A Note About The Recent Fence Bug

[DevBlog 3,404]

A couple of days ago a bug emerged where creatures like horses which are stored in pens were able to escape their enclosures on Wednesday’s maintenence restart. We thought we fixed this but during today’s restart the issue happened again.

As far as we know, the issue is fixed and creatures should no longer be able to get out of their enclosures during restarts.

We’re sorry for any lost creatures but we will be unable to assist in getting those back as the scale of that operation is too vast for our resources and rollbacks cause many problems of their own. We hope that creatures may not have wandered too far from where they are supposed to be, and that the timing was not too inconvenient.

In game development, bugs arise unexpectedly from time to time and some of those can be damaging and annoying to a large portion of our community. In an indie game such as Wurm, this is probably more likely to happen but in general we have seen very few of these types of issues so for that we can be thankful.

Ross Whiting - poseidon@wurmonline.com
Public Relations Manager

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[belthize 438]

Stuff happens, as long as there's an attempt to learn from it best thing is to move on.

Queue long stream of entitlement posts in 3, 2, 1 ...

[Wiro 370]

Stuff happens, and then it happens again and we get sleep bonus lol.

[fatboy 448]

i just changed to stone, they didnt roam far, *shrugs*, its snowing ingame and outside. thats all i care atm :-)

[Kegan 3,926]

i am fine with it as long as we know it is fixed. I am still going to safeguard and leave some trash animals in the wood fences to see what happens.

[NESGamepro 350]

Queue long stream of entitlement posts in 3, 2, 1 ...

Way to diminish other people when something doesn't effect you. Shouldn't we have a little entitlement as paying customers, especially post "1.0"? Shouldn't they have a little more pride in their work and you in yours?

I call this completely unacceptable. Not only the bug but for the complete lack of official notice until at least 8 hours after it happened, again. While they party it up.

I feel compelled to make stone fences now because this seems to be a recurring issue, not just these last 2 times. Where was the warning for that? How could I have possibly known? I was going for a more natural aesthetic. I'm not guaranteed this will ever save anything I've worked for because this game is still in beta and forever "indie", which apparently means buggy, despite the 1.0 and the celebrations.

It's not wurmageddon 2.0 but it is not right and should never happen again at any cost if they want this game to ever be more than a moderate success. It most certainly has the potential. I still have faith they can pull it off. Think big guys!

[Pingpong 1,070]

Rofl...that's hilarious, it happens 4 or 5 times in a month costing folks their 4,5 and 6s horses+ gear (and months and months of champs) and "we're sorry but you're screwed" is the official response?

Edited December 21, 2012 by Pingpong

[JudusX 199]

If your on the freedom servers i urge everyone to help out your neighbor and be honest when recovering horses with or without equipment. Check with your friends if you find loose animals and keep them safe for them if possible. We all know this was frustrating but it happens. I think most will find your friends will help you replace your lost critters and even people you don't know are usually more than willing. If your attending the Impalong and you lost your gear on your horses due to this why not ask those around to give you a hook up for this Christmas, im sure someone will help replace what you lost.

also i want killing of non aggressive creatures, in the wild, a punishable offense for a few days while people recover, people that take advantage of this bug don't belong on the freedom isles.

thanks

[Hula_Girl 266]

I am really disappointed. Limited development resources is one thing. Frequent introduction of the same bug over and over again is another thing. I don't know if it's about lack of skills or lack of respect for your customers, but I'm deeply dissapointed. Really!

[Derecho 50]

I am really disappointed. Limited development resources is one thing. Frequent introduction of the same bug over and over again is another thing. I don't know if it's about lack of skills or lack of respect for your customers, but I'm deeply dissapointed. Really!

Both, really.

They're making money off of you, so who cares?

[Pashka 707]

Stuff happens, as long as there's an attempt to learn from it best thing is to move on.

Queue long stream of entitlement posts in 3, 2, 1 ...

Here is the one thing I'd wish for. This just happened 3 days ago.....where did the learning thing happen?

[Manifestation 85]

Here is the one thing I'd wish for. This just happened 3 days ago.....where did the learning thing happen?

Do you guys also remeber that 10 hour rollback we had at the same time? where all the pregnant horses had miscarriages, and everyone had to sail to the impalong for the second time? And we all lost all the work we'd done. And people had characters deleted, and premium time lost?

I remember how we were all baffled by the fact that they release patches without making a backup beforehand, i remember how confusing it was that the rollback had to be 10 hours...

Surely they'd learn from such a massive mistake, surely...

Well when asked if we would get a rollback to fix the issue for the 3rd time (yes, he rebooted the server for a "fix" and it WAS NOT FIXED), here's the answer we got.

[23:31:45] <&Rolf> sigh

[23:32:26] <&Rolf> I'm having a live video feed in 1.5 half hours and have to write the script

[23:32:35] <&Rolf> so a rollback would keep the servers down

[23:32:39] <&Rolf> until after christmas

[23:32:49] <&Rolf> i assume you'd rather have them up?

...

[23:39:04] <&Rolf> it would be 8 hours rollback as well

Yes, my words are full of venom today. Deal with it.

Edited December 22, 2012 by Manifestation

[Emoo 4,357]

Hmm, I was thinking that since Rolf and yourself Woosoo have been taking public relations alot more seriously these past few months that perhaps there would be a sense of real compensation when the staff mess up big time like this. Dissapointed to see that nothing has changed from years gone by, players get screwed and told to deal with it. Even making the small change of having "Compensation" sleep bonus stackable over 5hrs. Myself like many many others already have had 5hrs SB and the server has crashed, been rebooted, blah blah blah so many times in the past few weeks that not only have I been able to use it but I keep getting more thrown at me like it actually means something.

Personally I didn't loose any horses as I use tall stone walls for my pens but I feel the pain of the 100s of others who did. And having been in the situation in the past of feeling hard done by. I completely understand. Definitely a real crappy situation. Like you say Woosoo, problems in games like this are inevitable, nothing can happen to stop big problems like this happening. Everyone understands that however what you do after those problems occur, well that's entirely up to you. Personally I don't feel that "Sorry, nothing we can do to help" makes anything better because there isn't a person here that dosn't know that if Rolf wanted to offer compensation and put some effort into fixing his mistakes he could.

Edited December 22, 2012 by Emoo

[Pashka 707]

Sorry did you say? There wasn't an apology made.

[Windeee 36]

I was replacing some of my wooden fences with low stone walls and the cows and bulls were walking thru the stone walls

[Manifestation 85]

Sorry did you say? There wasn't an apology made.

That's a really good point, I just went looking through the IRC logs and stuff searching for Rolf or a staff member or ANYONE saying sorry....came up empty handed...

Is it really that hard to say ?

SB =/= Apology

[Derecho 50]

That's a really good point, I just went looking through the IRC logs and stuff searching for Rolf or a staff member or ANYONE saying sorry....came up empty handed...

Is it really that hard to say ?

SB =/= Apology

Rolf is too "busy" writing the "script" for his "release party" to bother with such trivial issues, he basically told the guy to ###### off because he was busy writing the script.

[Keldun 335]

I wonder how you can celebrate the release when you haven't even finished it yet?

[Kegan 3,926]

The thing i am afraid of is on the next server restart the exact thing will happen again after all this was "fixed" a few days ago too.

[GreenHero 72]

You people have never been a part of an MMO release have you? Or have ever even played another MMO for any extended period of time? Because believe you me, I have been screwed far more severely and gotten nothing so much as an apology.

Good lord.

[Ninetoes 5]

Wurm 1.0 eh? hahahahaha

Gonna keep ignoring this 'let's put it on live server and see what happens' style of develpment and just enjoy what remains of a 'good enough' MMO for now.

[Sizewell 2]

I noticed that the horses were loose within a couple of minutes after the server was back up after maintenance. I mentioned this in Chat and posted on the forum immediately. Someone else tried /support to report it but was not getting any response. Approx 2:30hrs later the server was taken down to fix the bug.

If it had been taken down more or less straight away, horses etc wouldnt of had a 2:30hrs head start to make their escape.

[Kelebeth 37]

It is still very unsatisfying to hear that nothing can be done. I feel an easy thing to do would be at least make a special spawn of horses, cows, deer, on those servers where they have gone extinct in the wild.

But OK, we must at some point draw a line and move on and look into the future.

Does the future for Wurm staff look any different than it is today? Is something going to change in the update system? Will backups be made prior to updating the live servers? Are updates tested before releasing them on the servers? And if ###### happens, how can customers that were hit by something terrible be compensated?

If staff value their business, and take pride in what they do, then answers to these questions must be available to you. And guess what... your customers are dying to know what you have in mind.

Edited December 22, 2012 by Kelebeth

[Kelebeth 37]

. double

Edited December 22, 2012 by Kelebeth

[Wossoo 1,915]

It happened at the worst possible time for us and it sounds like the worst possible time for alot of our players too. The worst for us because of time restraints to deal with the issue yesterday, and the major cons of doing a rollback, and the worst for the players because many of you are at the impalong.

Obviously we never intend for bugs like this to happen and in an ideal world they never would but as I said in the blog post this is software and bugs happen. We are improving the way we test features and patches and hopefully this will lead to less problems of this kind in the future, and we have a couple of volunteer team members dedicated to testing on the test server and we are always looking into ways we can improve the way we test code changes.

On the subject of compensation, I am not really sure what to say. We do not have the people to be able to manually lead all horses back to their owners or prove ownership of horses. We do not have the ability to prove who lost how much due to the issue due to the nature of creatures being unconnected to players.

Sleep bonus is a form of compensation but maybe that is not enough? What would you guys suggest? Taking into account we will not flood the economy with free silvers, we do not have interesting items we can give out in this case that would have any relevance, we cannot provide extra/free premium to those who have lost out as I mentioned previously we have no realistic way of determining who deserves that form of compensation. Spawning horses in general is one idea but it is unlikely to compensate the people who actually lost them.

As I said in the blog post - We are sorry (I think that counts as an apology) for the issue and that people lost out but we are unable to compensate you unless someone comes up with a justifiable and realistic way of doing that. A thousand minds are better than 2 or 3.