58 replies to this topic

[renouille]

This bug was reported around 6 months ago and seemed to be fixed for a while... but now it's back for more. I recently lost 7.5k condensed white potions to this bug.

How to reproduce it:

• Prepare to send a message.
• Attach something to the message. (This reduces your carried weight, although it isn't shown.)
• Put more stuff into your inventory so that you no longer have enough free weight to hold the attachment.
• Try to retrieve the attachment, or cancel the message, or replace the attachment with something else (weight doesn't matter).
• Congratulations! You've just lost your original attachment.

The bug is in step 2, when the game reduces your carried weight. At one point (starting about 4-5 months ago) it did not, but the fix was reverted sometime afterward for unknown reasons. Putting more items into your inventory subsequently can leave you with a weight limit that is insufficient to hold both your current inventory and the pending attachment. Then, if you try to recover the attachment, the game attempts to put it back into your inventory and fails, and the attachment is lost because the game designers did not anticipate this possibility.


What's the glitch that people keep talking about?

After you select to use storage and close the Kafra dialog, there is a brief window before storage opens during which the mouse cursor is unrestricted. If you click on the mailbox NPC during this time, you can use the mailbox to receive messages while storage is open. This allows you to receive messages continuously without repeatedly paying mail and storage fees but does not otherwise enable any functionality that is not possible through other, uncontroversial means. Most importantly, it is utterly unrelated to the bug described in this post because (1) the bug cannot occur except when you are sending mail, not receiving it; (2) to send a message when storage is open, you simply need to click on the "Send Messages" button in the friends/party window which, by the way, has never been restricted with respect to simultaneous storage use; and (3) triggering the bug requires only that you acquire weighted items from some source, but this source doesn't have to be storage; it could be a trade or even another mail message. This is important and I suspect some people will not even bother to read this paragraph in full, so here it is again: the glitch has absolutely nothing to do with the bug!

Why would you try to "overweight" yourself?

No one does so intentionally; rather, it can happen unexpectedly for a variety of reasons. Several of them are presented in the following annotated videos.



Video #1 is a reenactment of how someone lost items while sending a message to me.
1. She attaches a few thousand of the same item.
2. She learns my weight limit is higher than what she'd thought.
3. She pulls more from storage without checking her stats, expecting the game to reject the transfer if it would lead to problems. (It doesn't, which is the bug!)
4. She tries to stack the inventory items with the attachment, but this doesn't work--it replaces the attachment instead. This may not be serious enough to be considered a bug in and of itself, but it's still bad because it is inconsistent with what experienced players have come to expect after extensive inventory/storage/cart management.
5. The game first tries to transfer the attachment to inventory. That obviously fails, so the attachment is gone.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0Beoh_Cn4E


Video #2 shows how I lost my items. The annotations are fairly thorough so I'll forgo explanation beyond one comment that isn't mentioned in the video: When you successfully send a message, your only feedback is a one-liner in the chat window telling you that the message was sent. When you're sending many items and many messages, it can become virtually impossible to match the lines with the corresponding messages. That is what happened to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTTw6TkAKrg


Video #3 shows how you can lose items using ONLY the mailbox NPC and nothing else.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JYO8cBFVZQ


Another reasonable scenario, similar to #3, is item remailing. By that I mean opening mail from someone, getting the attachments, and resending them to someone else. If you fail to notice that a message wasn't sent (much like in #2), then pulling more items from another message in your Inbox produces the same result--you lose items, all while using the mailbox "as intended"--no storage, no party/friends, etc.


Some other useful corollaries are:
- Never try to send items when you're overweight (>100%). You can go overweight by dismounting, or by moving a TKM from an aligned map to a non-aligned map. These are just some obvious examples.
- Although I've been focusing on weight limit, you can probably lose items by exceeding the hidden item count limit. I haven't tested this.
- The devs need to put more thought into user-friendly design. In all of these examples at least one instance of poor design was implicated as a catalyst for the ensuing disasters.

Edited by renouille, 05 May 2011 - 12:30 PM.

[OgamiItto]

Seems pretty logical to me. I wouldn't expect any different result, though a confirmation box would be nice ("Are you sure you want to delete...?"). Really sucks that you lost those pots though.

[Heimdallr]

There is a reason that mail and storage and trade are not by default allowed to happen at the same time. You are working very hard to glitch yourself out. Stop trying to bypass the game and it will stop doing mean things to your condensed pots.

[renouille]

Seems pretty logical to me. I wouldn't expect any different result, though a confirmation box would be nice ("Are you sure you want to delete...?"). Really sucks that you lost those pots though.

It doesn't seem logical to me. Your carried weight shouldn't be reduced when you attach items. Items shouldn't be disappearing into oblivion because the "programmers" (and I'm using that term very loosely) were too lazy/stupid to handle error conditions. There will never be a confirmation for deleting items this way because they never anticipated that items could be lost. They just try to stuff the items forcibly into your inventory while assuming that their own code for doing so could never possibly fail. Except it can, and does... because they made it that way, and forgot about it.

There is a reason that mail and storage and trade are not by default allowed to happen at the same time. You are working very hard to glitch yourself out. Stop trying to bypass the game and it will stop doing mean things to your condensed pots.

I view this as a disingenuous attempt to pass the buck. The trick I described is well known among veteran players and I don't see people being reprimanded for similarly slick tricks like using talkie boxes to proc miracle, stacking traps+rideword hat to mvp without ever running out of hp/sp, desyncing themselves with skills like item appraisal to deceive enemies or lay traps from far away, skill "dancing" to artificially increase aspd (this is in fact widely regarded as a trait of a skilled player, btw), etc., etc. Why aren't you yelling at people for DS dancing?

There's also absolutely nothing that prevents you from trading when the mailbox is open.

Not to mention that, as Nuhasna pointed out,

you can just click the send messages on friend/party list while storage is open

Edited by renouille, 03 May 2011 - 04:25 PM.

[Beata]

More importantly, why was the fix taken out? GMs fix made it that if such incident occurred the attachment is automatically re-mailed back to you.

[Nuhasna]

Your thinking of mails sent to you from other players, where if what they sent weighed too much, its remailed as an error mail.

Ive lost mail that way to actually, since it was a situation where the char was deleted after mailing stuff. So deleted chars cannot auto-remail.

[Ultimate]

The new search method in kafra is buggy indeed. Like Heim said. ALSO people should be aware that items that have been hacked/glitched/whatever you want to call it, and decide to HIDE these items in the mail system is just going to further incriminate them. Why would you card a valuable MVP card into a glitched item?

[Nilami]

There is a reason that mail and storage and trade are not by default allowed to happen at the same time. You are working very hard to glitch yourself out. Stop trying to bypass the game and it will stop doing mean things to your condensed pots.

I personally have to agree here with Heim's comment. He's not being rude or reprimanding you. I would look at it the same way. The "tricks" you list are just that - tricks. People doing them don't get reprimanded because it's a use of the client that originally was not intended and would take more than it's fair share of work to even come close to "fixing." As you said, some of the tricks are even considered signs of veteran play. If something wasn't meant to be used in that manner (such as having two different parts of the server/client UI relationship open at the same time) then you can expect glitches, bugs, and lost items.

Most people would not demand it to be fixed so that they can continue to misuse the client in a way it wasn't meant to be used. Now, if this was a thread about how we need to come up with an all-in-one user system, where you don't have to use different NPCs to access vital services such as Storage, Mail, Auction, etc, then that would be something I'm sure they would be willing to hear about.

Edited by Nilami, 03 May 2011 - 05:05 PM.

[Fibrizzo]

Stop glitching my game you bastards!!!

[MeisterKirisaki]

You are working very hard to glitch yourself out. Stop trying to bypass the game and it will stop doing mean things to your condensed pots.

It wasn't really hard to discover this "glitch", the inconvenience of handling mass amounts of mails containing items is a pretty good reason to look for a way to make things easier.

Though I do agree that from the game management's view it's easier to blame people for an unexpected outcome before even thinking about putting effort into fixing bugs.

[Kadnya]

There is a reason that mail and storage and trade are not by default allowed to happen at the same time. You are working very hard to glitch yourself out. Stop trying to bypass the game and it will stop doing mean things to your condensed pots.

Just my very personal opinion, but I feel that client side solutions should never be trusted. Remember the chat filter bypassing for example, or the character creation restriction for example... trusting in the client for important things isn't a good approach.

I know it's not your fault, but kRO mabby, but a fix would be nice, since as others have pointed out, you don't even have to try to bypass, or work very hard to glitch. You just have to use the friend or party list to open the mail box from storage, which is nice since that way you don't even pay zeny to the mail birdy xP. I know I use the list for mailing always, not the birdy...

Edited by Kadnya, 03 May 2011 - 05:25 PM.

[BlackPotato]

Why aren't you yelling at people for DS dancing?

cause DS sucks now?

[renouille]

I personally have to agree here with Heim's comment. He's not being rude or reprimanding you. I would look at it the same way. The "tricks" you list are just that - tricks. People doing them don't get reprimanded because it's a use of the client that originally was not intended and would take more than it's fair share of work to even come close to "fixing." As you said, some of the tricks are even considered signs of veteran play. If something wasn't meant to be used in that manner (such as having two different parts of the server/client UI relationship open at the same time) then you can expect glitches, bugs, and lost items.

Most people would not demand it to be fixed so that they can continue to misuse the client in a way it wasn't meant to be used. Now, if this was a thread about how we need to come up with an all-in-one user system, where you don't have to use different NPCs to access vital services such as Storage, Mail, Auction, etc, then that would be something I'm sure they would be willing to hear about.

This argument ignores the fact that you can lose items in exactly the same way without "tricks" of any sort. See the part about using "send messages" while storage is open.

Using the "trick" did not in any way influence how I lost my items--I posted about it only for the sake of full disclosure; nor would fixing the bug facilitate, in any way, any alleged "misuse" of the client.

If you can explain to me how "send messages" is unintended, then I might change my mind. Otherwise, this seems to me to be nothing more than grasping at straws, seizing upon the feeblest of excuses to avoid helping a customer. It's rather like denying compensation to someone who was wrongly imprisoned for 18 years due to prosecutorial misconduct because the dismissal order failed to contain the words "actual innocence."

[Heimdallr]

I want to remove the send message with attachment option from non-mail box usage.

That would solve alot of our problems with the mail.

LIkely the only fix is to make it so the mail window completely closes after you send a mail, and to keep the weight attributed to the attachment you make to stay attributed unitl the window closes. This would stop the bug, but also eliminate multi mail sendings. I understand potters have quite alot of mail they want to send and receive, the game really isn't designed with a secure mailing protocol in place, I don't ever use it for anything important, too easy to misspell names, too easy to have wrong weight in place etc. Storage shuffling has been a prime cause of issues with vend/trade/mail/upgrading over the years, and the fixes have been to make it so you can only do storage and nothing else at the same time.

My favorite was the strong smith that sent too much steel, person returned due to weight issues, in the mean time the smith had transed and had less strength than his normal smith build... items required GM attention to acquire.

I won't argue any point regarding how it would be nice if the mail worked better, clearly the mail working better and to keep "oopses" from happening is a better thing than not haveing oops protection. But it isn't bugged under normal usage, the only way to lose items is to do things in a manner that is purposely working to have more than just mail or storage open at one time.

[AtlasThunderbeef]

All this talk reminds me, a friend of me was sending a spear he borrowed to me through mail and managed to miss-spell my name.

=.=


The character he sent it to hasn't been used in many, many years; Nagi Springfield

While my new character is named Nagi Springfield'




There should really be a confirmation screen when you mail a message.



I should send a ticket about this..

[Fureedo]

I want to remove the send message with attachment option from non-mail box usage.

That would solve alot of our problems with the mail.

LIkely the only fix is to make it so the mail window completely closes after you send a mail, and to keep the weight attributed to the attachment you make to stay attributed unitl the window closes. This would stop the bug, but also eliminate multi mail sendings. I understand potters have quite alot of mail they want to send and receive, the game really isn't designed with a secure mailing protocol in place, I don't ever use it for anything important, too easy to misspell names, too easy to have wrong weight in place etc. Storage shuffling has been a prime cause of issues with vend/trade/mail/upgrading over the years, and the fixes have been to make it so you can only do storage and nothing else at the same time.

My favorite was the strong smith that sent too much steel, person returned due to weight issues, in the mean time the smith had transed and had less strength than his normal smith build... items required GM attention to acquire.

I won't argue any point regarding how it would be nice if the mail worked better, clearly the mail working better and to keep "oopses" from happening is a better thing than not haveing oops protection. But it isn't bugged under normal usage, the only way to lose items is to do things in a manner that is purposely working to have more than just mail or storage open at one time.

If the character is overweight and thus cannot receive the item, set a variable to that variable +1 ( starts at 0, first time overweight is 1, second time is 2, etc)
Put the item that cannot be received in the character's kafra storage.
Make the kafra's fee for the storage being the normal fee + an ammount times the variable, and ressets the variable to 0 once paid.
add a few more checks for the 30k limit and the number of items, if any of those is filled, send the item back as a mail error.

Voila! fixed!

[Xellie]

I want to remove the send message with attachment option from non-mail box usage.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO That prevents name typos and allows me to empty my chars weight limit whilst in dungeons / ET etc!

[Kitten]

For once I'm going to agree with Heim.

[Viri]

That's like saying I know this trick that'd be really cool if it didn't disconnect me immediately. Please make it not disconnect me so I can abuse it. It's blocked for a reason as stated, live with it or don't use it lol

[Susan]

two ways to reply to this topic:

• thank you renouille for letting the community know about this bug. too bad you lost your items, we'll be warned not to lose ours. *GM option: it's too much of a pain to fix it, so you'll have to live with it. send a ticket for further help.*
• lol cheater stop crying, your own fault for tricking and bugging through ragnarok, sorry 'bout your loss but go play legit and it won't happen.

I'm going to pick #1

[Viri]

^precisely why we can't have nice things. If people complain about things like this they'll just take it out entirely. Either stop bugging it or stop complaining when bugging things goes "wrong"

[Fibrizzo]

For once I'm going to agree with Heim.

Why? If you can't carry the items because you are overweighted from the mail the items shouldn't dissapear... As it happens it's a bug.

[Viri]

You have to jump through hoops to get both open at the same time though, they blocked it from working normally you have to do a work around just to get both open in the first place. It's your fault imo

[Hrothmund]

Intergrated mail/storage would be nice so that received/sent mail goes directly out of kafra storage rather than personal inventory. I didnt realise this was the reason we can't trade while in storage now.

Should just allow characters to go over 100% weight, but they can't move in addition to no skill use/items. I dont really see the abuse in that other than a char doubling as a kafra storage with 100 item slots.

Edited by Hrothmund, 04 May 2011 - 03:14 AM.

[Viri]

Would be funny on those people you masq gloomy into over 100% weight. NEVER CAN RUN AWAY :3