There is a rumor floating around that I am working on a new foundry quest. It was started by me.
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celantraMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Silverstars, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 465
edited August 2013
BB - glad you are on the case. I appreciate Cryptic making sure that it is working properly, and that quests will not need major changes after the update.
It would have been helpful if you had said this... way sooner... like before you even took the servers down. Many of us were excited to log onto the foundry in the morning to work with the new content only to be bitterly disappointed with being unable to edit for the whole day. Heck I changed my schedule around so I could spend the day editing, turned out I wasted an entire day.
I know I can't speak for everyone, but about 90% of the authors I've met spend the majority of their time in the Foundry and have little interest in the actual game itself. With that being said, if the Foundry is offline for an entire day the entire game may as well be down. You guys claim the Foundry is important to you, but the way you handle communication with authors makes me question that.
If you read his post you'd have noticed that they weren't worried about data loss until they started restoring missions and discovered the teleporters were misaligned. So how could they have informed us about the potential data loss before they started checking for it?
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cipher9nemoMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
Hey Gang,
We are making sure there are no data loss issues before we turn editing on.
I hope this will help explain why editing is off adn when it might be back on.
The reason..
If there is a data loss issue, and an affected project is changed in any way, we will have a very hard time recovering that lost data. We went through this a long time ago and we are being very careful to make sure we don't cause any problems with your Quests.
What we are doing..
We are comparing, playing and diffing several projects to see if the functionality and data is the same between pre patch and post. This will tell us if there is a data loss issue. Basically if the logic of a quest is the same between both patches, there is no data loss for that type of functionality or content.
When will editing be back on?
I expect that we will turn editing back on tomorrow, possibly mid day, but that may change. We will make sure to keep Authors in the loop.
So what is the current status?
At this time we believe there is no data loss issues. However, there is an issue with the data of where the origin point of teleporters is located. It appears that the point has moved a little. We are still testing to make sure we know all the issues that may come from that change. This is one of the things that caused a slight panic about a potential data loss issue.
Do we have to wait until all the quests are republished before we can edit?
Not at all. Keep in mind that anything you publish, while we are re-publishing all of the quests, will be queued. It may take some time for your quest to appear in the catalog once you publish.
As an aside to this, publishing did get delayed while we looked at an issue with the catalog. Re-Publishing will resume and continue as planned.
Again, I hope this helps!
Thanks a ton!
Thank you. This is the sort of communication I really appreciate: filling in the community on what's going on and why. Would have been nice sooner, but later is better than never. Thanks!
bazagMember, Moonstars, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited August 2013
Heya everyone. I just thought that this sort of thing should always be expected for module updates. Everytime the codebase of the foundry is updated there is a possibility of change that causes some, or all missions, to have incompatibility issues.
Therefore every module will have to go through this process to make sure it all works.
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cipher9nemoMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
Heya everyone. I just thought that this sort of thing should always be expected for module updates. Everytime the codebase of the foundry is updated there is a possibility of change that causes some, or all missions, to have incompatibility issues.
Therefore every module will have to go through this process to make sure it all works.
Every module will have to go through a process of limited to no QA and extended downtime? I'd like some of what you're drinking/smoking if you think that's acceptable developer practice to repeat over and over again. :rolleyes:
Heya everyone. I just thought that this sort of thing should always be expected for module updates. Everytime the codebase of the foundry is updated there is a possibility of change that causes some, or all missions, to have incompatibility issues.
Therefore every module will have to go through this process to make sure it all works.
Actually there is something very wrong with their development and release procedures if they only become aware of problems like this after release. But, given the state of the rest of the game, it doesn't surprise me. The teleporters thing could well be related to the longstanding bug where teleporter co-ordinates do not work properly.
It would be nice if you were auto "Subscribed" to your own quests, or if you could just do a "My foundry" search from in game. I got a tip and I wanted to see if there were any comments. but since the short code has changed I cant Find my foundry.and searching by @global or foundry name doesn't seem to work.
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ananvilhurtzMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
It would have been helpful if you had said this... way sooner... like before you even took the servers down.
I'm no fanboy when it comes to Cryptic communication skills, but I'm fairly confident that they did say there would be Foundry downtime somewhere. I'm at work at the moment so I can't go searching, but I'm fairly confident.
Religion - 60 GF (15.3k GS)
The Seeker - 60 DC (11.5k GS)
Faithless - 60 CW (10k GS)
What we are doing..
We are comparing, playing and diffing several projects to see if the functionality and data is the same between pre patch and post. This will tell us if there is a data loss issue. Basically if the logic of a quest is the same between both patches, there is no data loss for that type of functionality or content.
When will editing be back on?
I expect that we will turn editing back on tomorrow, possibly mid day, but that may change. We will make sure to keep Authors in the loop.
Thanks for the update! Please keep us posted today. I'm finishing my first quest, and I made a list of final edits before going to work yesterday. I almost went into work an hour late just to finish the list, but work pays. Alas...
tulipvorlax:My Foundry button did gray out once yesterday, too. I thought they'd fixed it, but it only did it once and went back to logging out.
0
agentjasporMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, SilverstarsPosts: 0Arc User
It would be nice if you were auto "Subscribed" to your own quests, or if you could just do a "My foundry" search from in game. I got a tip and I wanted to see if there were any comments. but since the short code has changed I cant Find my foundry.and searching by @global or foundry name doesn't seem to work.
Short code shouldn't have changed. The likely reason why you cannot find your quest is because it hasn't been automatically republished yet. My guess is that tip you're seeing is from right before the servers went down for the module update.
If only there were some way that republishing of quests to a new server environment could be tested before the go-live time. Some sort of alternate machine. Republishing could be tested, and they'd then have some sort of benchmark that they could use to calculate an estimated down-time.
Or, if they had such a machine, they could republish to it and then at go-live time they would then only have to swap the pre-republished data live and only have a tiny subset to republish anything that was updated between the pre-republished timestamp and the go-live timestamp.
If only there were some way that republishing of quests to a new server environment could be tested before the go-live time. Some sort of alternate machine. Republishing could be tested, and they'd then have some sort of benchmark that they could use to calculate an estimated down-time.
Yeah, you would think. That's sort of NetOps/IT 101. You have at least a development and production environment, such as different physical/virtual servers or difference software instances, where the production environment is shadowed in the development environment. Then when the development side is ready to build and publish things get switched over. Only changes since development should need to be pushed over/updated. Yet it seems Cryptic/PWE has a model of copying over everything whenever there's a big update instead of just throwing a virtual switch switch. Some developers/publishers use these update windows for server maintenance, not for copying entire databases back and forth. And other developers have live publishing (eg: Arenanet).
At any rate:
1.) I'm happy for the thorough communication this time, even if it was a little late. It's an improvement instead of leaving us in the dark as we've experienced in the past.
2.) I wish Cryptic/PWE would implement a system to roll out major updates better than this. They're putting all of the struggle/downtime on their users instead of handling that burden on their own side.
If you read his post you'd have noticed that they weren't worried about data loss until they started restoring missions and discovered the teleporters were misaligned. So how could they have informed us about the potential data loss before they started checking for it?
Because of his first paragraph:
The reason..
If there is a data loss issue, and an affected project is changed in any way, we will have a very hard time recovering that lost data. We went through this a long time ago and we are being very careful to make sure we don't cause any problems with your Quests.
Note the "long time ago" section, meaning they were prepared for it.
Note the "long time ago" section, meaning they were prepared for it.
And yet they keep making the same mistakes over, and over, and over, and over.
They even had a bug report on the Nightmare lock boxes FOUR days before going live and they proceeded to aim and shoot themselves squarely in the foot. Again.
We had been running republishes nearly every day on the preview shard leading up to patch day for some time now. We imported a set of quests from live to test republish and looked at alerts we found during our frequent tests. We were able to find several major issues and correct them before the build went live but we did not catch all of the issues. When we did see a problem with data or code on preview we would address it and keep looking.
Our ability to make sure every combination of feature and function in a quest comes down to volume. While we can probably import and publish all of the quests from live to preview and test, we will likely not be able to test every quest. In the end, it really comes down to knowing how a quest plays on LIVE and going in and playing it on preview. If something looks off, we investigate. That is exactly what we did along side of fixing publish alerts on preview. I am confident that we found and addressed the major issues but when we hit the volume on live and started seeing some inconsistencies we got a bit protective of your quests. We have a law, on the Foundry team, that we do anything and everything we can to make sure we do not cause a loss of data to your quests.
Although we have been working to streamline and improve our testing and republish process, it is clear we can do more. I am having a postmortem with the team to identify where we struggled and what we can do to improve this process.
We had been running republishes nearly every day on the preview shard leading up to patch day for some time now. We imported a set of quests from live to test republish and looked at alerts we found during our frequent tests. We were able to find several major issues and correct them before the build went live but we did not catch all of the issues. When we did see a problem with data or code on preview we would address it and keep looking.
Our ability to make sure every combination of feature and function in a quest comes down to volume. While we can probably import and publish all of the quests from live to preview and test, we will likely not be able to test every quest. In the end, it really comes down to knowing how a quest plays on LIVE and going in and playing it on preview. If something looks off, we investigate. That is exactly what we did along side of fixing publish alerts on preview. I am confident that we found and addressed the major issues but when we hit the volume on live and started seeing some inconsistencies we got a bit protective of your quests. We have a law, on the Foundry team, that we do anything and everything we can to make sure we do not cause a loss of data to your quests.
Although we have been working to streamline and improve our testing and republish process, it is clear we can do more. I am having a postmortem with the team to identify where we struggled and what we can do to improve this process.
Thanks for hanging in there!
Is the foundry down or up? I'm at work and i would like to play a little, since i havn't been able to yesterday. I mean when i'm at home or else i would lose my job i guess, haha.
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tsumoroMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 151Bounty Hunter
We had been running republishes nearly every day on the preview shard leading up to patch day for some time now. We imported a set of quests from live to test republish and looked at alerts we found during our frequent tests. We were able to find several major issues and correct them before the build went live but we did not catch all of the issues. When we did see a problem with data or code on preview we would address it and keep looking.
Our ability to make sure every combination of feature and function in a quest comes down to volume. While we can probably import and publish all of the quests from live to preview and test, we will likely not be able to test every quest. In the end, it really comes down to knowing how a quest plays on LIVE and going in and playing it on preview. If something looks off, we investigate. That is exactly what we did along side of fixing publish alerts on preview. I am confident that we found and addressed the major issues but when we hit the volume on live and started seeing some inconsistencies we got a bit protective of your quests. We have a law, on the Foundry team, that we do anything and everything we can to make sure we do not cause a loss of data to your quests.
Although we have been working to streamline and improve our testing and republish process, it is clear we can do more. I am having a postmortem with the team to identify where we struggled and what we can do to improve this process.
Thanks for hanging in there!
Thank you for the update, do we have an ETA as to when we believe things will be available to edit. Or is this still very much a WIP?
Now that i know whats going on, i"m fine with Foundry being down as disappointing as the down time is.
Are there any plans to deal with quests that were published as tests by authors long gone?
Example: "This is a test map", content = 1 room with a mob to kill and some random details. Author: <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font>; last logged on 2 months ago
Pretty sure there are tons of them slowing the republish process
agentjasporMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, SilverstarsPosts: 0Arc User
edited August 2013
Thanks for the update, and I think most of us understand that you're trying to be extra careful as to not screw something up that could be irreversible.
So how we looking on the republish progress? The Featured quests are available and continue to get even more plays and attention, while the rest of us languish waiting for our quests to return from the void.
Although we have been working to streamline and improve our testing and republish process, it is clear we can do more. I am having a postmortem with the team to identify where we struggled and what we can do to improve this process.
Thanks for hanging in there!
I just want to thank you VERY VERY VERY VERY much for good communication and a willingness to talk to the community about what's going on, what your plans are, and a bit about what you've been up to.
There may be trolls who hate everyone and everything, but most of us really appreciate transparency, and it goes a LONG way toward mollifying us to have you, you know, actually show up and say something.
So... yeah. Please keep it up, and good luck battling the dark bug faerie!
Campaign: The Fenwick Cycle NWS-DKR9GB7KH
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
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mrthebozerMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited August 2013
And those few Featured quests are suffering as well, as it looks like a number of them returned with quest-breaking bugs. Since the authors of these have no way to correct the issues, regardless of the status of the Foundry - any word one way or another on if these issues (misaligned teleporters, holes in the walkmesh, hundreds of trees that appear out of nowhere) will be addressed as part of the fix?
Someone else, over in General, explained it better than I could:
Quote Originally Posted by ashlotte
Do you realize how many keys people bought? THEY.MADE.A.KILLING today. Beyond their wildest dreams.
"OHMIGOD, BOSS BOSS! Someone forgot to reset the percentage for Nightmare Infernos and now everyone's buying keys and getting hundreds of them per person! Should we do an immediate rollback?!"
"WHY YES, OF COUR- wait... did you say... *Buying*.... lockbox keys in the hundreds?!"
"Y-yes, sir?"
"Rollback? Are you out of your corn fed mind?! There shall be nothing of the sort! Our profits have spiked beyond our wildest expectations!"
"B-but sir! This isn't morally right! Think of the economy!"
"Johnny, you're getting a raise!"
"HELL YES! F**k the economy! Yahoo!"
True story.
All The Best
The <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> in me laughed
But that's always been my issue with Featured stuff. The inability to touch the quests mean that eventually they WILL break. Which is a shame.
Why should they eventually break? Updating code so that it remains backwards compatible with existing data is a standard feature of programming which any competent programmer knows how to do.
Break in the sense that things work differently than they used to, and thus foundry missions become impossible to play.
For example, 'the chest is hidden in the flowered vines.' Except now the vines don't have flowers, so it's indistinguishable from every other vine in the forest.
Campaign: The Fenwick Cycle NWS-DKR9GB7KH
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
Why should they eventually break? Updating code so that it remains backwards compatible with existing data is a standard feature of programming which any competent programmer knows how to do.
And those few Featured quests are suffering as well, as it looks like a number of them returned with quest-breaking bugs. Since the authors of these have no way to correct the issues, regardless of the status of the Foundry - any word one way or another on if these issues (misaligned teleporters, holes in the walkmesh, hundreds of trees that appear out of nowhere) will be addressed as part of the fix?
The most useful thing that you can do for all of these issues is post specific quests and the location that is now buggy. Because featured projects are not editable by the original author, we want to fix all issues on our end.
The most useful thing that you can do for all of these issues is post specific quests and the location that is now buggy. Because featured projects are not editable by the original author, we want to fix all issues on our end.
Trishani's quest, "Answer the Raven's Call," featured author quest this week. Her forest map (Forest Looping Path 01) has about 1000 trees all over it.
Comments
If you read his post you'd have noticed that they weren't worried about data loss until they started restoring missions and discovered the teleporters were misaligned. So how could they have informed us about the potential data loss before they started checking for it?
Thank you. This is the sort of communication I really appreciate: filling in the community on what's going on and why. Would have been nice sooner, but later is better than never. Thanks!
Hammerfist Clan. Jump into the Night: NW-DMXWRYTAD
Therefore every module will have to go through this process to make sure it all works.
Every module will have to go through a process of limited to no QA and extended downtime? I'd like some of what you're drinking/smoking if you think that's acceptable developer practice to repeat over and over again. :rolleyes:
Hammerfist Clan. Jump into the Night: NW-DMXWRYTAD
Actually there is something very wrong with their development and release procedures if they only become aware of problems like this after release. But, given the state of the rest of the game, it doesn't surprise me. The teleporters thing could well be related to the longstanding bug where teleporter co-ordinates do not work properly.
I'm no fanboy when it comes to Cryptic communication skills, but I'm fairly confident that they did say there would be Foundry downtime somewhere. I'm at work at the moment so I can't go searching, but I'm fairly confident.
The Seeker - 60 DC (11.5k GS)
Faithless - 60 CW (10k GS)
Thanks for the update! Please keep us posted today. I'm finishing my first quest, and I made a list of final edits before going to work yesterday. I almost went into work an hour late just to finish the list, but work pays. Alas...
tulipvorlax:My Foundry button did gray out once yesterday, too. I thought they'd fixed it, but it only did it once and went back to logging out.
Short code shouldn't have changed. The likely reason why you cannot find your quest is because it hasn't been automatically republished yet. My guess is that tip you're seeing is from right before the servers went down for the module update.
The Crystal Relics - NWS-DMXNCNAVJ
Tower District Contest Entry: Undercover Brother - NW-DCD6OI9JE
Zen Store
30min
Online Game
hour and a half
The Foundry
TWENTY-THREE HOURS and counting
If only there were some way that republishing of quests to a new server environment could be tested before the go-live time. Some sort of alternate machine. Republishing could be tested, and they'd then have some sort of benchmark that they could use to calculate an estimated down-time.
Or, if they had such a machine, they could republish to it and then at go-live time they would then only have to swap the pre-republished data live and only have a tiny subset to republish anything that was updated between the pre-republished timestamp and the go-live timestamp.
If only there were such a miraculous machine.
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics
Yeah, you would think. That's sort of NetOps/IT 101. You have at least a development and production environment, such as different physical/virtual servers or difference software instances, where the production environment is shadowed in the development environment. Then when the development side is ready to build and publish things get switched over. Only changes since development should need to be pushed over/updated. Yet it seems Cryptic/PWE has a model of copying over everything whenever there's a big update instead of just throwing a virtual switch switch. Some developers/publishers use these update windows for server maintenance, not for copying entire databases back and forth. And other developers have live publishing (eg: Arenanet).
At any rate:
1.) I'm happy for the thorough communication this time, even if it was a little late. It's an improvement instead of leaving us in the dark as we've experienced in the past.
2.) I wish Cryptic/PWE would implement a system to roll out major updates better than this. They're putting all of the struggle/downtime on their users instead of handling that burden on their own side.
Hammerfist Clan. Jump into the Night: NW-DMXWRYTAD
Because of his first paragraph:
Note the "long time ago" section, meaning they were prepared for it.
@Moonchips
And yet they keep making the same mistakes over, and over, and over, and over.
They even had a bug report on the Nightmare lock boxes FOUR days before going live and they proceeded to aim and shoot themselves squarely in the foot. Again.
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics
Our ability to make sure every combination of feature and function in a quest comes down to volume. While we can probably import and publish all of the quests from live to preview and test, we will likely not be able to test every quest. In the end, it really comes down to knowing how a quest plays on LIVE and going in and playing it on preview. If something looks off, we investigate. That is exactly what we did along side of fixing publish alerts on preview. I am confident that we found and addressed the major issues but when we hit the volume on live and started seeing some inconsistencies we got a bit protective of your quests. We have a law, on the Foundry team, that we do anything and everything we can to make sure we do not cause a loss of data to your quests.
Although we have been working to streamline and improve our testing and republish process, it is clear we can do more. I am having a postmortem with the team to identify where we struggled and what we can do to improve this process.
Thanks for hanging in there!
Is the foundry down or up? I'm at work and i would like to play a little, since i havn't been able to yesterday. I mean when i'm at home or else i would lose my job i guess, haha.
Thank you for the update, do we have an ETA as to when we believe things will be available to edit. Or is this still very much a WIP?
Are there any plans to deal with quests that were published as tests by authors long gone?
Example: "This is a test map", content = 1 room with a mob to kill and some random details. Author: <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font>; last logged on 2 months ago
Pretty sure there are tons of them slowing the republish process
@Moonchips
So how we looking on the republish progress? The Featured quests are available and continue to get even more plays and attention, while the rest of us languish waiting for our quests to return from the void.
The Crystal Relics - NWS-DMXNCNAVJ
Tower District Contest Entry: Undercover Brother - NW-DCD6OI9JE
I just want to thank you VERY VERY VERY VERY much for good communication and a willingness to talk to the community about what's going on, what your plans are, and a bit about what you've been up to.
There may be trolls who hate everyone and everything, but most of us really appreciate transparency, and it goes a LONG way toward mollifying us to have you, you know, actually show up and say something.
So... yeah. Please keep it up, and good luck battling the dark bug faerie!
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
But that's always been my issue with Featured stuff. The inability to touch the quests mean that eventually they WILL break. Which is a shame.
Then again, at that point hopefully people will go from the Featured copy to the 'in production' copy.
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
The <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> in me laughed
Why should they eventually break? Updating code so that it remains backwards compatible with existing data is a standard feature of programming which any competent programmer knows how to do.
For example, 'the chest is hidden in the flowered vines.' Except now the vines don't have flowers, so it's indistinguishable from every other vine in the forest.
Wicks and Things: NW-DI4FMZRR4 : The Fenwick merchant family has lost a caravan! Can you help?
Beggar's Hollow: NW-DR6YG4J2L : Someone, or something, has stolen away many of the Fenwicks' children! Can you find out what happened to them?
Into the Fen Wood: NW-DL89DRG7B : Enter the heart of the forest. Can you discover the secret of the Fen Wood?
The most useful thing that you can do for all of these issues is post specific quests and the location that is now buggy. Because featured projects are not editable by the original author, we want to fix all issues on our end.
Trishani's quest, "Answer the Raven's Call," featured author quest this week. Her forest map (Forest Looping Path 01) has about 1000 trees all over it.
[UGC] Kolde Acres (Discontinued)