Have you worked on any programming ever? Because, yes, sometimes things as simple as this are just thrown in. It's possible that they simply switched shaders (graphical shaders, not the item type in Destiny) on the ball to an existing test shader from long ago which measured velocity and showed it through a visual color change. Simple shaders like that aren't hard to make, especially when their physics system already apparently keeps track of things like velocity and momentum. They may have numerous balls, of all colors, such as red, green, or even possibly black and blue, that they may have used during testing, kept hidden from the public, waiting for the right day when they may be revealed to the world. Maybe more than one could be exposed at a time. Imagine, a tower full of balls. Maybe the Queen took some to the Reef as a result of her wrath. Hopefully we'll see these balls drop someday. Testicles.

Again, if it is anything like a predefined feature they had laying around that they thought would be cool to use, my post can be safely ignored and my rage soothed.

A.... Texture swap? The ball physics, spawns, and overall shape identical and not tied to anything that would break if tampered with. It all looks simple (in relation to the bugs you compared it to). I'd imagine the QA guys looked at their task list and saw, scrawled in chewy pencil lead the sentence '[i]kick the ball in the tower if you find it and let me know if it -blam!-s up. Low priority so just do it between test builds.[/i]' The Dev then looks over the whole [b]page[/b] of code involved in his changes, corrects his mistake that caused the ball to glow the wrong color based on time of day, and sent it out with the new build. He then writes '[i]alright, try it again[/i]' with his chewed pencil and continues doing work. Or perhaps he just playtests it himself while waiting for QA to get back to him on the important parts of the build. It takes probably 10 minutes of kicking it, standing on it, sitting on it, dancing on it, crashing it into things and booting it off the edge to get an idea of whether or not it's working. The possibilities are limitless on how this thing was produced, tested, fixed, retested, refined then deleted, reproduced and tested AGAIN without completely wasting time. Had this ball been reborn as a purple ball with new physics and basically new everything, I'd understand your issues, but as it stands, hot swapping textures, adding a dynamic light to it and making that light read the time of day to change color just doesn't scream "Wasted QA time" to me.

The physics of the ball were changed, according to the devs. Simple parameter changes, yes, but definitely more than ten seconds of kicking the ball around.