"Badass" Bug Infects and Kills Borderlands 2 Characters 189
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.'"
Ah yes... Non-featured features... (Score:4, Funny)
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¦
Why does this happen? (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Funny you should use that comparison... Borderlands 2 also has (or at least had, I'm unaware whether this was fixed) a form validation bug. When you trade with somebody, you can input a negative number for the money you "give" them as part of the trade. The other player, however, only sees 0 if the value is negative. If you trick the other player into accepting the trade, the money is actually taken from their character without warning. As if that wasn't enough, should the value you've drained be larger tha
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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?
Wrong. This is happening because in Borderlands 2, there aren't dedicated servers like in Call of Duty. When you play multiplayer, you host a local server yourself. Then everybody else connects to your server as a client. The server is not trusting client stored data, but the server ITSELF can be modded and compromised.
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This is also just a game. If there were a loss of customer privacy data then I would be concerned about the minimum necessary levels of security. But there's no reason to worry about hiring security experts or implementing best practices when it's just a fictitious character at risk. Things will be patched and nothing of value will have been lost.
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And this is exactly why modded boxes should be banned from XBox Live.
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Oh snap, i gotta return to the combat zone ASAP, the screen went all black and shit! See ya later
Re:Ah yes... Non-featured features... (Score:5, Informative)
It would seem you lack basic reading comprehension skills.
This doesn't just target the modders, it targets EVERYONE that happens to be in a game with people that enable this option.
It's worse than that (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:It's worse than that (Score:5, Insightful)
What's remarkable is that after having similar problem with "contagious" bugs in the first Borderlands, they did not safeguard against the possibility in BL2.
In the original, two missions could be left in an unfinishable state, and everyone who played with someone with this condition would catch it too. Luckily, one of the two was a beginner's mission, and most people would already have moved the storyline past that point, and the rest get around it by recreating the character. The other one, though, was nasty.
Re:It's worse than that (Score:5, Insightful)
What's most remarkable is that a bug like this is possible at all. It reveals that the game developers did some seriously stupid shit. Nothing that another player has done to their profile should affect what happens to my profile.
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the game developers did some seriously stupid shit
That's a bit harsh. This is something people have to rip apart and mod their console to activate. It is not something the game devs intended to be able to do in the first place.
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That's a bit harsh. This is something people have to rip apart and mod their console to activate. It is not something the game devs intended to be able to do in the first place.
While you have a point there (and it's one that's been made widely in this thread) it points to some very bad decisions being made somewhere along the line. Perhaps (my guess) the behavior of some important function was changed dramatically somewhere along the line, and since this code was never intended to be accessed by the user, it was never updated to reflect the new meaning of the function. Maybe a function that used to apply to one user was made to apply to all users, and a new function created to app
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Some decisions are very important when the software is important or handles important data. However this is a game.
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It reveals that the game developers did some seriously stupid shit.
It's really quite simple.
If _I_ am playing on "Badass", "Iron Man" or "Hardcore" mode, then I have chosen to play in a game where I can only die once. Once I turn that switch on, it's stuck and there is no backing out. Every time I start a play session, it is set to "Badass" mode. It's a feature of the game world, not specific to my character.
This includes multiplayer games. I can't cheat by joining a co-op game with someone who is non-"Badass" and enjoy the benefits of their "Nicebutt" lifestyle. Be
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Which of those steps was the "seriously stupid shit"?
The part where the game still checks to see if a supposedly disabled setting is on or off, and still has active functions to enforce permadeath?
Im no programmer-- but this isnt difficult. Somewhere there are a series of functions that get called @ death. One of those does the permadeath stuff. That should have been either ripped out, commented out, or neutered prior to release, if they really did not want that mode ingame.
Re:It's worse than that (Score:5, Insightful)
p>Im no programmer-- but this isnt difficult. .
You sound exactly like the manager who told the coder "just get rid of the setting but don't rip out all the other code behind it. We'll have to retest everything and we don't have budget or schedule for that. This isn't difficult. "
Re:It's worse than that (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would you have to retest "everything" if youre only modifying the permadeath function?
That depends. Do you want your company featured on TheDailyWTF.com [thedailywtf.com] or not? It's full of stories about PMs and business owners who insist that changes be made without adequate testing, and none of them end well.
When you start working with big projects, large teams, and looming deadlines, you realize that nothing is ever that simple.
If you spend an afternoon writing a program that makes the screen flash and types "Hello, World!" over and over again until someone kills it, then yes all you need to do is comment out a line or two and everything will work perfectly.
When you are dealing with hundreds of thousands of lines of code, interdependent modules and inheritance diagrams that resemble buckyballs, all written by dozens of people over several years time, things get complicated.
If you honestly think that you can make changes to a product without needing to test them then you may have a future in high-frequency trading [nanex.net], but I advise you to be a little more careful in truly competitive markets like gaming.
Re:It's worse than that...a Fatal Virus (Score:2)
Whether deliberate or not, this is a perfect example of a virus gene flip that results in no person being immune.
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At least this is not in the level of the fictional world of Sword Arts Online where the player is the one who dies. Still, a serious level of a bug and lack of security in the xBox 360 software.
Not that I have any inkling what's really going on (Score:2, Insightful)
But I wouldn't be surprised if this was an attempt to go after people with modded consoles that went terribly awry.
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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.
Re:Ah yes... Non-featured features... (Score:4, Insightful)
However, from Microsoft's perspective, sounds like it's "attacking" (or at least pointing the finger) at the very group they likely want to eradicate; those who mod their consoles.
It would seem you lack basic reading comprehension skills.
This doesn't just target the modders, it targets EVERYONE that happens to be in a game with people that enable this option.
Actually, you're both wrong.
"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."
Re:Ah yes... Non-featured features... (Score:5, Informative)
Incorrect. Players with modded or unmodded consoles who join a multiplayer game with a character in badass mode get kicked into that mode. Having a modded console does not protect you from this bug. The article highlights the fact that an unmodded console to make it clear that it's not just modders who are at risk of losing their characters.
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Also, if a modded xbox user can enable the mode, I would imagine they can also disable the mode. Unmodded xbox users are simply stuck with it. So in that regard, they are the vulnerable group.
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Unmodded xbox users are simply stuck with it. So in that regard, they are the vulnerable group.
Yeah. I don't play BL2, so I don't know the community, but I wouldn't be surprised if ambushing unsuspecting non-modded players with Badassed permadeath became (or already is) a griefing practice. Certainly seems lulz-ish.
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Oh no my character got deleted. If only I could create a new character...
Bah I remember the old days when you lost the game you needed to start over from the start. Perhaps if the game was setup like that you will have a lot more interesting strategies.
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To be fair, game over in the good old days (i.e. Contra) only meant losing a couple of hours. It sucked but people knew what they were getting into. Games these days are so long that most people don't want to torture themselves by replaying the last 20-30 hours to restore their characters, especially when they weren't expecting it.
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To answer your first question, yes. To answer your second question, it depends.
Whether you enjoyed the game up to that point or not, having your progress reset sucks. If you know it's coming, like in any roguelike, you just restart a little wiser. If you don't know it's coming the fun quickly stops.
Re:Ah yes... Non-featured features... (Score:5, Insightful)
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I'd say the ability to permanently kill an opponent in multiplayer is more than a simple bug.
What is it, a complex bug? It sounds pretty simple to me, in fact it sounds like it's working as designed but in a non-user-friendly way (the server should indicate that it is in hardcore mode, for example, so that people know the consequences, and make them explicitly agree to join).
It sounds like you need to watch the South Park World of Warcraft episode again and come back to reality on how important a multiplayer character really is.
Re:Ah yes... Non-featured features... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ah yes... Non-featured features... (Score:4, Informative)
use a wired connection
From GP:
then find out they're on wifi
Let me make this more clear for you:
then find out they're on wifi
Don't participate in the conversation if you lack reading comprehension.
Re: use a wired connection (Score:3)
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Either a life threatening bug or a life lesson, depending on your point of view.
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more of a unfound bug as hardware interlocks where (Score:2)
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
but it's hitting unmoded boxes (Score:2)
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
Re:but it's hitting unmoded boxes (Score:4, Informative)
Right. Which is exactly the sort of thing that engenders ill-will towards modders. "What? My character died permanently? And this could have been avoided if the modder were in jail instead of playing Borderlands? I'm going to write my Congressman!"
GP was suggesting that Microsoft is trying to generate this kind of social friction against the 1337h4x modding community.
Re:but it's hitting unmoded boxes (Score:4, Funny)
Right. Which is exactly the sort of thing that engenders ill-will towards modders. "What? My character died permanently? And this could have been avoided if the modder were in jail instead of playing Borderlands? I'm going to write my Congressman!"
Only by people who are really, really stupid.
I see your point.
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How long before a victim of permadeath launches a law suit, seeking damages from the modder (or MS!)?
You can imagine the headline "modder takes plea bargain of homicide saying 'I'd rather take my chance in the big house than suffer punitive damages' "
It is only a matter of time...
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I'm in favour that everyone should have the right to mod, hack and homebrew the hell of whatever they bought. But they shoud stay out of online games! At least as long as consoles don't sport a cheat-safe homebrew mode that allows your own stuff to run but still keeps games in a safe sandbox. But I don't think we'll ever see that.
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> Right. Which is exactly the sort of thing that engenders ill-will towards modders.
But what is the purpose of modding your console? If it's to allow them to cheat at online games, then I would argue that any ill-will is definitely earned.
I'm having a little trouble coming up with any other legitimate reason for modding.
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hehe (Score:4, Informative)
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
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What you say perhaps applies to consoles back in the time they were actually made of different components than standard desktop PCs. Now you've got the same, just arbitrary stripped down in terms of possibilities of doing anything else with it.
That, sir, is complete bullshit. The only console for which that has ever been true is the Xbox, and even it had a new and improved GPU which wasn't available on PC, NV2A which falls between NV20 and NV25. Every other games console since the 8 bit era at least is made of either purpose-designed or at least purpose-customized components.
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While that's true on the hardware side, I think the more important piece is the software design. The console software generally pretty much looks verbatim like the desktop software. Back in the PS2 days and before, I think game companies exercised more discretion and were more conservative about releases (and online multi-player was by and large non-existant). Nowadays they are more aggressive because consoles allow and encourage updating of every little piece of software, and the multi-user facet has no
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A console has a defined set of hardware features and therefore much easier to develop and maintain. There is no need to support the many combinations of video hardware and drivers, memory configurations, CPU speeds, and OS versions that are found on PCs.
Consoles gene
Russian roulette... (Score:2)
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Sounds like being forced to play Russian roulette...
In Soviet Borderland, Bug Squash You!
First BTD (Score:2)
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No, third, actually. The first BL has two of them.
Yes, really.
mega lolz (Score:2)
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Wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Wait... (Score:4, Insightful)
No. Though wow did have another similar bug.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident [wikipedia.org]
Re:Wait... (Score:5, Insightful)
The corrupted blood incident is actually better described as emergent behavior in a complex system.
The Blizzard developers didn't make a mistake, they just didn't think about all the consequences that debuff would cause in a world-like environment. And researchers had a field day studying the CB spread of the epidemic:)
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The Blizzard developers didn't make a mistake, they just didn't think about all the consequences that debuff would cause in a world-like environment.
I don't know if I can agree with that. The mistake Blizz made was not considering the particular corner case that enabled this in-raid debuff to escape to the larger world: a player character's combat pet (hunter or warlock, back then) goes into "time suspension" when dismissed, and carries all debuffs applied to it up to that moment into suspension. That's a
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The incident in EverQuest could have easily been solved by high level paladins casting just one single spell over and over again until it stopped spreading. That actually the normal procedure at the end of the event the viral comes from, everyone gets in tight and paladins repeated cast that spell to make sure everybody gets cured before moving on.
Part of why corrupted blood was so terrible (read: hilarious) was that it could not be dispelled. The only way to remove the debuff was to die or wait it out.
How to avoid the bug (Score:5, Informative)
How to avoid the bug, from the Gearbox forums [gearboxsoftware.com]:
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.
no big deal (Score:3)
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Finishing BL without dying isn't hard - I did that on playthrough 2.
Completing BL, on the other hand, is hard. Killing Crawmerax is not easy without exploiting glitches. The description for that optional mission is, IIRC, "You. Will. Die."
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NetHack.alt.org - one player was consistently able to ascend 13/13 games.
_major_ caution.
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Probably only slightly easier than beating nethack.
I can consistently beat Nethack without dying, and have done so many times. My infallible strategy involves a minor tweak to one line of the source code, in the grand tradition of Captain James T. Kirk.
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More along the lines of:
if(hp <= 0) hp = 1;
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Truly badass players don't die anyway.
Yes, they do [google.com]... the antibiotics abuse is to blame.
(grin)
Also known as... (Score:3)
Nethack mode?
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In BSG Terms (Score:3)
When you die, you don't get uploaded, 'cause the stupid humans have taken out the ressurection ship.
So yeah (Score:2)
Whine, whine, whine (Score:2)
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 dow
Article is misleading (Score:2)
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
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Or it's for use in a later patch/expansion.
Re:You're Missing The Point (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:You're Missing The Point (Score:5, Interesting)
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Uhm. No. Developers usually develop stuff halfway, then some higher-up decides that it needs to be cut. So they leave in the code, but remove every way of getting to it.
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...what? Are you serious?
The developers didn't intentionally leave in that code as a perk to console modders. Why would they reward console modders by letting them force permadeath on other people?
It's a bug, and it's one that can ruin people's fun, so they should be made aware of it. That's it.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Like everything else in the world, Microsoft's detection isn't perfect.
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I would guess the process was thus: feature was developed, at some point in the development cycle it was decided not to include said feature; it is far easier to just disable the portion of the software that controls the enabling or disabling of the feature than it is to actually go and remove all the code related to the feature - partly because a lot of the time someone will reverse the decision in n month's time anyway. This doesn't just apply to games, it applies to pretty much any form of software; I'v
Re:You're Missing The Point (Score:5, Informative)
They didn't include it.
Game programming involves a lot of seperation of policy and mechanism. Policy is the rules behind the game, things like leveling up, binding items, calculating damage, UI layout, etc. Mechanism is the tech that holds it together, things like 3d rendering, database transactions, network layer, physics simulation, particle simulation, font rendering, etc.
Generally speaking game programmers work on the mechanism side of the spectrum and game designers work on the policy side, but where they meet is determined by the individual team, generally speaking there will be a core engine handled by specialist engine programmers on the very mechanism extremity, some core systems handled by game programmers built on top of that, with policy written in a scripting language that interfaces with those. Mechanism is hard to implement and moves slowly, good game programmers will focus on making the interface for this very clean and flexable to allow policy to change rapidly while leaving the mechanism clean and undamaged. This allows the best play experience to be developed with the minimum expense of programmers (who are the only game developers who regularly get 6 figure salaries, so the fewer the better).
Programmers almost never remove mechanism, since the policies controlling them get turned on and off on an almost daily basis and a seasoned programmer will never fully trust a designer who confidently says "oh, we won't need that anymore". It is the norm to be told "hey, you know that thing we got rid of 6 months ago because testers hated it? We want it again!", so programmers just tend to leave everything in there in the assumption it will come back.
Anyway, games are shipped with maybe 1/3rd of the the functionality turned off by scripts and config as a general rule, unless you have a programmer dominated studio where the attitude is "I wrote it, it's going in". What you're seeing here, as with Hot Coffee and every time you see hidden content/functionality coming back through fan mods is just a product of standard operating practice, there is a lot of vestigial functionality lying around since code and resources in modern games are just too big for any individual to keep track of. You turn something off, make it unable to turn on and it's not there. If some idiots want to mod their consoles and screw with the game, turning stuff on and off like a trained monkey at a switchboard, well, that's pretty much what most game designers do for a living and designers still get their name on the credits, so I don't see why we can't give credit to the Hot Coffee modders for "creating" that feature from nothing.
As for this bug, I'd be more critical because it's implemented wrongly. If a modder could have turned it on, then a game designer could have switched it on, seemingly at random before shipping, since he "is an expert in game theory, emergent narritive and human machine interface, why won't anyone take me seriously as a professional?" The golden rule for programmers is to never throw sharp toys into the playpen.
Up the ante... (Score:2)
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No, that was the first draft, but the legal department advised against that implementation.
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As an Xbox 360 owner I have to ask, how is your Skyrim DLC going? ;-)
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I suspect they didn't care what a modded 360 could do. What I further suspect is that they didn't realize was that it would cause collateral damage.