I dunno, the amount of shenanigans you have to do to get it over 2 billion or whatever…I don’t think this is happening by accident, over the course of any kind of normal game.
They should fix it but it’s whatever, if you set out to break the game and it doesn’t break, where’s the fun in that? The game doesn’t even crash or anything.
Well, for example, the topic post isn’t doable beyond the breaking point. It’s at least that annoying.
There’s no need to nerf Hotpool. The current devs have released quite a few chars with %buffs of some or another tile type(s), and Hotpool has the craziest potential yet, doubling the strength of a strike every time he takes any dmg … bonkers compounding potential in a game full of cascades and multihits, and with tiles starting with strengths in 4 digits.
All that’s needed to prevent what happened to Kwahder (overflow until flips to negative) is to do what Bucket assumed(?) they did … set an upper limit on tile buffing. Set it at, say … 2 billion. If this buff takes that tile strength over 2 billion, set it to 2 billion. They already have lower bounds on all kinds of things, preventing things from going below 0 or 1 to avoid various undesirable, weird player experiences; just set the upper bounds to avoid other kinds of undesirable player experiences.
What happened to Kwahder sounds irritating. All of a sudden you’re no longer doing damage … and have to figure out why. Kwahder did … other players might not. It might be a crucial match, leading to much frustration. And now, imagine it wasn’t a strike being buffed, but a protect … one second you have big fat protects mitigating all damage, then all of a sudden you have zero protection and you’re eating nukes … but your protects are still there. WtF? That’s a bad player experience.
And NOTICE, that, despite the strike rolling over to -2Bn, he wasn’t doing massive amounts of negative damage, because … the devs did set a lower bound. If they had bothered to set the corresponding upper bound, this weirdness wouldn’t have happened at all. Imagine there wasn’t a lower bound, and a protect tile was buffed until it overflowed, and then your team randomly dies from full health with no apparent explanation. (I get confused enough when the bomb blows up my Juggs 
)
I like these %buffs, they’re fun, and better than discrete buffs, they keep powers evergreen, relevant to all levels of play. But I don’t want them to blow up in my face. The possibility may be rare … right now … but! The powers, they be creeping … numbers in the game have increased several orders of magnitude over the years … more characters will be released with these %buffs. Sure it’s a rare occurrence, but it shouldn’t even be a possibility, and it’s elementary to good code to keep variables reined in!
Yeah, like, I assume (hope?) this is on a list somewhere, but I bet it’s fairly low-priority. Stuff like this tends to keep getting passed over in favor of stuff that makes money, or more urgent bugs like powers that don’t work or whatever. Their team is really small too – having worked in environments like that, you generally end up deferring these sorts of things.
Hey, maybe it’ll get fixed in the new engine (coming 2037!).
Such optimism is so uncharacteristic. Turning over a new leaf?
Somebody SHOULD try to see what happens to a protect that hits this upper bound. Do you start gaining health when you take “negative” damage? Bring Wasp with you and try again.
That already doesn’t happen, ie. enemy hits for 100, but you have 1000 protects, you don’t gain health.
With negative protects, more likely it would increase the damage, ie. enemy hits for 100, but you have -1000 protect would result in 1100 damage.
I’m watching you guys, don’t think that I am not and the day that MPQ explodes in a shower of strike tiles I will know who was responsible…