Tried a TR...and lost everything!

[Auran82]

With a codebase the size that I am sure DDO is, there would have to be systems that are intricately intertwined with other parts of code that no-one working at Turbine now, really fully understands how the interaction works, or why it was coded that way to begin with, but they know that attempts to rewrite it have wasted many hours and failed miserably (or the code written ended up going toward some other system)

I can only imagine how many attempts have been made to rewrite sections of the code that have just resulted in many wasted hours and probably explains some of the weird things we see like the multitude of crafting systems in the game. I'm sure stuff like adding the force ritual to a cannith crafted weapon increasing the min level is not intended but the interactions involved are so convoluted, that no-one is game to try to fix it because of the possible ramifications and would also explain why the stone of change crafting system hasn't seen an update in so long.

I'm sure some of the developers working on DDO now probably have dreams/nightmares on how they would code certain sections of the game if they were making it now. I often wonder if there is a whiteboard/specification document somewhere outlining the games intended progression from 1 - 20 (if this was even in the original spec) and if so, how that compares with what the game actually looks like now.

[Syllph]

Not that anything should have gone wrong but:

I TRed Saturday morning on live and everything was fine.

So just in case you were TRing before Monday's update and were wondering if anything has been ninja'ed into live it all looks fine.

Come Monday though..... I still wouldn't want to TR on Monday.

[Hendrik]

It's fixed internally. You will be safe to TR when we allow it.
It was a halo effect of a much worse TR bug, if you must know.

Thanks Maj, and your team, for coming in on a weekend and fixing this bug!

Thanks to the Llama user base that found it!

I look forward to a hotfix in the near future to allow TRing.

[Phemt81]

Like the ability to slay raid bosses instantly with the divine Destruction spell, for instance.

Cool! Tooltip embedded on the hyperlink, nicely done!

[Adoraro]

....That is unfortunate, and time consuming for us, but the nature of the beast with such a...mature...code base.

How many million lines of code are there?

[waterboytkd]

I'm kinda confused. Are people angry about this bug? I mean, bugs happen. And they've been tinkering around with Reincarnation, so it's not unexpected that a bug would happen involving Reincarnation.

AND this is the point of Lamannia now. It gives us a chance to catch bugs that somehow slip through their net. Yes, it's a little scary that this bug cropped up so late in the Lamannia cycle (just a few days before launch), but it was caught, and Turbine is taking care of it. What more do you want? An immaculate test server? Not only is that idea completely absurd, but there would be no point.

This is something we've been clamoring for: an earlier and longer Lamannia, a Lamannia no longer considered a preview server but a test server, so WHEN we find bugs, they can fix them before the update goes live. Some of the responses in this thread seem...nerd-ragey when it's completely inappropriate. It's a test-server; we're supposed to find bugs on it.

Again, huge thanks to the OP and anyone else that went onto Lamannia to test this out. You guys saved U13.

[Thrudh]

I'm kinda confused. Are people angry about this bug? I mean, bugs happen. And they've been tinkering around with Reincarnation, so it's not unexpected that a bug would happen involving Reincarnation.

AND this is the point of Lamannia now. It gives us a chance to catch bugs that somehow slip through their net. Yes, it's a little scary that this bug cropped up so late in the Lamannia cycle (just a few days before launch), but it was caught, and Turbine is taking care of it. What more do you want? An immaculate test server? Not only is that idea completely absurd, but there would be no point.

This is something we've been clamoring for: an earlier and longer Lamannia, a Lamannia no longer considered a preview server but a test server, so WHEN we find bugs, they can fix them before the update goes live. Some of the responses in this thread seem...nerd-ragey when it's completely inappropriate. It's a test-server; we're supposed to find bugs on it.

Again, huge thanks to the OP and anyone else that went onto Lamannia to test this out. You guys saved U13.

This. You nerds are scary when you rage. There's absolutely nothing wrong with finding a bug on the TEST server, and it getting fixed before launch. Sure, it was a huge bug, but it was caught because they listened to us, and made Lammania a test server.

That's EXACTLY how it's supposed to work. Jeez Louise.

[Failedlegend]

I'm kinda confused. Are people angry about this bug? I mean, bugs happen. And they've been tinkering around with Reincarnation, so it's not unexpected that a bug would happen involving Reincarnation.

AND this is the point of Lamannia now. It gives us a chance to catch bugs that somehow slip through their net. Yes, it's a little scary that this bug cropped up so late in the Lamannia cycle (just a few days before launch), but it was caught, and Turbine is taking care of it. What more do you want? An immaculate test server? Not only is that idea completely absurd, but there would be no point.

This is something we've been clamoring for: an earlier and longer Lamannia, a Lamannia no longer considered a preview server but a test server, so WHEN we find bugs, they can fix them before the update goes live. Some of the responses in this thread seem...nerd-ragey when it's completely inappropriate. It's a test-server; we're supposed to find bugs on it.

Again, huge thanks to the OP and anyone else that went onto Lamannia to test this out. You guys saved U13.

Amen.

Devs I guess I have to apoligize for them since they obviously won't...please ignore the people who are complaining (don't ignore the bug report though :P) there's always going to be people who blow-up and start screaming "DooooOOOOOooMMMM!!!!!11!!!1!!!" for everything. It's a waste of energy to try to satisfy them.

[Jasparion]

And I disagree, this is not what DDO needs. We have bugs, but nothing close to what you are suggesting. The reason you notice, is when we screw up, we like to go big.

What we need is an expansion...oh look on the horizon...

How about after the expansion you spend 'x' time nailing down the bugs/issues from the expansion, then dedicate 'y' time to cleaning up all the old issues before bringing out something new?

The Turbine bean counters get their expansion loot, we get a game with a lot less bugs.

'x' and 'y' being whatever time it takes to fix the vast majority of issues. Maybe even run a competition and get players to rank their issues in order of importance. Whoever gets closest to the final Turbine list wins a novelty shot glass or coffee mug or an in-game pony which will boost their running speed by 100%.

[kyostal]

And I disagree, this is not what DDO needs. We have bugs, but nothing close to what you are suggesting. The reason you notice, is when we screw up, we like to go big.

What we need is an expansion...oh look on the horizon...

Haha +1 for this "When weh have bugs, we go big" ... hehe.. GO big or GO home as i always say

[Riggs]

So...

A big bug was found on the 'not-live' server, and is going to be fixed or disabled until fixed.

And lots of people are mad about it.

There are plenty of things to be mad about at some point - things working basically how they are supposed to should not be one of them.

Sheesh.

[HungarianRhapsody]

So...

A big bug was found on the 'not-live' server, and is going to be fixed or disabled until fixed.

And lots of people are mad about it.

There are plenty of things to be mad about at some point - things working basically how they are supposed to should not be one of them.

Sheesh.

The only thing that really bothers me is that they're still messing around with new code the day before the live release.

I understand that things come up and that making very late changes is sometimes necessary, but if I were making the schedule, I'd very much want the "final" version that we plan to release to live on Lamannia the Wednesday (at the latest) before the Monday release so that any emergencies can be taken care of at a more reasonable pace instead of requiring the kind of mad rush that ends up allowing crazy bugs through because of a mistake in versioning, etc. It's obvious that even Friday's release to Lamannia was not the planned "final" code that was planned to be released on Live on Monday.

That's absolutely not MajMal's fault. That's absolutely not MadFloyd's fault or the fault of any of the programmers or QA folks. That's entirely the fault of whoever decides on the schedule of releases and whoever makes the final go/no go decision. That's either a project/product manager or Fernando.

[Dark_Helmet]

So...
A big bug was found on the 'not-live' server, and is going to be fixed or disabled until fixed.

And lots of people are mad about it.

There are plenty of things to be mad about at some point - things working basically how they are supposed to should not be one of them.

The "problem" is that implemented a fix that broke something else and it was something easily tested internally ("Hey, we made modifications to the reincarnation code, so lets do the regression testing of all TR scenarios") and we have to find it for them. It just doesn't seem like they have solid regression testing scenarios pre-built.

Now, they have only 2 days to regression test a fix to make sure it doesn't break anything else.

Yes, it was good that it was fixed. No, it isn't enough time to test THAT fix (that fixed something broken by a previous fix - which fixed something broken by an earlier fix...)

We are still going on past history of Turbine's record, so forgive us if we don't "trust" them.


Creating new content is different than modifying existing content:

• New code is like putting a bag of holding inside a portable hole. A rift to the Astral Plane is created, but only those items are lost.
• Modifying existing code is like putting a a portable hole into a bag of holding. It creates a Gate to the Astral Plane which sucks in nearby items and lives, possibly making them lost forever. You need to be more careful when doing that.

[Carpone]

Can we ixnay the snarkfest already? All any of us want to see is a dev post that says, "This is fixed in U13. You won't lose your stuff. Have fun TRing."

Thanks.

[Auran82]

I think the problem you will find is that DDOs code base isn't as modular as you would expect with something this size, so the scenario of 'We did something with reincarnation, do a full regression test of the reincarnation system' isn't as simple and one would hope.

However, you would have thought that running through some quick lesser/greater/true reincations and comparing expected results with what actually happened would have quickly shown that something was horribly wrong. Unless this *was* done, but the test characters they made, powerlevelled to 20 with dev tools and use reincarnations on didn't have any items to make the testing quicker and thus, the issue was not noticed.

The main thing though, is that the issue *was* found (though sadly not through in house testing) and will hopefully be fixed. Though I am slightly confused about whether it will be fixed when U13 comes out (today?) or if reincarnation is being disabled until the issue is fixed in a patch to come soon after.

[Rhysem]

Can we ixnay the snarkfest already? All any of us want to see is a dev post that says, "This is fixed in U13. You won't lose your stuff. Have fun TRing."

Thanks.

I think the reason they are getting the rage is the general uselessness of in game support if you have item issues. Ie: My epic cove ring is still missing +5 pro and no stone of changing it doesn't fix it. A friend lost 3k cove dragonshards to a zone crash. They don't care. They either can't or won't verify and fix it. So if the bug made it live and you found it, guess what? You'd be screwed. They aren't going to do a rollback just for you.

[protokon]

I think the reason they are getting the rage is the general uselessness of in game support if you have item issues. Ie: My epic cove ring is still missing +5 pro and no stone of changing it doesn't fix it. A friend lost 3k cove dragonshards to a zone crash. They don't care. They either can't or won't verify and fix it. So if the bug made it live and you found it, guess what? You'd be screwed. They aren't going to do a rollback just for you.

This.

I don't like bashing turbine's customer support, I don't blame the problems on them when they are unable to help, but my gosh...sometimes it gets really, really frustrating to see things like...an ingredients bag with year's worth of ingredients grinded out, vanished without being able to get it back.

I know it's hard to show empathy or emotion behind a computer screen and sending a line of text, but dang - some of the canned messages they use really feel like they were just sitting in the copy buffer waiting to be paste to the next person...

Perhaps turbine should consider better equipping their in-game GM's with a system capable of helping return lost items from bugs. It would certainly give peace of mind to players about their virtual assets they spend so much time collecting. Good customer service may be a pain in the ass to give sometimes, but I am certain the player base would be overall appreciative of it.

Then again, there are those of us who will never be happy no matter how hard you try to please us :P

[Peter_Stauffenberg]

I'm playing on Khyber myself and think it's good that a serious bug like this was found in BETA (Lammania). If U13 had released and introduced the TR bug, then it would have been a disaster.

So all the work you players do on the Lammania server save the rest of us players on the other servers from a lot of grief. So thanks a lot for that.

You experience more bugs and that can be frustrating. On the other hand, volunteering to play on a beta server means that this is what you should expect. Let's hope Turbine has a way to undo the damage done for those who TR'ed and lost their inventory items. If yes then the serious bug won't have a lasting damage.

I'm not sure if players who play on Lammania are rewarded for volunteering to do QA work. You get new updates earlier, but do you get turbine points, bonus items etc. as well?

For me the only "bug" I'm concerned with on Khyber is the lag that comes and goes. Doing a raid with a lot of lag can be the difference between success and a wipe and that's not fun. So I wonder if Lamannia is having the same lag problems as Khyber.

I have always wondered why DDO doesn't have a login queue to their servers like most other MMO's. With a login queue you can ensure that not too many people login at the same time, thus creating lag.

[Peter_Stauffenberg]

I think the reason they are getting the rage is the general uselessness of in game support if you have item issues. Ie: My epic cove ring is still missing +5 pro and no stone of changing it doesn't fix it. A friend lost 3k cove dragonshards to a zone crash. They don't care. They either can't or won't verify and fix it. So if the bug made it live and you found it, guess what? You'd be screwed. They aren't going to do a rollback just for you.

I agree. This is my biggest issue with DDO as well. One time DDO crashed when my toon was zoning. After that it was not possible to load my toon at all. DDO hung if I tried. Other toons loaded normally. I did everything in the book to get him back again like reinstalling DDO. So years of playing with that toon seemed to have been wasted. Next week the toon was possible to load again. I don't know why. So I was saved, but had a hard time for some time.

One time the server crashed and was rolled back. That meant I lost the last 30 minutes if achievements including a unique item I got as an end reward. That was frustrating. Fortunately it wasn't a raid unique item.

I have a guild friend who lost his Maenyas fists when moving the item from his inventory to the bank. The lag hit at the time and the item poofed. I always pray I don't get the red or yellow connection indicator every time I shuffle my large mats froms the Shroud between my toons.

I think what Turbine could do is to allow the GM's to have an item creator. This means you report what you lost due to a crash and the GM's can evaluate your request to get these items back. They won't rollback, but they can look at the character data and make a judgement if it's likely the toon had this item and create it for him. I know it's based on trust and can be misused. Still, it's better to ensure that people who lost items get them back than people getting an item they should not have had by making a fake request. It's probably possible to have a counter how many times you've used this service ala the /stuck command to detect misuse.

I know this is more problematic with items not bound to account / character because you could in theory sell the items and then report them as missing, e. g. like large devil scales.

I wouldn't have worried about crashes if I know I can always get the lost items back if I make a request to the GM.

[cryptblitzer]

So your bank items stayed, but your inventory got deleted?

That is one monster bug if I am understanding what you are saying correctly.

Ive seen people quit games over less.