Page 1 of 3 123 LastLast
Results 1 to 10 of 25

Thread: Rollback that is Ridiculous Beyond Belief

  1. #1
    Executive Chef deadpixel's Avatar
    Join Date
    Mar 2011
    Location
    Southeast Asia
    Posts
    3,045

    Rollback that is Ridiculous Beyond Belief

    After I started the latest Dragon Tales, the game crashed, and I was locked out (couldn't log in) for three days. I didn't bother submitting a ticket to Support because I knew that I would be able to get in on the third day whether I submitted a ticket or not.

    Once I got in, I caught up as best I could with the tasks of the last two days and got up to the crafting of the Decoration Dragon egg. Three minutes later the game crashes and when I got back in, found that it had rolled back into an incredibly ridiculous state.

    The game recognizes that I had started crafting the egg as my next task is to hatch the egg.




    However, after the rollback, the egg that was being crafted in the Spell Shop disappeared and now instead of having two Decoration markers to restart crafting the dragon again, I am left with one, making it impossible to craft the dragon unless I spend five hundred gold.




    It is a simple matter to put in place a subroutine that compares the game's current stored state against the items that it should have to be in that state when a rollback occurs, and yet such a simple subroutine has not been implemented despite DS being a "matured" game.

    Please do not advise me to submit a ticket to get this fixed. I just won't bother with finishing the current Dragon Tales. I am no longer emotionally invested in the game, and my playing it is now more out of habit than anything else.

  2. #2
    Community Manager [S8] Vanellope's Avatar
    Join Date
    Aug 2018
    Posts
    440
    Quote Originally Posted by deadpixel View Post
    Please do not advise me to submit a ticket to get this fixed. I just won't bother with finishing the current Dragon Tales. I am no longer emotionally invested in the game, and my playing it is now more out of habit than anything else.
    I'm sorry to hear that this happened for you. However, you WILL need to submit a ticket to Support to have this fixed. I hope you decide to send in a ticket so you're able to complete as much as you can!

  3. #3
    Rhino Keeper
    Join Date
    Jan 2014
    Location
    UK
    Posts
    402
    Is there a connection between missing markers and not being able to get into DS. Missing markers is becoming a more frequent issue for me and now I cannot log in.
    Dragon Story - Iceland, Fantasy Forest Story - Saint Mary

  4. #4
    Rhino Keeper
    Join Date
    Jul 2019
    Location
    USA
    Posts
    339
    I?m sorry this happened deadpixel.
    S8 really should hire you as a part time consultant or IT support. I don?t know why they don?t do the little things that would make their customers so much happier. It?s just baffling at this point.

  5. #5
    Rhino Keeper
    Join Date
    Mar 2016
    Location
    Florida
    Posts
    176
    The rollbacks are game challenge features. Only the best can win with them. LOL

  6. #6
    Executive Chef deadpixel's Avatar
    Join Date
    Mar 2011
    Location
    Southeast Asia
    Posts
    3,045
    Quote Originally Posted by greywagtail View Post
    Is there a connection between missing markers and not being able to get into DS. Missing markers is becoming a more frequent issue for me and now I cannot log in.
    Before I give my opinion(s) on this, I must make it clear that I am not an S8 staff member, and neither my work nor the company I work for is in any way related to S8.

    Now that that's out of the way...

    No, there isn't. The reason for the missing markers is found in the random, "inexplicable" crashes we experience in DS. These crashes trigger rollbacks in the game that are sometimes not properly done. The explanation sometimes offered for the crashes is that, for some of us, our games have gotten "too big," leading to "memory issues" that cause the game to crash.

    But here's the rub; memory issues are repeatable. What this means is that if there is a memory leak, or if our data is so large that it overwhelms the device's memory management causing the game to crash, then the same set of actions would cause the game to crash all the same time.

    Let's take one of the simplest crashes that I am sure every one of us has experienced at least once on DS:
    1. We start the game.
    2. We leave the game alone without doing anything to fetch a hot drink, soda (pop), or some other food.
    3. We come back and instead of DS, we see our Home screen.
    4. ??? The game crashed.

    If it were a memory leak that caused the crash, we would see this crash happen EVERY TIME we start the game and leave it without doing anything.

    Now, let's look at another common crash occurrence; the game crashing while we are collecting coins:
    1. We start the game.
    2. We see that we have a ton of coins.
    3. Without moving the island or resizing the screen we start collecting the coins in a particular order (or at least I do).
    4. The game suddenly crashes, and we are left tapping on our Home screen.

    If this crash was caused by the device's memory manager being overwhelmed by the huge data set of long-time players, we would see the same thing happening at almost the same point in our coin collection every time we make the collections. But the reality is that we are sometimes able to collect from ALL of our habitats without the game crashing.

    Also, if our devices were running out of memory due to memory leaks or massive amounts or computational storage requirements, we would first see the game slowing down, performing sluggishly, and stalling (hanging) before it blinks out; if it even does.

    So, what do I "think" is causing these random crashes? I believe they are caused by unresolved/improper handling of errors in the synchronization routines.

    Every app is a compilation of procedures and functions knitted together to create the "magic" that we experience while using or playing the app. Woven into each of these procedures and functions are little sub-routines known as "error traps" for error/exception handling. Their purpose is to catch unexpected situations in the application's running and redirect the processing so that it continues to run correctly. If the error trap does not exist, or if it were rushed out (improperly written), the app/game may not know what to do when an exception occurs, and it would (always) just terminate its running (crash).

    Unless we are specifically looking out for it, we won't notice the times when the game on our devices synchronizes its data with that of our accounts on the server. If the data our devices present to the server is "acceptable," it is updated to our account and the game continues. If the server finds that there are discrepancies, it may trigger a rollback on our devices to a previously recorded state. There are thousands of possible discrepancies that the developers must account for, which means that when the game encounters one that the error trap isn't able to resolve, we would experience a crash. If that crash happens before the data is completely and properly updated to the server, a rollback with a situation like the one I (many of us) had would occur.

    Having to resolve thousands of discrepancies does not mean that a programmer must account for every single one of them. There are many ways to bundle them together and handle them as one.

    Sorry for the long read

  7. #7
    Executive Chef deadpixel's Avatar
    Join Date
    Mar 2011
    Location
    Southeast Asia
    Posts
    3,045
    Quote Originally Posted by Frostyforest34 View Post
    I?m sorry this happened deadpixel.
    It's okay. I have too many dragons on my overcrowded island anyway and this happening will save me one cycle of having to move some dragons into the stable to make room for new ones. It is still disappointing though.

    Quote Originally Posted by Frostyforest34 View Post
    S8 really should hire you as a part time consultant or IT support. I don?t know why they don?t do the little things that would make their customers so much happier. It?s just baffling at this point.
    It's a nice thought but S8 doesn't need me. They have good people working for them and it is quite a task to maintain and support a game of this size. Change is also difficult to come by because it would mean massive changes to the game's framework. Expansions are also difficult because it would require a redesign of the way DS handles its habitat data.

  8. #8
    Farm Supplier
    Join Date
    Jun 2013
    Posts
    63
    Quote Originally Posted by deadpixel View Post
    After I started the latest Dragon Tales, the game crashed, and I was locked out (couldn't log in) for three days. I didn't bother submitting a ticket to Support because I knew that I would be able to get in on the third day whether I submitted a ticket or not.

    Once I got in, I caught up as best I could with the tasks of the last two days and got up to the crafting of the Decoration Dragon egg. Three minutes later the game crashes and when I got back in, found that it had rolled back into an incredibly ridiculous state.

    The game recognizes that I had started crafting the egg as my next task is to hatch the egg.




    However, after the rollback, the egg that was being crafted in the Spell Shop disappeared and now instead of having two Decoration markers to restart crafting the dragon again, I am left with one, making it impossible to craft the dragon unless I spend five hundred gold.




    It is a simple matter to put in place a subroutine that compares the game's current stored state against the items that it should have to be in that state when a rollback occurs, and yet such a simple subroutine has not been implemented despite DS being a "matured" game.

    Please do not advise me to submit a ticket to get this fixed. I just won't bother with finishing the current Dragon Tales. I am no longer emotionally invested in the game, and my playing it is now more out of habit than anything else.
    Firstly, thank you so much over the years, posting tips for all of us 💖
    Exactly same thing happened to 1 of my islands. Likewise, I didn?t bother to raise a ticket, it wouldn?t get look at for several days and as usual no fix! I just gave up on that island, too many dragons and no space, good to have a ?forced? breather.
    I have been playing this game for almost a decade. Without my very nice neighbours, I would have given up long ago 😻
    Merry Xmas everyone, and stay safe.

  9. #9
    Farm Supplier
    Join Date
    Oct 2012
    Posts
    55
    Quote Originally Posted by deadpixel View Post
    Let's take one of the simplest crashes that I am sure every one of us has experienced at least once on DS:
    1. We start the game.
    2. We leave the game alone without doing anything to fetch a hot drink, soda (pop), or some other food.
    3. We come back and instead of DS, we see our Home screen.
    4. ??? The game crashed.

    If it were a memory leak that caused the crash, we would see this crash happen EVERY TIME we start the game and leave it without doing anything.

    Now, let's look at another common crash occurrence; the game crashing while we are collecting coins:
    1. We start the game.
    2. We see that we have a ton of coins.
    3. Without moving the island or resizing the screen we start collecting the coins in a particular order (or at least I do).
    4. The game suddenly crashes, and we are left tapping on our Home screen.

    If this crash was caused by the device's memory manager being overwhelmed by the huge data set of long-time players, we would see the same thing happening at almost the same point in our coin collection every time we make the collections. But the reality is that we are sometimes able to collect from ALL of our habitats without the game crashing.

    Also, if our devices were running out of memory due to memory leaks or massive amounts or computational storage requirements, we would first see the game slowing down, performing sluggishly, and stalling (hanging) before it blinks out; if it even does.

    So, what do I "think" is causing these random crashes? I believe they are caused by unresolved/improper handling of errors in the synchronization routines.
    Your assumption based on your examples would be correct if every start of the game would be exactly the same. But this isn't the case, you have different or none ingame notifications or ads popping up for every start. Those already alter the memory to a different state each time, so it doesn't matter in which order you collect coins or how far you get. Btw. i never ever get to collect all coins in one go since years and my game slows down before crashing, i can almost always tell beforehand when it crashes.

    Be as it is the number of crashes i get has ground my playing the game almost to a halt. Since almost years i do the bare minimum because the constant crashes and lost work due to rollbacks (always on the important stuff like missing food, collecting gold from my gold dragons ) make it just to bothering to waste time on it.

    I usually play on my iPad mini 4. generation, yes not the newest device but one still getting the latest iOS and performing still great in much more demanding games like RR3. I just started the game (with the same user logged in) on my iPhone SE (2016), same amount of memory, smaller screen, A9 instead of A8 processor, it already runs much longer than it usually runs on my iPad mini. From that i would almost guess that the problem is with the handling of the graphics memory by the game. But i won't switch over and use the iPhone instead of the iPad because isn't worth it to play on such a small display. I rather stop playing.

    On the positive side: The game manages to run the ads smoothly and it also only crashes after the ad and invalidating for e.g. your next fight for which you viewed the ad. Win-win for Storm8
    Last edited by Marty67; 12-14-21 at 09:40 PM.

  10. #10
    Rhino Keeper
    Join Date
    Mar 2016
    Location
    Florida
    Posts
    176
    Several crashes with rollbacks during this battle arena. Ugh lost 3 wins so far and 1 lost win became a loss, so 4 hrs thrown away.

Page 1 of 3 123 LastLast

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •