Why the bug I wrote became a core gameplay mechanic?!
Chapter 276 - 285: Another Confrontation Between the Bug Faction and the Mechanism Faction

Chapter 276: Chapter 285: Another Confrontation Between the Bug Faction and the Mechanism Faction

Lilith paced around the living room angrily, but even as she practically smoked her CPU, she couldn’t come up with a suitable solution.

What should she do?

The game had already gone live, and the current version was completely set in stone. Even if changes were to be made, they would have to wait until the future release of version 70.

Moreover, version 70 was still just in the planning stages, development hadn’t even started. It would be at least half a year before it could go live. Even after version 70 launched, it would be independent of version 60, with no mutual impact.

So what about version 60? Wasn’t it completely screwed?

But there was also some good news: the game had so far collected far more negative emotions than positive ones, given that up to this point, the bug had only appeared on a small scale.

Instructor Ding’s team was the first to discover it, and it was already the wee hours of the morning, when player numbers were at their lowest, so the word hadn’t spread yet.

Even if some teams tried overnight, they repeatedly wiped in front of Nephalor, creating a wealth of negative emotions at first. Only upon successfully unlocking a job would they harvest a certain amount of positive emotions.

From the current perspective, the negative emotions were still in the majority.

"Damn it!

"Gu Fan, you keep an eye on things for me. I need to think about how to handle this emergency!"

After saying those words, Lilith disappeared without a trace.

Clearly, she was not willing to give up just yet, but she herself couldn’t come up with any great ideas and who knows which strategist she had gone to seek new help from.

However, Gu Fan didn’t mind, at least everything was going according to plan so far!

...

The next morning.

The amazing bug in "Shadow World" shot up to the hot searches on all the major gaming forums and websites!

It wasn’t just spreading rapidly among the player communities, but countless UP hosts and streamers were also introducing it on video websites and live streaming platforms.

Of course, there were also many who advocated for keeping it under wraps to make a silent fortune. With a bug this awesome, it was better to quietly make use of it. If it became well known, wouldn’t that just alert the officials to fix it pronto?

But obviously, that was just wishful thinking. On one hand, there were too many players willing to share; it was impossible to stop them. On the other hand, Instructor Ding had already used the bug to claim the world-first defeat of Nephalor, so how could the officials not know?

Thinking they could keep it from the officials was wishful thinking indeed.

So, everyone simply began discussing it wildly and started celebrating.

"I can’t believe Nitiandang could actually produce such a heaven-defying bug. Isn’t this omnipotent job entirely overpowered? The whole team turned into superhumans and just 15 people took down Nephalor. If we went by the normal, bug-free jobs, even 25 people would barely make it!"

"Because the dungeon adjusts the difficulty based on the number of players, the more players you have, the more health the boss has. Of course, this all-powerful job is indeed too heaven-defying; with dual or even triple talent boosts, who could withstand that!"

"This all-powerful job is just too awesome! I never imagined that one day, my Priest could cast Holy Light Spells and shields at the same time, and even switch to the Flame Series later on, combining a Pyromancer with a Hellfire Warlock for some serious burn action!"

"Our team had an emergency meeting this morning to start the raid, just a pity that we didn’t encounter Nephalor at the first boss. Don’t know how many bosses in we’ll have to beat before we meet him. Sigh, it’s tough!"

"Right now, what job combinations are strong? Pyromancer + Magician? Or Warrior + Knight? Rogue + Berserker?"

"It’s still unclear, the combos that have been tried out so far are just superficial and obvious. If we continue researching, we might find some even stronger ones."

"I’m envious of Instructor Ding’s server! Their raid progress has almost become the standard for server guilds, where you just go in and directly face Nephalor. We checked with the guilds on our server, not a single team encountered Nephalor right off the bat, it’s tough!"

"Bosses, hurry up with the research, I’ll copy your homework the moment you figure it out!"

"Let me give y’all a reality check, stop researching, and don’t bother about raid progress or whatever. It’s not worth wasting too much energy on this. It’s obvious that this is a serious bug that’s completely wrecked the game’s core mechanics, so the devs are definitely going to shut servers down soon for an emergency fix, maybe even roll things back. No point in busting your guts over this, when everything’s going to be wiped anyway."

"How can you be so sure it’s a bug? As everyone knows, Nitiandang has no bugs, only hidden mechanics!"

"I could go along with the ’hidden mechanics’ explanation before, but this time? Isn’t it a bit too much of a stretch?"

"Not really, looking back now, you can see there were a lot of hints dropped!"

As players dug deeper into the discussion, an unavoidable question was brought back into the spotlight.

And that is... is this really a bug?

This is crucial!

Advocates of both the bug faction and the mechanism faction have come out once again for the most intense debate in recent times!

First to speak up, of course, were players from the bug faction.

After all, the emergence of this jack-of-all-trades profession has shattered the game’s original planned class system, turning Shadow World from a traditional MMORPG into something bizarre. Mechanically and numerically, the original system was heavily compromised, and the difficulty of raids has plummeted.

"This is definitely a bug, no question about it!"

"If every player can randomly learn skills from other classes, then what’s the point of having classes at all? I’m sure this wasn’t what the designers intended. Why would they even bother creating specific classes in the first place? They might as well have just let everyone choose their skills freely."

"Exactly, and take Lava Mouth for example; as the first raid in the game, its difficulty was obviously meticulously crafted. The first boss acts as a DPS check, sort of a threshold for the team entering the raid, with the following bosses getting progressively harder. All things considered, they’re still within an acceptable difficulty range. Nephalor, as the final boss of the raid, usually requires a fully geared team to defeat. This difficulty curve makes sense, doesn’t it?"

"And now what do we have? After everyone became masters of all trades, a 15-player team, none with raid gear, just went and wiped out Nephalor? Even though Instructor Ding’s team is full of top players with great execution, it still doesn’t make sense for it to be that easy, right? Clearly, there’s been a numerical collapse! This proves the difficulty is definitely not what the devs intended."

"Right, plus there are further indicators, like from the very start, the game positioned itself as a high-difficulty MMORPG. From leveling up to five-player dungeons and then to raids, there’s a consistent theme of high difficulty.

"Yet with this ’jack-of-all-trades’ bug, the earlier content remains tough while later content’s difficulty has nosedived, creating an inverted difficulty curve. Even if the difficulty was meant to change, it should have been easier in the beginning and harder later, right?"

These points from the bug faction certainly carried persuasive power, winning over a considerable number of neutral players.

But the mechanism faction wasn’t about to concede defeat, quickly countering with a powerful rebuttal.

"Fine, then can you bug proponents explain the skill points system with orange, purple, blue, and green points? If there wasn’t supposed to be a system for all classes, why bother creating these points?"

In the game, any skill a player wants to learn has its own level of rarity, for instance, the Priest’s skill "Torment Suppression," a top-tier Damage Reduction Skill, requires spending orange points.

Following the common MMORPG color coding where orange stands for legendary, purple for epic, blue for rare, and green for uncommon, this skill is often referred to as a legendary skill by the players.

But this point system is everywhere strange.

Most jobs have incomplete orange points. Take the Priest for example; although there’s a cap of six orange points, even after learning all of a Priest’s skills, at most, only three points are used.

Questions about this were raised early on, but other players guessed it was probably in anticipation of future content updates. Like, if a new version is released, just add three more orange skills to round it out.

However, the emergence of this all-class gameplay has led players to reexamine this mechanism.

What if the cap of six orange points is meant to limit the number of cross-class legendary skills a player can have? That would make much more sense!

Not only that, but the mechanism faction also addressed and refuted each of the bug faction’s arguments one by one.