Incident Report for Item Loss Bug

This is very troubling. I do not believe that I was affected (been playing on the Beta servers for the past few weeks) but to those who were affected, and have proof, this needs to be rectified. These people on standard who have had items disappear/change/whatnot, I feel for you. GGG, there needs to be a prevention plan. I haven't supported in awhile (life needs money) but this is really testing my limits. As I said, I don't believe I was affected in any significant way but this is crazy. If I had been affected I wouldn't ever support again. This may be a drop in the bucket but, wow, this is nuts.

I can understand not being able to tell if an item was legitimately traded away or vendored. But I can't understand not fixing people's items if they were corrupted in some way that isn't normally possible (no sockets, loss of a key mod, etc.). Granted, these items are probably worth more now because they're truly unique, but you should at least let people request that you fix them.

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DoubleU wrote:

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This has always happened, friend of mine lost 3 mirror as a result...

Sure he did ;)
The fact that Chris has come along here and apologized says a lot about GGG as a company.

The fact that GGG aren't sufficiently logging these changes and don't have systems in place to recover says far more than an apology. I'm in software development, if a bug of this magnitude happened to us and cost a customer potentially months or years of work we'd be out of business - The fact that this is a game and not say a different hosted service is of little to no consequence, people invest a considerable amount of time and money into this game, errors like this are unacceptable.

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CliveHowlitzer wrote:

I assume this only affected players who logged on during that time. I wouldn't even notice if I lost shit on Standard, even if it did have MTX attached. Its all such a mess.

It sucks people lost items but its only pixels. Best not to get attached. That is the motto that I follow.

QFT. I don't understand why people are getting so upset...other companies wouldn't even apologize.

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rob16437 wrote:

Rollbacks or any other form of item restoration method could be abused, exploited and ultimately would make me quit the game, especially in hc.

If GGG had sufficient systems in place to detect deletion without user confirmation this wouldn't be an issue at all. Hardly a substantial engineering challenge in the grand scheme of things.

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Karcaroth wrote:

I'd like to echo the dissatisfaction that has been expressed repeatedly throughout this thread.

If you knew of a bug that was resulting in item loss that you had zero intention of reversing, you should have notified players.

what do you tell them? do you tell them "there is a bug that deletes items. we don't know how it works. do not play the game."?

that's not how debugging works. you actively need stress testing to isolate errors and fix them. 4 bytes were being altered under select conditions - 4. that's akin to a single ingrown hair growing on your head, causing you moderate pain. you need the pain to figure out which hair is bad, otherwise you will never fucking find it and it will just dig deeper into your scalp.

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Karcaroth wrote:

If the big problem is that "legitimate" item destruction is indistinguishable from item loss, then please remove player ability to destroy items so that there can be no doubt in case of future issues.

It is unacceptable for the developers of a game centered around loot acquisition to take this sort of "shrug we're sorry but you're SOL" stance when it comes to item loss resulting from a bug. I can understand why you would not get involved in issues with desync, scams, or outright theft, but in this case blame rests squarely on you, and you should address it. It might seem to be more effort than it's worth and not result in any direct profit for you, but I don't think you can claim to care about economic integrity when people can lose items without any warning and be offered zero recourse.

while it does seem harsh, this is not an issue of malicious intent, and acting as if this is some giant snub to the afflicted users is downright sensationalism. this is an issue of one or two minuscule mutations of the code causing unforeseen issues that took time for GGG to even pin down the root of. this is a game of bits and pixels with some virtual value attached. it sucks that these things were lost. but claiming that GGG has no economic integrity is utter bullshit. they couldn't possibly distinguish real cases from liars and cheats trying to score a free unique, and they don't want to spoil their administrative integrity to the fairness of the game for all users is really what's going on here.

the fact that they fixed such a deeply entrenched bug in a timely fashion, with only <300 items affected; AND addressed the fact that THEY are the ones who screwed up is a hell of a lot more than any other gaming company i can think of at the top of my head.

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AngryCustard wrote:

However I have to say that it is pretty poor that you're not restoring items. There is no legitimate way to buy items in this game, players spend thousands of hours playing, grinding to save for that shav's or 6L to perfect their build. It is not their fault that these items become corrupted. I really think they should be replaced.

those corrupted items are superexpensive now :)

so GGG, you can MANUALLY, INDIVIDUALLY restore player characters that died to your own 'bug' of carrion queen damage value(s), but you are now refusing to restore players' items that were literally deleted solely by your own mistakes, through no fault of the players themselves? Hell, they didn't even have knowledge of it, let alone fault.

Chris was right, you guys DID set a dangerous precedent when you restored those characters. Now you're all hypocrites, RIP.

I love you guys, always have (and you even fixed desync, something I thought impossible even for you guys!), but this is just inconsistent, unprofessional, shameful behavior.

final verdict:
0/10

I shouldn't, but I have to also express my dissatisfaction at how item losses (which are not the player's faults) are handled by GGG as a company.

"You played every day for almost a year and saved up every bit of currency you made to afford that 6L Shavs? Well it's going to disappear, but sorry, we will not give it back. But wait, you don't get your currency back either." Read that and tell me how this item loss bug has been handled is the correct route.

Back in the 1 Month Bloodlines/Torment Event I chanced a Cloak of Defiance while partying with a public group. Picked it up off the ground, got the achievement, linked it and said "Holy shit just chanced this," not 20 seconds later everyone in my group disconnected, I logged back in, no Cloak of Defiance in my inventory.

Still had the achievement though, but I suppose when you get the achievement "Left to chance" it does not log which item base the chance orb was used on.

Was pretty pissed to be honest, can only imagine what people who lost mirrors/acuity's/Shavs are feeling.

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greg2367 wrote:

so GGG, you can MANUALLY, INDIVIDUALLY restore player characters that died to your own 'bug' of carrion queen damage value(s), but you are now refusing to restore players' items that were literally deleted solely by your own mistakes, through no fault of the players themselves? Hell, they didn't even have knowledge of it, let alone fault.

Chris was right, you guys DID set a dangerous precedent when you restored those characters. Now you're all hypocrites, RIP.

I love you guys, always have (and you even fixed desync, something I thought impossible even for you guys!), but this is just inconsistent, unprofessional, shameful behavior.

final verdict:
0/10

You understand that the logging of those two events (character death vs. item deletion) is totally different right?

People also need to realize that "deletion" means deleted from memory, be it via /destroy, dropping in town, selling to a vendor, being in an instance when it despawns, etc. We don't know what their logging fully looks like, so commenting on it is asinine. It's also asinine to say they should have set logging up "in case this random glitch causes tiny bits of memory to be set to 0" AND that that is even possible.

To people thinking that GGG did this maliciously, or makes comments like "I hope they leave our other stuff alone", just wow. You really think GGG ever wants to make it less fun for people to play their game?

Folks that think GGG is lying about their logging/ability to restore items: get off the forums. If you don't believe what GGG says, there's really no point in being here.

People who don't want to support anymore: that's your right. I think you're stupid, but it's your right. GGG works damned hard to make a great game, talk to their players, listen to their players, and be up front with what's going on in their Dev world. They also happen to be human, which means shit happens. It's how they handle that shit that defines the company. If you think GGG is bad, I think you need to set more realistic expectations. Call Comcast or something and then tell me GGG is bad.