Oh god, this thread. I'm a software developer and I just don't even.

Spiral Knights is a client/server game. The client and the server are different programs; the server determines all the important stuff, like monster locations, health, our amount of money, the level layouts. Anything that you wouldn't want someone to crack open with a memory editor and abuse the game. The client displays things and takes user input, and ideally doesn't do anything else at all.

The client updates are what they send to us in patches. The server updates we don't get. We don't need them, and giving them to us is a huge security risk for their game. The only communication we have with the server is our packets on the network, and therefore in the absence of a true exploit (which they'd find out about and fix), we cannot find the server code, even with reflection, etc, because our computers are not running said server code.

Now, you can't be running through round trips with every user action. That's too much network overhead, and so games like this tend to bastardize their positioning and hitbox code to happen a bit more on the client side than would be ideal. The stun code could theoretically be available to us, but I seriously doubt it.

Animations are for looks only. Nothing about animations affects game mechanics in any way, unless the animations are wrapped up in code that flags out when they finish animating and the game does things according to said flag. Which is bad code, and the server isn't animating things itself anyway, so it's unlikely.

Now, I can imagine that there might be a "speed" variable which is quicker for the "I am stunned" state which, when it triggers stun on a monster, causes them to speed up their attacks in the even that they get stunned whilst attacking, prior to entering into the stunned state. That's a possibility, and adding a quick interrupt of actions on the onset of stun would fix it. But we don't know it's the case because we haven't isolated the problem that far. For all we know, it could be an issue with floating point division and rounding. It's stuff like that "Trojans shock range is really high now lol" bug that makes me wonder what exactly is going on with their numbers. Why would that even happen? So I imagine stun is similarly odd.

And yes, there are things in this world that are too difficult to do when developing software. Would you rather have a stun fix or a six month drastic overhaul in making the level design more entertaining everywhere. If stun's worth that much effort, then maybe it's not worth it to fix. Although I seriously doubt it is. I mean, it's a simple issue with attack speed. If their code is so precarious that the stun fix is THAT hard to implement, then they should probably be ashamed of that code. Or maybe it's just some freak thing that they haven't the faintest idea where it's coming from, which is probably pretty bad too.

Basically, bugs should be fixed in a reasonable amount of time, and the "it's been around for a year" thing is just not a great situation. And this bug of all bugs I can't imagine is THAT hard to fix. I mean, they haven't even fixed flying wolvers yet either. That's just an issue of running A* on warp. They haven't fixed the heat amp display on elevators. That's like a one liner of addition or an if statement. Maybe it is a monumental undertaking to fix it, and if so then they've a right not to, but I suspect they just didn't care because it doesn't break the game in a highly noticeable way (and now that RSS stuns, they care). I'm sure it's not the simplest fix in the world, but I should hope it's not comparable to feature development in required effort.