Chat bug is officially ridiculous

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I like how LivingHellfire and Samuel_Tow are having a perfectly polite conversation about their discontent with something and people come rampaging in to comment on something already addressed as though LivingHellfire just slaughtered their kitten.

You all amuse me so much more than you could ever possibly realize.

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Welcome to the Internet.

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wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwI like the one where you come out of the BM and the last price(s) you input show up in your first msg

EX: 2, 600, 000 can i join?

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If I were to go to Denny's and they got my order wrong, I'd signal the server, explain the problem and she'd take it back to the kitchen to either fix the order or redo it entirely, and it would be done without any kind of fuss (assuming it was both a legitimate complaint on my part and that I was polite and respectful about it).

Is it really too much to ask of gaming companies in general for, at the very least, service that I would expect at a damn Denny's?

[/ QUOTE ]So you're saying you want NCSoft to "spit in your food"? Honestly, no matter if you are right and completely respectful/polite, you can't predict a server or cook getting annoyed at having to redo an order and giving you a little "surprise".

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What the heck are you talking about? I know this is an attempt to be cute, but if we follow your perversion of the analogy, we'd have Cryptic deliberately bugging or possibly banning his account for daring to complain about the chat bug.

It's really quite simple. He's paying for a service. The service is legitimately not satisfactoriy (regardless of how you play it down, the chat bug is not "working as intended") and therefore it is the provider's responsibility to fix it, or provide some some sort of (canned even) customer service response and ultimately fix it.

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I generally assume that if a bug persists for too long, it's really hard to squash for some reason. That being said, I wish they'd prioritize this bug. It may not be a showstopper, but it defeats the whole purpose of a social game if your communication tools are broken, y'know? I want those retro goggles really bad, but seriously, delay Super Booster 3 by a week if it means this chat bug goes away.

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Arc #41077 - The Men of State
Arc #48845 - Operation: Dirty Snowball

If its persisted this long, I really don't think a week is going to fix it. Also, content development is a different team than bug tracking and patching, so all delaying the pack will do is make people wait for no reason.

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Doc Mech-Nec (Exalted): 50 Bots/FF MM
Crey Radiation Tank (Exalted): 50 Rad/Rad Corr
Servers: Exalted, Triumph, Champion
Alts: 32
Steam Profile

I think the chat bug is taking so long to fix because the devs are trying to work in an auto-(( )) feature for Virtue.

--NT

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They all laughed at me when I said I wanted to be a comedian.
But I showed them, and nobody's laughing at me now!

If I became a red name, I would be all "and what would you mere mortals like to entertain me with today, mu hu ha ha ha!" ~Arcanaville

Wouldn't it just be easier to make an OOC Channel like other games do.

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Doc Mech-Nec (Exalted): 50 Bots/FF MM
Crey Radiation Tank (Exalted): 50 Rad/Rad Corr
Servers: Exalted, Triumph, Champion
Alts: 32
Steam Profile

55555555555/signed

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Infinity and Victory mostly
dUmb, etc.
lolz PvP anymore, Market PvP for fun and profit

the chat bug so much cooler back when it was unofficially ridiculous.

=(

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The Nethergoat Archive: all my memories, all my characters, all my thoughts on CoH...eventually.

My City Was Gone

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All one really needs to do to avoid the chat bug is have a look at his or her chat line before typing. If there is garbage text in it, hit escape and retry. You'll write over the garbage text at next chat activation. Not to say it's not a bug or not annoying, but it's hardly ridiculous.

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For me, it's basically the difference between being able to type in combat and not being able to. Which is pretty big. I can type a sentence or two quickly... doing it twice or trying to remove three lines of '12439834275989889873wwwwwwwwwaaaaaaaa', not so much.

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Wow. This explains why, especially since I15 went live, my powers will suddenly stop working for brief periods of time in the middle of combat. It's not lag, because everything else is working just fine. I can see everyone else moving, and their powers are firing and the foes are moving as normal. I'm not rubberbanding--it's like my keystrokes are disappearing.

If I'm right, it's the chat bug interfering with my ability to fire off my powers in combat.


<THEORY>
The chat bug isn't exactly a chat bug, per se, but a keystroke queueing bug.
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/em puts on software developer hat

Keystrokes are generally queued. As the main application thread handles events, it grabs the next keystroke out of the event queue and handles it. Once it's handled, it is supposed to be removed from the queue. This is supposed to happen in first-in, first-out order so keystrokes appear on the screen in the right order.

It sounds like that's not happening: keystrokes remain in the queue, and that's why they suddenly appear in the password field, or the chat window, or they get selected first when you tap an attack key during combat. If you're in combat, and the next available keystroke in the queue, for instance, is a W instead of a 1, you'll move forward one tiny step instead of firing off the power in the first slot of tray 1.

Granted, this is all wild theory and speculation. I haven't seen the code. But based on how event-driven software works (and almost all software today is event-driven), it sounds like a pretty stable idea. It certainly seems to fit the symptoms, especially given that I've encountered the problems with text appearing in the password field, and powers not firing off in the middle of combat sans lag.

Fascinating.

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This bug is annoying when it happens to me in-game, but my primary concern is that it looks so damn bush-league to people just joining the game.

For something like this to persist for so long, I just can't help imagining new gamers thinking Boy this game is a mess - they can't even fix a little thing like this? Yech, I'll go back to that other MMO.

I want CoX to be successful so it's always around for ME, and I worry that something like this will cut into retention rates for new players.

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Keystrokes are generally queued. As the main application thread handles events, it grabs the next keystroke out of the event queue and handles it. Once it's handled, it is supposed to be removed from the queue. This is supposed to happen in first-in, first-out order so keystrokes appear on the screen in the right order.
It sounds like that's not happening: keystrokes remain in the queue, and that's why they suddenly appear in the password field, or the chat window, or they get selected first when you tap an attack key during combat. If you're in combat, and the next available keystroke in the queue, for instance, is a W instead of a 1, you'll move forward one tiny step instead of firing off the power in the first slot of tray 1.
Granted, this is all wild theory and speculation. I haven't seen the code. But based on how event-driven software works (and almost all software today is event-driven), it sounds like a pretty stable idea. It certainly seems to fit the symptoms, especially given that I've encountered the problems with text appearing in the password field, and powers not firing off in the middle of combat sans lag.
Fascinating.

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That's something like what I figured, myself. I've never seen buttons stop working, myself (packet loss and connection ping can just cause powers to de-queue themselves or not register, but that doesn't count), but from the looks of things, it appears that they're being saved in ANOTHER buffer separate from the one they're read out of to execute commands, which is then dumped on the chat line ala /beginchat. The game already has the functionality to enter text into the chat line as you activate it.

Now, the big thing here is that the symbols dumped into the chat line are buttons that already WORKED. If I buy something for 250 000 inf and hit enter, chances are my chat will have 250000 dumped in the front. I already typed that into Wentworth's, so it obviously worked, but it got remembered somewhere and entered into a text field a second time. To my eyes, there's some kind of secondary keyboard buffer that handles keypresses separately from the text field they are entered into or the function they activate, and for some reason it's either not getting flushed or the chat line is reading from it when it shouldn't be.

Of course, that's all just baseless theory, but it's interesting nonetheless

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666beholdsataninallhisglory666Mine's not working right.

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That's a different bug entirely.

(I LoL'ed)

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"Where does he get those wonderful toys?" - The Joker

You know what I'm waiting for? For my [censored]ing startchat binds ((EDIT: Startchat? Beginchat? I forget which it is/was)) to start working again. They broke around i14 (maybe a little earlier), and haven't been right since. Everyone else seems to have forgotten about the issue, but they haven't left me, despite leaving bajillions of others.

I make a chat bind so I can hit "Shift+L yo yo teaming time for me-dizzle" and have my message go out to the LFG channel. But now I have to hit "Shift+L left right right end" just to get to the point where I'm allowed to type. I don't want to feel like I'm [censored]ing cheating at a Konami game here. I just want to speak in borken gangsta slang to mah LFG homies, capice?


To add insult to injury, I hovered over my friend's shoulder as I told him the exact bind that I use, so that he can join the channel. And his works just fine, [censored]ing A.

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Pretty much.

I have almost infinite patience when dealing with bugs and/or issues with the service I'm purchasing, as long as the service provider tells me what's going on and what to expect. Whether it's a plate of food I ordered, someone paving my driveway or whether it's a game vendor.

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To be fair, I've seen posters tell the devs to their virtual faces that they're wrong about how difficult something is and that they just need to try harder. It would be nice to see a report or two, but since most of them would end up being, "We know it's an issue, we're fixing it/trying to figure out what causes it, we'll patch it when it's ready", it's not particularly important.

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We'll always have Paragon.