Lower and Upper Scheol crashes and dies (skips a heartbeat as Kelly says) #1591
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Reference: prk/issues#1591
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Report link
https://bytebin.project-rk.com/5eausSCV
Reproduction steps
Expected results
Zone should function normally after a relog
Actual results
Zone completely dies resulting in zero actions outside of global chat -- stuck and terminate all succeed in the chat, but the actual action doesn't happen. Nano's are unable to be cast and you end up in a casting loop
Bug prevalence
One or twice a day maybe more - it's happened to me twice now, but others have mentioned this in global chat about the zone so I never went. Sounds like it's every few hours.
Description & Attachments
Just to reiterate -- chat will still be live, but anything you try to do will not execute (nano programs, stuck commands, terminate, etc.) I am able to move, chat in global, use .bug .online, but any action I do results in endless cast time or execution succeeded messages with no action. If I moved, when I relog I am in the spot where I logged in at, not where I moved so the zone isn't responding.
This happened to me on my normal character and waited for a few hours to see if it self resolved. At the time of it happening there was a major lag spike, which is why i think it may be skipping a heart beat as it died during a lag episode. Terminate didn't work, stuck didn't work, mobs wouldn't attack so couldn't die, i also couldn't zone into garden, but insignia was consumed. Warp back to scheol upper didn't work.
From a BH POV:
I went there on my BH to investigate and since the soldier was stuck in the broken GS, i couldn't teleport to her. It also wasn't showing there was another gs (
.gs list) (the broken one) was open with a character in it. When the PF is broken.pf resetworks and shifts the characters to another playing field. They then have to log out and back in and places them into a working gs.So, I don't agree that this issue is "verified", sure - I've seen lag happen in scheol, but I've also seen it happen serverwide. If we want to have this focused on, players need to make more of an effort in creating reproducable steps.
As a reference point. I've created a level 130 character - I've traveled to Scheol Upper (
.tp to 1150.4 2088.3 y 33.9 4880) and ran through the portal which teleports me to Lower Scheol (.tp to 1173.5 1017.5 y 224.9 4881). Teleport time aprox 25-30 seconds.I'm now running around without issues. will update if/when I see more.
To add a few comments to this:
When playing normally, we had a full team of 6 toons around 120. We were killing all Spirits, Spirit Bosses, Soul Dredges and Soul Dredge bosses around the area by Ergo. If you are using the SLmap v2.22, it's the W1 to W11 bosses on the map.
We were killing in an counter-clockwise pattern starting closest to the Omni Sanc statue. The exact pattern followed was W10, W11, W9, W8, W7, W6, W4, W3, W1 and W5 on the map. Shortly thereafter, we ran into the Ergo room and talked to him (hoping that we could go to Adonis). It was maybe 2 minutes after that in which the zone died completely. Every time we logged back in, most of the team was at the entrance to the Ergo area maybe 2 meters away from the W11 spirit spawn location.
We werent targeting the other bosses in the area. We were trying to farm Tier 1 armor tradeskill pieces from the Spirits. So the mobs for E1 to E15 were never touched for our scenario.
SLmap v2.22 URL: https://rubi-ka.net/bitnykk/
@madcow wrote in #1591 (comment):
Thank goodness the dozens of people who spent many hours in this zone locked and and frozen can now rest easy knowing it wasn't actually a bug. A bit off topic I would like to petition the term bug hunters to be renamed to bug moderators. Quite annoying to run into multiple occurrences of bug hunters telling non bug hunters to hunt bugs better.
For anyone watching this ticket -- Next time you are in Lower Scheol AND the zone dies while you are there, immediately do the following command and see if anyone else is in the same Zone with you. Reach out to see what they were doing and document everything you possibly can. Also use SHIFT+F9 and capture your location details. Copy/Paste everything you can.
Command: .online pf
Hey @boxcar87 , I don’t think anyone would suggest that there isn’t a bug- just that we don’t know what it is. The threshold to be a “verified” bug is to have reproducible steps someone can follow to experience the issue. Currently we don’t have that.
While bug hunters do spend hours trying to find the causes of issues like this one, sometimes we need extra help to figure out what’s going on. So far we haven’t been able to duplicate this on the test server with only one character playing normally. The current steps to reproduce say that’s all we need to do.
You’re annoyed? Honestly man, only one person on the whole team ever has a character high level enough to enter scheol while playing legitimately. We tend to get distracted while playing and end up not levelling (instead doing BH stuff).
You’ve been one of the helpful players in identifying and even doing follow up work with issues you’ve noticed. Please give some grace here, we’re all doing best at spending the extra little time we have to make a successful PRK.
I previously haven't directly posted my experiences here so I'll do so now. To preface this my characters have probably spent over 20 hours inside a dead lower scheol PF. I've probably encountered a locked or locking pf.. at least 10 times.
I believe I have a unique take here because I was in the zone fairly often prior to other players reaching the point to where they could or would want to go to lower scheol.
First I'll write a few things that I don't think contribute to the breaking:
The lowest level of activity I have done to break the zone is to kill spirit mobs, not dynas. This was very early on in the trips to lower scheol when I was trying to farm a PB. I couldn't kill the dynas solo at that point. I would run around W1-W11 mentioned above and kill spirits. The behaviour of the zone breaking during this was as follows:
You can sometimes escape right at this moment if you are lucky by doing .stuck. It might take up to 30 minutes to finally kick off but you can escape at some point. However once this short window of "breaking" passes I have never escaped the zone.
What is critical to know is that during my first few times breaking lower scheol is that I did not see any multi spawns. Now since then I have seen Drake asking for feedback as he has made changes to the zone and since then every time I get stuck, there are multi spawns.
I can also attest that spirits are not the deciding factor. I know another player has experienced this dealing with the croakers. Here is his input relating to the matter #1516 (comment).
In the early days of this reset there were mainly 4 of us in Lower scheol before anyone else. It was myself, Kerri, Squish and Gumeater. Kerri once told me that she farmed all day with Squish and had no issues, yet when Kerri and myself hunted there together, the zone broke within 15 minutes. I know Gumeater also had terrible luck with keeping lower scheol working as well and to my knowledge he was solo the entire time. I play from Southeast Asia, I dunno about the other 3.
What I have noticed in recent times is that the zone likely struggles when trying to send data to new connections in the zone. At least twice I have noticed the zone deteriorating and reached out to the only other person in the zone and they attested that they had either just used the statue to enter the zone, or just logged in.
The most remarkable "breaking" occurrence:
In one specific occurence another player dual logged in next to me as I was soloing Demon dynas mentioned here. I noticed the zone crashing and I immediately messaged the player and he explained that his Enforcer toon was fine, but the Doctor character couldn't see anything, really bugged out experience. At this time neither of us could cast nanos or sit/stand. He logged out of the doc and the entire zone immediately recovered. When he logged the doc back in again it was fine.
My thoughts
I've tossed and turned between a couple theories.. I think that whatever Drake changed at some point did improve the zone. If I had to take a stab without any real testing tools or knowledge of the architecture used, it feels like a playfield is partially on its own thread, like combat interaction specifically or mob spawning logic. When a player enters lower scheol (or probably anywhere with lots of multispawns) the server gets bogged down a bit forming this ridiculously large packet of entity information to send to the client. When this little bit of lag occurs something with the thread that pf is on that the player joined gets really slow and eventually locks up.
Notable similar experiences outside of scheol
I have seen a few other zones break in similar ways. The most similar is noob island. There have been times when nothing spawned on the island (no NPCs or mobs) and I could do nothing except walk around. The key difference here is that I was able to perform actions like casting nanos or sitting and standing.
Multispawns can definitely happen anywhere. However, aside from lower scheol there is only one time I saw more than 20 in a single spawn location though, and that was in subway. I only saw it once, I never saw that zone freeze up however.