Incident Report for Item Loss Bug

So surely this must have resulted in a small number of serious win items, which I'd guess people are keeping quiet? For example, there are a large number of uniques out there with a substantial downside, and if that value were zero instead ....

Y'all do know that you dun own those items, right? Everything that exists on those servers is the property of Grinding Gear Games. If a soccer ball goes flat, or a coupla hickory bats go missing from the locker, it's still GGG's playing field. So, forget about lawsuits and such.

Anyway, why is it that anytime something goes wrong (i.e., is not resolved to the liking of some players), GGG is accused of screwing the players for funsies? The Devs worked hard to resolve this as fast as they could, to prevent further instances of it occurring. If there was any practical way to restore the affected items, they would. They're not just being jerks because it makes them chuckle.

I swear, the level of childishness I observe on these forums... =>[.]<=

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Taelis wrote:

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TikoXi wrote:

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Taelis wrote:

So you guys knew about this bug for over a week.. And no warning was given to players, and now they are left with the consequences. I hope at the very least this is a lesson to improve your code so that you can distinguish between item loss due to bugs and deletion of items.

I can tell you don't understand how data is stored, so I'll try and keep this very simple:

That's not going to happen. You are asking someone to not get sick. In order to not get sick, you have to live in a sealed, conditioned container, isolated from all outside contact of every kind with everything passing through in or out to be screened, checked for contamination and filtered. Even the air.

Yes, it's possible to ensure that you never get sick. But are you really going to do it? No - it's impractical.

It's exactly the same with this data. "Sure, we can ensure that it we will be able to tell if it got bugged or not. But the data will be essentially unusable."

My beef isnt so much that it happened, its that they knew it was happening and did nothing to warn people (not even an announcement of HEY dont use the mtx! Hey were disabling this because of reports).

Also i'm not asking anything of the sort. they should have measures in place that allow them to roll back characters. and if they have those measures they should be able to compare items from one rollback point to live and determine what was affected (especially since most people will report exactly what was affected. And then there's the obvious like shav's missing its unique affix)

Also: For the record I was not affected personally by this (i havent even logged in since buying my supporter pack.) but if I had been and this was the response I would be pretty pissed, and unlikely to support them in the future with my money.

The fact that we weren't given any warning about this is probably a testament to how long it took them to isolate exactly what was going on, the quickly the severity of this bug was revealed to GGG and subsequently patched out. While in hindsight it does look bad, what good would giving anyone any warning would have done? "Hey guys - we have a problem backend that is fucking with items in all sorts of ways. We don't know what's causing it, we're not even sure what's wrong, so uh - yea...just letting you know something wrong!" I'm pretty sure the numerous posts of "Kaoms Helmet" and the "nerfed shavs" had the community pretty convinced something was going wrong.

Also, they likely didn't know what was causing the bug, and afawk, the ammy mtx wasn't the cause of it.


As for rolling back characters - I'm not sure why this isn't possible, but if it isn't, it isn't. I imagine it has something to do with the way items are stored in the database. it's likely that they aren't sorted 'in this account's stash', with 'this char's items' and so on and so forth. Doing a rollback on a single account has ALL sorts of problems accociated with it too. Any trades would have to be undone, and that effects people not involved with the actual glitch, etc etc etc...

Honestly, the prospect was likely suggested and quickly dropped. trying to roll back individual accoutns, assuming that the data is stored individually so that such a thing is possible, would likely be completely impracticable.

Finding individual item data to rollback has similar problems. The whole concept is a tangled mess of glue-covered-hassle. Sticky, entwined, a mess to look at with no guarentee of success. It's just better for all involved to assume that you can't make it work and not try.

Everyone has every right to be pissed. But I'll say it again - there's just no other way for this to play out for GGG.

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Taelis wrote:

So you guys knew about this bug for over a week.. And no warning was given to players, and now they are left with the consequences. I hope at the very least this is a lesson to improve your code so that you can distinguish between item loss due to bugs and deletion of items.

No other companies except GGG do give out such 'inside' coding-wise things, that caused 300? from 1-2-3mil?users items to corrupt.

300 / 1 000 000 = 0.0003%

There is no perfect code out there :)

This is utterly bs, I feel sorry for the people who were affected by this, and there was this guy who got his 248% legacy shav completely destroyed
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1268823
GGG please for the love of god do something about the item restoration to justify this.

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HikaruYami wrote:

TikoXi, GGG should absolutely take responsibility for all of their fucking glitches. The argument that "if they take responsibility now, they will also have to in the future" as a reason to not do so is completely sociopathic of you. If their business model is to never take responsibility, they deserve to fail as a business.

Further, GGG wasn't transparent about this issue until it was fully fixed. The fucking responsible thing to do would be that as soon as they had two reports (or one fully-confirmed report), make an announcement about the bug and how they were trying to fix it (but that they would not be able to restore items, so people should not play if they cannot handle losing items). All week, people were going onto the bug-report forum to report their bug only to find out for the first time that this was a known bug that lots of people were experiencing.

Quite frankly, everyone that GGG thinks actually was affected by this change should be given a free perfect +1 acuity.


(I was not affected by this bug, I am just completely morally outraged at GGG)

[Post Edited by Support]

They might have not know what was causing it, or what even the bug actually WAS until they fixed it. Such is the nature of software.

If they put out a PSA every time that they found a software glitch like this, we'd be suffocating under the physical weight of our desk crushing us alive every time we opened the forums.

As for whether or not they would or would not be able to restore items, they didn't know THAT until after the bug had already been fixed. Again - such is the nature of software glitches.

You are making the assumption that they knew/could have known things that in reality are impossible to know and even hindsight doesn't teach you. It just doesn't work that way, and I'm sure GGG (and a hell of a lot of other software developers) wished it would. It would ease a lot of burden on their PR people.

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Souleus wrote:

So surely this must have resulted in a small number of serious win items, which I'd guess people are keeping quiet? For example, there are a large number of uniques out there with a substantial downside, and if that value were zero instead ....

possibility of that is rare but there. And if it did happen, I imagine that someone is going to have a nigh unique unique and is going to be keeping very quiet about it.

If it did happen - it'll never get found until they tell someone.

Oh now I know where my Tabula has gone!!

I'm very disappointed that the items I lost can't be restored. I surely hope GGG has no intentions of taking away what they've left us with then.

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InfiniteMonkeys wrote:

I wasn't affected but it's totally unacceptable that you aren't restoring items. The idea that it's indistinguishable from normal item deletion is absurd. Nobody's going to just delete a Shavs or 6L or whatever. It's hardly going to break the economy if very few items were affected as you claim, but it totally fucks over the affected players. I understand your policy of not returning items lost to scams, desync or whatever, but when it's caused by an unavoidable bug which is entirely your fault, it's ridiculous that you refuse to do anything about it.

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Rolling back a character is probably not possible without a ton of effort per character.

Significantly less effort than it'll take for all the people who lost Shavs etc to get them back. If GGG let a bug like this onto the live servers, they need to put some effort into making it right rather than just fixing the bug and telling everybody affected 'tough shit'.

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.

If an item is clearly modified in an impossible way, then you should be able to restore it. If you are afraid of being "unfair" by addressing these items while being unable to restore items lost, you are ignoring the greater unfairness to begin with.

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.