September 28th, Renewal Hardware Maintenance

Disclaimer -- I'm not a current player of iRO, but I did play some 10~15 years ago. I was informed of the current situation "by a friend of a friend" on another forum. Although I haven't played since renewal, I am fairly knowledgeable within the context of RO and believe I may be able to provide assistance in resolving the problem(s) described. I'll attempt to provide context for players, but apologies in that my explanation will be "staff focused".

When a user reaches 4th job, there is a chance their character will get stuck in a state where they constantly revert their level upon relogging or changing maps. ...

This reads as though the zone server process is failing to update the MSSQL DB. For player context, a "zone server" is an application that hosts one or more "maps" (e.g. `prontera.gat`). It is possible to deploy multiple zone servers to "horizontally scale" and support additional load, incurred by more players, monsters, NPCs, etc. Every map is unique to a zone server aside from instanced maps, but I won't detail those here.

Everything on the zone server, e.g. characters, monsters, items on the ground, etc. is "cached" within the zone server's memory. Persistent data is stored within the database (i.e. MSSQL DB). When a player logs out, transitions to a map hosted on a different zone server, or periodically (e.g. every 5~15 minutes), character data is written to the database (i.e. the database is "sync'd" to the zone cache). These caches are important, as it is not possible to write changes to the DB at the rate they occur in game, e.g. imagine writing a change to disk every time a player consumes a potion, loots an item, or receives damage.

The zone server interacts with the database through "stored procedures" (or SPs) rather than direct queries. SPs are a common design pattern to abstract the database from the application while improving security, maintainability, and performance. There are many SPs involving character syncs, e.g. there are SPs for character HP/SP, buffs, stat and skill point allocation, refine logs, and item history to name a few. The observed behaviour is suggestive of a SP failing during the zone:MSSQL data sync, as the new zone post login or map change is unable to pull the character data from the database (i.e. the data was not persisted or written to disk).

1. Character begins reverting EXP/base level/job level every time they change maps or logout.
2. If the user spends the extra stat points they got from leveling above their reverted level, the stat points stay allocated even after reverting back to a lower level.

3. If the user spends a single skill point from the extra job level they obtained, they will permanently disconnect from the game on every login and be unable to play.

As this lack of persistence is limited to 4th job characters, I expect the SPs relating to the 4th jobs, or their requisite tables, are failing and/or undefined. I'm relatively hopeful that reviewing the zone logs should print a log line indicating such, e.g. `Could not find stored procedure 'SOME_SP_NAME' which should significantly reduce the RCA scope. If those log entries are absent, it should be possible to identify the missing SPs (or tables) from a MSSQL DB debugging utility, however this process will be very noisy and is strongly recommended to be performed on a non-production environment.

Shoutout to Crevox for the detailed procedure to reproduce and symptoms, it was very helpful.

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