The Mana World Forums

Crush wrote:So you don't look at mantis because it is useless, and it is useless because you don't look at it?

Point, but one of my real problems with mantis include the mess of useless categories, and nobody seems to have the knowledge and permissions to fix them.

Though in any case, "looking at a bugtracker" is not likely to ever be on my list of things to do every day, whereas looking at the forums is.

Crush wrote:When I was still involved in the development, I found mantis to be a lot better bugtracking tool than the forum, because forum topics immediately fall out of sight when people stop posting in it. Mantis tickets, however, stay in sight until they are resolved.

This can be a motivation, to me, to fix the bug early (which is doable in most cases, such as this one)

And, unless the ticket is assigned to me, it does not stay in sight - there's too much noise in the Mantis system.

Crush wrote:Also, the signal to noise ratio is a lot lower on Mantis, because the ticket discussions are much less likely to drift into debates on principles (like it's happening here right now).

Agreed for individual bugs, but mantis in general has a lot of noise left over from before the Mana project split. See earlier point about needing categories.

Crush wrote:When those first 4 people who are currently known would receive a free towel, how many people would appear who claim that they were also victims of this bug? I don't want to imply that all of them would be liars. It is very likely that there are indeed several other victims. But there is no way to tell who is lying and who is telling the truth. Why should those 4 people be compensated just because they had the luck to be mentioned here, while several others are not?


I think that the only one who should definitely get his towel replaced is Nard, because he was the one who made a proper bug report with the exact conditions which lead to the problem (the reports by Jael RD and nelson6e65 were very misleading). Without that bug report it would not have been possible to find and fix it.

Seriously, good bug reports should be held in high regard, because a good bug report can save hours of development time.

You are totally right, Crush. But, I had not "made a proper bug report" because that was not my intention; I didn't lost a Towel. I was just making a mention about another friend which has the same "problem".

Nard wrote:Thank you for your trust, Crush. I think the report by Jael RD and nelson6e65 was misleading because they had several actions in short time interval, which was not my case. surely, they saw the problem some time after the action, an misinterpreted the initial condition.

var wrote:If there's a recent backup before the bug was introduced, take it and count the total number of towels owned by the players in the database, dyed and non dyed, it would be N, then count the total number of towel that are actually in game N-Nlost, the difference N - (N - Nlost) could be (if nobody delete the char or throw the towel in the floor after the backup, which is hard to believe) the total number of people that lost the towel due to that bug so give just to that players the towel back. It should be 4 or whatever, you can even know who owned or didnt own a towel as well. Stop with this we cannot tell who owned the towel, if you want you can know.

This is possible, DEVs/Administrators?

var wrote:Now this has been a fault of the developement team so the developement team must take the responsability of it, do not punish the players for your fault.

I'm agree with you... but Nard is quite right:

var wrote:(..)I know this game is open source and relies on goodwill, and nobody is perfect. The decision of replacing or not is up to Administrators. If I am offered one I will not refuse (..)

I love this game! I appraise the job of Dev's team. All problems have fix/solutions.
Go ahead!
But, would be unfortunate that players stay away only (or become embittered) for an error/bug not solved for they.

Regards!

------------
PD: I hope you can trust in me: Players who I know with Towels are: ferskelletor, AlucarD, Akiraz and Cannuto... because they are in my party (No-Name-Worms).

my thought remains the same. We need a button that says 'Report Bugs Here' on the main themanaworld.org site. That will help those that are unfamiliar with mantis to post a bug. I have a mantis account and i've only looked at a bug ticket when i've gotten the email

When this link would just point to Mantis, I don't think that it would be very useful. Having to register would be a big barrier, and those who bother to register would very likely flood mantis with duplicated, poorly written or just plain pointless tickets. Maybe have some kind of "anonymous complaint box" and have real developers write proper mantis tickets about the problems mentioned there.

Problem A: Someone would have to program this

Problem B: Someone would have to look at it regularly

Seriously... isn't there a record of who owns what? ... trades made? what was bought when and for how much? I had just assumed that there was such a thing, for those things and chat, but I am assuming too much maybe. In any event, Jael RD started this thread because he noticed his towel missing and towels did go missing, so how is there any question of his credibility. There are 100 slots in the Inventory window and plenty of players use those slots. Plenty of players have oranges in their Inventory too. Are you saying that we need to have photographic memories in order to report a bug? What's with the red-tape and proper procedure stuff? Reminds me of government antics to give a run around.
I am not a programmer, but I know a little bit about code structure. There is code for the towels and how they function. In fact, I bet if a player came to me and I had access to that code that I would be able to simply find the Orange Hitchhikers Towel, find the use function of the towel and see plainly that "Hitchhiker's Towel" was missing from the code and only Orange remained. Another thing I would question is how that happened and when, since the Orange hitchhikers towel had worked fine before one of the updates. Why was the Orange Hitchhiker's Towel code ever touched at all?

Here's another thing I noticed....

1st update = Selim was changed for the better.. I think we all agree Thank you for any changes that keep the game fresh and for having this game put together at all.

2nd update = Orange Hitchhiker's Towel now turns into an Orange when used. What else was in this update? Am I too forward to ask?

3rd update = Orange hitchhiker's Towel fixed

What was the second update?


And one more thing to remember... although the contributors of this game have put in a lot of time and effort and although the server and game is free to use and alter, although GM's put in a lot of time into keeping things in order.... This game would also not exist without players. I know it is hard to take any criticism at all when you put your time and energy into something and do it all for free, but if you are ignorant... expect ignorance back. That is simply human nature and I see in threads above that it is greeted well when a bug is reported so that it can be fixed.

So let's see that then, eh?

Ledmitz wrote:1st update = Selim was changed for the better.. I think we all agree Thank you for any changes that keep the game fresh and for having this game put together at all.

damn... you know my masterplan... changing the .png file and let some noobs get oranges xD

Ledmitz wrote:Here's another thing I noticed....

1st update = Selim was changed for the better.. I think we all agree Thank you for any changes that keep the game fresh and for having this game put together at all.

2nd update = Orange Hitchhiker's Towel now turns into an Orange when used. What else was in this update? Am I too forward to ask?

3rd update = Orange hitchhiker's Towel fixed

What was the second update?

There were a lot more things...
If you're interested in a short overview of what's being worked on and getting in, see the Weekly Summary and in case you want to have a closer look, the git repositories are publicly available.

Beside of working on new content, we're currently doing some code-cleanups step by step, in order to have better understandable, maintainable and consistent data. This means a lot of changes that shouldn't be visible to players if everything's done right.
The issue with the warp towel in particular was caused by some name changes of items that used a different name in the item_db than shown to the players. This made scripting harder, since you e.g. had to use "GemRawRed" in scripts when meaning a Ruby.

Hm.. I guess I owe a little apology. I do understand now. Thank you Jenalya for setting me straight and being patient with me. I can't believe I forgot about the new icons as well. Maybe for my next avatar I will put a foot in my mouth.
I will take a look at the development side of things more. I am becoming interested in sprites as well. I guess I will take a look at the dimensions needed for them to know where I can start from. I have submitted audio tracks and am waiting for one to be post processed before I continue making more. I know you can't do everything, but you sure can try, eh? Time for me to learn something new again.

Could we know about the Administrators decision whether to replace orange towel or not?