No - my arc is not $*&%! invalid

So Mrs JD wanted an insight to my mind and we just played through my Handyman arc fine.

Shortly after I'm browsing the list despairing at the number of imagination-challenged authors out there (how many 'play this drivel for 10 badges' arcs do we need?) and I notice that Handyman is not appearing in search anymore.

Swapping to my main account to see if it's been banned or something, I find that it is unavailable as 'One or more of your published arcs have been marked invalid. Most likely restrictions on published arcs were changed and your arc no longer meets the guidelines. You can fix the errors and republish.'

Rubbish - it was fine not 10 minutes earlier. The MA arc server hasn't declared itself unavailable. I've not edited the arc.

So I open the published arc for editing - no errors are showing. I immediately click republish and voila - it republishes without any complaint.

This is not the first time this has happened. Yesterday I had this happen 3 times each about 5 minutes apart. Refreshing my search it would be fine.. be fine.. be fine.. disappear and claim to be broken. But each time republishing without modification was fine.

Something is not WAI.

BTW - Anyone else seen this?

Log on 30 min ago and the damn thing's done it again...

But a popup on login re: emergency maintenance for a arc server issue this afternoon (13:00 BST for 2 hrs). Hope that this bug is covered.

Could it be because someone clicked the "Report for Content" button?

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Could it be because someone clicked the "Report for Content" button?

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I checked - my 1st thought was that maybe it had been autobanned. My second thought was that would mean a severe humour-failure on the part of at least 5 people...

But there was just the single complaint that it got almost as soon as it was published... with no complaint text (just the default 'enter complaint here' type text)... I think that that was a complaint in the mistaken belief that it was still being used for testing petitioning!

I was a tad annoyed earlier - I'd just finished your other arc (heh heh heh heh) and wanted to try that one, but could I find it in the search list?

No.

Hope it returns soon.

If you mean you looked c.9am you just missed it - I put it back at c.09:30 BST and it was still showing as OK at c.12:30...

But, of course, the servers are now down for maintenance, so that doesn't help you much!

I fully expect this maintenance/patch to do nothing about problems of vanishing mobs and arcs wrongly marked as invalid... but at least as a pessimist I have a chance of being pleasantly surprised!

They didn't day anything about a patch just maintenance did they?

I say maintenance/patch as I expect that the servers probably need patching to deal with the bug that's caused this (the emergency maintenance period).

I'm not saying that a client-side patch will be required, nor that it won't!

I've had some loopy crazy bizarro shenanigans with MA too. I too hope that this afternoon will stabilize the whole shebang, and that future issues can be released to Live after transferring from Test without the assistance of Mr. Mxyzptlk...

It's the first bank holiday of the Easter weekend, and the first day off work/school for the gaming proletariat - does Sod's Law mean nothing anymore?

It happened yet again (though was fine when the servers came back up).

If you want to play this but cannot find it, please check back occasionally, as I'm not removing the darn thing - it's the server playing silly beggers. Though when it pops back up depends on when I spot it's down and I don't actually spend 24/7 ingame...

They STILL havent fixed the Height bug, OR the Cape bug...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

I may have found what makes your arc suddenly go invalid. Have a look here: http://de.boards.cityofheroes.com/showfl...e=0#Post1342418

So the server may be punishing my arc for appealing to our mainland European friends... gah.


Good find Ashuroa.

I wonder if this may be related to the other problem I've seen where a custom mob is dissapearing from my other published arc.

Just thinking that maybe my arc is being marked as invalid if my defeat boss objective in Handyman is hitting problems when accessed from Zukunft or Vigilance (or any other server - it may not be a langauge-related bug as much as a server -related bug for all we know). Being an objective, the boss can't be dropped so invalidates the arc...

Whereas the mob who keeps vanishing from my other arc is 1 of 2 mobs in a group that is used as a pool group for battles, it is never referenced as a single, named mob. So if any server has problems with it maybe it drops the mob as invalid, but the group and mission stay valid as there is still one mob left in the group.


Just my musings... can't really test it from our end, but if support do actually look at the bug report I referenced this thread in it so I may as well record my musings.

Well it happened yet again...

Must have been sometime between 22:00 last night and 09:30 this morning - put it back up as per usual.

I've escalated the issue. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Thank you for escalating - but it looks like todays patch has not fixed the issue.

Handyman (arc 1076) was available before the downtime at 14:00 BST. It was still available when the servers came back up.

At c.15:20 BST, Ashuroa (who posted above re: problems with accessing arcs from Zukunft) contacted me to say that he'd tried to access the arc from Zukunft and could I check that it was still available.

It was not. It was wrongly reporting to be invalid again.

BTW - Ashuroa tells me that they've tested from other servers and it looks like Defiant is OK but both Zukunft and Vigilance cause the issue.

We seem to have located the cause of the issue and are able to reproduce the issue. It will be fixed as soon as possible.

Thanks for your patience with this!

It would be nice if, whilst waiting for the problem to be fixed, you could tell us WHAT is causing it, and how we might be able to avoid it in the meantime.

You're not important enough to know and by publishing how to do it, you might (no, will) find people trying it out left, right and centre, just for laughs.

We've already mentioned what seems to be a repeatable way to recreate this error though...

So griefers could already grief.

What players have reported and what is announced by the devs brings with it a certain level of clarity and persuasion for your junior sociopaths though...

Mmmmh, I've just thought up an arc plot....

Happened to me again today.

My 'Demanufacture' arc (ID 6992) experiences the same issue as described. Tonight it was suddenly invalid even though nothing has at all been changed and still well under on filesize.

Kind of annoying when this arc is intended as a lead in to another published arc to tell a longer story.

Republished, and back in the search. My other arcs (7004, 6982) remain unaffected atm.

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Swapping to my main account to see if it's been banned or something, I find that it is unavailable as 'One or more of your published arcs have been marked invalid. Most likely restrictions on published arcs were changed and your arc no longer meets the guidelines. You can fix the errors and republish.'

[/ QUOTE ]Know the feeling, this happened to me, and couldn't for the life of me work out why? so I ended up changing some of the content, which it now appears that I didn't need to do, as the "bug" is being/has been fixed.