Chad McKinney · Developer

Well, it's an entertaining bug that's happening. The root of the issue is that the persistent data, the persistent loadout for players, is getting wiped out, and effectively the body is getting detached. And when that happens, you end up spawning as a little white golf ball and bounce around. This is not the first time it's happened, but it does surface from time to time from similar root issues. And in this particular case, it got out in 3.0 and started happening to a lot of people. And we weren't entirely sure what was causing it this time. After some investigation from QA and from our LiveOps guys, it looks like they got a solid repro for it, which is: in a heavy server, making changes in the Personal Manager app was ending up sending incomplete or missing data to the persistence database, which was causing this kind of corruption. This is one of those situations where obviously we did a ton of QA and bug fixing in persistence before we went out and we just didn't see this at all. I fixed a lot of persistence bugs and this was not one of them that even came in. And the reason why it was showing up in live and not for us is because of the much heavier traffic and performance issues at scale. And so we were able to find, thankfully, again with some hard work from QA, some reliable repro steps. And they were able to reproduce it by having people on the server and then also doing some fast swapping in and out of mobiGlas, applying changes in PMA, and doing this kind of whirling dervish act, you could eventually arrive at this white ball.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

Now, you said it wasn't seen in Evocati.

Chad McKinney · Developer

It was seen in Evocati. Too infrequently for us to find the source for it.

Jared Huckaby · Host, Community

This was one of those great moments where it's always important to remember that every Star Citizen environment, whether it's the Evocati or the PTU or even our live alpha environment, is still a testing environment. They're all testing. And people are like, why did you push 3.0? Because some things we knew we wouldn't be able to track down until we got this out to as many people as humanly possible. And it wasn't until we got it out to everybody, and started seeing the hammering that can only occur when everybody is in there, that we were able to actually track this down.