I was watching a RW with interest due to it's knock-down-drag-out realness... It was probably the hardest turtle war I ever watched. The highest lead in the whole war was 330. For most of the war the lead was below 100. But the lead kept switching hands, and the leaders of both teams were pulling out the stops and going all in, seeking out flight delays and the whole nine yards!
It was inspiring to witness.
But then the most interesting thing happened:
I went to check in on the war expecting that it had ended, and was super shocked to see their war actually lasted over 5 days!
I had always thought that the lead target decay was balanced to end the war on the 120th hour (5 days, 0 hours). This war lasted 5 days and 4 hours!
Could this have been the longest Ranked War in the history of Torn?!?!
But the weirdness didn't end there... I clicked in to the war report to view the graph and see when it was that the teams had finally "called" the war - meaning one team conceded - and this is WILD! Lookie here:
As you can see, both teams fought to the end. But it appears the end never came!
You can read the story of how it all went down in the Bugs and Issues Forum here:
https://www.torn.com/forums.php#/p=threads&f=19&t=16490841&b=0&a=0&start=0&to=26261471
While I'm not personally involved in this one, when I saw what had happened, I thought it was newsworthy and the everyone would appreciate the opportunity to read up on it.
I don't know if this ever happened before, but it seems from what I can gather so far that the decay increment was going to place the lead target below 0, and this scenario was never accounted for when the RW system was coded. This is a totally normal, mundane sort of bug, it's no matter of incompetence, these little things get overlooked all the time... but it produces a WILD result!
It seems the lead the winners had in the last hour was smaller than the decay interval.
If you've ever been in a 3+ day real RW in which the lead was so close throughout the war, as I have, then you know how stressful these events can be. People call in sick to work, people get in fights with their spouses, people give up nights of sleep, people get edgy, punchy, and even sometimes turn on their own faction mates. The pressure can be immense, and the leaders have to hold everything together.
If you've been in such a war, then you can imagine how devastating it would be having won (or even having lost tbf) and receiving 0 reward. Luckily these guys recognized it as a bug immediately, so perhaps they were spared some grief in that.
But frankly I can't even imagine having a war that hard fought then looking at a goose-egg for my reward.
Mentions: RW Bug