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Comment by Supermancho | Hacker News Reader

The question is "why didn't the players notice" not why the developers didn't notice.

The article leads with a clickbait question.

The reason they didn't notice is because the stats aren't readily available and public to everyone, to see the sharp uptick in wins paired with the game being filled with opaque systems. No player playing for the first time would notice or have a chance to notice.

To put it another way, this is an article about a (secret and mistaken) massive change to a very difficult game that made it slightly less difficult. Same article turns around and asks why nobody noticed, like that's an interesting question.

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> the stats aren't readily available and public to everyone

The stats have always been public and instantly available, impressively so. Here's the bot command to query the stats in question:

    !lg * start>"2015-03-06 00:00:00" start<"2015-03-21 00:00:00" cv=0.16 / won

Output:

    1180/39437 games for * (start>'2015-03-06 00:00:00' start<'2015-03-21 00:00:00' cv=0.16): N=1180/39437 (2.99%)

So that's a 3% winrate for the major version in question during the dates the bug existed.

Using another query to determine the all-time winrate across all versions:

    !lg * / won

We see the historic winrate to be about 1%.

The listgame interface is documented at https://github.com/crawl/sequell/blob/master/docs/listgame.m... , and the bots can be found on IRC and Discord.

> The question is "why didn't the players notice" not why the developers didn't notice.

No, lots of players noticed. The question is phrased as "how did the players miss this?", but that's not what the author means - what he means is "why didn't the community come to a consensus on what had happened within two weeks of the introduction of the change?"

Which is a much stupider question.

> Which is a much stupider question.

I don't think it's a stupid question at all; not when the effect is so large. It was literally double what it should be, leading to a 3x overall win rate.

Coming from Dota 2, if there was a bug like this it would be caught within minutes, if not seconds, and patched within an hour or two.

- Yes, the Dota player base is orders of magnitude larger, and the damage numbers are easily available. Also I have never played Crawl.

It's not a stupid question at all, it's actually a good pretext to discuss the difficulties inherent in reasoning about an opaque system you are interacting with.

The article also brings evidence that many players didn't notice or believe that anything changed, they specifically believed that nothing did change, which is a surprising belief for such a huge change - but understandable in the context of of such an opaque system. I also believe that other players noticed something had made the game easier, but no one realized what specifically had changed, or most likely suspected how big of a change it was.

> The article also brings evidence that many players didn't notice or believe that anything changed, they specifically believed that nothing did change, which is a surprising belief for such a huge change

Not really. The article cites responses in online discussion to that effect. But there is no evidence that those responses came from someone who had ever played the altered version of the game. With certainty, many of them didn't. You don't have to do a playthrough on the latest version before leaving a new comment in a forum thread.

It's a safe bet that the majority of the player base never encountered the bug at all, since it was only available if you downloaded the game within a two-week window.

I thought it was an interesting question followed by an interesting take. There was a bit of ego salve in the conclusion but it seemed plausible.

“Slightly less difficult” is a huge understatement. I don’t know specific stats, but I’d say the average player had their winrates at least double (eg 2% to 4%)

It is not easy to notice a change of 2% success to 4% success without a lot of samples.

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