Valve explains Dota 2’s most explosive bug

Dota 2 is a large sport with tons of of characters, performed by tens of millions of individuals day-after-day, so it’s not too stunning that Dota 2 bugs pop up once in a while. Valve is normally fairly good at staying on prime of them, however some are extra dramatic than others. Probably the most enjoyable and explosive slip-ups to make its method into the MOBA this yr is the Dota 2 Techies Sticky Bomb bug, and now the staff explains the way it happened.

In a brand new recurring characteristic referred to as ‘Between the Lanes,’ the Dota 2 staff talk about “among the challenges, bug fixes, and completely happy accidents we encounter whereas engaged on a sport as distinctive as Dota.” First up is the Techies Sticky Bomb bug, which let gamers utilizing the sport’s most notorious hero create a veritable military of Sticky Bombs, which they may then management and transfer across the map to overwhelm foes with the swarm’s explosive payload.

This really dates again to the large Techies rework in 2022, which Valve says “created a bug the place Techies’ Sticky Bombs didn’t expire, and in some circumstances grew to become controllable by the casting participant.” Nonetheless, this wasn’t really an issue on the time, as a result of “there have been no circumstances the place the bug might really happen in a match.” That every one modified with the large Dota 2 New Frontiers replace earlier this yr, nonetheless.

Merely put, Valve explains that Sticky Bombs have been primarily based on the unique Distant Mines utilized by Techies. As a result of these might be manually detonated, they have been designated within the sport’s code each as ready to make use of talents, and as a controllable unit for the individual taking part in Techies. Nonetheless, the sequence of actions taken by the Sticky Bombs meant they have been by no means ready to really obtain or act on these orders.

This modified with New Frontiers due to the introduction of the Twin Gates, which let gamers shortly journey between reverse corners of the map. In contrast to most different interactable map entities, Twin Gates can really be utilized by non-hero items, as a result of boss monster Roshan likes to make a journey by them to go to his vacation house on the opposite aspect of city.

All of this mixed to create a state of affairs the place the Sticky Bombs might try to make use of the Twin Gates if the Techies participant clicked on them instantly after tossing the Sticky Bomb out. This put the Bombs in a state that interrupted their typical habits, which then left them idling and all of a sudden in a position to be immediately managed, as their regular preventative measures have been not stopping gamers from giving them orders.

And thus, a bug is born. Pleasant! Luckily for Valve, as soon as it realized the issue, the repair was fairly fast. There’s really by no means a cause why the Sticky Bomb must be player-controlled, in order that they merely eliminated the tag marking it as a controllable unit, which put a cease to the difficulty.

“As with so many bugs, 99% of the time spent fixing it’s normally in attempting to trace it down,” Valve says, “The precise resolution normally boils all the way down to altering a single line of code – probably the identical line of code you wrote to repair a earlier bug.” Fortunately the state of affairs is resolved, and the joyous however final damaged trick is not any extra. “Now we sit and wait to find no matter new bug we created by deleting that line of code.”

It’s virtually time for Dota 2 The International 2023, so atone for all the small print. We’ve additionally put collectively one of the best Dota 2 custom games, if this style of chaos has you wanting one thing much more ridiculous than what the bottom sport supplies.