The bugs you remember (fondly or otherwise)

[srmalloy]

20 hours ago, Call Me Awesome said:

The old days where mobs had no collision with each other.  You could literally herd up hundreds, pull them around a corner and they'd all jump into the same exact spot.  Hit them with a heavy single target attack and you got ALL of them.  This lasted at least until issue 5; I know I used that tactic at the tail end of issue 3 and all of issue 4.

And the wolf farms that took advantage of this, particularly Unai Kemen's "Close the dimensional rifts" mission on a map that was essentially the NE corner of Boomtown full of wolves. You needed a /Dev Blaster, who would jump into a particular open-top shipping crate and start putting down Trip Mine as fast as possible while a Tanker aggro'd up the whole map, then the Blaster would fly up into the air and the Tanker would jump into the shipping crate, followed by all of the wolves. Because there was a bug that prevented a Trip Mine from going off if the Blaster that set it was too far away, nothing would happen until the Tanker was sure they'd gotten as many wolves as possible into the shipping container, then the Blaster would dive down until the Trip Mines went off, killing all the wolves in the shipping container. One of the entertaining things about doing this was that, if you were too close to the shipping container when the Trip Mines went off, you'd get a pop-up error window from the game engine saying "Too many effects to render".

 

My own experience with an egregious bug was actually two-fold. In the beta test of inventions, my Kat/Reg Scrapper got a recipe for the Touch of Lady Grey proc (chance for negative energy damage), which he crafted and slotted. The enhancement abbreviated itself as "chance for negative", which was prophetic -- when the proc went off, it did a negative amount of damage to the target, healing it. The devs fixed this, and introduced a new bug, which I referred to as "Touch of Lady Grey: Chance to One-Shot" -- when the proc went off, it did an absurd amount of damage to the target. Testing this, I took my Scrapper to Crey's Folly and found Jurassik. As if wanting to show off, the proc activated on his first attack, doing "6.1344e+13" points of damage to Jurassik, blowing him to fragments. I was amused by the fact that CoH spilled over into scientific notation without missing a beat; as it turned out, I wasn't even close to the biggest hit with this bug.

[Serringa]

From the original launch of CoH through at least a few issues later, Smoke Grenade from Devices debuffed enemy accuracy by many times more than intended due to a decimal place error in the powers data. Throwing one smoke grenade would typically reduce all enemies' chance to hit down to the 5% floor.

 

This was popularized during issue 0 by a guide on the forums, which if I recall correctly was called something like "Fire/Dev - level 40 in 4 weeks" (the level cap was 40 before issue 1). Fire was the best AoE set and /Dev was as good as being defense capped, so this was really easy to level at a time when leveling was definitely not easy. Despite the popularity of this guide, Smoke Grenade went unfixed for many months.

[Extor Prime]

On miserable nights like this one, I miss the bug known as Jack Emmert. It was a bug that made everyone else miserable. But it got fixed.

[Hyperstrike]

The drifting mugging animation.

You have a guy on the ground, flopping as another guy kneels over him and punches.

The models became so horribly misaligned over time it looked like the mugger was punching the guy in the balls.

[Number Six]

When the AI for the crate you're supposed to be retrieving from the bad guys forgets that it's supposed to be an inanimate object and starts turning to face you whenever you're nearby.

[Bionic_Flea]

No one ever remember me fondly . . . Fleas ruin everything.

[Razia]

10 hours ago, Serringa said:

From the original launch of CoH through at least a few issues later, Smoke Grenade from Devices debuffed enemy accuracy by many times more than intended due to a decimal place error in the powers data. Throwing one smoke grenade would typically reduce all enemies' chance to hit down to the 5% floor.

 

This was popularized during issue 0 by a guide on the forums, which if I recall correctly was called something like "Fire/Dev - level 40 in 4 weeks" (the level cap was 40 before issue 1). Fire was the best AoE set and /Dev was as good as being defense capped, so this was really easy to level at a time when leveling was definitely not easy. Despite the popularity of this guide, Smoke Grenade went unfixed for many months.

Oh god I remember that. @lol at 4 weeks today, but back in the day that seemed almost impossible to me (played AR/DEV).