Throughout its history, Entry Point has had its fair share of glitches. Many have been patched,
while others remain unfixed to this day. However, we recently found what is probably the weirdest
glitch in all of Entry Point. In this video, I'll tell the story of how the glitch was discovered,
and discuss what exactly made it so enigmatic. This is Entry Point's Strangest Glitch.
Skill is, at least in theory, the most important factor in any competitive game.
Once you understand how the game works, it's your personal skill that determines how far
you can get and how well you can perform. When someone succeeds at difficult challenges,
we generally attribute their success to their natural skill and talent. On the other hand,
when someone repeatedly fails, we assume that they just aren't that good at the game.
Attributing success to skill generally makes a lot sense,
but it relies on the assumption that the game is fair, which is not always true.
One of the most competitive gamemodes in Entry Point is EP Battle Royale.
This is a custom EP gamemode I came up with, which I'll summarize briefly.
Basically, several players join a Legend Loud lobby, and there's a few restrictions on which
items they can bring. The game starts off with a grace period, which normally lasts 90 seconds.
During this period, the players spread out, looking for items or good camping spots,
but they aren't allowed to fight each other. Once the grace period ends,
friendly fire is enabled, and the last player alive, wins.
Overall, this is a really fun and intense gamemode, but one of the first things
I noticed was that I almost always lost. Whenever I fought against another player,
my bullets seemed to deal almost no damage, while their shots made my health go down way faster.
It was definitely frustrating being so weak in firefights. I was forced to accept that it
was all just a skill issue, and that I lost because I just wasn't that good at PvP.
Now, don't get me wrong, I know there's plenty of players out there who are better than me at PvP,
and skill definitely played some role, but the difference in damage was too big to be
accounted for by any differences in skill. Part of me realized that something in the game
had to be off, but at the same time, I didn't want to look like a sore loser making excuses.
Mr. Weab, who is probably the best EP Battle Royale player so far, eventually discovered
an inconsistency with friendly fire. He went to the Blacksite Legend Loud with
a few friends, all of whom had the exact same armor and skill tree.
However, when Weab started doing friendly fire, some players clearly took more damage
than others, which didn't make any sense. I decided to test this out with someone, and
we got the exact same findings, which confirmed that friendly fire was indeed inconsistent.
Surprisingly, every player's armor went down at the same rate even though their health didn't.
Thus, armor caused some players to take a lot less damage than they should have, but the armor itself
didn't absorb any more damage. We also discovered that if a player
took off their armor and put it back on, then the armor glitch would go away and
they would take a normal amount of damage. Thus, we made it an official rule in Battle Royale
that every player had to take their armor off and put it back on at the beginning of the game,
which made the gamemode fair for all players. For all practical purposes, it seemed that the
issue had been resolved, but we still had no idea what was causing all of this.
A user known as Stallsun Guy decided to report this glitch to Dart, one of EP's
QA members. All the QA members have contact with Cishshato, which means that it's normally their
responsibility to find and report glitches. However, Dart was already aware of the armor
bug. And not only did he know about it, but he also knew what was causing it.
According to Dart, the issue was caused by the player order in the lobbies.
Each lobby has four different slots that can be occupied by players as they join,
and each player's armor buff was dependent on their position.
I didn't have a chance to calculate the numbers, so I'm just throwing out random
numbers here to give you a general idea. Maybe the player in the first slot took 20%
less damage while the player in the second slot took 50% less damage, and so on.
In hindsight, this kind of makes sense. Because I was the one who created all the Battle Royale
lobbies, my character was always in the third position, which I guess corresponded
with either no buff or a very small buff. Also, we later discovered that this glitch
didn't just affect friendly fire: it affected all damage, but we just hadn't realized it yet.
Thus, even in normal loud, some players had way more protection than others.
Eventually, a QA member, presumably Dart, reported the issue to Cishshato,
and it has since been patched. However, this still leaves many questions unanswered.
It's definitely odd that Dart, a QA member, knew about this glitch all along but chose not
to report it to Cishshato until after the community discovered it. If he knew, then
why did Dart hesitate to tell Cishshato? And then there's the question of what exactly
caused this glitch. Glitches generally happen when the code doesn't work as intended or the
developer makes a mistake, but it's hard to see something so specific being coded by accident.
The player order and the damage taken are totally separate things that should have no relation to
each other in the game's code. Not only that, but I believe this only happened on Legend,
because my tests showed that friendly fire was consistent in Elite but not in Legend.
I just don't see anything Cish could've done that would accidentally make damage
dependent on the player order. Such a relationship could only
realistically exist if the developer intended it to, which would suggest
that this was an intentional feature and not a bug. Perhaps this is how Dart knew about it.
But why would Cish implement such an unfair feature? And why
would they remove it after it was reported? No matter how we try to explain this phenomenon,
no explanation really makes sense. Although this glitch or feature or whatever you call it is now
gone, it remains an unsolved mystery. And that, is the story of Entry Point's strangest glitch.
Also, if you're 13 or older, then I would recommend joining my Discord server,
which is linked in the description below. It's the best place to get in contact with
me or hang out with the EP community. Anyway, I'll see you guys next time...