Bugs are extremely annoying, but in large MMOs like WoW they can never be completely prevented. That makes it all the more important that serious bugs are fixed as quickly as possible. If, for example, you can no longer see various abilities in a boss fight, then the bug certainly counts in the “absolutely fix immediately” category.
Exactly such a bug appeared for the first time a few weeks ago in the fight against Halondrus – one of the bosses in the current raid Mausoleum of the First. Various ground effects were no longer visible (but still deadly), walls and floors disappeared depending on the camera angle, and dropped bombs suddenly could not be found. In short, the boss was barely playable.
With several hotfixes, the WoW developers tried to tackle the problem. However, the success was manageable. The problem was no longer as bad, but it was still present. Many guilds therefore gave Halondrus a wide berth and turned to other bosses, if that was possible.
Not a simple fix – a serious problem
Over time, Blizzard has had to live with the ridicule of fans. Because while some bugs that were actually well received by players were promptly fixed, the Halondrus bug remained in the game. Now Blizzard has finally spoken out and explained why the fix took so long and what the underlying error was.
The first problem was to reproduce the bug. This was the only way to find out what the problem was. However, the Q&A team did not succeed. So they applied various hotfixes in the hope of solving the problem, but without really knowing – and without success. Finally, a single developer found the error in the system.
This wasn’t really a bug with Halondrus or a bug with the current patch. As Blizzard reports, there was a bug within the actual patch system of WoW (buy now ). This had ensured that a hotfix, which should actually have nothing to do with the current problem, caused misinformation. Various textures received the command that they currently do not need to be rendered and displayed because they are outside the player’s field of view. This technique is usually used to save resources.
The internal test servers are at the exact same level as the live servers, but probably work with a different hotfix mechanism. Therefore, the error did not occur there and could not be found there.
Error should be fixed now
According to Blizzard, they have now repaired the faulty files and fixed the bug in the hotfix system. With this, the graphics problems in Halondrus should now be a thing of the past. The developers explicitly apologize for the fact that it took so long to find a solution this time. Well, all that’s missing now is a fix for the Hunter bug …
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.
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