Welcome to the second Patcher's Perspective, the column where I talk about whatever I think RotWK players should know about, published every other week. Let's start off with a discussion of the ClanWars situation.
September ClanWars
ClanWars is in a bit of a weird situation at the moment. First the site went inexplicably down for days, then the administrators
announced that it had fallen victim to a DDoS attack. A few days later the site began to work properly again - being down only rarely - but the only news from the site administrators was that
there will be no prizes in August due to the DDoS situation. The status of the RotWK League has been up in the air during this time.
The problem is, the site's been fine for most of the past few weeks. There's absolutely no reason for us not to have a functioning league at the moment.
Therefore, starting on Tuesday, September 1, full support is being restored to the RotWK League - regardless of any potential future DDoS issues, and regardless of whether prizes are offered for September or not. If - worst case - the site is down for two or three weeks, the September competition will continue, just be sure to save your replays to AR them when the site is back up. More likely there won't be any problems at all. This means that we'll be getting all the ARs/AMs processed within a week of them being posted. Cool beans. Apologies also for the poor handling of the DDoS incident on the part of the RotWK League - we should have simply waited for the site to come back then processed the many ARs when they were submitted (as we'll be doing again this month), not ignored them.
Hopefully this means we will have an active September competition again. As for September rules: the roster limit will remain at five. Max invites per month has been increased to eight, from six.
Fortress Banners
And on Sunday, we got our first serious bug report, as usual from Turin. Get ready for story time, I'm going to have to explain how I messed up this time. It involves the extremely interesting world of Fortress Banner Leadership.
Originally, the Banners all had their own unique modifiers for unit stats. Whereas most Leaderships, such as a hero's (Aragorn, Theoden), a Drummer Troll, or the Eye of Sauron, used the modifier "GenericHeroLeadership," Banners were a rare exception to this rule in that they had their own unique modifiers. Men Fortress Banners, for example, used the modifier "MenFortressBannersLeadership." MenFortressBannersLeadership was exactly the same as GenericHeroLeadership and the two did not stack, but they were still different modifiers, which meant that they needed to be edited separately in order to keep them the same.
2.02d brought to completion the new Leadership and stacking system, where Leaderships gave just +33% armor and damage, rather than +50% damage and +100% armor as they did in 2.01. To make the change, the previous coder, Ryder, changed the stats of GenericHeroLeadership only, while leaving the other modifiers, like MenFortressBannersLeadership, the same as they were before. Instead, he changed the Banners themselves to give off GenericHeroLeadership as opposed to MenFortressBannersLeadership. (This was done with other objects that used non-standard Leadership as well, such as Hwaldar.) This was a good thing, as it meant that he could then change every Leadership in the game by editing just GenericHeroLeadership, useful if there was to be a need to alter how all Leaderships function at the same time.
By the time Version 2.0 was rolling around, the benefit of having one Leadership modifier was gone. There's no way that we're going to change how Leadership works now, so there's no point in having GenericHeroLeadership being used for everything. Instead, it's just messy to have modifiers like MenFortressBannersLeadership that you'd think would be used for that purpose, but actually aren't. Therefore, for a bit of code housekeeping, I went back and changed Banners (and Hwaldar, etc.) to use their original modifiers again, instead of GenericHeroLeadership. Then, I edited the individual modifiers (MenFortressBannersLeadership) to the proper 2.02 values. It's the same result in-game, just slightly cleaner from a coding perspective - or messier, depending on your preferences.
At least, I
thought I had edited the individual modifiers to the proper 2.02 values. But they unmistakably haven't been. Fortress Banners, in Version 2.0, have the same stats as they did in 2.01: they give off +50% damage, +100% armor, as opposed to +33% damage, +33% armor as they should. (The only difference from 2.01 is the FX, which was changed elsewhere.) There are a couple of ways this could have happened; maybe I forgot to save the file after I edited it, maybe I simply forgot to edit it. It doesn't really matter, because it's wrong, and the only way to fix that is with another patch.
What to Do?
So now the problem: what do we do about the overpowered Banners? Do we release a patch to fix it, or let it be and wait until December for the next patch, as previously promised? For the reasons I explained in
the last Patcher's Perspective, I'm not inclined to update it now. Plus,
as Varek so grammatically put it in General Discussion on Sunday, "most players who are used to 2.01 don't want to spend much time to get used to a new patch and train it because it is obvious that there will come a new 2.02 patch any later or even soon." Preventing ClanWars from changing "every month and a half" is certainly a good reason not to fix this bug until later.
On the other hand, during a ClanWars downtime, this is the perfect time for a hotfix, as it's hardly going to disrupt anything. In addition, it wouldn't be anything to re-learn, all it would do is put Fortress Banners back to their intended strength (plus correct other bugs). After all, shouldn't bugs be patched as soon as possible? It wouldn't be hard to put aside my current iteration of 2.02 and code a simple bugfix patch, and this is the least-disruptive time to do so. Of course, due to the complications involved in releasing a new version, it probably wouldn't be out until a week from now at the earliest; and as I said above, the hope is that ClanWars will be active by then.
So I don't really know what to do now. This bug is serious; it's not
that serious to
require a new patch, though it certainly is going to affect gameplay quite a bit: 2.01 buffs were
strong. (A word of warning: do not attempt to fight your opponent's units if he has Fortress Banner Leadership.) The other known bugs are much less of an issue. A new patch wouldn't hurt anything and would only make the game better, but people would have to download it, and it would not only break the "continuity" of the game that I was trying to establish by holding off on the next update until December, but also reduce our credibility by releasing a new patch just after we promised not to do so for the rest of the year -
again. Hence, I'm inclined to wait it out, despite the severity of the bug. It doesn't exactly totally ruin an aspect of the game, like 2.02e Shelob or Dragon Strike, so I think we can all deal with it for now - unless, of course, it turns out to be a bigger imbalance than anticipated. (Please share your thoughts on this issue in the
discussion topic for this article.)
