Please FDEV give powerplay commanders an update on the care package bug

Is it really that hard to fix?

This was totally a foreseeable problem. Of course, like anything else in the game that yields rewards, some players will take it as a personal challenge to get ludicrous levels of it. Was that also really that hard to incorporate into the PP2 design mechanism? Or at least preventing a hard crash when trying to redeem rewards?

Now players have unclaimable rewards under this poor design and I’m sure FD realize that many of the easier fixes would lead to massive piles of salt, like these:
  • capping the max pp level
  • auto discarding reward mats that are > than max storage


FD are in a self-created Kobayashi Maru scenario. Players used the system that FD created to achieve ludicrous levels of rewards. Attempting to redeem results in a hare crash. And the obvious solution to create ludicrous levels of mat storage will likely never be implemented because of previous FD discussions about increasing player account storage size would prohibitively increase their storage capacity/costs.


Waiting & watching for their solution.
 
Would be nice, if it would not sort too, i.e. sort by time / level (newest on top). Because it is impossible to find anything collectable there in big list, because it resorts.
 
There are 2 distinct problems:
1. A bug that appears when you have too many packages. It should never lock up your client, even if the existing code cant be made to handle the large quantity it should be patched to 'fail gracefully' and leave your game in a usable state. As a temporary workaround, could it be patched to just display the last 20 packages rewarded ? Access to some and a working client is better than access to none and having an unusable client.

2. Managing more than a few partially used and new care packages with the current interface is a nightmare, why do we have to reopen every one to find that 1 unit of rare material we need?. Possible solutions - add filters so you can find care packages containing the material you need without opening every...single...one, OR place leftover care package contents into a new 'Powerplay rewards bank' where you can transfer them to your material stores as needed. Maybe such a bank can be 'located' on the power megaships - you have to visit one to collect.
 
This was totally a foreseeable problem. Of course, like anything else in the game that yields rewards, some players will take it as a personal challenge to get ludicrous levels of it. Was that also really that hard to incorporate into the PP2 design mechanism? Or at least preventing a hard crash when trying to redeem rewards?
It doesn't even need a ludicrous level of reward. There are 100 ranks on the main track, and if you end up with unclaimable materials in all those reward packages (if you don't have the Odyssey expansion, you'll have at least 24 partly unclaimable packages just by reaching rank 100) you'll already be in trouble.

  • auto discarding reward mats that are > than max storage
I'd be absolutely fine with that! By definition the ones that are > max storage are the ones I have little use for anyway. I'd far rather they just disappeared (or at least there was a "discard all" button to do it) than have to shuffle around material traders every few ranks and visit the bartender to sell off a bunch of assets I have no use for.

And the obvious solution to create ludicrous levels of mat storage will likely never be implemented because of previous FD discussions about increasing player account storage size would prohibitively increase their storage capacity/costs.
No it wouldn't.

For ship engineering materials, they're stored as a counter per material already, so the ones with a 300 cap must already be using at least a 16-bit integer (which can go up to 65535) and the others would only take an extra byte to promote to that. There's about 80 materials which would be affected so that's an extra 80 bytes per CMDR, and there's from Frontier's last official figures about 15 million accounts, so that's just over a gigabyte of extra storage costs. Basic AWS storage costs 8 cents per gigabyte month, so this would cost Frontier about a dollar a year in additional storage. They can afford that. (If they've not prematurely optimised and are just using a 16-bit integer for all material buckets to make the database coding much easier, they're already paying that dollar!)

For Odyssey assets the calculation is slightly different - we have a thousand asset slots total, each of which can contain one of 33 types of material. The efficient way to store this is still as a separate count of each, so we could go up to 256*33 storage here for free (probably capped at 250 to stop it being obvious why), or again up to 65000 of each for another half-gigabyte of storage. (I'm assuming that an insignificant fraction of the 15 million accounts have Fleet Carriers with Bartenders to double their storage)

There are currently gameplay implications for Powerplay for allowing indefinite storage of Goods, and were until about ten days ago implications for indefinite storage of Data, so they might want to keep those limited for that reason. Those two are also partly location-aware, which means they can't just be stored as a count of the type of item, though in most normal cases this won't necessarily be adding a huge amount to the storage requirements.

The only bit of player data which takes up significant size - multiple terabytes across the player base - is going to be the exploration database. Everything else is tiny by comparison and will remain so pretty much whatever Frontier does. Keeping Legacy up with its separate exploration database costs Frontier unimaginably more - though still probably only a few tens of thousands a year, which even now ongoing console sales will cover - than any fiddling around the edges of non-exploration data will, in terms of data storage.


(EDIT: okay, I'm not counting backups and live mirrors to different servers of this data here. Let's say ten dollars a year, then)
 
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place leftover care package contents into a new 'Powerplay rewards bank' where you can transfer them to your material stores as needed. Maybe such a bank can be 'located' on the power megaships - you have to visit one to collect.
I like this! I think a several-step solution would work well: first, combine unclaimed care packages into one single package every Thursday; second, once that "mega-package" grows too large (say, you have more than the inventory limit for ship materials or 50 pieces of an on-foot material) the excess is transferred to the vaults at Powerplay carriers; and third, once in the vault you can trade these materials for what you need and withdraw from the vault using the existing material trading logic at any Powerplay carrier, or simply sell your surplus for credits. Optional fourth step: once the vault surplus is more than 3 months old, it gets auto-sold for credits to keep the warehouse from getting over-stocked.
 
For ship engineering materials, they're stored as a counter per material already, so the ones with a 300 cap must already be using at least a 16-bit integer (which can go up to 65535) and the others would only take an extra byte to promote to that.
Based on that they had "technical problems" with increasing modules storage I would say they use bit-fields for the counters everywhere.
Which means 1 byte can have couple counters parts.
 
Based on that they had "technical problems" with increasing modules storage
"Technical problems" can mean something very different to "it would cost too much to store the data", though.

Module storage is a very different problem anyway - all modules are unique and have multiple properties of their own (where they're stored, module type, engineering including legacy engineering, any discounts applied to the purchase, etc.) so there isn't a compact storage like "you have six beam lasers" possible. They also need to track exactly the same size of information whether the modules are fitted to a ship or in storage at a station somewhere - and there was no practical limit on buying Cutters to use as extra module storage that way.

(No idea what the technical problems were: making sure the interface still worked in weird cases like "someone has stored 500 identical chaff launchers at the same station" and didn't hit things like the care package bug which started this thread feels more likely than anything directly related to the total number of records)
 
Storage space is not the reason FDEV haven't fixed this. The current method of keeping care packages and tracking up to 10 items in each uses more storage than simply merging them into 1 'super' care package (or materials bank) per commander, and the bug is making it worse and costing fdev storage because some of those items would be used and removed from the care packages but cant due to the bug and the poor design of the care package UI.
 
Personally I think this is very easy to resolve. Only reward a random selection of items where the player hasn't hit the storage limit. When a package is rewarded instead of forcing the player to collect it, automatically add it to storage and inform the player of what was added.
 
I don't personally have the bug but manage my care packages, but TBH this is also an issue. Every few care packs I pick up I have to either go to the bartender and sell a bunch of stuff or visit 1, 2 or 3 of the Materials traders and do bad trades just to keep on top of them. It means I'm spending more time trying to manage them than actually doing Power Play activities.

The bar tender is bad enough but at least you can sell those goods but raw, encoded and manufactured mats you can't you just have to be really careful not to fully fill either of these and do bad trades to keep on top of them plus its three stations to visit every couple of care packages. It's absolutely frustrating, maddening and downright unacceptable that not only do they bug if you ignore them but prevent you playing the game just to manage them.... Come on FDev you know this is broken in multiple ways - FIX IT FTLOG!
 
I don't personally have the bug but manage my care packages, but TBH this is also an issue. Every few care packs I pick up I have to either go to the bartender and sell a bunch of stuff or visit 1, 2 or 3 of the Materials traders and do bad trades just to keep on top of them. It means I'm spending more time trying to manage them than actually doing Power Play activities.

The bar tender is bad enough but at least you can sell those goods but raw, encoded and manufactured mats you can't you just have to be really careful not to fully fill either of these and do bad trades to keep on top of them plus its three stations to visit every couple of care packages. It's absolutely frustrating, maddening and downright unacceptable that not only do they bug if you ignore them but prevent you playing the game just to manage them.... Come on FDev you know this is broken in multiple ways - FIX IT FTLOG!
I concur. I did try to manage my mats by trading down for a loss in an attempt to free up some space, but this is just too time-consuming and not worth the hassle.
When the bug hits me, I plan to repledge to my Power, to get rid of all these half-consumed packages, which is a REAL SHAME.
 
The bar tender is bad enough but at least you can sell those goods but raw, encoded and manufactured mats you can't you just have to be really careful not to fully fill either of these and do bad trades to keep on top of them plus its three stations to visit every couple of care packages. It's absolutely frustrating, maddening and downright unacceptable that not only do they bug if you ignore them but prevent you playing the game just to manage them.... Come on FDev you know this is broken in multiple ways - FIX IT FTLOG!

The whole North American continet, at least, can't do a single power play conflict zone because they will not populate the instance. Completely repeatable. Reported, ignored in a series of patches and releases since. Not to mention the multiple aspects of PP gameplay simply turned off and left off since it arrived. While I 100% support them doing things that make the game financially feasible and I have made those purchases myself, it is becoming apparent that they are not prioritizing getting anything much fixed that is released broken or broken later. It's about taking the money and running with it.

This reward interface breaking and it's random resorting are the kind of thing that should be embarassing to leave this long but that doesn't seem to be the case. It is simply not a priority as evidence shows.
 
When will I be allowed to collect my hard earned aid packages? The game crashes when I try to do so! It would be better not to give anything than to create a problem for the player.
 
I have just been hit by the bug.
I decided to unpledge, then pledge back (which gets rid of all packages...), so that I can now collect the packages I earn.
A real shame!
 
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