ANNOUNCE: Hallifax and Gaudiguch Conflict Quests

Ianir

Hi everybody,

TL;DR: NO HALLIFAX EPIC QUEST PROGRESS OR GAUDI/HALLI SMOB RAIDS UNTIL OTHERWISE ANNOUNCED PLEASE.

Following the raid upon the Continuum on July 7th, the Primary Generator in Hallifax was taken down by the assault from Gaudiguch. This is the first time that this has occurred in the history of Hallifax and Gaudiguch, and as such was the first time that the 'restore the Primary Generator' aspect of Hallifax's questlines was rigorously tested in a live environment.

It quickly became apparent that there were some bugs in the quest to restore the Primary Generator. Due to the nature of the conflict quest - where Gaudiguch continues to steal power from Hallifax until the spheres are restored, and Hallifax loses the benefit of the Primary Generator's presence - this situation was understandably pressured. A large number of our volunteers devoted their time over the weekend to attempting to intervene and enable players to complete the restoration.

On July 8th, it was discovered following bugs from players and intense investigation that the bug was caused by the way the two versions of Hallifax's generator quests interact. For those unfamiliar with the quest, Hallifax essentially complete the same quest for their epic as for restoring the Primary Generator, with the difference being who you hand the stages of the quest into.

Unfortunately, due to an oversight in the quest's design, these two versions did not lock one another out. Whilst trying to restore the generator, you could go to the 'wrong' researcher, scientist or similar and seemingly complete the next stage. Due to the differences in the quests, this could then cause it to become impossible to progress the quest, as it believed itself to be in the other version. This also caused the difficulties in identifying the cause of the bugs, as the quest was in an entirely illogical state.

As a result, the quest was in such a conflicted state that we were faced with two viable options. One, we could undo the progress that had been made in attempting to fix the Primary Generator, rolling back to the moment where it was broken by Gaudiguch. Two, we could manually fix the Primary Generator as if the quests had been completed in their entirety.

Due to the stress this extensive bug has caused the players in Hallifax, we elected to do the latter. We endeavour as much as possible to never interfere with player conflict quests, but in this instance the bug was too severe for us not to intervene.

Obviously, this does not fix the bug. We have a plan for how to do so, and will do so with the highest priority. However, resolving this bug involves the modification of approximately 100 unique progs across items and NPCs - and as such it will not be something we can do instantly.

In order to facilitate our doing so, we must ask that no one in Hallifax seek to complete the generator quests in any form during this time. We will let you know as soon as it's possible to do so. In the interim, should you find anything that is out of place in Hallifax, please file a BUG as soon as you can with the full details of the issue. As well, until this is fixed, we must ask that no supermob raids on either Gaudiguch or Hallifax occur.

Thank you all for your patience in the past 48 hours.

Regards,

Ianir the Anomaly.

(Copied from the in-game announce board for visibility)

Oneiroi

We are pleased to announce that We have now resolved the bugs as We are aware of them with the Hallifax Generator quests. A full breakdown of the changes may be found in Changelog 1472, but in essence, the three versions of the quest have been made exclusive - you may no longer accidentally complete the wrong version at any time.

Members of Hallifax are now free to resume completing the Generator quest as they wish. We thank you all for your restraint from doing so in the past 24 hours, as it has made resolving the situation much easier. Should you encounter any bugs whilst you are doing the quests going forward, please file as detailed a BUG report as you can, and We will look into it as soon as possible.

As this matter is now resolved, We are also lifting our prohibition on the raiding of Hallifaxian and Gaudiguchan territories. We thank you all for respecting this restriction in this time.

The Oneiroi

Snald

@Maligorn

Maligorn

Yendor said:

@Maligorn

  If it's meat, I'll meet you on Vortex and we can do an episode of top 10 anime betrayals.

Enya

Super applause

Viravain

I want to unabashedly shout a rave to the unbelievably talented, dedicated, brilliant, and hard-working behind-the-scenes people who toiled tirelessly over this monster of a quest for three straight days. It was like watching a seasoned maestro conduct a nightmarishly complex symphony, and they did it all with finesse, good humour, and efficiency. I am never not proud of the true geniuses I get to work with.  

Steingrim

I too would like to thank all the people who jumped into this head first and got this sorted.

I feel it would be amiss for me to at least not raise the question that while this code is fresh in the minds of the coders that perhaps Gaudi's own Epic quest problem could be addressed?

At the very least not having Drachou eat things and not give any advancement is a huge issue as is the locking out of many of the citizens from even advancing the quest.