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"Badass" Bug Infects and Kills Borderlands 2 Characters
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.'"
Or as most people call them, bugs.
A âoefeatureâ that is not really a feature turns out to be âoebuggyâ! WOW!
News at 11, 10 Easternâ¦
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quick! deploy a small update to fix that!
Oh wait. there is no quick.. or small. when it comes to xbox updates.
But on the pc even the pirate version of borderlands is upto update #6 now. lol
tell us again how consoles are better... i always liked that joke. :D
Bugger.
Sounds like being forced to play Russian roulette...
-Myke
"When you die in the game, you die for real" LOL
but it's hitting unmoded boxes due to users joining others in a online game and getting a flag set on there character that is tied to unused / leftover code
Or Borderlands Transmitted Disease, i've been wary not to go screwing around with the public, shit's rough nowadays.
You lost me at Xbox
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.
This is so similar to The Ring, it's not even funny (the movie, not the Xbox hardware failure)
We hear all this talk of how modded/hacked consoles are bad for the game developers and industry as a whole. If that's the case, why would the developers include a feature that can only be used on such a console? The real story here is not that your character may get deleted. Your character is not real. The story is that the developers of Borderlands 2 have decided that players who mod/hack their console are a market segment worth developing for. That's a real problem for the console manufacturers with real consequences because it flies in the face of their claims.
But I wouldn't be surprised if this was an attempt to go after people with modded consoles that went terribly awry.
XBox 360 is a virus. As a PS3 and Linux user I've suspected that a long time, XBox 360 must die. Bring in Milla Jovovich.
Wasn't South Park's WoW episode like this?
Die in the game - take a taser blast to the butt from XBox. Wonder how many "hard core" gamers would prefer that over character deletion?
They couldn't get hardcore mode working properly so they disabled it for everyone, and didn't realise that modded X-Box consoles could re-enable it.
How to avoid the bug, from the Gearbox forums:
We also advise that before ceasing play, users always select "Save and Quit" from within the pause menu while their character is alive. If after the death of their character players find themselves at the main menu of Borderlands 2 instead of respawning in-game, be sure to immediately select "Continue" to resume playing as that character.
The bug only affects the Xbox version, not PS3 or PC.
Truly badass players don't die anyway.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
But I wouldn't be surprised if this was an attempt to go after people with modded consoles that went terribly awry.
No. It's a partially completed feature, a Hardcore mode that either wasn't finished or left to be padded out as DLC. There's some code left in the game for it, including a check to see if anyone has the mode enabled, but since it wasn't finished it just enables it.
Bit of faulty logic, easily fixed, although apparently the game outright deletes your character data upon death with the mode enabled, so if you have already been nailed by it, too bad.
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.
Now the poor guy who got adventuresome and inquisitive with his LEGALLY purchased toy will be shunned by those who are too dumb to take stuff apart to see how it works.
Nethack mode?
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
When you die, you don't get uploaded, 'cause the stupid humans have taken out the ressurection ship.
Reminds me of the bad ol' days of PSO.
At least it's a merciful death, rather than a NOL'ing.
Its like AIDS.
Once only rumored in the modded community, it can now be transmitted unknowingly by both modded and non-modded users alike.
It will result in permanent death, and currently has no known cure.
So mortality is contagious? And here all the zombie and vampire movies had me thinking immortality was what was contagious.
undocumented
Don't play with those damn Smurfs
"watch out we got a badass here"
If it's easy to activate this mode on xbox, it's probably easier to do it on PC?
Sounds like this should have been implemented at the start. A hardcore mode would have been fun.
more of a unfound bug as hardware interlocks where in the Previous models and the software was designed so that it was realistically impossible to test it in a clean automated way.
The system noticed that something was wrong and halted the X-ray beam, but merely displayed the word "MALFUNCTION" followed by a number from 1 to 64. The user manual did not explain or even address the error codes, so the operator pressed the P key to override the warning and proceed anyway.
The older models had hardware interlocks that masked their software defects. Those hardware safeties had no way of reporting that they had been triggered, so there was no indication of the existence of faulty software commands.
Some of us have wired connections that aren't 100% reliable. For the most part, my cable modem (time warner) does fine, but due to the technology involved, it could go bad at any time for reasons outside my control. I actually lost a character when I was playing in a perma-death guild thanks to my cable-modem dropping at an inopportune time.
People on here talk big about being able to do what they want with the system's they by, how it's no one else's business what they do once they own it and companies shouldn't try to lock things down.
Congratulations, now you're seeing why this attitude of, "I'll do what I want because it doesn't hurt anyone else" is false. Your modding your equipment has now caused others to be affected. Regardless of the fact that this is only a game, your actions are now rippling down to others (the only time trickle down works).
Getting hung by your own petard isn't much fun, is it?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Except Borderlands 2 doesn't use a dedicated server. One client is used as a host, the other clients connect to them. That's true for both the console and PC versions. So my unsubstantiated guess would be that for the 'infection' to be passed on, the game host has to be 'infected'. So essentially the clients getting infected are being told by the server it's a hardcore game, and to set the hardcore flag.
In all likelihood its the reason the feature was never released. It's too easy to pass it on to others who just don't understand what's happening to them when they agree to join that game.
Whether deliberate or not, this is a perfect example of a virus gene flip that results in no person being immune.
The bug doesn't infect you just because you played with somebody who had the bug. They have to be hosting the game, I'm almost positive. Then for you to share it with somebody else, you'd have to host the game, etc. If you don't know you have the bug, then I could see this happening.
Still, they don't even mention if the bug is "saved". I don't think it is, there's lots of local server variables you can modify on the PC by editing RAM address values (like with Cheat Engine) and you can modify all kinds of things like making the game temporarily harder and increasing the drop rate. These values are not saved to the character. That said, badass *could* be something that is saved, but the article isn't clear. Has anybody tested? I think we're jumping the gun here, assuming the worst.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
"Why are y'all looking at us? We would never create a bug that casts XBox 360 modders in a bad light. No sire-ee. Not us."
Oh fabulous. The days when your children cry about their games blowing up in their face and you're not allowed to cuff them and make them shut the fuck up. Bring back the ruler beatings in our schools!
Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
This sounds more like a virus than a bug.
So that leads me to wonder if/when the game maker will patch it to prevent further spread. After all: Some players may not want to lose their characters permanently.