Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Vendor and Stockroom Issues Pt 2
Trentmare. I agree to some degree, but its entirely possible that disabling all item deletionrelated codewould cause the servers to become unstable and begin crashing within hours of the update.
That would not be helpful.
And that's not an example of code that needs to be cleaned up or commented?
not really. no. the only thing it is a sign of is that they didn't do acomplete "what happens after 30 days" test of the code that allows for 30 day vendor sales.
Nothing else.
It is impossible to conclude anything about the quality or nature of the code from this.
Hey Thunderheart,
You have got to speak to your CSR's. They are a bunch of brain dead morons!!!!
Sorry, had to get that off of my chest. now for my real complaint
When the servers came back up after the nov 13th patch i logged on my main character and found the vendors to my secondary char empty. A day later (about nov 16 or 17) i logged on that char and found emails saying that all of my auctions had expired at the same time on the afternoon of nov 13th. There were around 60emails so i began deleting them but stopped about half way through as i arrived at my vendors. checked them and they were empty as was the stockroom. Thinking it was an invis bug i logged off and back on. My comp was a bit choppy so i logged off for the night and back on the next day. Rechecked and the vendors were all still empty with nothing in stockrooms. This was around nov 17 or 18 (4 or 5 days after the sales had ended (this would be less than 14 days from the time the sales were posted), so i submitteda service ticket. I have been reading and replying to csr responses ever since. Initially was told i shouldn't have left the items in the stockroom for 7 days because they were deleted intentionally after 1wk and couldn't be reimbursed. I took the liberty to instruct this csr in some basic math and informed him that 18 minus 13 was 5 and that 5 was in fact less than 7.
My next csr response asked to list the names, quantities and sale prices of all items lost. I did this for those items that i still had emails for and indicated i'd be glad to forward the emails i still had if necessary but i didn't have a list of the other 20-30items lost. I had thought logs were kept and asked if it was possible to check those logs. the response was they were checking the logs but they needed the names and quantities from me to do so. I sent in a list of what i had emails for along with quantities and sale prices. I didn't hear back for about 5 days so add a comment yesterday.
While i'm glad, TH, that you are addressing this, you might want to let the csr's know that, because today i recieved a reply from CSR patrickM that i couldn't be helped because the items had been on the vendor for to long and were deleted intentionally as a part of the game. Apparently CSR patrickM prefers to use the force when responding to service tickets and finds actually reading the ticket an antiquated (sp?) waste of time.
I really tire of the frequent reminders of the uselessness of the csr's in this game. I certainly hope the eventual resolution of this issue involves reimbursement. I personally don't care if it's return of the resources lost or a reimbursement for their value in credits, but something is in order, that doesn't involves CSR patrick m's response of 'tough luck'. I know for one that what i lost had been collected over the course of months, represented some high quality materials from game launch (eeketian, eci, and the kammris iron dene among others), and represented the bulk of my income potential. I lost several crates of stim's as well but incomparison to the resources the150-200k lost there isn't nearly as important.
At this time all of my vendors are down and i wont replace them until issue is fixed because i simply can't afford to.
Ok, rant over, now i sit and wait patiently.
Malitevv wrote:
not really. no. the only thing it is a sign of is that they didn't do acomplete "what happens after 30 days" test of the code that allows for 30 day vendor sales.
Nothing else.
It is impossible to conclude anything about the quality or nature of the code from this.
If your scenario were true, the bug is a result of leaving in obscure debugging code that makes outdated assumptions. Said debugging code should either:
- be removed
- be given dependencies to defined constants
- be referenced by comments in code elsewhere that might break it if changed
Any of these would fall under the heading of "cleanup". And if the failure to do any of these things causes a bug that results in data loss, I'd say the cleanup is very much needed.
And you CAN conclude something about the quality of the code from the fact that there's a bug in the end product. You can conclude, at the very least,that there's abug in the code. 
Or is it your position that the system is functioning as intended?
You know, you have a point, but when my couch is on fire.. I don't worry about getting my carpet wet when I try to put out the fire.
Sad shape to be in , isn't it?
ok....here we are in about day 5 of this travesty...this really is the most devestating bug of all time...
AND STILL NO WORD FROM SOE....HOW CAN THEY JUST IGNORE THIS????????
Thunderheart wrote:
Just a heads up,there are lots of people working on this right now. Its a top priority. In addition, Im working with the Merchant Correspondent and some other regulars to chase this down.
If anyone can show us how to duplicate and repeat any of these errors consistently, it would be very helpful.
(and no, no one wiped out items to clean the database. thats just silly.
I already know what is most likely causing this. the old system was 7 days on sale then 7 days in stockroom before it's deleted. So whoever programmed that in instead of using a flag for stockroom and a seperate timer they appearently used a shortcut of a 14 days timer from teh time it's flagged as on sale before the item is deleted. Then when the sale time was increased to 30 days the same increase wasn't added to that decay timer.
Therefore the best solution would be have a flag and timer for stockroom that's removed when the item is removed from the stockroom whether that's by retrieving it or putting it on sale again.
It'd be nice if ya'll would remove the deletion/decay code until this is fixed so more folks don't lose items to this bug.
It'd also be nice if we could see the time remaining for our sales on our vendors the same as we see on the bazaar, instead of having to look at the details on each item to see this. Several hundred items on a single vendor takes a while to check. Multiple vendors liek this woudl be a nightmare.
p4Samwise wrote:
And you CAN conclude something about the quality of the code from the fact that there's a bug in the end product. You can conclude, at the very least,that there's abug in the code.
True. But one of the first things you should be learning in any advanced programming class is that it is impossible to write complicated software that does not have bugs in it. This fact cannot be avoided. It is way testing and quality control is so important. And I agree that there was some error in THAT regard.
Butthe fact that bugs exist in the softwareis not an interesting observation. Of course there are bugs.
Malitevv wrote:
Butthe fact that bugs exist in the softwareis not an interesting observation. Of course there are bugs.
I just use the uninteresting observation to point out the general principle that yes, you can use deduction to make educated guesses about the code based on what you see in the final result.
And feel free to stop talking down your nose at me about programming classes. I'm a software developer with a BS in computer science, thank you very much. 
And one of the things I've learned (more so working in the real world than in school) is that you save yourself a LOT of grief byarchitecting your code well and keeping it clean- and that many developers (and even MORE academics - very few of my CS profs could code their way out of a paper bag)do not do fully appreciate this.
I can't believe you asked us how to do this on page 5 of a thread where almost every post of the first 4 pages tells you how to do this...
Oh man...
I don't mean to be talking down my nose at you p4Samwise. Sorry if it came off that way. It was a general "you" and wasnt' meant to be directed at you personally. But you are changing the subject. The point is that nobody knows if the code is badly written. Nobody knows if it is poorly commented. And nobody knows what the exact source of the bug is, despite appearances.
You claimedto be certain on all three points.
And that's the only thing I ever disagreed with.
the other point p4Samwise is that trivializing the debug process they way you are (by implying that simple competence is all it takes to avoid these kinds of issues) is an insult to software developers every where.
I'm going totake offense at that whether you are one of us or not. 