I wonder what could have been done to fix this bug. Does anyone with more experience with the game have any ideas?
We'd need to know the specifics of this transformation to build something adequate.
If the specifics of the transform are known, I think you could also start with a prefix that the receiver could use to determine drunk vs sober, and have two different decoding paths.
And I’m not sure whether you meant both meanings or not, but maybe elaborating will help someone else.
- You can determine drunken state using the game's front-end API. They call debuffs/buffs 'auras' and you can match it against a specific set of drunken aura ids. - The game will randomly add Hs and iirc the word "hic" to a sentence in order to emulate drunkenness.
Personally, I like the checksum solution the best -- don't even try to be smart, just validate the integrity of the message. This also solves issues where your message gets truncated, or other problems arise. They also likely had to break up their messages across multiple chat messages (there's chat limit) so a checksum goes a long way here.
I think sending everything twice when drunk -- and letting the receiver figure it out -- would be most true to the drunk behaviour.