Development Cycle Archive
Thread: Vendor and Stockroom Issues Pt 2
Eutock wrote:
A function call may exist to delete vendor items, but that function may actually be a method inside an object
OH NO! A method inside an object???? How will they ever find it when it's hidden in there?
I apologize. I just get tired of people trying to convince everyone that coding/debugging/breathing is an inherently extremely difficult thing to do. 
The suggestion actually does have some merit if there is a unique "remove item from vendor" function somewhere that could be disabled temporarily without drastically hurting anything. Regardless of whether the function is a method, or how it's triggered, you can disable it by putting an early return in there. To my mind having *no* vendor deletions would be preferable to the misfires we're having.
Of course, it's possible that there is no such "remove item from vendor" function at all, the code that needs to get called to remove an item from a vendor comes from lots of different places,is not documented in any comments, and nobody's sure any morehow it works at all because the original author vanished in the Bermuda Triangle and called all of his variables "thingy", but that would be evidence ofstaggeringly poor coding practices, and Istrongly suspectthe SOE folks are better than that. 
I was not sugesting that programming is "inherently extremely difficult", but that the process of debugging is not always as trivial an activity as it seems on the surface. Throw in QA and acceptance testing, and finally approvals, and the process draws out even further (and could also explain why a potential fix is not in tomorrow's patch).
The reference to "method inside an object" was a light suggestion to potential challenges in debugging objects.
Kenelm1 wrote:You guys are above average intelligence, I can tell by reading these posts so im very surprised that noone has figured out what happened. Its very simple grasshoppah....
There are too many items in the game and way too many credits, whats a better way to take a big chunk of both out of the system thenby putting in this "oopsie" that eats literally millions of credits (value) and items across all servers. Then fix it in next publish while saying "Sorry no way to track your items and no reimbursements".
Ill bet the guy that thought this up got a new corner office eand a new Beamer....
I'll buy that. too bad they don't put the energy into making a good game instead. In the long run it might save them all a trip to the unemployment line and the repo of that new beamer.
user28 wrote:
Why do i never get a email response saying sorry for the inconvienence................i get 0 response, except the classic your request has gone unread over and over................
I see this mentioned a lot and just wanted to note...
When you get that "you have an unread message" message...that means YOU haven't checked your CSR ticket and readTHEIR response. You have to double-click your ticket and open it up. Their response is appended to your ticket.
Hope this helps someone.
Ah, it makes sense now, but I somehow never realized that's what the message meant! Thanks!
Kenelm1 wrote:
You guys are above average intelligence, I can tell by reading these posts so im very surprised that noone has figured out what happened. Its very simple grasshoppah....
There are too many items in the game and way too many credits, whats a better way to take a big chunk of both out of the system thenby putting in this "oopsie" that eats literally millions of credits (value) and items across all servers. Then fix it in next publish while saying "Sorry no way to track your items and no reimbursements".
oh. I thought of that. That's one of the "dishonest" reasons for this issue that I thought of. I hope that is not what happenned though.
It's rude and inherently dishonest to treat the players that way.
If that's what happenned then it means you basically can't really trust anything the developers say now or in the future. That's not the way any online game should be managed and I hope it isn't the way this one is managed.
jaojyn wrote:Other important issues (Lacking payment)
There are several instances where a vendor doesn't pay you credits. I was testing yesterday and most of the purchases that were made were credited to my account... but not all of them.
Even worse was when someone offered an item to my vendor for 350k... I bought the item.. the money was subtracted from my account... but not credited to his.
This happened to me 2 different times in the last 2 months. I had been tracking my banks account and found that after I had logged off for a while (was less than an hour) when I came back on the money had appeared. Your case may be different but it sounds so similar.
In another instance I bought 300k worht of stuff off someone elses vendor.. they didn't receive the cash.
So pretty much whether or not you lose items... you aren't getting 100 percent of yer credits from the vendors.
Talk about a great built in money sink
And I have had this happen once. At first I thought the player knew an exploit but after further interaction the player is a great actor or I fell prey to this bug. It was a BIG order that the customer received that I did not get paid for.
-Indene- (I layed off my entire staff and now do business face to face.)
Malitevv wrote:
p4Samwise wrote:Forget fixing professions. Take a month off to clean up all that code - and the parts you can't clean up, put copious comments in so the next person to come along and do maintenance won't have to guess at what he/she is breaking by making what look like innocuous changes. It'll be time well spent.
Why do you assume it is unclean and uncommented? What if all the introductory level programming practices you mention are already being used and the problem is simply a typo in a single conditional expression in a data base query?That's all it would take to cause exactly what everyone is observing. I'm not saying it is the cause, but to assume the code is badly written and poorly documented because of an issue like this is just silly.
If it were that easy a hot-patch fix would have been issued days ago.
-Indene- (25+ years of programming expertise. Can you say Fortran? I knew you could
)
I read the first Merchant issues post and up to page 4 on this one, and there's one detail I haven't seen anyone mention that could be important to fixing the problem. Any items in my vendor storeroom now show up in my Available Items tab on the bazaar. It might not be a problem with vendors after all, but that items are somehow linked with the bazaar (which still adheres to the 14 day[7/7] deletion policy). Possibly when they added sub area locations into the game (a few months back), they inadvertantly linked some aspect of vendors with the bazaar.
Thunderheart, please pass this on to devs if it hasn't been mentioned yet. Thanks.
Ceno Kre'Fey
Rifleman/Master Damage Taker
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Malitevv wrote:
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.
As another software developer in the real world (with a masters in CS, and years experience in both systems administration and C++ and embedded programming), I have to agree completely with p4Samwise.
There are no coincidences in code. The fact that items drop out of game at 14 days is just too much of a flag. And they ARE being deleted - if you read the posts about CSR interaction, the CSR's are saying that they were DELETED because they had been in the vendor too long. However, even without the CSR's comments (which, I'll admit, cannot be taken as gosipel), the fact that the items are poofing right at the 14 day mark (to the second) is just too strong an indicator.
This DOES indicate that the code is sloppy, and undocumented. This is exactly the sort of timer bug I have seen in other real world pieces of code wher sequential events were to take place.
So, I'll throw in another 20 to your 1 that p4Samwise has hit the nail on the head.
I may just be imagining things on this, but I could have sworn that items in my stockroom have always shown up in my Available Items tab on the bazaar... not just since the last patch.
CenoKreFey wrote:
I read the first Merchant issues post and up to page 4 on this one, and there's one detail I haven't seen anyone mention that could be important to fixing the problem. Any items in my vendor storeroom now show up in my Available Items tab on the bazaar. It might not be a problem with vendors after all, but that items are somehow linked with the bazaar (which still adheres to the 14 day[7/7] deletion policy). Possibly when they added sub area locations into the game (a few months back), they inadvertantly linked some aspect of vendors with the bazaar.
Eutock wrote:
The reference to "method inside an object" was a light suggestion to potential challenges in debugging objects.
It was a patently absurd one, which is why I had to mock you for it. 
In modern (OO) programming, almost every function is a method. If anything, having your functions divided into classes makes debugging easier.