Strange coincidence

[Galadan]

When I need Celestial essence I usually make it in very large quantities (500+) and I have noticed something I consider more then a coincidence.

The last 3 times I have made CE in mass quantities I have been in PoK and PoK has crashed while I am doing the combines. When I log back in all of my combines have been undone and I end up right back where I was when I started doing the combines. I can run around PoK for half an hour before I start the combines but I pop up right where I was when I started.

Maybe all the zone crashes as of late have something to do with a glitch in the RNG?

Anyone else notice this or am I the only fortunate one?

[Ryuchitoran]

This happened to me as well.

I had two velium mastodon cloaks prepared when I logged on, I did the combines.. failed one, and succeeded on the other.

Then I lost connection. When I came back.. all the components were back in my inventory and the finished cloak missing like I had been rolled back. I tried the combines again and succeeded both times!

I thought it was rather odd, but I was a happy camper.

[Galadan]

What zone were you in and did the whole zone crash or you just LD?

Also, how long ago?

[Nolrog]

I'd say it was probably a coincidence, however, it's worth sending in a bug report. That way, QA could take a look and see if they could reproduce the crash.

[utania]

When a zone crashes, you will get rolled back to the last point your character was saved.

Stuff like trading with another player will force a player to stop exploits.

So if you didn't do anything that saved your character then yes everything you did would have been rolled back.

Though i think you are also saying that you tradeskilling is crashing the zone ?

[Tanker]

While it could've been his tradeskilling that crashed the zone, it could also have been anything anyone else in the zone was doing.

Note that anytime you perform a tradeskill combine, a "save" is generated. These get cached on the world server until it has time to open and save your file. If you got 2 combines in before the crash, maybe the world went down, instead of just your zone?

Of course, there will come a day when all my info is obselete, and we're storing chars direct to DB, etc. ... Someday.

[Pootle]

Note that anytime you perform a tradeskill combine, a "save" is generated.

Wow, that a lot of 'saves' for the servers to process.

I had a crash the other day, and rolled back just over 150 combines (i think it was soda water) in POK.

Crash happened in middle of a trade to my mule who was holding components for space, after I had made around 600 soda waters.
Was very annoying!

[Galadan]

If a save is made every time a combine is complete I don't understand why myself and others are being rolled back several hundred combines.

Also, their seems to be a serious shortage on "rare" drops as of late which would again point to a problem with the RNG.

I was out of game for awhile and came back to the frequent zone crashes. When did they start and what changes took place around that time? Anyone know?

I don't think it's the "Tradeskilling" thats crashing the zone but the constant use of the RNG while TSing. The RNG encounters an error due to the fast paced, repetitive use caused by TSing and thats what is causing the crashes.

[Sukrasisx]

I don't think it's the "Tradeskilling" thats crashing the zone but the constant use of the RNG while TSing. The RNG encounters an error due to the fast paced, repetitive use caused by TSing and thats what is causing the crashes.

Oh come now! Surely you don't think that a few hundred TS combines come anywhere close to pounding on the RNG as hard as the same amount of time spent in combat? Especially when the combines are trivial so there's no skillup chance to compute, but just the failure chance? (And in the case of celestial essence, it might not even use the RNG on the failure chance, since it's no-fail, though it's possible the code still asks for a random number to check if it's below 0%.)

Also, I think folks are missing part of what Tanker said, probably because he's using coder jargon. What he calls a "save" apparently involves saving your information on the world server, but not immediately saving it to disk (or database, or whatever). So the information has made it from your client to the server, but it's not permanent yet. As Pootie says, saving to disk on every combine would be a lot of saves; that's why the server doesn't do that! Presumably the server saves things to disk "every once in a while", or when you do certain things (certainly when you zone, but other times as well). The devs probably don't want to advertise just what things force a save to disk, because they don't want players doing those things all the time just to avoid the occasional rollback. If players did that, then we'd have the problem Pootie was hinting at: the servers would slow down from having to write stuff to disk all the time!

[Malikki]

This happened to me the other day, might have just been the timming but when it happened twice i thought of this post.

i was not makeing CE's, i was makeing Blessed dust of Tunare x 600, i had made 300 of them and on the 300 and 1st combine PoK crashes, i was like hmm... and it made me think of this post.

[Bobaten]

Just so someone gives a counter example: I did ~600 brut champagne combines last week(600 magnums+600 sodawater + 600 final combines =1800ish combines) and pok didn't crash. Then I switched to pottery and got 50 skill ups there and pok still didn't crash.

[Galadan]

Oh come now! Surely you don't think that a few hundred TS combines come anywhere close to pounding on the RNG as hard as the same amount of time spent in combat?

No I don't. I don't think that everything in game is run off of one RNG either. That would be an insane amount of hits to one RNG every second.

Just so someone gives a counter example: I did ~600 brut champagne combines last week(600 magnums+600 sodawater + 600 final combines =1800ish combines) and pok didn't crash. Then I switched to pottery and got 50 skill ups there and pok still didn't crash.

I too have done several combines and not had the zone crash. I did a few hundred fletching combines this morning and a few hundred alch combines this evening, no crash. At this point I haven't had it happen since. When it happens again I will /bug it.

Do I think I crashed the zone? I don't know. I do think it deserves some looking into though.

[Unapuma]

Once between my main and a bot alt, I made 2,000 celestial essence in one sitting. 2 boxing tradeskill is no fun but twice as fast as just one toon, and especially sence CE are no fail I didn't have to worry about skills.

Lots of clicking, lots of autoinventory hot key, no crash at all. So it may be just coincidence on your end if the zone crashes while you're doing big tradeskill run.

[Tanker]

*standard disclaimer about how it's been a while since I saw the code, and I'm old, so there's the whole memory.... what?*

The RNG is not a separate thread... it's just a function with a static grid array and an algorithm that generates good, random-like(1) numbers. Each server has it's "own" grid that's just part of the memory of the server when running. The "number of hits" to the RNG is irrelevant, as it never "runs out", and takes no more or no less time each and every time we call it, no matter how often it is called.

The part about saves is correct. A zone-server "save" is almost always generated when inventory changes occur (not location changes, but actual deletes/transfers/purchases/combines, etc.). This results in your character being sent to the world server, where it is queued up for an actual "stored to a file" save. I'm not sure how often these happen, but there are both some events (like zoning) that FORCE it to happen, as well as a timer that only lets a save stay queued for so long.

There's also a bit of error handling in the process. If a zone generates an exception, it tries to save all it's current characters to the world before crashing (sometimes it works). If a world crashes, it tries to save all the characters in the queue first (works less often). etc.

A rollback of 160 combines seems excessive, but probably possible, if rare.

As I mentioned about the memory thing, I've now forgotten the real reason for this thread, so I'm going to ramble off now....

Tanker

(1) see one of many posts on why "random" is a word designed to start arguments. "Random-like" can also be viewed as "indistinguishable to a normal person from random".

[KyrosKrane]

(1) see one of many posts on why "random" is a word designed to start arguments. "Random-like" can also be viewed as "indistinguishable to a normal person from random".

Heh. I used to judge Magic: the Gathering, which to oversimplify a little is a card game where each player has his or her own deck. Before beginning each game, the player has to shuffle that deck, and optionally the opponent's deck. Of course, players always bring up the whole routine about possible cheating or advantage gained by shuffling improperly. In practical terms, it's impossible to truly randomize a deck of cards within the 1-3 minutes usually allowed for shuffling, so Magic has this concept of "sufficiently randomized." It's usually defined to mean that the player has no idea what card is coming up next, or even the likely location of a particular card within the deck.