Of dumb bugs and dumber gamers

[DCoder]

I don't normally go to XWIS forums because I consider them to be a cesspool of failure. And something recently proved to me, once more, that that opinion was correct.

I learned of a dumb bug in the game (sure ain't the first one or the last one...) - the Guard command affects your own units... and anyone's War Miners/Slave Miners, regardless of whether you're their owner, ally, enemy or even observer.

It was being abused on XWIS, and rationalized by some users as being there by design - "it didn't work in RA2, only YR", and "the Chrono Miner is immune to it". I can not favourably compare their intelligence to that of amoebas, so I'll just say that this issue has been fixed in Ares, and it took me less than 30 minutes to do it.

Oh, and hail Westwood for leaving it there in the first place. Where would I get my intellectual challenge without their lovely code to debug?

[Modder666]

Btw, I tested this and confirmed it fixed just in case anyone has to ask.

[MRMIdAS]

does this mean harvesters go to guard anythime i click guard, or only when I click it with nothing selected?

[DCoder]

You could just test it with vanilla YR or an earlier build of Ares When you have a harvester selected and click guard, it will obey no matter if you are the owner or not.

[Professor_Tesla]

That is the most retarded bug I have ever heard (read?) of. What piece of lazy Westwood code allows this to happen?

[Renegade]

I don't know the exact details, but from the code I've seen, it looked like Westwood was changing the guard command to accommodate for the Slave Miner (which has a gun, and thus can guard, but is a weird building/unit hybrid and thus needs special treatment) and fucked something up in the process.

It's a pretty logical chain of events, really:

• Harvesters in RA2 work fine, guard mode for armed units in RA2 works fine
  
• YR adds new, weird, armed harvester
  
• YR needs guard mode changes to accommodate for new harvester
  
• Westwood changes guard mode behavior for armed harvesters
  
• Westwood fucks up
  
• Bug affects only armed harvesters, because only those can guard
  

And yet, the cheaters and apologists want to tell you that's "by design"...because, clearly, one day, Westwood's game designers sat at the round table and thought "hey! wouldn't it be awesome if I could send commands to my enemy's units?! I mean, I'd send commands to his harvester, drain his resources, and then conquer him! Get it?!? Command & Conquer???".

(Did I mention RenProj's official policy on cheaters is "cheaters have small dicks and need to be castrated"?)

[Blade]

I'm amazed I haven't heard of that cheat before now and that it got past initial QA and didn't get picked up for the 1.001 patch.

[WoRmINaToR]

I have watched several online videos (youtube) of people doing this. You just click, press 'g' and their harvester stops whatever its doing (harvesting) and sits there. I may be able to dig up a few of them, but they are hard to spot because most of them aren't named "harvester guard bug," but instead the names of the players ingame.

What's sad is that a few of these bug exploiters lost in the end of the game. Just shows how n00bish cheaters tend to be (though every once in a few years you find a really good cheater, lol)

And about XWIS, well Sergeant Hartman comes to mind...: "I didn't know they stacked sh*t that high!"

[Aro]

"the Chrono Miner is immune to it".

It did have effects on the Chrono Miner too, but instead of spinning around and moving frantically like it does to War Miners, Chrono Miners just halt on the spot for a small period of time.

[DCoder]

Heh. No weapon - no way to "guard", I suppose.