Fixed Internally Agents of Change do not appear to work on FV

Discussion in 'Resolved' started by Tutankamen, Sep 15, 2021.

  1. Dre. Altoholic

    Hilariously (and perhaps very relevant?) I tried to zone into static Permafrost after that and got kicked. "That zone is not ready to receive visitors yet"

    Dropped the dz and camped. Logged back in to "cannot be added to this expedition" so, total bust.
  2. Jhinx Whimsical Chinchilla

    Fixed internally?

    What appears to be consistent:
    • Need 6 bodies
    • Those bodies need to be All Access accounts
    • Does not appear to matter if those members of the group are online, as they hold the spot
    Questions:
    1. Level Range: Are there issues with the level range of the party? Are offline members considered to be of a specific level? Could it be 5x level 1 characters and a 115?
    2. Maximum Level: I thought it might be an issue with 115 toons (see "unflagged" above), but others are suggesting that it is not the case, but I was able to get into Seru long enough to be banished to Everfrost. Have any of you been successful to pop AoC instances with your 115 toons?
    3. Raid Requirement: Does a raid need to be formed? This does not appear to be the case, at least for some zones, since with our lower toons we were able to do PoFire and Kael without issue. If you form a raid, isn't that a bit of an issue with offline members?
    4. Unflagged Against All Odds: What makes a toon flagged vs. unflagged? Why a level 115 who did his VT flagging, has all the keys, has killed every boss in the zone, and is considered "unflagged" for Vex Thal, and has his Arx key, killed Seru innumerable times, but is "unflagged" for Sanctus, and can't get into either zone, yet a 107 toon that stepped into both the OW version of those zones for the first time that day is deemed to be "flagged" and can enter without issue.
    5. Mercenaries, Really?: Do mercs work in raid instances via AoC? People talking about using mercenaries to fill group slots to pop raid instances is confusing with my history of mercs being a no no in raid thingies.
    6. Knock, Knock, Let Me In: Two of us used various levelled toons, invited from the other one, and we're both All Access, we had 6 people in the group, with only 2 online. What could we have changed to get the 115 in?
  3. Cragzop Cranky Wizard

    You've got some misunderstandings here.

    -You need at least a full group to request (but being in a raid with 6+ is fine as well).
    -FTP characters (at least for now) can make up the group to get the dz, but cannot zone in. I am pretty sure that the flagged part of the dz is suppose to tell you which toons are All Access (yes) vs FTP/Silver (no) ... but this part seems extremely buggy at the moment and cause the majority of the issues with the AoC dzs.
    -These are not raid instances, but special access picks of the original zones. Therefore mercs are fine in them (provided the toon is not in a raid).
    -Level range shouldn't be an issue.

    Most of the misunderstandings here seem to be that the system is just not working well at all on Live so folks are reporting their specific issues/observations and not really doing any testing/elimination themselves. Plus, there wasn't any type of posting for Live players explaining what should/should not be happening with the AoCs.

    And finally, for those wondering why it wasn't tested better ... Test is special and the AoCs accept FTP/Silver as All Access. So there were no chances for players to test things out. There also seems to be some strange bugs affecting these (like Thylex in Temple of Veeshan AoC dzs not appearing) that wouldn't seem to have anything to do with the access issue.
    Waring_McMarrin and Jhinx like this.
  4. Braccus_Lafamilia Guild Leader, LaFamilia, Cazic-Thule

    Can confirm this. Also Lord Yelinak wasn't up entering Skyshrine. As I would assume that would be considered the "raid mob" as opposed to just the crusaders it does indeed look out of whack.
    Very unreliable flagging mechanic. As posted above fully keyed and flagged old school means nothing, having the "flagged" indicator in expedition window saying "yes" means nothing. You might zone in you might not. Logging to character select, logging to desktop, or switching toons doesn't seem to truly solve any issue.
  5. Ngreth Thergn Developer

    correct
    yeah. I didn't put in a check to be sure all 6 people in the requesting group are all access/gold/lifetime. I'm not sure I'll do that either, though I guess it might get rid of some confusion.
    the "ready" prompt is individual and ALSO checks if you are access/gold/lifetime, and will not allow free to play members to enter the instance.
    Then, becuase of campfires and banners, we also have a zone filter.
    HERE is where the issue is.
    For some reason the "You are at least a gold member" (so subscription, all access, lifetime, used a Krono recently enough that you are a "member", etc. you are NOT silver or Free to Play.) is NOT behaving as we want it to and is being flaky.

    A coder stayed late looking into this last night. I'm guessing they are sleeping now, so I do not have the results of what they found, but from a "Confirmed" on another post, they at least confirmed the bug.

    To let you know what the previous fix was.

    I was checking for "Is Gold", but only gold. Gold and All Access would both trip that as "TRUE" but lifetime would NOT. So in the downtime patch (my change could have been a hotfix. but there was a zone crash bug that needed the downtime and went in at the same time) I change the zone filter to the check that checks for "Gold or greater" access.

    This SHOULD have worked, fine, and did on our internal testing, but... well. You see it seems to be something more complex.

    Code is looking into it.

    As for "Why are progression servers being hit" Well, there used to be this horrible about 40 condition check on the zone filter for progression servers. With the change to allowing members on all servers access, I simplified the check significantly. Since you have to be a member to be on progression servers, we made the logical leap that this simplification would work, and our testing bore it through.
    Unfortunately, the issue with that "member" check made it effect progression servers.
  6. Sythrak20 Elder

    If you guys could look into maybe the AoC just refusing to zone you instead of porting you to your succor or bind point that would help alot too even when this is fixed.
  7. Gidono https://everquest.allakhazam.com

    Been there, done that. Everything tests fine in the test environment but production behaves differently. This is fixed by having a staging environment that mirrors production. You push your test changes that test fine in the testing environment to the staging environment first and see how things behave.
    PathToEternity likes this.
  8. Flexing New Member


    Or you don't try to change bad code with clearly no documentation and smoke test it in an hour. If it's working and not causing undo stress onto your systems, why even bother trying to change it?
  9. Alnitak Augur

    Practical observation from several DZ in the last few days:
    - "Flagged" check is indeed flaky, it is usually fixed by camping next to AoC and logging back in. Worked for me as a fix so far.
    - you basically need a full group to request the Instance. And since the DZ locks the "account" you do not really need 6 accounts for that. 2 is enough (and 1 can be a lowly f2p body for group invites or just a friend). Make a full group with characters on your account and request the DZ. Once inside - you can solo it, even drop the group and pop the merc if it's what you prefer. Other characters can be offline at that time.
    - if you switch the character for a loot pick-up and run to the AoC your zone flag may be flaky again. Just camp at AoC and log back in. The fix works.
  10. Hamshire Augur

    Im not usually one to ask for more down time but could you take the servers down and revert what you did and or throw a fix in for this? People are spending more time trying to enter these broken AoCs then it would be for you guys to patch this, to give an example three of us on the Rizlona TLP spent a good hour to an hour and a half alone trying to get 12 toons into the Yxtta AoC the other night. The following night more guildies tried it and just straight couldn't get in, got frustrated and wasted the dz. This is just two stories from our guild of one AoC of course with this effecting all servers ( TLPs even more because we rely on them ) and this is majorly effecting every guild on all the TLPs.
    Xanadas likes this.
  11. Herf Augur


    While I agree that smoke testing has to be extensive on a change like this, I can just imagine what that "if else" or "switch" statement must have looked like. And given that, there would have to be a bunch of testing when unwinding the spaghetti code.

    Why change it? To reduce the code differences in features common to both TLP and Live.

    If it was me, I would have changed it given the opportunity, but I would also personally test the heck out of it and try to break it, not just testing for expected results. The test matrix would be large.
  12. Herf Augur

    In our raid experience yesterday it can take multiple times of relogging to get the flags sorted on already flagged characters. Not enough data to tell if just logging to character select vs relogging from Windows behaves the same.

    I just know it took a raid of 4 groups 20 minutes of screwing around after popping the instance to get people were know were flagged, into the zone.

    hmm...we know that the DZ tool will mark people as unflagged when they switch toons. Perhaps there's an issue there that's causing this problem. Don't mark people unflagged when they log out the toon, but are still in the DZ.
  13. Dre. Altoholic

    Seems to me like the fix should be to turn off all the checks until they are working right. Will a couple people be able to request instances they shouldn't for a (maybe) brief period of time? Perhaps. Do I care? No.
    Machen and Xanadas like this.
  14. Xanadas Augur

    If only there was a test server where these issues could have been identified before releasing it to production on a TLP LAUNCH NIGHT.

    I agree with a previous post that all "how much money are you giving us" checks should be disabled until this is actually working right.
  15. Dre. Altoholic

    Maybe it'll give a few folks the taste they need to sub :)
  16. Captain Video Augur


    Q: How many people do you think play on the Test server?
    A: A very small fraction of the # you seem to think.

    The Test server patch notes are posted more than a week before the Live patch goes live. If there's something in the patch you are keen to get tested, then copy some of your toons over to the Test server and test it yourself! It's not my job or any other player's job to test it for you.
    Stymie likes this.
  17. Waring_McMarrin Augur

    Test server treats everyone as all access and has other special rules that made testing this difficult.
  18. suinegEQ Elder

    Theoretically it made it difficult but all TLP players are gold as well and if you read Ngreth's post there are a few issues with some assumptions made there.

    I would bet $100 that no players took more than 10 minutes and tested it on Test and submitted anything.
  19. Hamshire Augur

    Spent an hour today having issues getting in the Txevu AoC, this issue is prob one of the most frustrating ones ive had to deal with from the games side of things.
  20. Dre. Altoholic

    Seems very RNG to me, though I haven't tried the Txevu one yet.

    I've run across Everfrost about a dozen times in the last week but I'd say the worst kick in the pants is when the Sebillis AoC punts you to the EJ/TT zoneline ><