NEWS [UO.Com] House Customization Warning

[UO News]

Customer Service
2012 Dec 13 01:38 GMT
Due to an issue with customization, please do not customize your house until further notice.

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[Sauteed Onion]

Is this being announced in game.. where it should be?

 

[CovenantX]

Did Pub 80 go to Origin & Izumo before going live to other shards as normally every pub would? *didn't see anything posted about it going to origin before*

 

[KLOMP]

Nice bug-fix patch.

 

[Kayhynn]

Yes it came to Origin. And while Iw as decorating homes and stuff, I didnt customize so didnt find that problem

 

[DJAd]

Does anyone know what the problem is?

 

[Faeryl]

Nurse Miss Maude posted a short while ago that everything in her house except three items fell outside her house on Siege when she was customizing her house a little earlier this evening. There's another thread about it further down the page.

An alliance member of mine had the same thing happen on Atlantic earlier...

 

[Kayhynn]

I tested what I could on Origin and Izumo. But I have a keep on Origin, so messing with customization wasn't in the cards for me.

I have 3 keeps and a customizable house...but the house has vendors so I can't customize it heh. So yeah I couldn't test customization.

I'm guessing the issue is stuff not going into the moving crate and going under the house sign which it's not supposed to do.

I'm a wee bit miffed that a notice isn't on the patcher in big red lettering.

 

[DJAd]

I'm a wee bit miffed that a notice isn't on the patcher in big red lettering.

Yes totally agree when there are big issues like these. Can't they just add a popup message on login to inform players. Maybe like the vet reward gump thing so it's kinda hard for people not to see it.

 

[Nurse Miss Maude]

I have 3 keeps and a customizable house...but the house has vendors so I can't customize it heh. So yeah I couldn't test customization.

I'm guessing the issue is stuff not going into the moving crate and going under the house sign which it's not supposed to do.

I'm a wee bit miffed that a notice isn't on the patcher in big red lettering.

It wasn't a moving crate issue Kayhynn. It happened the moment I went into design mode.

 

[Kayhynn]

Nurse Miss Maude: I know. The items should have gone into the moving crate. Instead they unlocked and went under the house sign. The moment you go into design mode things are suppoed to pop into the crate then pop back out if you didnt design over them.

 

[Nurse Miss Maude]

Nurse Miss Maude: I know. The items should have gone into the moving crate. Instead they unlocked and went under the house sign. The moment you go into design mode things are suppoed to pop into the crate then pop back out if you didnt design over them.

Thanks for explaining that Kayhynn.

 

[kelmo]

Welcome to the creepiness that is Nurse Miss Maude Uhall... We adore her on Siege. Until shot time... I applaud Miss Maude's courage to post here and send a bug report. The bug report seems to have gotten a swift response and her post on Uhall seems well received...

 

[Kayhynn]

Thanks for explaining that Kayhynn.

No problem. But glad you posted about it and reported it. A lot of people will be losing items that way if they don't notice it till too late.

 

[Nurse Miss Maude]

@ Kelmo - it was scarwee posting on UHall!!!
@ Kayhynn - Yes, it would be very sad for people to lose items.

 

[Larisa]

Yes thank you! I also have a castle on Origin so couldn't test anything that had to do with customizing.

 

[DragonSlayer]

Nurse Miss Maude posted a short while ago that everything in her house except three items fell outside her house on Siege when she was customizing her house a little earlier this evening. There's another thread about it further down the page.

Same thing here but even if the items didn't end up under the sign they were UNLOCKED in the house. Check eveything!

 

[cazador]

Lol gj!!

 

[Gheed]

Need more folks with a horse in the race. I tell ya... allowing everyone to place an extra house on origin will catch these things alot faster. Hell make it a 5 year vet reward. You will still get alot of folks working in beta... isn't that what Origin is supposed to be?

 

[Larisa]

Yep...wish I had another account I'd put a custom house on it just because :/ I just have way too much stuff to downsize lol

 

[Kayhynn]

Need more folks with a horse in the race. I tell ya... allowing everyone to place an extra house on origin will catch these things alot faster. Hell make it a 5 year vet reward. You will still get alot of folks working in beta... isn't that what Origin is supposed to be?

I dunno. How many people think to customize their house as part of testing things? Who would have known to look for this bug? Or other bugs that have been found after the fact? I know I wouldn't think of it.

It really should have shown up on Test Center and it didn't, which makes me ask why.

 

[Hattori Hanzo]

Towers, Keeps, and Castles FTW.

 

[Smoot]

i bought an 18 by 18 that a guildmember had let collapse, didnt really want to move but wanted to keep the house as it was, as charnel hill cemetary. so now its a foundation with my stuff on it, no house? any idea on how long this stuff takes to fix, as i dont look forward to living out of bone containers and chests on the floor.

i DID however have some problems with customization when i first tryed to custumize, just to redo the floor tiles to remove the 4 SALE sign from the seller. This was before i moved my stuff tho so no issues with that, there was nothing in the house at the time. When i custumized, i was only able to change the floor tiles in the back 1/3 of the house. walls worked fine but floor tiles wouldnt place at all in the front 2/3s. The foundation was also buggy. when i changed it the old foundation showed thru the edges of the new one. i paged a gm, but took it back after i figured just re-starting the game sometimes fixes stuff like this. and it did. but of course this wouldnt help someone with all there stuff already in the front yard. and of course it might not be a one time fix, making me reluctant to custumize again until notice is given that housing problems are fixed. Guess ill be staring at a foundation for how long you think? a week? a month?

 

[Gheed]

Whether folks purposely test new pubs isnt really the point. But on that point you are 100% correct.... they wont test. And yes several will abuse the gift just to claim the reward. Yes there would be abandoned houses. Yup folks will even wrangle prime housing from Origin naitives. But there will be some who make an effort to to be a part of the Origin community for PvP, events or just to take part in the expanded community. There will be folks trying out the new content and all of the (sometimes) 100's of variables related to each component of the new content. They will do this because they have a permanent stake in the game there. Something that can be maintained. Something that won't be wiped out on a new TC roll out. You may only see peak activity in the small gap between Origin and production pubs. But there will be more activity. It is all a numbers game. Somewhat intended RNG bug catching. As many eyes on the new content as early as possible, for whatever reason.

After all, someone on Siege caught it day of after sitting on Origin for a week? Not to blame Origin for not catching it.. and not to single out any component that failed here, Internal, TC or Origin.. especially Origin. But it wasn't caught. All three components failed. If a company was to hold themselves accountable for a three phase test roll out that didn't catch a major issue, I would think that company would research their failure, report on their findings and offer a solution that makes sure it doesnt happen again. Kind of hard to do here. Cant force folks to go to TC. Cant force folks to give up all they have accomplished on another shard and move to Origin on the off chance they may actually catch a bug.. Most likely be a chilly day in hell before more bodies are added to internal testing wiith training and knowledge of game mechanics. Letting more folks into Origin just seems like the most efficient cost to benefit.

I dont think it would be a good idea to roll it out first. So many have been chomping at the bit for multiple houses I'd think Siege would benefit better for that. Maybe even bump it up to a 10 yr vet reward.

 

[Gheed]

The publish was live on Origin and Izumo for about 24 hours before it was published to Europa and Drachenfels. Also, there was no announcement that the publish was live on Origin and Izumo. So, no, it did not sit on Origin for a week's worth of testing.

And there's nothing stopping people from playing on Origin now. Nothing at all. The only catch is that, just like any other shard except TC, you need to pay to have a house there.

Big oversight on my part. It crossed my mind to verify the dates but I was too quick to post without doing that. What frustrates me most is that I don't trust changes to housing. I dont even have anything really important locked down in my courtyard. Typically I dont get into housing related content untill many months have passed without issues.

 

[G.v.P]

The publish was live on Origin and Izumo for about 24 hours before it was published to Europa and Drachenfels. Also, there was no announcement that the publish was live on Origin and Izumo. So, no, it did not sit on Origin for a week's worth of testing.

If not for Tina I wouldn't have known the publish was on Origin/Izumo. I think that's the real problem, because EA isn't telling us when they update Origin recently. They used to have better communication regarding any and all updates. It's tough for me to clock many hours into UO during basketball season, but from what I can tell, EA needs to do a better, slower job of pushing out publishes. It's better to wait a little while than disallow us time to test things out.

 

[Eärendil]

Here is something I experienced some days ago - think it has nothing to do with that specific problem, but i was angry like hell:

Some days ago a house collapsed in Luna, Drachenfels. I camped the spot for 5 days. I was right there when it collapsed and I could place a small house.

Next step: I tried to re-size it to 9x13. I entered the command "I wish to re-size..." and the house disappaered. I tried to change the size to 9x13 but then the message appeared: "You cannot place a house... you have to wait 7 days...". I tried it over and over again - no chance.

Then I changed my account and tried to place a new house on my ground with another account - but the area was blocked for my other account. So I had to wait one hour until the area was free again.

In the meantime I switched accounts every now and then to see if I can place the house with the first account... nothing...

After about an hour the area was free again and just a second before I could place a new house on my old ground, a shard-hopper was faster than me and placed it right under my nose.

I called a GM - but it took 3 days until I got a response. GM Saupha contacted me and told me: "This should never have happened, this is a serious bug, you are absolutely right to be upset - contact the Devs."

However, no response so far...

If I had known, that this would happen, I would have never tried to re-size it.

Let me please say that I am really in love with that game and that I really appreciate the Devs´ work. But this was one of the most disappointing experience in my UO-life. It took me 3 days to calm down

Now back to the original topic

 

[Aurelius]

Apart from the ever-futile question of why the hell something this important is not all over the login screen messages so people can have a chance of being warned of such a huge issue - it clearly was a reported problem, since the patch notes for the sudden shutdown of all the servers included this line :

http://uo.com/article/Hot-Fixes-Publish-80

Items will not be rejected from your house any longer when you customize


So even when we do report stuff....... it gets broken more when they try fix it

 

[pumpkin_escobar]

Great now I find out.. Lost two city banners because I needed to change a teleport tile? Wtf

 

[DerekL]

I saw the same thing happen with beta testing for past expansions. People would rush to sign up and make sure they got in and could say they were "in the beta." And yet, once the beta went live, it was always just a bare handful of people who actually logged on and tested things. Yes, there were others who yammered on and on about theoretical, pie-in-the-sky wishes and desires in the beta forum. But you never found them actually LOGGED ON and helping to test anything. And eventually, by the time the beta was done, they were no longer even logging in on the forum.

There are facets to the issue not immediately visible...

Once upon a time, we briefly had a full time (I.E. no wipe) test shard with a dedicated and passionate community of full-time residents... the late and much lamented (by it's denizens) Test Sosaria. But after a while, the dev's just used it as their lunchtime playground, and then stopped using it at all.

Once upon a time, TC was supposed to be a rotating copy of all the shards, but the dev's kept defaulting to copying (IIRC) Chessie regardless because it was in the same datacenter and thus was faster and easier.

This was all years and years ago (and I am in no way casting aspersions on the current team! I'm a recent returnee and don't know them.), but it illustrates something most people miss - the full time player population is only half of the equation. The dev team is an important part too - without their explicit and ongoing support and willingness to communicate and dedicate the time, player test communities will go nowhere.

 

[Zynia]

Once upon a time, we briefly had a full time (I.E. no wipe) test shard with a dedicated and passionate community of full-time residents... the late and much lamented (by it's denizens) Test Sosaria. But after a while, the dev's just used it as their lunchtime playground, and then stopped using it at all.

Test Rewards 1 was the besttttt everrrr!

 

[Assia Penryn]

So I saw the post about the fix that was dated late yesterday. Is this fixed and has anyone.... *gulp* .. tested it?

 

[Kayhynn]

It is not fixed. This announcement happened after the "fix"

 

[THP]

Is this being announced in game.. where it should be?

bingo...........thats to obvious.......and tooo easy.....but would really help as .iam led to belive only 10% of uo players read these boards......well thats what iam told when were trying to approximate uo populations.....[whatever]

 

[Izzy MBC]

Great, this just got me good. I finally re-arranged all my Chests in my house, customised to move a few Teleporters and exiting to my horror ALL my chests landed outside. Fortunately I secured them before anyone came along (kind of secluded), but now I face another strange problem after this fiasco.

In my rush to protect all my stuff, my Chests are mostly secured around my house entrance. I only have two Stairways outside leading up to my Ground Floor. They are blocked with locked down chests, I can no longer enter my house, and I can't release them since I can't get into my property.

Well... AMAZING is perhaps a word that sarcastically comes to mind. I sent a GM Ticket about 10 minutes ago, waiting a response... my history with GM tickets tend to be fairly fast, I will retain the hope it applies again tonight.

Edit: I also hope that I did Secure successfully everything inside the house which I can no longer view... pretty sure I got it all while I moved them, one-at-a-time... if I lose any major chests, I will seriously lose a lot of heart. I mean a lot, sentimental pixels are highly sentimental.

Edit Again: Okay, someone kindly knocked some sense into me, by suggesting I just switch characters to someone who's in the house. Alas, it's worked, and I'm back inside. Now for a lot of heavy chest shifting.

Thanks game!

Edit Once More: Truly rewarding, I then discovered EVERYTHING was not locked down in my house, this is a beautiful problem not to advertise in-game. Thanks a lot, my night is made for all the wrong reasons.

 

[LadyElizabeth]

To be fair, this issue was caused after they tried to fix a house not setting itself up properly when one went into custo mode (locked down items and doors still remained visible), and as far as I can tell those fixes were not implemented to Test Center; when the publish went to Origin and beyond, these fixes were added on but not updated on TC until this morning's maintenance. There was less than a 24 hour period for somebody to catch this issue.

 

[Crysta]

Seems like this is something that calls for all shards to be immediately locked down until fixed paired with a revert, doesn't it? The damage potential is massive.

 

[Assia Penryn]

Devs, can we get an update on fixing this? Also, can you please make an hourly in-game warning or put it on the prompt on log in?

This is a very horrible bug to a player and I know if I had been caught by it and lost the items I have accrued for 15+ years now... I would probably cancel my account. I've heard of players now trying to CONVINCE other players to customize for various reasons so that their stuff pops out of the house. Please, please warn players beyond the uo.com. Warn via the loading prompt... the list of bug fixes is there, put this warning there!

 

[DevilsOwn]

Devs, can we get an update on fixing this? Also, can you please make an hourly in-game warning or put it on the prompt on log in?

This is a very horrible bug to a player and I know if I had been caught by it and lost the items I have accrued for 15+ years now... I would probably cancel my account. I've heard of players now trying to CONVINCE other players to customize for various reasons so that their stuff pops out of the house. Please, please warn players beyond the uo.com. Warn via the loading prompt... the list of bug fixes is there, put this warning there!

good grief yes..... do a global all chat channel warning until this is resolved.... not to go visit a website but something like "DO NOT customize your home in any fashion until you receive notice that it's all clear!"

 

[Kayhynn]

good grief yes..... do a global all chat channel warning until this is resolved.... not to go visit a website but something like "DO NOT customize your home in any fashion until you receive notice that it's all clear!"

Yes. A regular warning that posts every 15 minutes.

 

[old gypsy]

I hate to even think about how many players (who never heard about this) may have tried to customize...

 

[Uriah Heep]

I don't even understand what caused this...is it a byproduct of fixing it where things cant be locked down under the house sign?
If so, that's tragic, since that was something that didnt need fixed anyway.

 

[Olahorand]

Here is something I experienced some days ago - think it has nothing to do with that specific problem, but i was angry like hell:
Next step: I tried to re-size it to 9x13. I entered the command "I wish to re-size..." and the house disappaered. I tried to change the size to 9x13 but then the message appeared: "You cannot place a house... you have to wait 7 days...". I tried it over and over again - no chance.

Did the account have an house, as he placed the Luna plot?
In this case the 7 days block applies even if the account is house free.
(Other than that I deeply mistrust the resize command, especially during that 7 days time frame in an interesting spot.)

 

[Eärendil]

Yes, it had a house. But there was no warning (not in the Internet, nor on any help-sites) and my friends (very experienced long-time players) told me, there shouldn´t be a problem... Now I am sure that I will never trust the resize command again...

But thanks for your answer, Olahorand

 

[Merus]

Here is something I experienced some days ago - think it has nothing to do with that specific problem, but i was angry like hell:

Some days ago a house collapsed in Luna, Drachenfels. I camped the spot for 5 days. I was right there when it collapsed and I could place a small house.

Next step: I tried to re-size it to 9x13. I entered the command "I wish to re-size..." and the house disappaered. I tried to change the size to 9x13 but then the message appeared: "You cannot place a house... you have to wait 7 days...". I tried it over and over again - no chance.

Then I changed my account and tried to place a new house on my ground with another account - but the area was blocked for my other account. So I had to wait one hour until the area was free again.

In the meantime I switched accounts every now and then to see if I can place the house with the first account... nothing...

After about an hour the area was free again and just a second before I could place a new house on my old ground, a shard-hopper was faster than me and placed it right under my nose.

I called a GM - but it took 3 days until I got a response. GM Saupha contacted me and told me: "This should never have happened, this is a serious bug, you are absolutely right to be upset - contact the Devs."

However, no response so far...

If I had known, that this would happen, I would have never tried to re-size it.

Let me please say that I am really in love with that game and that I really appreciate the Devs´ work. But this was one of the most disappointing experience in my UO-life. It took me 3 days to calm down

Now back to the original topic

Did the account that was trying to do the resize have another house still placed that had started to decay (but was still standing at the time of the resize)?

 

[Eärendil]

Merus: Although I cannot exactly remember how it was - it must have been alike... Think you are right...

 

[Theo_GL]

I dunno. How many people think to customize their house as part of testing things? Who would have known to look for this bug? Or other bugs that have been found after the fact? I know I wouldn't think of it.

It really should have shown up on Test Center and it didn't, which makes me ask why.

The Dev team should be testing this because they know they changed the house customization code. What Test center and origin should find is those bugs that are unusual or in situations that are unique that weren't in the standard set of test cases/regression testing.

However it seems our dev team has no testing team whatsoever and expects the playerbase to do the testing on Origin/TC. And of course because little people play them and they don't know what areas of the game were changed they are not doing systematic testing. Its the only answer I can see because honestly there is no execuse for bugs like these even making it to TC/origin. Any decent testing team would find these during standard regression testing.

 

[Victim of Siege]

I did some testing of Customization, but I never tried it with anything locked down in the house. Guess it's one of those things that we cannot think of everything, but it would be nice if we could.

 

[the 4th man]

Warnings would be nice........losing alot of stuff due to someone who works for UO, and then not being compensated........I can see when it's a players fault......but not the companies. Player compensation for years of playing, collecting, then getting the shaft!