Every once in a while you get those head-scratching errors and bugs, and some of them are quite comical sometimes. It’s even more comical when the error is disproportionate to its fault, such as a glitch that was discovered in the recently release Super Smash Bros. on the 3DS, which has reportedly banned a user from online play for upwards of 130 years–136 years, to be exact.
Taking to Reddit, the the banned user outlined both the problem and some workarounds in order to avoid said problem, but not necessarily a solution. The glitch itself is supposedly caused when repeatedly targeting another player in four-player Group or Free For All matchups. It’s also been pointed out that quitting mid-match also attributes to this particular glitch. One-versus-one online play still seems to work fine, though.
Thankfully, despite no solution having yet been found at the time of writing, someone later did come along with a possible explanation as to why the user was banned for such a silly amount of time, suggesting that the glitch was caused by a coding error. A snippet of their solution has been detailed below.
“ Now, when a computer handles numbers, it has a limited amount that it can store. Since computers count using zeros and ones, the maximum number a computer can hold is weird. If you have signed numbers (negative or positive) then the computer can hold between -2147483648 and 2147483647. If you don’t have signs, it can hold numbers between 0 and 4294967295 without you telling it to store bigger numbers, ” they said.
“ So here’s what happened. The method may not be 100% correct, but the result is the same:
Programmer decided to use an unsigned (only positive) integer on time because you’re not going to have a negative ban time. Maximum number: 4294967295
Programmer decides that the default ban time will be -1 seconds. This way, they can check at the end if there was any time added. If not, then they reset it to zero and move on.
Some complicated bug in the program results in them forgetting to check for that -1, so the player gets banned for -1 seconds.
Remember how we said that we’re only allowed to have numbers between 0 and 4294967295 because we have unsigned numbers?
Those players got banned for 71582700 minutes. That’s 4294962000 seconds, which is darn close to 4294967295. ”
We’ll bring you more news on this glitch and whether or not it gets a solution should further information reach our ears. You can read the glitch’s possible explanation via the source link below.
[ Reddit ]