I chose to place this article here as I hope that somebody from the development team or the support majors will eventually take notice. We already discussed that on Leanon, but my impression is that those discussions are going into a black hole, and the local support though doing their best can't do much about.
Since nearly half a year there are problems supposedly caused by a different ticktimer data format on Unix servers - as far as I (unconfirmedly) learnt, Leanon server has moved to Unix as the first of Ryzom servers. Troubles arising therefrom concerning the PvP flag have been resolved by a client based minipatch.
A much more severe problem is lasting: after every scheduled reboot or crash, all player items stored in the trading system are marked as long elapsed (obviously caused by a server side ticktimer inconsistency during startup) and thus destructed as if the normal seven days period were exceeded.
This is causing a lot of grief and frustration among the players. The local CSR do their best informing about scheduled reboots and warning about imminent item loss. Yet, not every player is online at the right time, and players in the start area at Silan are much more restricted not having the backup storage available on the mainland.
This is not a trivial problem. User crafted items in the trading system are an important part of community life, some of the glue holding the playerhood together and keeping the game alive. It is user generated contend and thus an important asset of the game.
Working in IT I completely lack any understanding for the attitude of maintainers and developers towards that problem. In professional IT, data loss or data corruption is considered the maximum credible accident, worse than crashes or other interruption of service. In case of an imminent threat of that kind, all routine work, much more future development work, are postponed until a solution or at least a sustainable workaround has been implemented.
In Ryzom, maintainers and developers don't seem to care at all about the loss of data reflecting engagement and efforts of paying customers. I cannot but consider such an attitude simply incomprehensible.
It cannot be so hard to find at least a workaround, e.g. backing up the trading system data once or twice a day and restoring them after a crash, and backing them up before any scheduled shutdown, restoring a healthy state before allowing any user login during startup. It seems to me that nothing of that kind has even been reflected so far.
Since nearly half a year there are problems supposedly caused by a different ticktimer data format on Unix servers - as far as I (unconfirmedly) learnt, Leanon server has moved to Unix as the first of Ryzom servers. Troubles arising therefrom concerning the PvP flag have been resolved by a client based minipatch.
A much more severe problem is lasting: after every scheduled reboot or crash, all player items stored in the trading system are marked as long elapsed (obviously caused by a server side ticktimer inconsistency during startup) and thus destructed as if the normal seven days period were exceeded.
This is causing a lot of grief and frustration among the players. The local CSR do their best informing about scheduled reboots and warning about imminent item loss. Yet, not every player is online at the right time, and players in the start area at Silan are much more restricted not having the backup storage available on the mainland.
This is not a trivial problem. User crafted items in the trading system are an important part of community life, some of the glue holding the playerhood together and keeping the game alive. It is user generated contend and thus an important asset of the game.
Working in IT I completely lack any understanding for the attitude of maintainers and developers towards that problem. In professional IT, data loss or data corruption is considered the maximum credible accident, worse than crashes or other interruption of service. In case of an imminent threat of that kind, all routine work, much more future development work, are postponed until a solution or at least a sustainable workaround has been implemented.
In Ryzom, maintainers and developers don't seem to care at all about the loss of data reflecting engagement and efforts of paying customers. I cannot but consider such an attitude simply incomprehensible.
It cannot be so hard to find at least a workaround, e.g. backing up the trading system data once or twice a day and restoring them after a crash, and backing them up before any scheduled shutdown, restoring a healthy state before allowing any user login during startup. It seems to me that nothing of that kind has even been reflected so far.
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Daomei die Streunerin - religionsneutral, zivilisationsneutral, gildenneutral