Feldon A number of players have been reporting an issue over the last two weeks that leaves them in a “phantom group”, lumped together with ghost players or mercenaries who aren’t actually grouped with them. As a result, these players are unable to join any other group, despite trying /leave, /disband, or even /camping to character select. Some have only found relief from server reboots.
From Holly “Windstalker” Longdale‘s twitter:
Big apologies to folks dealing with group issues. We are trying to fix a historic bug and it has exposed other problems. We are on it! #EQ2
— Holly Longdale (@WindstalkerEQ2) March 11, 2013
From Zoltaroth last Tuesday on the EQ2 Forums:
We’ve added some code to help fix this problem in yesterdays hotfix. If you guys continue to have issues post in this thread and we will continue to look into more fixes. This is another one of those “cannot reproduce internally” bugs that has been driving us crazy because we all see it happen on live.
I have it on my healer at the moment, I suspect that the issue is related to the fact that you can now (usually) get groupinvites when in a group and that it forcefullt drops you from the group you are in before you even chose if you want to join this new group or not.
The only time this happened to me, it was after rejoining my original group after (apparently) being auto kicked out to receive a new group invite from someone else. So… terrible new feature gone wrong?
I can only imagine the spaghetti code they have to deal with. Normally I have little tolerance or patience for SOE’s general incompetence but in these cases I can’t blame the current staff for the horrendously poor and shortsighted job of the original programmers.
Yeah, EQ2 is 13 year old code. It’s also a second system.
Amazingly, this is the first I’ve even heard of this…
@feldon yep it is a second system. But I think the problem here is actually due to poor source control. That is, the code that is used internally does not entirely match the code that exists on live. Stuff got released to live in the past, then someone else patched the same code from a previous version copying older code to the internal system. I think this has happened a number of times over the last thirteen years, as well as the odd “fix it now” done on live that did not make it back into the internal version.
The sad bit is, this is happening to TRION’s Rift as well, only they do not have the excuse of a long life cycle.
Happened to me once already in 2007 on a raid in freethinker’s hideout. Raid was over for me because the ghost was part of the raid standing at zone entrance. I guess this feature has been there in the code all along sleeping until recently when some ancient code paths were reused.
this is not new. I seen it like 3 months back. I could not get an invite to raid, it said i was in a group. I could not invite anybody it said my group was full. I seen it off and on over the past 3 months. So its been happening a lot longer than the past 2 weeks. It has gotten worse lately.