Original date of blog: June 18th, 2015
So, just about every month, we get a new update in the game. Sometimes they bring fun things, like a new line of tanks, or a new map, or something like that. This time, Wargaming went for a different approach. They wanted to give us something new, something special. So, they broke the game.
Before, there was this chat bug, where you’d be typing, and it would delete the message halfway through, meaning you’d have to re-type the message tens of times before you’d actually get the whole sentence in there. They did fix that. They just broke everything else, in a most spectacular way.
When Sloth told us just after the update that he’d had a game where he’d been unable to see the enemy, and they got slaughtered, I thought to myself ‘oh dear’, and made note of what map and which spawn that had happened on, so I would be prepared if I spawned there, just in case.
And then the rumour intensified, and I heard similar stories all over the place. Teams not seeing each other at all, or one team seeing the other but the other team not seeing them. And it happened on all maps, all over the place. That’s when I decided – I had to see that for myself.
So I tooned up with Tiger, because I hadn’t played with him in a while, and it’s always a joy to toon with him, and we started the game. The first battle was in the new map. It was a completely horrible loss. I was in my T30, and I did exactly 0 damage before I was slaughtered. Shows how important it is to know where the heck you’re going in a map, lol.
Then, the second game we entered had a guy from Valiant in the enemy team and was on Falls Creek. We all headed towards the base, and started capping to draw them in. I got shot in the bum, and turned to face the enemy, only to see that the enemy wasn’t actually looking at us. They were driving like they had no idea where we were. Turned out, they didn’t. They couldn’t see us. Which made it a field trip for us, because we had them in our sights. You can imagine the slaughter. Needless to say, we won.
The next few games started promising. But that’s as far as it goes. The game loaded, we started driving and about a minute into the game, we’d suddenly be back in the garage and our platoon would be dismissed. It was around this time that I just started laughing and didn’t really stop laughing throughout the entire time I played.
We had a few normal matches, but they were few and far between, with a lot of crashes during the games, which sometimes kicked us out of the app completely and wouldn’t let us back in at all until the game was over.
It was on Black Goldville that we had our first Invisible Team Bug Match. We drove around, saw no one. So we headed to the base as the enemy started to cap. We drove into it, started driving around to see where they were. We killed a few of them, they killed a few of us. It ended in a draw.
From then on, the game felt like a lottery. Every match, you got this little excited knot in your stomach, like right before you make the free fall in a rollercoaster. Would you see the enemy? Would the enemy see you? The amount of relief you’d feel when it turned out to be a normal match was palpable. And all the while, I was laughing a heck lot at all the broken bits of the game. It was just too impressive that they could break the game this way.
That’s not the worst of it – apparently, on Port Bay (the new map) there was or is, because I don’t know if they fixed that yet, apparently a point where you could fall down the map and enter everlasting free fall. Well, everlasting? Until the clock ran out.
There was this one map on Mines, where we had Romulan Wartanks all around, and we tried to cap again. The enemy game. And with excellent teamwork and watching what the others of the team were driving into, we managed to kill three enemies, and we capped the base. That was pretty cool. Hardest victory, ever. Not sure where the four tanks went that we couldn’t see. They didn’t even try to stop us.
And let’s not forget about the glitch where you could drive into the water of Port Bay at some specific place, and not drown. Yes, update 1.10 will be engraved in our minds forever. This morning, they patched it a little, and broke other things again. But the game does seem to be playable, at least. No more random crashes and ghost teams.
I have to admit, part of me regrets it being fixed so quickly. I felt like a true daredevil, heading out there, daring to try and play in a game that really didn’t want to play with you. The Russian Roulette of guessing if you would see your enemy or not. It was just heck funny. I don’t think people have fully appreciated just how difficult it is to break a game like that.
Wargaming must have been scratching their heads a lot yesterday, not to mention that they must have done a lot of head-desk-repeat. And I don’t want to know what’s happening to the guy responsible for this update, for making it, and for allowing it to go out when it was so incredibly faulty. This is definitely going to lose them money, because they’ve had a lot of angry players on their hands. Not to mention all the people that have premium account and haven’t been able to use it properly all day, because the game was unplayable (me included).
Despite the fact that I had a ton of fun and was laughing my butt off for most of the time, the draws and lack of enemies to shoot at do in fact alter your ratings for the worst. And the constant crashing probably had a lot of people raging. So they will have to come up with something big to make up for all the problems, all the frustration and all the lost prem-time all around.
Maybe they will make a smaller broken version of the app, for those who like to live dangerously 😉 Somehow, I doubt that though. But we’ll see where it goes. Things are back to normal now. Well, as normal as it can be, while still having some bugs. Like the chat saying you have x-amount of messages, but you only really have half of them. And tanks pointing their turrets the other way, but still managing to shoot you.
I’m guessing they won’t break it further, for now, but I’m wondering if they’ll ever manage to fix it all properly. The Russian Roulette will be limited to the new updates then, instead of every match. They’re like a box of chocolates. You never know what’s inside. Could be a really rich and nice caramel filling. Or boogers.
Battles fought: 7,293
Winrate: 64.17%
Average damage: 1,565
Amaunet85's blog and whatnot 