker it gets dealt with.
Kirby1612 Apr 12th 2007 8:34AM
Well, try getting everyone ready to go to Arc, walking inside and finding it empty O_o
We reset the place, and nothing. We dispanded and reformed our group, but it was weird none the less.
Twinny Apr 12th 2007 8:36AM
hmmm, We had a member go AFK in a karazhan group, we waited and waited then eventually kicked him from the group.
Expecting the Ingame trigger to hearth him, off we went and summoned his replacement came back up and as the last player to enter i got locked out.
On closer inspection there was the damn NELF hunter in question standing in shadowmeld, STILL in the instance. Paged a GM and waited, then waited and waited a bit more. After 45 mins the player eventually disconnected and it allowed me in.
The Gm did page me eventually but it was too late at that stage, useless git had no interest in reporting the problem and just avoided the issue completely. /rude
Jenet Apr 12th 2007 9:17AM
@1. We had the wizard of oz event bug on us, and the GM basically said GFY. I hate that half of them seem helpful, the other half can't be bothered to assist.
Collateraldmg Apr 12th 2007 8:57AM
My guild had problems in Kara as well. We we're slacking on Aran so he didn't go down until he sheeped us (dots ftw!). B/c of this unorthodox death the instance failed to recognize that he had died. His door wouldn't open and his trash wouldn't de-spawn. Long story short, after a night of waiting, 2 soft-resets, at least 3 GMs, we re-cleared to Aran only to find him still in his chamber. We decided to screw it, cleared through Chess, killed nightbane, and called it a week.
Brahmana Apr 12th 2007 9:32AM
The Battle of the Crimson Watch in shadowmoon is a neat concept; outdoor battle of semi-epic proportions. You turn in a book you get off an elite and then accept the next phase. However, my group didn't get prompted to accept the next phase, even though we were all turned in. Then, after helping another group finish up, we tried it again, three of us not abandoning the quest we had in our logs because IT WASN'T MARKED FAILED. The only requisite is that you defeat Illidian's forces 0/1. The two members that did accept a fresh quest in time got a completion. The rest of us got squat.
I just about screamed. If you know the area then you know its a frustrating place to get to with non-flying members and then to have it bug out and screw three of us out of a nice ring and a very unique tabard is the poo icing on the crap cake.
Cremean Apr 12th 2007 9:43AM
@3 If you you had killed a boss it won't kick him out because he's saved to the instance.
It really ticks me off how much bug testing we are doing for Blizzard.
Matt Apr 12th 2007 9:55AM
On the subject of Arcatraz, my group got to the 4th spawn, the Star Wars kid dragonthing, and we got the one that does the blastwave knockback. When he was about dead, he knocked the tank up onto a ledge, evadebugged to 60% health. We had a lot of DPS, so we kept hitting him. He did it again, this time up to 30%. By that point, the boss was about to spawn, and we couldn't do anything about it. That room is WAY too small to be having huge knockback attacks.
Michael Apr 12th 2007 10:25AM
So we are doing OZ, and we get all the way to the Crone on our 1st try ever and the last two people die. We try again and when we get to only Roar and Tinhead they suddenly decide to despawn. We go back in and try again except Strawman won't actvate, and Roar/Tinhead won't even appear,
GM said it was a known bug. We had to port out to SW and go back because the doors were shut...
HiWay Apr 12th 2007 9:56AM
Wow a lot of you people bitch a lot. You expect the game to be perfect when there are contstant changes and enhancements being implimented. Welcome to the software industry; I salute them for how quickly they issue hot fixes.
Meg Apr 12th 2007 10:01AM
I personally have had trouble with the dragonrider boss in Heroic Ramparts. Forgive me that I can't remember his name. The past few times that I have been in there we have started the fight, wiped, SS rezed to find that the dragon is gone.....it's really getting annoying...
daniel Apr 12th 2007 10:04AM
@9: what other industry gets away with letting their customers debug their products for them? auto industry, healthcare, construction?
Brahmana Apr 12th 2007 10:07AM
@9 One, its a thread about buggy encounters. Amazingly enough, we're all talking about buggy encounters. And two, if a bug occurs to even 50% of the groups that run it, then that's something that maybe should've been caught in testing.
Blizz is quick on their feet for the most part, yes. It's just amazing how the same goofy bugs crop up in different forms over and over again.
robodex Apr 12th 2007 10:12AM
Once we had an issue on the first time we ever did Big Bad Wolf; a brilliant paladin in our group told us we didn't need to go in until the fight started so we just kinda hung out outside. Needless to say, the door closed, locking everyone out. There needs to be a way to reset the encounter when this happens =\
Luckily, we had an amazing mage who is almost a professional at getting places (the two of us have been to a lot of the "hidden" places in WoW,) and he was able to climb up to the top of the organ and get to the stage so he could start the event.
Pain Train Apr 12th 2007 10:29AM
Yeah, people that play this game do bitch a lot, but it's because we have lots of reasons to do so.
This game went through a long beta test phase. Now I wasn't in the beta, but given the number of bugs I personally have encountered, it seems as if they sat around and /danced during the entire thing(exaggeration).
First off, endgame item quality is so messed up it's not even funny. When you go into a raid and an epic drops that is no better than your blue from a 5-man, it makes sense to be pissed off. Raids take a lot more work than a 5 man, the loot should be a lot better. Tier 4 isn't all that great (it does look awesome though). and Tier 5 is barely an upgrade from it. These aren't even real bugs, just terrible planning of itemization.
Going to Underbog for the first time and fighting the last boss was a great experience. He used his levitate spell on the priest, who was sitting up there floating and happened to get a crit greater heal on me. This pulled aggro, and because he was floating 30 feet off the ground(as a result of one of the bosses abilities) the boss evade bugged and healed from about 40% back to full. Now, we were pissed, but we came back and downed him. So it worked out in the end, but the thing of it is, WoW players pay $15 every month to play this game, and don't get me wrong, it's worth it because it's an amazing game. But we expect and deserve a fairly polished game and some decent customer service when bugs do show up, and time after time we fail to get these things. I understand that to exect a 100% bug-free game is unreasonable, but BC has an absurd amount of bugs in it. I don't worry too much about many of them because they don't interfere with gameplay much (wrong buff icons, occasional texture tearing etc.), but there a a lot of bugs that kill groups and just make you want to punch a hole in the wall.
As one example, my guild had just finished the chess event in karazhan, and we were going to begin clearing to Prince. We quickly noticed, however, that the silence effect from a chess game in progredd was still in effect. We couldn't run into the next room because we would pull a group and a pat and die. We had to call it a night, because of some stupid ass silence that prevented us from moving on. This is a widely experienced bug, as are countless others that significantly affect enjoying the game. I would name them all, but I would have to leave the task to my future children in my will because I would die of old age before I finished (I'm 17).
To sum up my rant,we pay monthly for this game for a reason. When we get a product as buggy as BC is, and then get crap "working as intended" or "we're aware, go away" answers from GMs, we have a right to be a bit pissed about it. Yeah, blizz has hotfixed SOME issues, but a miniscule fraction of them, and never the really bad ones. When you pay for something, you have expectations for getting something in return. If you pay a plumber to come fix your toilet and he says "It's working as intended" and leaves without fixing it, you would be pissed. Some people may be a little too whiny,(none of the comments here fall into that category) but there is most definitely an abundance of things to reasonably complain about.
dan Apr 12th 2007 1:11PM
For the Lord's sake don't you dare think that the GNOME in Arc does MAD DPS. HE DOES SHIT. He is nice to have to take the mind flays but that is it. We waited once to see how much dps he did. Barely any. He is a kinda cool help but that is all.
Twinny Apr 12th 2007 10:47AM
@9
words cant express how dumb you are. ill leave it at that.
HiWay Apr 12th 2007 10:48AM
I fully understand, but cannot fully relate to the end game bugs; I honestly don't play enough to get there. But to bug test something as massive as this game it's going to based on the average level of people, always have more bugs up top on the obscure level. The floating bug that you mentioned that re-set the boss, I would have probably had steam rolling out of my ears at that point; but isn't a well documented bug report sent to the tech support/bug forum generally responded to "quickly?"
I'm just saying the reference to the auto industry and such is really a difficult one to make in this situation. Cars have been around so long that many parts are tried and true, whereas much of the new electronics on cars, thousands of factors more simplistic than the code for WoW, still have bugs. Healthcare, tons of experimental procedures done - when the bugs are gone they are no longer experimental... Many drugs not yet passed by the FDA like diet supplements are "experimental" with long term effects unknown. When these results show up, many products die thats why advertising makes people rich quick, they sell and avoid the repurcussions. Construction - Tacoma Narrows anyone?
Bugs happen, they suck, report them and let the designers do their best to fix it - biggest thing to remember in softwhere though, where you fix one thing, it may break something else in 1,000 other places that the compiler might not catch just due to faulty math from a runaway variable to a small value being a multiplier throwing stuff way off.
Beaverius Apr 12th 2007 11:09AM
I have two bug types that I've seen quite a bit that really annoy the hell out of me.
The first is something that I'm not sure all classes have dealt with. There is a bug that messes with the ranges of mobs that drives me insane as a hunter. I send my pet on a mob, it goes to apoint before the mob, starts attacking but clearly is attacking mid-air as if the mob is next to him and invisible. To add fruther annoyance, since the range is all screwy, I can't tell where the mob is, so I literally have to run around and just hope I pull in range and get some shots off in the dark before my pet dies or something stupid like that. This is ESPECIALLY frustrating in areas of high-aggro (i.e. all of outlands) where you don't have the liberty running around like a stupid hunter.
The other common annoyance is the evade bugged mob. Once realize the mob is bugged it's easy to move on, but I have had a sort of mix of an evade bugged mob that suddenly hits me despite their graphic being 100 yards away. you just can't win in that situation. FD and sac the pet most of the time to save you a hassle:(
There is also a bugged quest in Netherstorm in the 2nd bio-dome for Talbuk Tagger. After about 7 talbuks, you stop receiving credit for the tagged animal, forcing you to abandon because you can't, as far as I know, finish the quest.
HiWay Apr 12th 2007 11:18AM
@18
Assuming you have a broadband connection like cable or DSL you may want to bitch at your ISP (assuming you don't use wireless). If you use wireless, odds are you're getting interference from somewhere causing packetloss, because both of those first two bugs, evade and "invisible mob" are packet loss related. Not so much ping related, your ping may be fine but if you're dropping packets - which is frequent with older wireless setups or setups on a bad channel (try using channel 11) which is prone to interference, this is the exact symptom. Try running a ping to a WoW server ip over a good duration of time to capture your average packet loss.