Black Spindel bug? (Destiny)

by slycrel , Wednesday, December 09, 2015, 15:06 (3367 days ago) @ Cody Miller

It's bad form on bungie's part a little, I'm a bit surprised if that is actually the case -- that's a pretty big one to slip through.

Chances are this is a "merge bug" somewhere.

When the features being released, worked on by multiple teams, get merged into a common codebase just before release, there is a possibility of just about anything breaking due to unforseen side effects of changes between the two teams.

So we have things like dragon's breath, which is completely different now. Chances are good that this isn't something that was done by the weapon balancing team. They added a bunch of Y1 exotics in this patch which also changed a bunch of code in this direction. So the likely scenario is that fork A of the codebase was made to do weapons balance changes. Fork B was made to change a bunch of weapons. Forks C, D, E and F were made for supposedly "unrelated to weapons" changes. When release time comes around, all these have to come back under the same roof. Inevitably, code gets changed in overlapping places. Based on how these "conflicts" get resolved is how the code actually behaves going forward.

Regardless of how well you've tested up to that point, there are any number of problems that can cause problems. Making a huge assumption that it was something like this, I'd bet that they had merge conflicts in the codebase that were heavily reviewed and signed off on. However, what looks good by eyeballing the new merged code doesn't take into account feature X, which hasn't changed, but totally relates and changes the behavior of all the merged code. But since it hasn't changed, nobody has tested for that, assuming it has all been tested previously, and a bug slips through.