Sai - Bugs inventory forever... :(

[Dreams]

I bought a Sai. I was changing through the blade appearance when it bugged. It unequipped and went invisible in my inventory and cannot be selected.

Somehow, all of the wizard spells my character knows are gone, he was made hostile to himself, his full inventory was wiped.

After relogging a few times (thinking it was desync) and moving to another server, the only lasting effect is an invisible Sai in my front page inventory. All of the spells are showing up as 0, and I cannot see a spellbook.

This is totally Snuggle a Bugbear.

Edit: More details-
- Only the first page of inventory is wiped, but moving an item into free space brings it all back temporarily.
- The square where the sai would have unequipped to is impossible to click on, but it takes up a spot where other items cannot be moved to.
- Wizard spells try to refresh themselves as I move through to the 2nd area on another server, however it seems to randomly remove all spells.
- On login there's no spells, sometimes they come back, other times they don't. I can't view my spellbook at all.
- The Sai was a bronze one from Sib with no enchantments.

[Irongron]

Put your character to one side, and we'll make it a priority for your character file to be restored as soon as a developer able to do so becomes available.




Sadly this is not so incredible a story, and really proves right, once again, something Symphony had already illustrated to me. If we want to use HAK content, this is a process we must go through.

Like a lot of our players, I really wanted to have a ton of new clothes & items taken from the NWNVault on Arelith, and like our players thought 'Hey, they already work elsewhere!'

Until a professional illustrated the thousands of errors these contained. Stuff that crashes the server, drops performance, or breaks characters. I was told that we could not compare Arelith to most of these other servers for a few reasons, primarily because we are far larger. Something that breaks 1 time in a 1000 might only happen every 2 months elsewhere would happen every day on Arelith, another reason is that those other servers may have found and fixed the problem, but not been able to update associated HAK. A third reason is that they may break when interacting with Arelith specific systems. In short; one cannot judge the functionality of models based upon their use on other servers.

We should, I was told, only introduce new clothing and items a few at a time, and that if we did some mass CEP/PrjQ release of tens of thousands of assets, we would almost entirely unable to isolate the origins of problematic issues. Even if we try to test stuff advance, same deal - a few objects a time, every couple of weeks. It's not news I took very well, faced with all this fantastic looking content I wanted it yesterday.

I know this is painful, but a good portion of the testing must happen on the Arelith live server, because unless we want to release 1 object every month for the next 25 years we will need to go through it. I didn't expect Sai, of all things, to cause this kind of problem, but we will either look at fixing it within the new day or two, or remove the item from Arelith until it can be fixed. It won't be the last time something like this happens, and because we're not rolling out 10,000 new objects in the next month, it shouldn't be every day either.

[Dreams]

Thank you for the quick response. I figured there might be reasoning to that, but it was surprising with how many things the bug affected!

[Spyre]

I bought a Sai. I was changing through the blade appearance when it bugged. It unequipped and went invisible in my inventory and cannot be selected.

Somehow, all of the wizard spells my character knows are gone, he was made hostile to himself, his full inventory was wiped.

After relogging a few times (thinking it was desync) and moving to another server, the only lasting effect is an invisible Sai in my front page inventory. All of the spells are showing up as 0, and I cannot see a spellbook.

Edit: More details-
- Only the first page of inventory is wiped, but moving an item into free space brings it all back temporarily.
- The square where the sai would have unequipped to is impossible to click on, but it takes up a spot where other items cannot be moved to.
- Wizard spells try to refresh themselves as I move through to the 2nd area on another server, however it seems to randomly remove all spells.
- On login there's no spells, sometimes they come back, other times they don't. I can't view my spellbook at all.
- The Sai was a bronze one from Sib with no enchantments.

When did you first start customizing your sai?

[Dreams]

About ten minutes before the initial post. I put some messages in the DM chat so that you'd have a log of when it happened. In Sibayad.

[Spyre]

Ok, just confirming so we know where to pull your backup from.

[Dreams]

Thank you, Spyre!

[Spyre]

I'm currently at work and won't be home for about 14 hours.

I have passed it along to someone else that can help.

[Dr. B]

Put your character to one side, and we'll make it a priority for your character file to be restored as soon as a developer able to do so becomes available.




Sadly this is not so incredible a story, and really proves right, once again, something Symphony had already illustrated to me. If we want to use HAK content, this is a process we must go through.

Why not make a beta server?

[TimeAdept]

Or use the PGCC.

[Xerah]

There was a beta server pre-haks. No one used it for longer than a cup of coffee.

[Peppermint]

Let's be real, guys. I give the devs a ton of flak for not catching obvious things, but this one wasn't obvious. It'd have escaped anyone's attention.

[Irongron]

This was fixed earlier today by Morderon, and will be sent to the live modules a little later. We have a few other minor things going in, and so will wait until all are ready.

[Subutai]

Let's be real, guys. I give the devs a ton of flak for not catching obvious things, but this one wasn't obvious. It'd have escaped anyone's attention.

Assuming this bug doesn't appear every single time anyone modifies their sai's appearance, I'm gonna throw my hat in on this one, as well, and in the general concept of it. There have absolutely been bugs in this and other updates that could have (maybe should have) been caught as part of standard QA pre-release, but particularly in the case of rare bugs, it's 100% accurate that not everything is going to be caught until it's live.

It's easy to get frustrated at devs when bugs show up, but it's extremely important that we think about whether or not a given bug is prevalent or closely tied enough to a change for the devs to reasonably find it. Constructive criticism and feedback is all well and good, but sometimes no amount of testing can help find something.

[darthkitteh]

Things like this happen, even in big businesses which can cause major outages.
Tests are all well and good, but there is only SOO far you can go until a real time environment is the only thing left to work with.
And like stated before: "It works on other servers" Iron is right in regards to sheer numbers, stress of data works differently on every server, even if its smaller or bigger. You could have a server that has a huge load on glacier, while another doesnt store much and had a huge load on bastions.. its different each time.

TL;dr -> Different servers different code. Don't shout/complain at people for doing a volunteer job. Stating where something is not well is far different than: "Why didnt they catch it" cus thats just rude.

And final note: I work in a DevOps environment and things like this do happen, its how the resolution is handled that matters.

-----

Anyway, off to the other bit, Its interesting that it effected your spellbook though, makes me believe there is a name or tag used that shares the same. For example one of the models of the Sai could be .Fir (for firm blade?) and fireball stars with the same tag .Fir
If anyone finds out what connects this, I am definitely curious.

[Dreams]

I'm currently at work and won't be home for about 14 hours.

I have passed it along to someone else that can help.

This still seems to be bugged, I'm scared to try to change the weapons on another character to test anything also.

[Spyre]

Working on this now

[Spyre]

Your character has been restored to a version previous of the encountered issue.

Please let me know if there are any issues.

Thank you.