TECHNICAL SUPPORT / WEB APPs BUGS

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.

If i'm not mistaken Aniro will hit negative tick in 3days and Arispotle in 9days. ohh joy ;-)

Perhaps the devs think using the trading system for storage is an exploit. Regardless, fulfilling ad hoc crafting requests requires a lot of bulk storage and other methods for bulk storage are not very viable. I agree that something should be done quickly. :(

It is not only about the bulk storage. Crafters enjoy to place good things in the trading system and see them bought by people who need them. Younger players love not to have to ask for any item but go out, earn the money and buy them. Especially females (probably not only those) love shopping and trying new fashionable clothing. All that is only possible when the shops are filled with other than the quite boring, uncolorful and low quality NPC stuff.

If this is a problem with changing the servers over to Unix, I would hope that Arispotle and Aniro are not going to be migrated before the devs fix the problems. As it is, perhaps I will take a screenie of my mats on the vendors before I log off each night.

For clarification: The problem has nothing to do with a "changing to Unix". All shards have been running on Linux servers since release and that hasn't changed. The problem is that the so-called server tick (that determines time on Atys) has passed a certain value (max signed int), meaning that, in some cases, the time value becomes negative. There are luckily only a few places in the code where this happens (most places use unsigned int) and most of those have been fixed by the client side patchlet.

Leanon was the first to rollover because that server's date was the highest. Aniro and Arispotle are, indeed, due in a few days.

I know that the devs are aware of the issue, but unfortunately I don't have any more information than that at this time.

oh, *bleep* -- I hope you can keep us informed, Sywindt. It's a Y2K bug all over again.

This needs to be a priority. I can see any prolonged effects of this on Ari causing the loss of many peeps.We would go from a low pop server to a ghost town pretty quickly.-Kil

Yup i never use vendors but that is because I don't digg/craft but even I can see this as the end of the server if it happens, would be a masacre loosing all those ppl.

great idea, wipe out the stored mats muahaha or make em more buy able :P down with the interest rates :P

Top priority, for sure. Can't afford to be running ouf of bits.

bump. Any news on this?

I suppose a servertick should be an unsigned int, not signed.