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Dual Wielding Bug


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When I attempt to equip a character with a second heavy sword, I'm prevented from doing so with a reasonable warning similar to "this weapon is too heavy to be carried in your off hand." Yet, if I have a lighter sword in my off hand and a heavier one in the other, I can click the lighter followed by the heavier one to make them swap hands. Now, I have a heavy sword in my off hand, at which point I can replace the lighter sword in my dominant hand with a second heavy sword.

 

This makes no sense! How am I suddenly capable of carrying a heavy sword in my off hand just by trading swords with my dominant one? Is this yet another bug that fundamentally altars the realism and consistency of the gameplay mechanics?

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Lilith -

 

Nearly every piece of software, games included, has bugs. Most of them are trivial and not worth pursuing. Some definitely are. The two that I've pointed out on this forum are more than trivial because they allow exploitation of the game in such a way that gameplay is artifically, fundamentally altered. Good software developers care about this. Neither you nor I know the percentage of players that do.

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I haven't collected statistics, but I have been on this forum for a long time and seen a lot of different players with different preferences. For every player who's bothered by bugs like this, there's another who enjoys finding and exploiting them, as represented by Skwish-E in this very thread.

 

And frankly, yes, this one is a fairly trivial bug. Many of the best swords in the game are light enough to be used in the off hand anyway, so the effect on game balance is minimal.

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Also consider the number of major, exploitable bugs in the big-name, huge team, long development cycle games, the so called AAA releases. Yes, there seem to be about as many. More in quite a few games that get rushed out the door.

 

—Alorael, who isn't making excuses. Bugs are annoying. But they're also a fact of life in games, and the fact that few of the bugs in Spiderweb games actually break the game, or worse, break your save file is far more important. (Yes, it does happen sometimes. And that's bad. Jeff is good about fixing these problems when he can hunt down the cause.)

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Fair enough. I'm actually not much of a gamer save for the occasional RPG, so apparently these types of things are way more common in video games than I realized. I am a software developer of line-of-business applications though, so I guess I have a different perspective on usability bugs.

 

Also, count me firmly in the non-exploitation camp :-)

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I've found plenty of professional software with bugs as well. But it's different when bugs aren't something to exploit. Users usually don't go around trying to do crazy things just to see if they work the way players do.

 

—Alorael, who read this and recognized that the inventiveness, audacity, and sheer insanity of players makes stopping exploits nearly impossible. Users of less exciting software can be depended upon not to try so many things just for the hell of it.

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Fixing it still takes time. You may not think it's a significant amount of time, but maybe it is for a one-man operation like Spiderweb. If that one worker takes time to fix this bug, it's that much time he's not spending producing his next product.

 

I also side with those who find this a trivial bug simply not worth fixing. Considering how long the game was out before this thread appeared, I can only assume a great many people played the game and never noticed it...or perhaps noticed and were never troubled by it. The opportunity cost in time and effort simply isn't worth it.

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It's not just a matter of editing one line of code, either: after making the edit you have to recompile and reupload the new version, which is a non-trivial amount of work. And if you do this for every little bug that's found and fixed, eventually people are going to get sick of downloading a new version of the game every time you find a bug, and they'll start to think "if the game needs this many bugfix releases, it must be unstable: if these are all the bugs that have been found, how many bugs haven't been found yet?". Paradoxically, waiting to fix bugs until you've found a critical mass of them can make your software seem less buggy to customers than fixing every bug as soon as it's found.

 

In short, apart from being more work than you'd think, making a lot of minor bugfix releases amounts to advertising that you have a buggy game. It's bad marketing.

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In the Mac version, at least, WoT has zero effect on mental resistance as shown in your character info screen. The other wards do affect their respective resistances. I think someone once suggested that WoT just affected the hit rate of mental attacks, but I don't find that plausible, and it would be hard to prove.

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