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Live
PTR
10.2.7
PTR
10.2.6
Beta
Game Crash Upon Switching Shadowlands Covenants Results in Learning Both Sets of Abilities
Live
Posted
2020/12/03 at 1:50 PM
by
Archimtiros
Twitch streamer
Angelicus07
found himself subject to a gamebreaking bug upon crashing after swapping covenants from Necrolord to Venthyr, resulting in his Death Knight Malhaius gaining access to both covenants abilities at the same time! In a video uploaded to youtube, he shows his recently Venthyr aligned Death Knight using
Fleshcraft
,
Door of Shadows
,
Abomination Limb
, and
Swarming Mist
one after another.
While we don't know exactly what happened to cause the bug, it's probably for the best that it isn't easily reproducible by other players, as it is clearly a major bug! At the time of posting the video, his ticket had not been answered and the issue had not yet been resolved, although he has since streamed on Twitch and doesn't appear to access all four abilities anymore, implying that it may have since been fixed.
So yeah. I swapped covenant and somehow after a sudden crash I have access to all Venthyr AND Necrolord abilities at the same time.
** As of the time of this upload, the ticket I have opened to Blizzard has been up for more than 12 hours, with no response. I don't want you to think I am enjoying this shit. I want my case resolved, and the issue known and fixed !
In the screenshots, you can see the Death Knight channeling
Fleshcraft
while preparing to cast
Door of Shadows
, and later casting
Swarming Mist
while
Abomination Limb
is in progress, all with the Venthyr covenant icon on the minimap.
Interestingly, this bug does show that players are able to use multiple covenant abilities at the same time, which
may
hint toward a future in which players gain access to more than one covenants ability or abilities of a covenant other than their own, but certainly shouldn't be taken as proof of the fact that it
will
happen. The inability to combine their favorite cosmetic covenant with their desired covenant's abilities was a common complaint throughout the beta process, and so anything to help mitigate that restriction would be highly desired by many players. As it currently stands however, this appears to be just a one-time novelty.
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Comment by
Murzac
on 2020-12-03T15:55:55-06:00
Is this... SL Beta? How such things 'pass to live'? Months on Beta and NO ONE had this bug?
Must be another bug triggering it then. One more reason that they 'should' have sent more Beta access, to more people, or instruct those on Beta better on 'testing' stuff more, than 'playing' it.
Who says that no one found it? I've reported tons and tons of bugs during beta and the sad part is, at least half of them made it into public beta aka retail.
Ultimately it's a question of priorities. If it's a bug that only ever occurred once or twice on some weird situation that rarely happens, would you rather fix that or something else that happens more often? You're also more inclined to fix bugs that you know you can actually fix because you can never know what kind of a rabbit hole the bug might be. And on top of that if you can't replicate it, fixing it becomes a lot harder because you might think you know what's causing it and the only way to check that is to push a fix to the beta and wait to see if the reports about it keep coming in. That is the unfortunate truth about bugfixing in large scale software.
Also people have to also remember that the frequency of issues in live is absolutely bonkers compared to beta no matter what you do. Live is going to have 100s of times more players playing it. So if one player encounters one bug after one week in live, it would potentially take 100s of weeks on beta for one player to encounter the same bug. That translates to several years. You could increase the amount of players in the beta, but what that would do is also increase the amount of bug reports on other things. If this is a thing that happens on 0.001% of the playerbase once in a week, then the odds that a developer is going to actually take note of it are really marginal. Especially if, as mentioned before, there's 50 other bugs that actually happen all the time that they already know how to fix that they need to get on to.
Comment by
Sielinth
on 2020-12-03T15:57:44-06:00
Is this... SL Beta? How such things 'pass to live'? Months on Beta and NO ONE had this bug?
Must be another bug triggering it then. One more reason that they 'should' have sent more Beta access, to more people, or instruct those on Beta better on 'testing' stuff more, than 'playing' it.
do you usually hard crash your beta client? and if you do how do you induce it without doing harm to your personal PC?
I'm genuinely curious. as former software developer, we induce BSOD by overloading memory / CPU, physically yanking out power cords and perform other extreme acts in dedicated test beds as a means of seeing how our software handle itself in various "worse case scenario" but even then it doesn't catch everything
I personally don't recommend any of those procedures for normal end users
Comment by
Fuggem
on 2020-12-03T17:35:42-06:00
Nothing surprising, i've never seen a WoW content so bugged, missing npcs&items, falling through floors, WQs just not possible to complete..
What if expansion release was rushed and.. oh well !
I feel like your in the minority here. I haven't encountered a single WQ I couldn't complete or any missing NPCs. Falling through floors I did encounter shortly after the weekly reset, but I haven't seen it since.
Comment by
DarkXale
on 2020-12-03T18:08:36-06:00
Interesting. If the crash is the cause, this might mean it's handled client-side. Hackers could maybe replicate this by having the client send the "join this new covenant" instruction and blocking or disconnecting for the "leave my old covenant" instruction
No, its just likely that whatever caused the covenant switch not to execute correctly also caused the client to crash.
Comment by
Lionhearte0
on 2020-12-03T18:31:26-06:00
Nothing surprising, i've never seen a WoW content so bugged, missing npcs&items, falling through floors, WQs just not possible to complete..
What if expansion release was rushed and.. oh well !
That's a shame your experience has been so awful.
For myself, whose played WoW since Vanilla, Shadowlands has been an excellent launch experience. The most recent ones I can think of all had really funny, but also *!@#ty bugs that prevented play.
Warlords of Draenor? I remember jamming through that portal and facing IMMEDIATE game crushing lag and disruption as thousands all bumrushed the portal and portalled into Draenor. My friend who was with me disconnected, and was never able to get back on that night. I MANAGED to go through, with severe lag, able to stay logged in for about 5 minutes. Talking to Khadgar was not possible. Nothing worked. People were power-point sliding by. And then the crash, and servers going down, for 16 hours. That was fun!
Legion? Quite smooth, in fact I had some confidence in them with their new tech they explained at Blizzcon, but there were some bugs as well (I remember Khadgar's dialogue being repeated a million times in chat, making everything else unreadable. Funny but not unplayable). There were some disconnects after but nothing too severe.
BfA was hilariously bad for me. While the launch was smooth and I was able to play with 2 of my friends, a really nasty bug had hit my character after being taken prisoner in the intro - I was shapeshifted into cat form but totally pacified. You know, being "imprisoned" and what not. However, since my friends were with me and we were all partied up, I was able to get quest credit and didn't really notice anything wrong until after leaving the island. Turns out, I was still pacified and couldn't do anything. ANYTHING. Pacified. Can't mount. Can't talk to innkeeper. Can't attack. Pacified. Pacified. It was like that for hours, with a ticket upon I tried thousands of things to fix it. Getting myself killed, logging out, etc. Eventually it went away and I was able to play BfA launch.
Shadowlands? Well, the worst that happened was some server lag that happened by the time I got to Ardenweald. It was about time I had logged out to sleep by then anyways, and it was fixed the next day.
No other issues whatsoever.
Comment by
Lionhearte0
on 2020-12-03T18:33:32-06:00
Interesting. If the crash is the cause, this might mean it's handled client-side. Hackers could maybe replicate this by having the client send the "join this new covenant" instruction and blocking or disconnecting for the "leave my old covenant" instruction
This is not true.
This is known as a 'race' case server problem, very common in multithreaded servers.
Essentially, the developers who implemented the system made it so: the covenant abilities are added, then after that, the old covenant abilities are removed.
So what happened was, the covenant abilities was added, but the server shut down before it activated the event 'remove old covenant abilities', which allowed him to keep the old ones and new ones. In other words, the order of these two events matter. As the first event 'add new abilities' was activated before server crashed, but the second event 'remove old abilities' didn't activate until after server crashed, so he kept everything.
It would have been better to put 'remove old covenant abilities' first, before adding the new ones, in case of a race case event like this. But, because this is so unlikely to happen, I guess the developers didn't think it would be an issue - and to be honest, I would have made the same error.
It also wouldn't matter, because like you said, in the rare case it does happen like in this case, well, let's just say if the operations were reversed, we wouldn't be reading about how he had two sets of abilities, we'd be reading about how he had none.
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