Blizzard Dev Recounts Glitched Bear in World of Warcraft

A Blizzard game designer lamented over bugs in World of Warcraft, recounting one particular glitched bear.

On Twitter, Game Designer Joe Magdalena discussed the bug which he called, “THE DEATH BEAR OF ARATHI HIGHLANDS.” It’s pretty fantastic:

During testing Burning Crusade we found THE DEATH BEAR OF ARATHI HIGHLANDS. He would look at you and you would just die. We were so confused until we found that his attack speed was set to .001 instead of 1.0. So in the blink of an eye he’d bite you 1000 times till you were dead. https://t.co/lBQBwDOrBr

— joemag (@joemag_games) November 21, 2019

He followed up in an email to Kotaku,

“We checked the combat log and saw hundreds of: ‘Brown Bear hits you for 1, Brown Bear hits you for 1, Brown Bear hits you for 1, Brown Bear hits you for 2, Brown Bear hits you for 1.’ It wasn’t doing huge damage, but it was instantly doing a small amount many many times,”

This led to the QA team to check the bear’s stats, with Magdalena concluding that the bear’s reign of terror was likely due to a typo mistake,

“A lot of development is done in spreadsheets and databases, likely this was simply a typo. A misplaced decimal creating an unspeakable terror!”