THE MULTIPLE TRADER BID SOFTWARE WAS PROPERLY TESTED

Grimm13

AlnilamE wrote: »

Grimm13 wrote: »

The process was altered for the NA server trader flip. Why do I say this, observation.

I was standing at my guilds trader at the flip. Saw the tabbards disappear and the info of hired trader also cleared on my home guild home page. The tabbards as easy to refresh as you just need look away then back, the home page just close and reopen.

So since I saw both were gone and knowing how EU went. I tried to hire our now vacant trader but when I clicked the hire button received a message which I will paraphrase as I did not screen shot it, "Failed to Hire as Trader resolution is still ongoing." it was a little different than that but is what it meant.

Took about another 30 seconds and the Home page updated saying I had won a different Trader so I left it to go verify in that zone. Found that it was true and looked at refund logs, saw all amounts correct.

To me it looks like they did a lock down of the Traders until the flip was complete which is as it should have been in the first place. I would say it is a combination of the software and server load, several things were overlooked.

"Unable to hire while traders change ownership"

There is a 5-minute lock on traders when they switch, as the query takes a minute to run. Some weeks we see your result almost instantly, sometimes it takes over 60 seconds.

This has always been there since the traders came out.

Edit: Messed up quote

ah, never had to try that close to the flip before.

mocap

ofcuz it was Russian hackers! What else could it be?

Billdor

marius_buys wrote: »

Gariele wrote: »

There was no way to properly test this on PTS. Most go to the PTS to test upcoming content/sets or look at the housing. Trade GMs don’t have the time or patience to set up guilds to test this. This was testing on the fly and it severely backfired.

I have several high end IRL Software devs in my guild and they all agree that there was no model used to stress test the software even BEFORE it went to PTS.

I even joked before hand to expect at least a 30min + handover but to write software that cannot rank bids... is simply gross negligence.

Clearly you don't since this isn't under the catergory of software. Its code, the two aren't interchangeable in this context.

You can't expect ZoS to have public testing when the PTS is rarely used for anything else but class testing.

Uryel

When something is properly tested, it works. If testing shows it doesn't work, it's not implemented, it's either pushed to a later date or simply cancelled.

So, no, it wasn't properly tested. I'm supecting it wasn't tested at all.

marius_buys

I

Billdor wrote: »

marius_buys wrote: »

Gariele wrote: »

There was no way to properly test this on PTS. Most go to the PTS to test upcoming content/sets or look at the housing. Trade GMs don’t have the time or patience to set up guilds to test this. This was testing on the fly and it severely backfired.

I have several high end IRL Software devs in my guild and they all agree that there was no model used to stress test the software even BEFORE it went to PTS.

I even joked before hand to expect at least a 30min + handover but to write software that cannot rank bids... is simply gross negligence.

Clearly you don't since this isn't under the catergory of software. Its code, the two aren't interchangeable in this context.

You can't expect ZoS to have public testing when the PTS is rarely used for anything else but class testing.

Erm, I dont think you understand what I saying.

Skwor

There was ample player feedback on PTS for this bidding system.

Of course the changes were not properly tested, if they were this would not have happened. You cannot avoid the cold fact that the event proves the supposition.

Wether proper testing was pratical to perform for this change could be argued, however that it was not properly tested is not arguable. This is a large MMO, server load and call functions are critical to manage and they should be well known.

ZoS even brags about the overall player numbers, if you are going to brag about it you better be ready to own the problems associated with it.

This sort of mistake is a pretty big oopsie, it should have been foreseen.

zaria

Guizan wrote: »

As a system developer, I tried to make a short analysis how I would have solved this assignment of traders with the new system, I do make some assumptions and as I am not privy to the details of the ESO infrastructure I might be off somehow, especially when it comes to specific numbers.

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I counted to just over 200 traders placed around the world.

This means that we have at least 200 guilds doing bids on the traders, each guild place between 1 and 10 bids with the new system of multiple bids. Let us say an average of 4 bids per guild this first time, and this average will increase as guilds build a cash buffer for more bids.

We also have a lot of guilds that try to get a trader but who only succeeds now and then pushing away one of the 200 regular trade guilds. I would guess that we have at least 500 guilds that place between 1 and 3 bids and with the new system. I will assume that the average is 1.5 bids per failed guild.

So in all, we have 200 x 4 + 500 x 1.5 = 1550 bids

Then all bids have to be put in a list sorted from highest to lowest and then the top bid win its trader automatically. Once you win a bid all the rest of the bids of that guild will be removed from the list, and the gold for those bids will be returned via mail. (something that FAILED miserably this week BTW)

We also have to have rules what happens in case of a tie when the top two bids are the same amount and on the same trader and this I have not addressed here but it could be either random, or if ZOS want to drain as much gold as possible from the economy they give the bid to the guild with the lower second bid

Then you go to the next highest remaining bid to find out who gets trader #2, and repeat the same procedure until you are out of bids or all the traders are assigned.

If bids still remain after all traders are assigned those bids will be refunded to the bidders.

It SHOULD be easy to create automatic testing for this with a set of randomly generated bids. Also, I hope that the bidding is handled by a separate computer that gets the data from the main database of the game and does the calculations without dragging down the server performance. After all the calculations are done the result should be returned to the database of the server.

The worst is that 1550 its not many transactions, guess its far more damage, healing and other effects going on in zones each tick. Add that its not time sensitive.

It also looks it was an secondary bug here as some got more gold back than they spent.

zaria

Reverb wrote: »

All day yesterday the EU server was circling the drain. While grasping at straws zeni turned off guild history polling. On a Sunday. Right before trader bidding closed. Check the Dev Tracker for more info.

Zeni has always always had a blind spot for how pulling one thread unravels other functionality. And we know that the EU environment can’t handle the number of players, and that the social aspects of the game are hardest hit by the performance shortcomings (grouping, guild functions, friends lists, chat channels). It should be assumed that the stop-gap measures they took yesterday for social functions also prevented the new multi bidding code from executing properly.

If I’m right, and I strongly suspect I am, there’s no good fix in the short term. Zeni will continue desperately plugging one small hole after another after another until the gaping hole at the bow is fixed. At least a year out.

This is very likely to be the reason for the bug, my guild list was empty on Sunday then I was about to join an event.
All the new servers they had solved most of the instance problems but the overall structures above zones and instances like dungeon and BG finder, guilds, trading and so on has problems.

ZOS_RogerJ

Greetings! We've closed this thread as the thread was initially started by violating our community rules around bashing. While we completely understand everyone has their own opinions, thoughts, feelings and even frustrations, we want the forums to be a civil and constructive platform for the game and it's community as a whole.