Earlier this week we identified the source of a "respawn" bug that would cause players to become stuck in the "you are dead" screen. Because of the extent of the problem, and the difficulty it causes players, we have decided to push the 0.34 update to stable very early.
What was the bug?
This was caused when two small bugs with existing systems combined together when another bug was fixed. When a player clicked "respawn" for an unconscious character, the game server immediately sends an urgent message to the database asking it to kill the players current character. The the server sets the players game character's damage to full, and proceeds to save the characters current inventory/position one last time to the database. Normally, by the time it has finished that the damage has been set for the character and, again, a message was sent to the server demanding the player was killed.
There was an old failsafe in the "save character" system on the central server, that when asked to save a character where no alive one existed, it would make a new one. What this meant was, the respawned character would be killed, then saved new, then killed again. The problem occurs that when a server comes under heavy load... both kill messages occur first. This means that a cloned, already dead, character then exists - trapping the player in a cycle of death. This complex logic state issue was identified and fixed yesterday.
What does this mean?
This means three things:
The 0.34 will not be as extensive as we wanted it to be (just hotfixing)
There is increased risk of new bugs creeping in to stable as 0.34 has not been tested long
Today the whole stable network will be dropped to deploy the update
Why not wait until the scheduled update?
We feel that the impact of the bug is too high, and affecting too many players, to wait until we have tested the update more extensively and deploy it during our scheduled maintenance periods (wednesdays). Leading into the weekend, there is the potential for the problem to become worse as the server performance drops as more and more character have the issue and connect/disconnect trying to fix it.
When will this happen?
7 February 12PM GMT, the stable branch network will be taken down to deploy the update. Please note: it can take game server providers up to 30 minutes to drop their servers. Players who are connected to a game server while the central server drops, are at risk of losing their progress.
How long will the downtime last?
We expect it stable to be down for three hours.
Will Experimental Branch go down too?
No, Experimental Branch will not be affected, although only a small number of servers run this branch.