Guild history turned off - perhaps this warrants an unplanned and urgent maintenance?

valenwood_vegan · September 4

Even across my own two accounts - same pc, same addons (also no trading-related ones enabled currently), both accounts logged in today before guild history was supposedly disabled, and then after guild history was disabled... both are geting current updates normally, but one has a gap of missing data between 2 minutes ago and 8 days ago...

vs.

Hope to find out what's actually going on here at some point.

Techwolf_Lupindo · September 4

There are still issues with libhitore getting hung when trying to fetch history. My daily activies are logging into one charater that does not any addons dealing with history or trading guilds. Do the daily writs. Then pull up history and manually fetch the days history for the trading guild I am in. When trying to do this with the libhitre addon active, it does not work or hangs 90% of the time. After doing all the main dailes stuff, I then log into my main charater with all addons active. Libhitre with MM will work just fine and process all the stored history already downloaded from the other characters.

Update: It appears that fetching history is turned off. But live history is still going on. Meaning sales that accrued while logged in will still be sent to the client. This mean one need to be logged in and online all the time to get all history from now on until this is fixed.

valenwood_vegan · September 4

Techwolf_Lupindo wrote: »

Update: It appears that fetching history is turned off. But live history is still going on. Meaning sales that accrued while logged in will still be sent to the client. This mean one need to be logged in and online all the time to get all history from now on until this is fixed.

Yeah interesting, that seems to be consistent with the behavior I've been seeing.

So presumably as long as I'm logged in at the time a trader bid is placed, I might still be able to see it without permission. Lol.

freespirit · September 5

valenwood_vegan wrote: »

Techwolf_Lupindo wrote: »

Update: It appears that fetching history is turned off. But live history is still going on. Meaning sales that accrued while logged in will still be sent to the client. This mean one need to be logged in and online all the time to get all history from now on until this is fixed.

Yeah interesting, that seems to be consistent with the behavior I've been seeing.

So presumably as long as I'm logged in at the time a trader bid is placed, I might still be able to see it without permission. Lol.

Yep I am seeing this too.

I have been offline doing some guild stuff on Discord and whilst I was away no history was collected but as soon as I returned recent sales started appearing.

Idna_Twoblades · September 5

Techwolf_Lupindo wrote: »

There are still issues with libhitore getting hung when trying to fetch history. My daily activies are logging into one charater that does not any addons dealing with history or trading guilds. Do the daily writs. Then pull up history and manually fetch the days history for the trading guild I am in. When trying to do this with the libhitre addon active, it does not work or hangs 90% of the time. After doing all the main dailes stuff, I then log into my main charater with all addons active. Libhitre with MM will work just fine and process all the stored history already downloaded from the other characters.

Update: It appears that fetching history is turned off. But live history is still going on. Meaning sales that accrued while logged in will still be sent to the client. This mean one need to be logged in and online all the time to get all history from now on until this is fixed.

Just did some testing and this is what I'm seeing as well.

Rishikesa108 · September 5

This is what Sharlikran said to me:

"ZOS has turned off all Guild History due to a permissions bug that exposed guild trader bidding history to members without the proper permissions.
Impact: Addons that rely on Guild History—LibHistoire, LibGuildStore, Master Merchant (MM), Arkadius’ Trade Tools (ATT)—won’t receive new data and may look “frozen.” Your existing saved data remains; no reinstall needed.

Action (recommended backups):

Back up your Guild History cache and MM/ATT saved variables to avoid loss if the game resets them.

Typical locations: Documents\Elder Scrolls Online\live\GuildHistory\ and Documents\Elder Scrolls Online\live\SavedVariables\ (e.g., MasterMerchant.lua, ArkadiusTradeTools.lua, LibGuildStore.lua, LibHistoire.lua).

Data gap to expect:

There will be no new history from Sept 4 → Sept 15 (PC).

Starting fresh on Sept 15, you’ll likely have data from ~Aug 16–Sept 4, then a gap, then Sept 15 onward.

Fix ETA: Included in the next incremental patch — PC: Sept 15 • Console: Sept 16."

Rishikesa108 · September 5

So... we will have a big hole.
Nobody can check sales in these weeks.
It's a mess...

Aestmanindel · September 5

What I really fail to understand is how they can pretend to claim they care for player base when everytime there is major issue the answer is: "We'll fix it eventually". Just few very big examples are block bug (at least two months during which blocking was challenging to be nice), or vHoF being uncleareable due to purge bug can't remember for how long, issue with database merge, some players have been banned for two weeks just for playing the game, and compensation was...... And many other example. All this, while if there is a bug directly impacting zos revenues action is taken instantly, the more recent was endeavour bug when players were able to claim multiple time the same changing zone. Servers got taken down after 2h, got patched down and taken back online.

I believe I'm not the only one who expect an official comment about this

msetten · September 5

Does this also mean that if someone clear outs the guildbank, we can't see who did it?

ApoAlaia · September 5

OK, so if I have understood correctly this is just all for nothing?

We are going to have the ability to 'fill' the guild history turned off for almost two weeks alas when it comes to placing the bids anyone in the guild that is logged in at the time of placing them will be able to see them anyway?

Furthermore now everyone and their dog knows that they will be able to do this, as opposed to before the announcement when only a few might have noticed?

They have basically made a vulnerability public without a fix or the intention of fixing it before it can be exploited?

EDIT: If what I have written above is correct - currently a red mist is somewhat interfering with my rational processes - they could have just left things alone and give us a heads up to bid 'the old fashioned way' (back in the day bids were visible to everyone so we had to place them minutes before the flip and hope for the best) rather than what they've done which is going to make the next two weeks deeply unpleasant while fixing nothing when it matters.

msetten · September 5

Just found out something else: It seems it is not possible to prevent guild members from depositing gold into the bank.We have a raffle each month for which guild members buy tickets by depositing certain amounts of gold into the guildbank. But as we can't see this any longer, we are going to get into arguments about people saying the bought tickets but haven't received those tickets. This means a lot of communication that they should not buy tickets until 13 september (I am on console). As not everyone is on discord and not everyone reads the Message of the Day, this is going to mean a lot of reminders in the chat over de coming days.

raystormusa · September 5

msetten wrote: »

It seems it is not possible to prevent guild members from depositing gold into the bank.

Correct, unless deposits are turned off for member ranks (edit: gold deposits remains enabled even with ‘Deposit to guild bank’ disabled). The implication and problems are clear - please spread the word and let GMs and Officers know so that they may announce to their members not to make direct donations to the guild bank until this issue is fully resolved, unless the member doesn’t care for raffles / no raffles are held / they are not eligible (ie Guild Leadership) / etc.

For the problem of bank wipes, yes, bank withdrawal history will be hidden, so the options are to either temporarily disable bank withdrawals, or continue to enable and accept the risk of bad actors being invisble.

Do your own risk assessment and risk management as needed.

heinousmoz · September 5

Other than the actual cluster of people being able to see bid history (and we definitely need more detail around that before the next trader flip as it doesn't seem like turning the history has fixed anything) the main thing I want to know is whether they will refresh the missing history once they turn it back on?

We're getting live updates so it's hard to say what is being saved on the server side. If we can regain that history then donations etc can be recorded after the fact. If it's lost...well then ZOS really have screwed GM's on this one...

agelonestar · September 5

It looks to me like history is shown when you’re logged in if you have a rank with history permissions. But if you log out and something happens, it won’t be shown to you when you log back in.

That might be wrong, but it’s the best sense I can make of the nonsense.

Really @ZOS_Kevin this isn’t a minor problem. All guilds, but especially Tamriel’s trading guilds, rely heavily on sales and bank deposit history. We absolutely need to know we can rely on the data and the post telling us you’ve turned off history is lacking a LOT of detail. Please please please (cue Sabrina) give us an update with some facts!

Mathius_Mordred · September 5

I'd rather they leave it on and then just fix the permissions later, this is going to cost us big time, I've had to cancel the raffles and anything else that relies on donations.

XSTRONG · September 5

Can you still see when players have donated gold to guildbank?

Mathius_Mordred · September 5

Oh and now MAIL IS DISABLED, wth is going on?

ApoAlaia · September 5

Mathius_Mordred wrote: »

Oh and now MAIL IS DISABLED, wth is going on?

I know of at least one GM that tried to hastily warn guild members via mail and got socially banned yesterday.

Did the same happen to you? I am not in-game rn so I can't test [if mail is working].

heinousmoz · September 5

XSTRONG wrote: »

Can you still see when players have donated gold to guildbank?

Only if you happen to be online when they made the donation. If you weren't then there is no way for an officer or GM to see it,

clacker · September 5

Its does need sorting as a Priority as I have already had to deal with agro from one guild member who left our guild after accusing us of not wanting to pay prizes out for a sales based draw that we were running this week.
We have had to suspend the draw because of issue.

Mathius_Mordred · September 5

ApoAlaia wrote: »

Mathius_Mordred wrote: »

Oh and now MAIL IS DISABLED, wth is going on?

I know of at least one GM that tried to hastily warn guild members via mail and got socially banned yesterday.

Did the same happen to you? I am not in-game rn so I can't test [if mail is working].

Looks like it might be that. But I also cannot event see my guild bank or store now at a banker in any town. I can on my other account so I know it's just my main account.

Aylish · September 5

So history is turned off, which will disturb guild functionality, and GMs aren‘t even allowed to warn their members via mail. Otherwise they get a social ban, losing access to their own guild‘s bank and store. As a GM!

Fix this now! We need our guilds‘ infrastructure!

msetten · September 5

raystormusa wrote: »

msetten wrote: »

It seems it is not possible to prevent guild members from depositing gold into the bank.

Correct, unless deposits are turned off for member ranks.

I tested this out this morning: even if you remove the "deposit in guildbank" permission from a rank, players in that rank can still deposit gold. No items, only gold. Might not be an issue for some, but as we have a monthly raffle for which we have to track donations, this makes it impossible to do those. All we can do is warn players via various channels that they should not buy tickets until the bug has been fixed and history is back on.

Does anyone know, if history will be turned back on, we will retroactively be able to see the history from yesterday till the fix has been released?

Mathius_Mordred · September 5

Aylish wrote: »

So history is turned off, which will disturb guild functionality, and GMs aren‘t even allowed to warn their members via mail. Otherwise they get a social ban, losing access to their own guild‘s bank and store. As a GM!

Fix this now! We need our guilds‘ infrastructure!

It's absolutely ridiculous. I'm getting to the point now that I'm really wondering if it's worth running a guild at all, or even playing this game for that matter. There are other things to do.

DragonRacer · September 5

Absolutely bananas.

We have seen emergency fixes for all sorts of other things, but who cares about guilds - especially trading guilds - am I right?

/sarcasm

And I'd like to know... since apparently history isn't turned off per se, but rather you simply can't see the history from your offline time but it still shows when you are online - does this mean 500 people can see my bids when I go to place them if they just so happen to be online when I do so? Am I gonna have to rush bid 11 minutes before flip in the middle of a work afternoon?

Mattymoo92 · September 5

@ZOS_Kevin show some love for the traders, for the last 2 years we’ve had the short end of the stick trying to make things more “accessible” and “cheap” for the average player while affecting the average trading experience for traders and now this. Please respond as this is a pretty huge problem for all trading guilds.

Ceral107 · September 5

Managing guild donations is already an abysmal task, even with the help of some great add-ons. Two entire weeks of having to ask for donations via mail (and risking a ban in the process for doing so) and then managing it from there with no history to rely on is horrid.

And on top of all that we don't even know why it happened, or that it's taken serious in any capacity, while the people who take care of so many players are left dry and struggling. Honestly, that makes it even more frustrating.

This is only the second most mismanaged situation I have encountered from ZOS in this game, but it's all the way up there. I can't even say I'm shocked anymore, just deeply disappointed once again.

QueenMisi · September 5

DragonRacer wrote: »

Absolutely bananas.

We have seen emergency fixes for all sorts of other things, but who cares about guilds - especially trading guilds - am I right?

I think there is genuinely no concept at ZOS of the link between guilds and player retention (ya know, that thing that brings the money in)

It's why when things like this happen, the communication is poor to non-existent, and the fixes are not prioritised. If the Crown Store had gone down they'd be turning staff out of bed at 3am to get it back up

Ceral107 · September 5

QueenMisi wrote: »

I think there is genuinely no concept at ZOS of the link between guilds and player retention (ya know, that thing that brings the money in)

This is so true, and I think this is why this hurts so much. We got nothing by ZOS to basically help making money for them by keeping people around. And while we do it ultimately for the people themselves and the love for the community we built up, the least they could do is to not screw us over for it. I'm not asking for improvements, just not to get a stick thrown between the legs and then getting abandoned in a ditch.

Tyralbin · September 5

Why can't they just turn off the Guild History section that is related to Trader bidding?

It's obviously a different system so surely there is a way to disable that seperately?