They said they fixed the Planetcracker Beams in a hotfox, but they didn’t say anything about the Hunter auto-pull bug, the bombs being invisible, randomly getting ABSORBED INTO THE WALL like our poor warlock, OR the seismic tremors being invisible.
We’ve recently deployed a hotfix that should fix the visual issue with Volatile Charges disappearing.
We’re still investigating the other reported visual issues with the encounter and will update this thread as we receive further information.
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Thank you so much! Now we can prog again this week.
It is fairly better than completely blinded, but still there are glitches. While approaching to the third zone, the surrounding area repeats disappearing and reloaded. Seismic Tremors and Planetcracker Beams are sometimes flickering…
After weeks of this being a top priority for our encounter and QA teams, we’ve solved this and fixed it.
Some background
Starting on June 10, in a portion of the Halondrus encounter, multiple abilities began disappearing or rendering inconsistently. While we rolled out some partial fixes a few days later, a number of issues have lingered for the past two weeks, understandably frustrating players attempting the Halondrus encounter.
It’s unusual for a bug like this to take so long to overcome. The first step we take when any bug is reported is to have our QA team investigate and reproduce the bug. Figuring out steps to reproduce a bug is essential, both for understanding what’s causing it and to make it so that we can correctly test the eventual fix. With the Halondrus issues, we ran into an immediate challenge: none of our QA testers or engineers were able to reproduce the bug following the same steps that were causing visuals to misbehave on live realms. That’s extremely unusual, and we spent some time trying to gather more information and test different theories, while applying some quick partial fixes.
Over the last week, guided by the curious case of a single engineer who was able to reliably reproduce the issue (when no one else could), we tracked down the underlying cause as a very niche and previously undiscovered bug in our hotfix system itself. This bug made an unrelated hotfix unintentionally cause player clients to read an erroneous visual “occluder” (an invisible volume usually used to tell the engine that it doesn’t need to render whatever is on the other side of it, to optimize performance) in the Halondrus playspace. The reason internal tests didn’t easily reproduce the issue was-- the actual game data was correct.
The Current Situation
We have now developed a process to both clean up the bad hotfix data and fix the issue that made this possible in the first place. That fix was deployed earlier today.
We sincerely apologize for how long this took to fix. It was a top priority for the team the entire time, but turned out to be almost unique in coming from an underlying cause that took far longer to track down than we ever expected.
19 Likes
Yay! I vote next bug fix, the dang music at Citadel of Loyalty so I can turn the music back on 
All we ask for is communication that you are investigating the issue. This went on for too long with silence when it was severely impacting every guild raiding this boss. It’s not uncommon for a consumer to be frustrated when the quality of a product worsens.
Please tell us so we don’t have to be.
They did post that they were still investigating additional reports of issues in the post before the recent explanation
7 Likes
It took them FIVE DAYS to ACKNOWLEDGE IT.
It took them EIGHTEEN DAYS to fully fix it.
Hundreds of guilds were able to reproduce the issue, because it happened EVERY PULL. This feels like a cop-out. If it isn’t they really REALLY need to start playing their own game.
Did you know that when you hit 3k io, or Glad, or kill Mythic Jailer, the conduit item you buy to upgrade all conduits to 278 upgrades all conduits EXCEPT for the covenant conduits that you aren’t actively playing. This results in your REWARD costing you 4500 more gold just because they don’t seem to care that people have reported this, complained about it, or even seem to care that you need to complete the ENTIRE ZM CAMPAIGN ON ALL CHARACTERS YOU UNLOCK THIS ON!
I don’t want to work for my REWARD.
While this did not affect me in the least, I wish to applaud the very clear and detailed explanation of what your challenges were that you needed to overcome.
I think this is really helpful to the players as a whole to understand the work involved which create the delays in addressing a problem.
I hope that you guys continue to do this in the future and thank you for the communication.
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Even I know it’s 99% likely that the most recent hotfix on June 8th and 9th caused such BUG, which suddenly affected all raid teams from June 10th.
If I were them, even if I didn’t figure out the exact reason, I would simply revert that recent hotfix, so it wouldn’t affect ALL raid teams on Halondrus. Why reverting? Because Raid-wide BUGs should have higher priority than some Dungeon tunings.
Yes they tried hard to figure out the issue, but it could be solved temporarily but immediately from the beginning, without gating all Halon guilds for at least a week.
The FACT that you have a start date speaks horribly about your software engineering troubleshooting skills as a team. Prior to June 10, it wasn’t an issue. That Tuesday, AFTER you pushed untested, non-QA’d code to live… the issues began. Now, you want to play ‘street smart’ and pretend that you had to find out what happened because you couldn’t reproduce the issue. Now you want us to congratulate you on the hard work you had to do to fix a problem YOU created and were clueless on how it came about. How about - play your game cause it was reproduced every single time in live when on that boss? How about start with what the hell you changed that Tuesday when the issue started?
It doesn’t take 2 weeks to ‘discover’ from a ‘curious’ engineer that something they pushed to the live server on that Tuesday broke other things… It’s horrible software engineer troubleshooting. Them even suggestion a QA team was involved is laughable - QA the code before pushing to live not after. Knowing the code I inherited from a developer that went to work for Blizzard - they know nothing about concepts like Unit Tests.
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Not to mention the bugs still exist. It is sad that they threw QA under the bus like this in their not apology apology.
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The reason your QA team was not able to reproduce the issue is the QA team was not running the same code/data as the users. Sometimes it doesn’t matter, but in this case it was critical.
It’s very useful when testing to start with a fresh install. But sometimes it’s not, since that’s not what all of the customers are using. When testing, you should do both - the clean environment, and the customer environment. When the clean environment was not able to reproduce the problem, your process should be to replicate the customer environment.
After a hotfix, you should do a SHA-256 (or later SHA standard) on the changed files, and compare them to a known SHA of the files you’re trying to get to.
In fact, the update checks in the bnet client can be made much faster when it doesn’t need to update - each update should include a unique key. When checking for an update, ask the server what the current key is. If it’s changed, then get the manifest. This is an issue for me because after I quit WoW and want to relaunch, I need to get in before the update check or I sit waiting for the manifest to download, etc.
this one happens a lot. i thought the hunters were just overexcited for a while there.
should be fixed much faster. makes ppl look bad until ppl know what’s actually going on.
hunters didnt need another stigma lol.