Past Glitches

Past Glitches of PWO

PWO started off as small and horrifically unstable. (Even moreso than it is now.) Below are a list of glitches that occured in PWO's past or now occur much less often than they used to. If you want to add a glitch, make sure it has either been fixed or only occurs very rarely now. Feel free to edit the categories the glitches are under: some may be incorrect.

Client Glitches

• Rare glitch that only affected certain users. It would, at random times send a blank PM to another, random online user for the glitched player. The glitched player would not know about the PMs being sent until the user the PM was sent to either closed the window or asked the glitched player what they had messaged them for.

• Users used to be able to circumvent a mute by relogging.

• If a user close a PM with more than 3 people, the PM would re-open every time somebody said something.

• Early in PWO's life, the first Pokemon into battle was the only Pokemon to show an accurate level. All following pokemon would temporarily display the first Pokemon's level, making it hard to accurately see the strength of one's opponent. (For example, if a user sent out a level 10 Pidgey, and then a level 50 Poliwrath, the Poliwrath would display a level of 10 despite having the strength of a level 50. The glitch was purely visual.)

• An unfinished chat censor would choose random people and censor their non-inappropriate words (EG: Turning "Assume" into "***ume") while ignoring any extremely inappropriate words any user made. This was later fixed, although the censor will still completely ignore certain curse words.

• For a long time, the Pokemon transparency color was black, so any Pokemon with black outlines looked strange. To fix this, the transparency color of NPCs, Pokemon, and other graphics was changed to a shade of pink.

• Elderly Women NPCs could only notice and battle a player if their backs were facing the user. They also were not updated with the rest of the NPCs when transparency color was changed, so they had a black box surrounding them when seen ingame.

• Black Bar Bug caused random users to be unable to play the game every time the client reached 20:00 poketime. The user could not move or interact with the world, and sometimes a thin black bar would appear on their screen. The issue turned out to be client-sided and was caused by people's computer display languages being something other than English. Other languages interfered with the characters Visual Basic relied on, and setting the home computer back to English would solve the issue. It has since been fixed.

Server Glitchers

• While not exactly a glitch, the top layer in maps were disabled for around 2 years, because a lot of the old maps had were incorrectly mad and there were random top layer tiles that would hinder players. The tiles in top layer didnt show up when it was disabled, so until the maps could be re-done, there were only 2 layers in PWO maps.

• One user contantly crashed the server by exploiting a glitch. The user found that if he got into a battle while owning absolutely no pokemon, the server would crash. Instead of reporting the issue, the user constantly abused it until staff could get on for long enough to ban him.

• At random times of the day, a glitch would occur that would eventually force the server to be reset. If a user was in the game and logged out, they would be unable to log in with that same account and would be see the message "User already in system." Their accounts, despite the user being disconnected from the server, were counted as being still in the game. Eventually, ghost accounts would add up until the server became full.

-This was supposedly fixed in 2010, when an autokicker was introduced that would kick off a user's account if he or she was trying to log back onto it. The UIS (User in System bug) reoccured in 2012, but it happens so rarely that it is currently a non-issue.

• There is/was a duplication bug that would multiply a user's items whenever they got on. For some people, it would eventually give them 999 Useless items (such as shiny rocks). For others, it would give them unlimited potions or even bikes (bikes were 10mil at the time). Instead of reporting the issue, several people exploited it by selling the items for money. Eventually this ruined the economy, as people would sell hundreds of bikes for $1 each. Eventually, the issue was somewhat fixed, but the damage was done and item trading was disabled.

• While it has since been fixed, recently there was a glitch that allowed players to constantly spawn one specific starter. Other details of this are unknown.

• Due to an error, some pokemon's movesets were swapped with eachother (generally making one of the two unusual). Tangela's Moveset was given to Kangaskhan, making Tangela nearly useless as the only move it could learn was Constrict. Staryu received Seaking's moveset, making Staryu learn impossible moves such as Megahorn and rendering Seaking completely broken. If a Seaking were spawned into the game, it would often crash the server. In areas where Seaking was a spawn (they were eventually removed) fishing users would see the message "You hooked an ERROR 119, but your skill was not high enough and it got away!" This was later fixed and all pokemon can now learn their appropriate moves.

• There was a money exploit that allowed users to create as much Pokemoney as they wanted. For a time, somewhat common/useless Pokemon were being sold for the max amount of money. (For example, a Shiny and then-useless Tangela was being sold for $1,000,000 on the auction house.) The economy became so bad that staff had to rollback the server data by two days, causing people to lose legitimately caught, rare Pokemon.

• Pokemon, normally starters, would transform into the previously caught pokemon (or, in some cases, random other pokemon). Some people would have only a Charmander and then catch a Metapod, only to see their Charmander had transformed into a Metapod. In one instance, a person's Squirtle transformed into a Groundon for no forseeable reason. The transformation glitch has since been fixed.

Playerdex Glitches

• Token store glitch that would allow people to continuously buy Pokemon/items without losing any tokens. This meant that, for however many tokens they had, they could get as many UCs as they could afford. This was later fixed.

• Shaymin's ID number was once so large that it would crash the server.

• On the playerdex, certain players learned how to manipulate the token store to allow them to obtain shiny UCs. This caused a rather large scandal involving prominent PWO players (as well as staff). The glitch has since been fixed.

• There was also a glitch that allowed players to teach their Pokemon any move they wanted (EG: Teaching a Pidgeot Flamethrower). This, too, has been fixed.