Please Fix Agatha3

WhiteBomber

@S0kun @MPQBlaine I know this has been discussed in other threads and part of this belongs in the bug channel, but those topics seemingly get no traction and I would consider this very fun character blocked from play until she is fixed.

The worst part is, I believe she was recently, unjustly nerfed to try and reduce the likelihood of bumping in to this issue, but it will still occur regularly. I spent a few months with her favorited to ascend, but after constantly being punished because of the bug, I had to back off (the time wasted was really unfortunate).

She has a super fun kit and is good option for multiple meta (passive damage, team damage, tick damage) so it is very sad to see her left by the wayside.

I understand there are likely some complications going on behind the scenes here that aren't easy to address properly in the old engine, but there a multitude of changes that could be made to avoid the issue. I won't waste anyone's time with my suggestions, but I know the team could think of some that don't nerf her in to the ground.

Pleeease fix (SAVE) her as soon as the new engine goes live (ideally un-nerfing her also, would be the best).

Just in case, the bug:
1. Create protect tiles via any means
2. Take ability damage that continually buffs those tiles until they roll over the max number

Result:
Your protect tiles will go negative, causing every tick of enemy damage to apply that massive negative amount to your health (you get 1 shot by everything). If you had any chance of winning by using Agatha's blue, that now heals the enemy instead of damaging them.

entrailbucket

Overflow errors should be pretty easy to catch and fix, but I have a feeling they have them all over the place. The High Evolutionary experiment showed that you can overflow health as well, with hilarious results.

I guess the question with Agatha is: how many turns are these fights going? I did some very rough math using the nerfed version and I'm not seeing it hit the threshold until turn 20 or so? Am I off on that? That's a very long fight!

WhiteBomber

@ DevTeam: Please note that amount of turns to win detract nothing from the severity of this issue. If this character is chosen (especially for a fight this character specializes in) there is a decent chance you experience this bug.

Her ability to kill people quickly has nothing to do with with whether or not it should be addressed, so I'm not sure why the question is relevant. You don't choose Agatha to intentionally lose the fight, so if it takes her 5 turns or 100 turns, it doesn't matter, you already made your choice to play that character.

She is clearly a defensive character, not a turn 0-1 murder machine. She can however get you very safely through many high play, top tier characters unscathed, see: ORed, Jugs, Flaptain5, Mephisto5, Polerlas etc.

Scofie

I'm no expert, but the issue seems fairly ingrained into the code as it is around numerical behaviours in the game. Technically I think the game is functioning as it should under the circumstances though the character power is not functioning as intended. I think the engine change will enable the issue to be fixed. 🫰

Rejoinder

I agree with this. It's very easy to trigger this bug (especially against any team involving Polaris), and it makes Agnes almost unplayable.

edit Doh! Agatha.

WhiteBomber

@Rejoinder said:
I agree with this. It's very easy to trigger this bug (especially against any team involving Polaris), and it makes Agnes almost unplayable.

I actually had to scroll up to remember her name wasn't Agnes, very well done! And thank you for weighing in, the more voices the better! This character has a very high potential and should be addressed properly as soon as the engine allows them to do so in the way they would like.

entrailbucket

@Scofie said:
I'm no expert, but the issue seems fairly ingrained into the code as it is around numerical behaviours in the game. Technically I think the game is functioning as it should under the circumstances though the character power is not functioning as intended. I think the engine change will enable the issue to be fixed. 🫰

The easiest fix is just to stick some ridiculous maximum on all these powers -- the current limit is like 2 billion or something, so just have Agatha's power stop buffing when you get that high. It's not like there's any gameplay-relevant difference between 2 billion in protect tiles and 3 billion.

High Evolutionary has the same bug, and presumably so does anyone else who increases something by a percentage as opposed to a flat amount. They should all be addressed, and there's no real difference between intentionally dragging out an Agatha fight forever or casting Evo yellow 200 times.

My guess is that the previous devs (Kitty, Nico, Falcon, etc) purposely avoided overflow problems by limiting boosts of this nature to flat numbers, and the current set of designers somehow don't understand why doubling the value of some number every turn is a bad idea.

WhiteBomber

@entrailbucket said:
High Evolutionary has the same bug, and presumably so does anyone else who increases something by a percentage as opposed to a flat amount. They should all be addressed, and there's no real difference between intentionally dragging out an Agatha fight forever or casting Evo yellow 200 times.

There is a critical difference in that, Agatha does not have a choice, it just happens, and way faster than Evo. If you want to spend 20 minutes spamming abilities to get Evo there, that is a very unnecessary self infliction, not to mention he would still win the fight after it happens.

I too don't understand why they didn't just put a crazy high cap on it. Instead they chose to nerf her, which feels much worse. Perhaps there is some engine / code related reason, but if they can't stop it from rolling over in the new engine, at least fix it another way.

KGB

@WhiteBomber said:

@entrailbucket said:
High Evolutionary has the same bug, and presumably so does anyone else who increases something by a percentage as opposed to a flat amount. They should all be addressed, and there's no real difference between intentionally dragging out an Agatha fight forever or casting Evo yellow 200 times.

There is a critical difference in that, Agatha does not have a choice, it just happens, and way faster than Evo. If you want to spend 20 minutes spamming abilities to get Evo there, that is a very unnecessary self infliction, not to mention he would still win the fight after it happens.

I too don't understand why they didn't just put a crazy high cap on it. Instead they chose to nerf her, which feels much worse. Perhaps there is some engine / code related reason, but if they can't stop it from rolling over in the new engine, at least fix it another way.

It's trivial to fix. Unsigned variables can never go negative. There is no reason that they ever needed a signed variable for strikes/protects/attacks etc (health is something else since you need to go negative to be downed).

KGB

entrailbucket

@WhiteBomber said:

@entrailbucket said:
High Evolutionary has the same bug, and presumably so does anyone else who increases something by a percentage as opposed to a flat amount. They should all be addressed, and there's no real difference between intentionally dragging out an Agatha fight forever or casting Evo yellow 200 times.

There is a critical difference in that, Agatha does not have a choice, it just happens, and way faster than Evo. If you want to spend 20 minutes spamming abilities to get Evo there, that is a very unnecessary self infliction, not to mention he would still win the fight after it happens.

I too don't understand why they didn't just put a crazy high cap on it. Instead they chose to nerf her, which feels much worse. Perhaps there is some engine / code related reason, but if they can't stop it from rolling over in the new engine, at least fix it another way.

They explained this but only kinda, and you have to read into it a little.

It sounds like right now the "new engine" version of the game is a totally separate copy of the code, so if they make a change to the "old engine" version, it has to be made in the new one as well to keep them in sync.

Effectively they seem to be punting any bug fixing until the new engine ships (whenever that is)...which, fine, I guess, but these overflow issues should be pretty simple to solve.

sambrookjm

@entrailbucket said:

@WhiteBomber said:

@entrailbucket said:
High Evolutionary has the same bug, and presumably so does anyone else who increases something by a percentage as opposed to a flat amount. They should all be addressed, and there's no real difference between intentionally dragging out an Agatha fight forever or casting Evo yellow 200 times.

There is a critical difference in that, Agatha does not have a choice, it just happens, and way faster than Evo. If you want to spend 20 minutes spamming abilities to get Evo there, that is a very unnecessary self infliction, not to mention he would still win the fight after it happens.

I too don't understand why they didn't just put a crazy high cap on it. Instead they chose to nerf her, which feels much worse. Perhaps there is some engine / code related reason, but if they can't stop it from rolling over in the new engine, at least fix it another way.

They explained this but only kinda, and you have to read into it a little.

It sounds like right now the "new engine" version of the game is a totally separate copy of the code, so if they make a change to the "old engine" version, it has to be made in the new one as well to keep them in sync.

Effectively they seem to be punting any bug fixing until the new engine ships (whenever that is)...which, fine, I guess, but these overflow issues should be pretty simple to solve.

Something simple like

change_to_value = change_percent * old_value

if sign(old_value+change_to_value) != sign(old_value)
new_value = maxint
else:
new_value = old_value+change_to_value

should do the trick just fine.

WhiteBomber

They responded on the Mephisto topic very quickly... Not a good look for Agatha, who is better than Mephisto and coincidentally, he happens to be one who causes her bug fast.

Zarqa

Very quickly? Mephisto has been reported bugged about every other week since November without any response or action until today.

WhiteBomber

The comment was only directed at them actually responding to the thread, I am aware he has been broken and mentioned regularly. They have both been broken since release. All of my experiences with his though, are more funny than game changing.

entrailbucket

Maybe someone can ask where they'd like us to report bugs?

I've made a few posts in the bugs forum but I don't know if they're watching it still. I've submitted them to CS a couple times but they got sorta weird about it ("no...no I'm not asking for compensation, I just want to report the bug!")

Codex

@Zarqa said:
Very quickly? Mephisto has been reported bugged about every other week since November without any response or action until today.

Lol at action. That post might as well be the generic reply given out when you submit a ticket to customer service.

Zarqa

@entrailbucket said:
Maybe someone can ask where they'd like us to report bugs?

I've made a few posts in the bugs forum but I don't know if they're watching it still. I've submitted them to CS a couple times but they got sorta weird about it ("no...no I'm not asking for compensation, I just want to report the bug!")

I did, kinda: https://forums.d3go.com/discussion/comment/1052635#Comment_1052635

DAZ0273

It is time to get real.

Bugs in the game that the Devs will move super quickly on:

1.) Anything giving out more resources than it should do
2.) Problem with offers/stores/anything paid for
3.) Problems with running PvE/PvP/Boss etc or loading the game

Bugs in game that the Devs will/might get around to eventually

Everything else including bugs with any of the 300-400 characters now in the game who basically they know you can just use somebody else instead (unless connected to point 3 above)

I suspect the only reason Mephisto might get on the radar is if his bug has potential to break the game by freezing a board, which Agatha's doesn't.

entrailbucket

@DAZ0273 said:
It is time to get real.

Bugs in the game that the Devs will move super quickly on:

1.) Anything giving out more resources than it should do
2.) Problem with offers/stores/anything paid for
3.) Problems with running PvE/PvP/Boss etc or loading the game

Bugs in game that the Devs will/might get around to eventually

Everything else including bugs with any of the 300-400 characters now in the game who basically they know you can just use somebody else instead (unless connected to point 3 above)

I suspect the only reason Mephisto might get on the radar is if his bug has potential to break the game by freezing a board, which Agatha's doesn't.

I think this falls under #3 but they're quite good at fixing things that crash the game too. I think this is a lot of their new character testing -- "does this power make the game crash?"

This seems basic but plenty of games/dev teams are bad at it!

WhiteBomber

@DAZ0273 said:
It is time to get real.

Bugs in the game that the Devs will move super quickly on:

1.) Anything giving out more resources than it should do
2.) Problem with offers/stores/anything paid for
3.) Problems with running PvE/PvP/Boss etc or loading the game

Bugs in game that the Devs will/might get around to eventually

Everything else including bugs with any of the 300-400 characters now in the game who basically they know you can just use somebody else instead (unless connected to point 3 above)

I suspect the only reason Mephisto might get on the radar is if his bug has potential to break the game by freezing a board, which Agatha's doesn't.

Well damnit, you're right... Maybe we should just stop trying, or stop mentioning issues you believe don't fit the criteria all together. I'll update the thread for you.

entrailbucket

@WhiteBomber said:

@DAZ0273 said:
It is time to get real.

Bugs in the game that the Devs will move super quickly on:

1.) Anything giving out more resources than it should do
2.) Problem with offers/stores/anything paid for
3.) Problems with running PvE/PvP/Boss etc or loading the game

Bugs in game that the Devs will/might get around to eventually

Everything else including bugs with any of the 300-400 characters now in the game who basically they know you can just use somebody else instead (unless connected to point 3 above)

I suspect the only reason Mephisto might get on the radar is if his bug has potential to break the game by freezing a board, which Agatha's doesn't.

Well damnit, you're right... Maybe we should just stop trying, or stop mentioning issues you believe don't fit the criteria all together. I'll update the thread for you.

I don't think he was saying they shouldn't fix it, or that we shouldn't talk about it. From my perspective they absolutely should be fixing this -- AND Evo, and, like, the Hit Monkey team up thing that's been broken for literally years now, and of course it's worth asking them where all these fixes are and what's taking so long.

I can understand why they're not doing this stuff, I guess (all the reasons Daz explained). That doesn't mean I agree with their rationale for deferring it, though (this stuff should be easy, come on guys!).