Original Post — Direct link

The bottom tree Sunbreaker melee ability in D2, Mortar Blast, was a perk called Thermal Vents in D1 for Sunbreakers, and it had exactly the same bug the ability still has to this day in D2:

Like half the time when you use the charged melee ability, it does absolutely zero damage (not even normal uncharged melee damage), uses up your melee charge, and only applies the very low aoe burn.

Here's a post on the Bungie forums way back from 2015 describing this bug back in D1: https://www.bungie.net/en/Forums/Post/154564476

And here are google search results with multiple posts from every year from 2015 till today on reddit and the bungie forums about this bug: https://www.google.com/search?q=destiny+sunbreaker+thermal+vent+bug

Here's a youtube clip from 2016 showcasing the bug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BY23EmczivM

How is it that player-beneficial bugs get fixed within months or even weeks, yet bugs that are a disadvantage to players often don't get fixed for multiple years, and in this case not even between full game releases?

External link →
over 4 years ago - /u/dmg04 - Direct link

Originally posted by Reevoo12

There's a lot of confirmation bias in this idea that bungie fixes player benefiting bugs and not player hurting bugs. They fix both, just read all the patch notes and you'll see that.

Part of the issue is the game breaking bugs that let you do insane damage completely ruin the player experience in certain activities. That's not really true of one ability on one subclass tree not working sometimes. So the former rightly gets higher priority.

Some bugs can share the same priority levels, but one bug with a larger amount of conversation takes longer to fix due to the complexity of the issue. Other times, bugs with a loud conversation can go on without a fix for lengthy amounts of time, as the cost to address it could override the actual benefit.

In terms of player beneficial bugs, I'd like to give an example of an issue that was just discovered that may be fixed in a shorter amount of time than expected. Players can currently hide their weapons/arms, which is leading to some pretty cool content creation. While this bug is benefiting players, it's actually causing issues with memory in the game. The team is investigating the full impact, but things like this could lead to nasty issues the more that players use the bug in public areas. Think error codes, crashes, or other. I admit from a personal side, I'm sad to see the bug needs to be fixed, but a cursory look at the issue indicated a fairly low wake fix (low time to implement, test, and ship) on something that a designer was already looking at.

Another would be the Wormgod Caress. We quickly disabled the Exotic, and are investigating the issue for a future patch. While players were having some fun annihilating bosses, Gambit/Gambit Prime was slowly becoming an issue where players could kill the Primeval in a very short amount of time without many slayer stacks. It was exciting to see players breaking the game in fun and new ways, but there was wider impact than just raids or nightfall bosses. As such, we had to disable access to the exotic, even though the conversation around it was fairly positive out the gate.

I've told the story about the Mercury Sparrow issue a few times, but that's another good example of a highly visible community request where the cost of a fix would have negatively impacted other areas of the game.

As for the Sunbreaker issue, I'll check with the team. I don't mean for the explanations above to be excuses of why we aren't addressing this one specifically. Rather, it could be that we've developed a fix in the past that ended up breaking in another hotfix. It could be caused by connection issues, which would require a rework of the perk. Performing the quick google search is showing me quite a few posts from 2015 and 2016, but it seems the report volume has dropped, so the issue wasn't on our radar. If the repro rate is low enough internally, the priority of the investigation may drop as other issues arise in development on other items that haven't shipped yet.

In any case, we'll get a conversation started with the team and provide updates when possible.

over 4 years ago - /u/dmg04 - Direct link

Originally posted by dmg04

Some bugs can share the same priority levels, but one bug with a larger amount of conversation takes longer to fix due to the complexity of the issue. Other times, bugs with a loud conversation can go on without a fix for lengthy amounts of time, as the cost to address it could override the actual benefit.

In terms of player beneficial bugs, I'd like to give an example of an issue that was just discovered that may be fixed in a shorter amount of time than expected. Players can currently hide their weapons/arms, which is leading to some pretty cool content creation. While this bug is benefiting players, it's actually causing issues with memory in the game. The team is investigating the full impact, but things like this could lead to nasty issues the more that players use the bug in public areas. Think error codes, crashes, or other. I admit from a personal side, I'm sad to see the bug needs to be fixed, but a cursory look at the issue indicated a fairly low wake fix (low time to implement, test, and ship) on something that a designer was already looking at.

Another would be the Wormgod Caress. We quickly disabled the Exotic, and are investigating the issue for a future patch. While players were having some fun annihilating bosses, Gambit/Gambit Prime was slowly becoming an issue where players could kill the Primeval in a very short amount of time without many slayer stacks. It was exciting to see players breaking the game in fun and new ways, but there was wider impact than just raids or nightfall bosses. As such, we had to disable access to the exotic, even though the conversation around it was fairly positive out the gate.

I've told the story about the Mercury Sparrow issue a few times, but that's another good example of a highly visible community request where the cost of a fix would have negatively impacted other areas of the game.

As for the Sunbreaker issue, I'll check with the team. I don't mean for the explanations above to be excuses of why we aren't addressing this one specifically. Rather, it could be that we've developed a fix in the past that ended up breaking in another hotfix. It could be caused by connection issues, which would require a rework of the perk. Performing the quick google search is showing me quite a few posts from 2015 and 2016, but it seems the report volume has dropped, so the issue wasn't on our radar. If the repro rate is low enough internally, the priority of the investigation may drop as other issues arise in development on other items that haven't shipped yet.

In any case, we'll get a conversation started with the team and provide updates when possible.

Following up!

Looks like the team has been investigating for a bit, and they're planning to address this in future hotfix. Don't have specific details on the changes they're developing or when exactly to expect it, but will be sure to cover it in a patch note preview.