35% Rule is Broken

Thanks for the feedback guys. For clarity though:

This is almost accurate, but not quite.

The sentinel tag didn’t “stop working”; it was consciously removed as part of Stefan’s 2015 morale rewrite, which also included the removal of the 35% rule. These things happened together; one didn’t lead to the other.

As many of us know, that morale rewrite was a disaster, and was reverted awhile after the ownership transfer.

Unfortunately, the whole mess left us with some unintended bugs, including problems with the 35% rule. It was also a partial reversion out of necessity, which is why things like sentinel and op-limit never came back. As with many things, competing priorities have lead to their continued delay.

In any case, the bugs with the 35% rule were tested and fixed about a year ago now. It’s always possible that some bugs were re-introduced. It’s also possible that some bugs weren’t caught during that testing.

So, if we want to improve this we need to do a few things:

  1. Identify what cases differ from their expected results.

    • Gather specific testing scenarios from players who are reporting the bug
  2. Replicate the scenarios on the dev server

  3. Identify which scenarios are bugs vs which require feature work.

Specificity is key. “This thing is broken” isn’t as useful as “Here is a specific scenario that needs to be evaluated”. @Lord_Pickle’s post above contains a good example of how to describe a problem, which would fall in the “feature work” category as it is more of a feature design issue than an actual bug.

@WhoFlungDung and @OrBit, do you have any specific details that we can use to help with test cases?

Thank you.