emergency world maintenace already...........

The maintenance got extended. Just saying.

I find it funny people still shake their finger at people using Windower. So 6 years ago. WHO CARES?!?!?!

Hope ya'll enjoy your evening and hope servers come back on soon for you. :)

I've got nothing against it. Windower's features I think are just basically UI fixes that SE should learn from.

And wow to the extension.

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Originally Posted by marvin83

I find it funny people still shake their finger at people using Windower. So 6 years ago. WHO CARES?!?!?!

Hope ya'll enjoy your evening and hope servers come back on soon for you. :)

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I just find the whole thing funny when people cry horror over the whole windower plugins, whenever it pops up in screenshot, thus resulting in 2 pages or more of derailed thread content.

All in all, I'm finding it very amusing that SE had to extend this emergency maintenance by 3 hours over an epic glitch, that or they must've found something else even more staggering.

Ah sweet mother of Moogles... It takes an extra three hours just to roll back a single equation change? O.o;

Nerf Blu while your at it! /fume (they're making it stronger by what I read)

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Originally Posted by Tommykun

Ah sweet mother of Moogles... It takes an extra three hours just to roll back a single equation change? O.o;

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Let's hope they forget to carry the 1 and we end up with 9,999,999 damamge cures. Do you think that 99,999 is the games preset damage limit?

Guess I can watch a movie tonight instead :p

thats 7 and a half hours update for a cure bomb LMAO .......... of should we say an SE bomb (fail!!).....

I think that like with previous FF games, 99,999 is the max allocated in the hex string for damage. FFVIII was the first game able to break the 9,999 limit if I remember right.

But seriously... shouldn't they have the equations written down somewhere so they can just go "Oh, here's the problem... there's a 8 where there should be a 3."

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Originally Posted by Tommykun

I think that like with previous FF games, 99,999 is the max allocated in the hex string for damage. FFVIII was the first game able to break the 9,999 limit if I remember right.

But seriously... shouldn't they have the equations written down somewhere so they can just go "Oh, here's the problem... there's a 8 where there should be a 3."

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Any bets someone did it on purpose to get overtime or somthing or the sort?

Why were they messing with the cure formula in the first place? hmmmmmm.. O.o

Vital organ transplants don't take this long.

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Originally Posted by Tsukino_Kaji

Any bets someone did it on purpose to get overtime or somthing or the sort?

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I wouldn't doubt it haha. Time's are hard for everyone. Or could have been that a dev -really- didnt want to go home due to his/her spouse wanting to stab him or he/she was desperately afraid of their spouse's cooking and wanted an excuse to order take-out.

YAY Second emergency maint, another 3 hours... 2 AM...

Yeah screw this, good night.

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Originally Posted by Nawesemo

Why were they messing with the cure formula in the first place? hmmmmmm.. O.o

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They probably weren't, going by history I think their code is just very messy.

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Originally Posted by Selzak

They probably weren't, going by history I think their code is just very messy.

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Good point. The thing is, it really shouldn't be. Spell coding really shouldn't have been messed with according to what I've seen in the patch notes. I just really don't understand how they could have messed it up.

They must have messed it up big time. What kind of coding errors would result in a 7 and a half hour maintenance?

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Originally Posted by Selzak

They probably weren't, going by history I think their code is just very messy.

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My guess is they used this to test the new Damage cap. The old Damage cap was 65,000 then it would just roll over (to 0), It would still do the large damage, the chat log would just read out the rolled over number.

They probably used Cures to test the new damage cap of 99,999 and forgot to change it back.

However, Seriously, 7 and a half hours to change it back...?

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Originally Posted by Tommykun

Good point. The thing is, it really shouldn't be. Spell coding really shouldn't have been messed with according to what I've seen in the patch notes. I just really don't understand how they could have messed it up.

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It's just all way more interconnected (and it seems overly so in FFXI's code) than you would probably think.

It would also make sense that this could take a while to fix if it's some obscure logic error or something that someone made in an unrelated section of the code that found its way into 99,999 damage cures on undead mobs. It could be anything, possibly something really small like a + where a - should be or an 'OR' where and 'AND' should be. It's almost like finding a needle in a haystack except that the needle makes the haystack sing Christmas Carols when it should just be hay. Definitely seems like they should have found it and fixed it a lot quicker though. Probably just forgot to account for something when they were changing whatever it is that they changed.

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It would also make sense that this could take a while to fix if it's some obscure logic error or something that someone made in an unrelated section of the code that found its way into 99,999 damage cures on undead mobs. It could be anything, and it's probably something really small like a + where a - should be or an 'OR' where and 'AND' should be.

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If that were the case, a rollback would be more logical would it not? Rollback -> reupdate at a later time-> ??? -> profit.

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Originally Posted by Ninurta2217

If that were the case, a rollback would be more logical would it not? Rollback -> reupdate at a later time-> ??? -> profit.

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I suppose, but I'd like to think that they've found the bug by now. Probably just realized that they opened a lot of other potential problems when they sat down and took a look at it. Honestly I can't imagine what would take this long, but eh I doubt they're just trying to keep us from playing.

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Originally Posted by Karbuncle

My guess is they used this to test the new Damage cap. The old Damage cap was 65,000 then it would just roll over (to 0), It would still do the large damage, the chat log would just read out the rolled over number.

They probably used Cures to test the new damage cap of 99,999 and forgot to change it back.

However, Seriously, 7 and a half hours to change it back...?

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If what you say is true, then my guess would be there's something wrong with the 'Cure as damage' code that became apparent in the extension but wasn't noticed before because it posed no problems. Also, with buggy engine code, what would normally be considered a 'sensible' solution might not work, even if it works in other instances. It wouldn't surprise me, buggy engine code can result in some seemingly illogical errors.


But it's kind of difficult to speculate 'why'. We don't know their code, we don't know why the problem exists, how difficult it is to get to the problem. Or what the solution is and how much work is needed to fix it. What would look like a small problem to us could be a major problem to fix.

it would really be better if they implement the test server access for the players so this kinda thing doesn't happen, cause seriously, they waited till what? 2/3 days ago to tell us the update was happening on the 11th...., then after a 2 hour maintenance I get ready to play, me and friends are gathering and we get a 5.5 minute warning....seriously SE? c'mon this is silly and very disappointing

and on top of that it starts off as 4.5 hours...then at the last minute they change it to 7.5 hours? all I can say to this is
"Kitanashia sighs heavily at SE"

Each time you add new bits of code to include new features it opens a new world of possible errors and conflicts. Sometimes it can go pretty bad, like there may be an old line of code somewhere that's hardcoding certain values and if that needs changing it can completely screw things up on a major scale. If the development crew has been shrunk down and certain people responsible for certain lines of code have moved on then it can be very hard to track down any conflicts in the code and work out a solution for it. Writing code is not as easy as you think, not every developer writes code the same way as each other so a different person having to work with someone elses' code to make his work may look at it and go "huh?!!!!" And if the other guy is not available then expect setbacks which could take days, weeks, or even months to fix while having to use "quick" workarounds which are not nearly as efficient and could cause future bugs and even more problems as more code gets added at a later date.

I agree, but if it is that big of a problem I agree with what someone else in this thread said why not rollback to before the update then fix the problem and give us the update in a few days or something like that

Does sounds like a communication/Previous person did not leave proper notes issue.

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Originally Posted by geekgirl101

Each time you add new bits of code to include new features it opens a new world of possible errors and conflicts. Sometimes it can go pretty bad, like there may be an old line of code somewhere that's hardcoding certain values and if that needs changing it can completely screw things up on a major scale. If the development crew has been shrunk down and certain people responsible for certain lines of code have moved on then it can be very hard to track down any conflicts in the code and work out a solution for it. Writing code is not as easy as you think, not every developer writes code the same way as each other so a different person having to work with someone elses' code to make his work may look at it and go "huh?!!!!" And if the other guy is not available then expect setbacks which could take days, weeks, or even months to fix while having to use "quick" workarounds which are not nearly as efficient and could cause future bugs and even more problems as more code gets added at a later date.

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Pretty much this. There's a reason software engineers jest about adding two bugs for every bug they remove. That reason is *not* incompetence.

I think part of the reason for this error may have something to do with the PLD update to Divine Emblem, that might've been one of the reason since they did make changes to that. I'm glad I didn't get involved with the whole hey I can one-shot stuff with a Lv.1 Alt., Hopefully they'll fix it right, least we know the damage cap now lol xD

well I don't know what Code type SE uses, but generaly in this kind of situation it takes loads of "Debugging" just to find the bug. Alot of False to True statements, there's just alot that can affect something "Small" like this. For most people that think it's an easy fix, go try your hand at game programming, skim through hundreds of thousands of lines of code to find one out of place ; or something.

A rollback would make sense, assuming it's not in the main code, or that it's not something that they aren't sure won't happen again later. They're best solution to this kind of thing, as has been said a thousand times now, is a test server so that the code can be tested first, then put in production environment later. . .

Oh yeah and as far as the damage cap, I doubt we'll ever see that, as is fairly evident when you watch a DRK or DRG Brew a monster lol

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Originally Posted by Alistria

A rollback would make sense

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It would actualy humor me to see them retract an update completely.

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Originally Posted by Tsukino_Kaji

It would actualy humor me to see them retract an update completely.

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yes but they wont, they would rather add more work to their workload than rollback and fix the update on the test server

Come to think of it I don't think I've ever seen them do it... I wonder if they don't have the capibility

yeah might be something to do with the original code that prevents them from doing that, had not thought of that

If they can't do it it's likely due to lack of Software to do it with, either that or they don't keep regular backups of the DB's

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not every developer writes code the same way as each other so a different person having to work with someone elses' code to make his work may look at it and go "huh?!!!!"

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I lol'd @ this ;p

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Originally Posted by Nawesemo

I lol'd @ this ;p

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My husband does it all the time when he works at home, hehe. He also invents a few new profanity words which maybe one day could end up in the Oxford Dictionary.

It's very possible that during the first maintenance, they tried just fixing the error, and when that didn't work, it became

"Well fuck, four hours isn't long enough for this, we have to rollback and rewrite the update code..."

or something to that effect. Wouldn't surprise me one bit, and it's something that can very easily happen with any codebase, especially one as haphazard as most SE code seems to be.

If I had to guess why it's taking so long I'd say it's probably because of spaghetti code.

Today is undeniable proof of incompetence, can we have the FFXIV team please.


I'm sure they could do that game, and this one on the side.