Hmm, when they told me they were assigning people to a list I kind of knew what the answer was going to be.
What is curious is that it took them a long time to find. I’d think that -as long as you believe there is a bug- this should be fairly straightforward to spot.
I could be remembering incorrectly, but back when this was occurring no one knew that issue was specifically limited to "mob spawns attacked certain people". The more honest description is the line about "From the beginning of AC, some players have complained about unbelievably bad luck."
People blamed this behavior for everything from loot drops, to combat outcomes, and to aggro mechanics.
And also remember that AC was before MMOs became massively popular, and outside of specific events and locations, there wasn't always more than a handful of players in a certain area for a given server where aggro mechanics like this would matter.
> I’d think that -as long as you believe there is a bug- this should be fairly straightforward to spot.
This is the power of continuous integration.
There's a certain amount of optimism needed to keep going as a software developer, and then there's the crippling amount of optimism that a lot of people have which makes for difficult team dynamics. CI says it doesn't matter if it works on your machine, it's red on a neutral box so fix your problems or it's not going into the release. It's much harder to ignore Jenkins than to ignore David.
People learn through trial and error that the Wally Filter works on bugs, so denial is their first and best defense. Prove to me there's a bug. I won't spend any time on it until you do.
I was waiting for them to say something like "then we take the random variable and multiply it by 3 to correct for this" and then explain some other, more subtle, bug. Looks like we all make stupid mistakes like this sometimes. I made a bug where I tried to get the month number for the next month, so you had to wrap at 12, but I just did "(current_month + 1) % 12" and left it at that, thinking for some reason that modulo works differently than it does in reality. Some stuff broke recently, due to that, and it was quite embarrassing.
What is curious is that it took them a long time to find. I’d think that -as long as you believe there is a bug- this should be fairly straightforward to spot.