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"Badass" Bug Infects and Kills Borderlands 2 Characters

Posted by Unknown on from the it's-a-feature dept.

An anonymous reader writes "BBC News claims that a feature in Borderlands 2 that can only be activated in modded XBox 360s has a bug that can cause characters to be permanently deleted when they die- even if they weren't the ones who activated the feature. 'The hidden option within the game, known as "badass" or "hardcore", is turned off by default but can be enabled by those that have modified or hacked their console. [..] When a player with an unmodded console joins a Borderlands 2 multiplayer game in which there is a character running in badass mode it too gets kicked into that mode. [..] Gamers who play alongside people who have modded their console "contract" the bug which deletes their character if they die during play.'"

13 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. It's worse than that by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It hits anyone who is in a game with anyone who has ever been exposed to it. So if player A enables it, plays with player B, and player B plays with player C, and I play with player C, I'm infected, and anyone that plays with me is also infected and a carrier.

    1. Re:It's worse than that by arth1 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What's remarkable is that after having similar problem with "contagious" bugs in the first Borderlands, they did not safeguard against the possibility in BL2.

      In the original, two missions could be left in an unfinishable state, and everyone who played with someone with this condition would catch it too. Luckily, one of the two was a beginner's mission, and most people would already have moved the storyline past that point, and the rest get around it by recreating the character. The other one, though, was nasty.

    2. Re:It's worse than that by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What's most remarkable is that a bug like this is possible at all. It reveals that the game developers did some seriously stupid shit. Nothing that another player has done to their profile should affect what happens to my profile.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    3. Re:It's worse than that by mekkab · · Score: 4, Insightful

      p>Im no programmer-- but this isnt difficult. .

      You sound exactly like the manager who told the coder "just get rid of the setting but don't rip out all the other code behind it. We'll have to retest everything and we don't have budget or schedule for that. This isn't difficult. "

      --
      In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
    4. Re:It's worse than that by Minwee · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Why would you have to retest "everything" if youre only modifying the permadeath function?

      That depends. Do you want your company featured on TheDailyWTF.com or not? It's full of stories about PMs and business owners who insist that changes be made without adequate testing, and none of them end well.

      When you start working with big projects, large teams, and looming deadlines, you realize that nothing is ever that simple.

      If you spend an afternoon writing a program that makes the screen flash and types "Hello, World!" over and over again until someone kills it, then yes all you need to do is comment out a line or two and everything will work perfectly.

      When you are dealing with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, interdependent modules and inheritance diagrams that resemble buckyballs, all written by dozens of people over several years time, things get complicated.

      If you honestly think that you can make changes to a product without needing to test them then you may have a future in high-frequency trading, but I advise you to be a little more careful in truly competitive markets like gaming.

  2. Not that I have any inkling what's really going on by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    But I wouldn't be surprised if this was an attempt to go after people with modded consoles that went terribly awry.

  3. Re:Ah yes... Non-featured features... by Selfbain · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I'd say the ability to permanently kill an opponent in multiplayer is more than a simple bug.

    --
    Well, it has never been successfully tested.
  4. Wait... by Velorium · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Wasn't South Park's WoW episode like this?

    1. Re:Wait... by tisepti · · Score: 4, Insightful

      No. Though wow did have another similar bug.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident

    2. Re:Wait... by Geirzinho · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The corrupted blood incident is actually better described as emergent behavior in a complex system.

      The Blizzard developers didn't make a mistake, they just didn't think about all the consequences that debuff would cause in a world-like environment. And researchers had a field day studying the CB spread of the epidemic:)

  5. Re:Ah yes... Non-featured features... by drkim · · Score: 3, Insightful

    However, from Microsoft's perspective, sounds like it's "attacking" (or at least pointing the finger) at the very group they likely want to eradicate; those who mod their consoles.

    It would seem you lack basic reading comprehension skills.

    This doesn't just target the modders, it targets EVERYONE that happens to be in a game with people that enable this option.

    Actually, you're both wrong.
    "When a player with an unmodded console joins a Borderlands 2 multiplayer game in which there is a character running in badass mode it too gets kicked into that mode."

    ...so the vulnerable group here would be user who don't mod their consoles.

  6. Why does this happen? by goombah99 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm assuming that this happens because the server is trusting client stored data. That's approximately the same as not validating ones inputs in a fill-out-form. Why in this millennium would anyone ever trust data stored on a client without validating it first? Isn't this 2012? Or is there some other way this could happen?

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
  7. Re:Ah yes... Non-featured features... by Bengie · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That's all fine and dandy until you include things like "lag" into the equation. Joined a game with 30ms ping then find out they're on wifi when their signal goes to crap and you jump to 700ms?.. Died? So much fun!