@Sila I appreciate that you've taken your time to thoroughly explain your process in dealing with rewarps! However, what you can say about rewarps handled in game is just word of mouth. Based off what John has said in his most recent reply: @John Here's the two newest GM's post histories: Fergus Aaron These two GMs are probably the most active in handling boss dcs and rewarps at the moment. I have found at least 26 instances where Aaron has confirmed a refund due to server lag, and 15 instances where Aaron has denied a refund due to server lag while the thread has a SS and proper format. When I went through Fergus' post history, I found at least the same amount of confirmed refunds while I could not find a single instance of a denied refund due to server lag while the thread has a SS and proper format. So based on these two post histories, we can see a 36.5% deny vs. a 0% deny. I believe that this huge difference can be called a "statistical anomaly," and that is the specific reason that I created this thread.
What you didn't bring into account with your statistics is the geographical location of these two GMs. Fergus is located in a timezone and region where we have likely our largest population of players which not only has higher odds of server lag due to the number of people online, but a higher number of people who would be affected by serverwide lag. You don't seem to be willing to understand this but I'll say it again, there's nothing abnormal or anomalous and you should stop reading into these statistics you're bringing up. You can easily substitute Aaron's name with any of the other GMs as they would make the same decisions. In fact, if it further helps, this thread brought us to grabbing a random few rewarp threads which we discussed in our staff chat and we agreed we would have taken the same action (both confirm and deny) ourselves. I really don't know what else to say as the decision would be the same regardless of who wrote the post, but thank you for going through the posts and finding these numbers.
You're still looking into it wayy too much and John worded it better than I could. I went through Aaron's post history just to prove a point here. He denied 5 threads in 2 weeks. At least two of them failed to provide an SS or any explanation. The other 3 there was no proof of server lag at the time that we could find. No posts in skype, no confirmation from other GMs, no shoutbox logs. What do you expect, for him to go "Okay so there's no proof it lagged but SURE we'll take your word for it and approve it anyway!" ? Thats not how it works. In the past two weeks I've easily declined over 15 rewarp requests in game alone. Probably more. If I sit online on my GM all day I can get 10 rewarp requests aside from actual server d/cs, 90% of which get declined. I get people who say "my client crashed" "i gfx'd and still crashed" "i d/ced can you rewarp" "i got an error msg when zak spawned". None of those are rewarpable without proof of it being server sided errors. We have specific requirements in place for a reason.
There are no statistics involved, considering that no one on staff has ever disagreed with his decision to deny rewarps. In other words, it isn't Aaron who is denying your rewarps, but staff in general. He's just the one who happened to post at the time. If it makes you feel better, we could have other GMs deny the rewarps, but it's still going to get denied in the end because of lack of evidence.
I think that we are focusing too much on aaron and forgetting the real problem. The problem being that multiple people dcing at the same time not getting rewarped/refunded because theres nothing mentionend in a skype group/anyone else bossing at the same time asking for a refund. The way its handled now I think if there would be a regional lag and you're playing during a time when not many people from your region is playing then you would not get rewarped because theres not enough evidence that there infact was any lag going on.
There's literally no other way for us to prove that a regional lag spike happened at the time of a requested refund if no one is around to confirm it, though. Unless you can think of a foolproof way that can't be abused.
If you guys have logs of which ip addresses are connected to the server, you could parse them and sort them into regions and use that to determine whether there have been any regional lag spikes.
I think you severely underestimate how much work that would involve just to confirm a boss rewarp. Consider the fact that we have an average of 1k users a day logging in and out constantly at any time from all regions... Far as I'm aware, you can't download a whole IP table without paying for it to start with. Then imagine how time consuming it would be just to separate it all by region, to think about if a person who's claiming a refund is from that region...How would you even tell if a group of logins is from a d/c or not? How do you know it's not just something on their end?
I think its really sad that you have to discourage everyone by saying stuff like "theres litterally no other way" Just because you cant come up with something doesnt mean that no one else can. Maybe ther could be a group of trusted people from different regions who are very active who report when ever they notice lag? its not the best idea i must admit but im just tossing it out there because the way it is now doesnt seem to be all that great either. Since most of us dont know a lot about what is possible in regards to loging info about dcs it would be nice if the people who actually knew about this stuff could come with ideas. I really doubt that its not possible at all keep some kind of logs.
We do have that lag d/c thread that we try to encourage people to post in. It's even linked in the shoutbox's topic. If more people posted that they were lagging when it occurs, we'd have a better idea. But really, more threads get confirmed than they do get denied. I don't understand where the sudden complaints have come from, just because a few threads got denied. It happens, whether it's merchant losses or boss rewarps. Sometimes we don't see any possible reason for it to have happened, or we have no proof, so nothing can be done on our side. More importantly, we're working to reduce reasons for these lag spikes to happen in the first place. Moving away from Voxility to a better DDOS protection is one of the major steps. We can't really avoid source-issues that cause lag currently, but at least those woudn't be regional. If the source causes people to d/c, it'll affect just about everyone. Voxility has been causing more regional issues. And new source is one of the major steps being taken against the source being at fault.
Is there a way to check the number of online players at any time? If you can do that then you can just compare the numbers at different times and let's say, for example, that the player count dropped by 40 in like 30 seconds then it probably was a regional lag.
Its because when multiple people dc at the exact same time you expect to get refund or rewarp because its obviously the servers fault, you have ss and everything but theres not enough evidence for it but how do you provide more evidence? the way gms collect evidence now seems to be better for certain regions because they get more evidence naturally, and I guess who ever is friends with gms and so on.
@Sila I think that you underestimate the power of a computer processor. A computer can parse that data and sort it in a few seconds. If you've noticed, a lot of the software you use has to process large amounts of data. Regardless, I'm just throwing out a suggestion. Older posts: @John If you took the time to take a look at the threads that Aaron denied, you'd notice the first three that come up are in hours that Fergus would probably be awake, so please don't assume. I put them here in EST for your convenience! Tw player - 12:16pm est my player - 4:16am est tw player 12:20pm est @Sila If you had read my post more carefully, you would have seen that I said that there were at least 15 refund submissions that Aaron denied that have ss and are in the correct format I understand that you might want to reply quickly, but if you're going to keep replying without reading what I have to say, then that is just disappointing.
Afaik, searching through, sorting and processing large amounts of data is a lot more time-consuming than you'd expect. You can't really determine the cause of a DC based on screenshots and words alone and I think it's unfair to blame staff for simply following their own policies. Just because a thread follows the correct format doesn't mean it qualifies for a rewarp. However, I don't think having a less strict rewarp policy is too much to ask for based on the recent problems with Voxility and the instability of the current source. I'm assuming most of the annoyance with not getting rewarped is from HT dcs since it requires an item that isn't readily available to enter (you could argue Zak as well but EoFs are pretty common so eh). Perhaps a way to compromise would be to refund elixirs to people who dc at HT since you technically can complete the run if there are still people inside even though it might be a complete pain in the ass. Also what's up with the Aaron witch-hunt?
I work at a big data company. We process millions of lines of data. - not that this matters; let's not digress Also read my disclaimer. I was trying to prove my original point, that there was a higher rate. Nothing has been said about Aaron other than the rewarps.
You do that for a living and get paid for it, the GM's here are volunteer's that do this as "a side job", plus im assuming you have a LOT more experience with reading data than they do.
Off topic but I'd argue to say Zak is more annoying because to get 5 more EoFs you need to do all 3 zak Prequests again, including the JQ and 30 gold teeth.At least HT elixir just requires some ore and a manon Cry. lol)
On the topic of Voxility, we are in the process of changing to a potentially better DDOS protection so I'm curious to see if that will reduce the amount of lag issues. If it does happen to reduce the amount of disconnections, this thread would likely lose its purpose. : )
I disagree. Sure, getting the EoF's is annoying however you can do it at a consistent rate, rather than relying on a random spawn time + the chance on even getting a cry from manon. Getting EoF's would take ~45min assuming you're able to complete the jq within 30mins while finding a manon could take anywhere from 1-360(?) minutes depending on the spawn time, assuming that a cry would drop.
maybe do like a feature where the npc allows for rewarps if the person hasn't died ( which is what 2-3 other servers are doing ) and you can't abuse it cause once you don't rejoin witin 1 minute you're out and you can only do it once.
