I hate to kick a game when it's down, but this developer post about fixing a deep bug in Warhammer's Action Point mechanic is astonishing. It's a bit decoded on Massively, but let me highlight the key points.
- Action Points are a mechanic in Warhammer that limits how fast you can take actions. You need AP to do anything and if you spam abilities you run out of AP.
- Action Points have been broken ever since the game launched. However, until 1.3.1 the "AP sometimes regenerates when it shouldn't" bug was offset by the "AP regenerates slowly because of server lag" bug. 1.3.1 improved server lag, making the "sometimes regenerate" bug into a game balance problem.
- 1.3.2 has changed action points so now the game is "working as intended". A full year after launch.
This kind of execution failure is very typical of Warhammer Online, and is just mind-boggling to me in such a high budget, high profile game. I'm a software engineer, and one of the things I particularly care about in my professional life is understanding complex software systems and their failure modes. I can sort of see how a "sometimes regenerate" bug can sneak through, although you'd hope your testing would catch things like this. But for that to then cruise along undetected because, hey, your servers are always pretty slow and laggy so who would notice anyway? That's just terrible.
The good news is they fixed the bug. Even better, they disclosed what the bug was. It gives me some confidence that under the new leadership Warhammer may be run better. Too bad it's too late to rescue the game. (Speaking of which, is there any reason to think there will be a significant Warhammer expansion?)
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