What's shard lock?

Well, so I want to say first that shard lock is kind of a community word. We didn't come up with this, actually. But the way we've architected Star Citizen, even though it's an MMO, we operate it from an ops side of things like a matchmade game. When you come in and you pick a shard, or you shard hop to one of your friends, you're just getting one of the shards that's currently running, right? And there's the process of bringing your character and unstowing it into the shard, and then allowing you to unstow items from your inventory down into the shard, and putting it back up there and getting out of there, right? It's kind of our attempt at not applying a classic MMO server setup to Star Citizen, where you would create your character on a server which then needs to run at all times, that when it's low population we need to consolidate, that we need to do character transfers or character renames, this typical kind of MMO grid system, right? It's a company desire to not do that pattern and to instead keep it fluid like it is now. So shard lock is a little bit of a price to pay for that. If you have any movement between shards, your character will need to stay in the shard until the hybrid decides that you're properly disconnected, that you've been gone or that you're coming back or not, and then move you back up. Now, in 4.8, we did run into some issues for some players. In this case, it was caused by an infrastructure failure, a small knock-on from a change that we made as part of Imprint. We track where you are with what we call the stow context. And so for the entities that we care about, because we don't care about every entity, and your player entity is definitely one we care about, we track where it is in the game world using your stow context. So are you stowed in the global inventory? And in what inventory are you stowed? Or are you unstowed in a shard? And if so, in which shard? The problem that some characters ran into is that some players are not very patient with the system when they go back to the main menu. And so they would go back to the main menu and it says, oh, your character's still in the shard, right? Or they would kill the client. Sometimes they do that. Kill the client, come back in, and then, oh, your character's still in the shard. I'm shard locked. Character repair. Well, the character repair in that case is the one that would cause the problem, where now the player would never get stowed, because the repair would try to repair your character. Anyway, there's a bug there that made it so that your character cannot be stowed. And so these players were shard locked. Some others ran into another condition. It was a fairly small subset of players overall that got into that situation, but it took us a while to identify the root cause, and that fix has been deployed. But I just wanted to mention that shard lock in and of itself isn't a bad thing. It's what enables us to have the flexibility to bring you into another shard kind of transparently, but we need to wait for the process to finish on your current shard before we can move you up, right? Now, we are in the process of putting in place active monitoring for players that get unstowed in a shard and stay there for a long period of time, so that we can attempt self-corrective actions if we run into that condition again, so that we don't need to chase the actual source. We can actually get some self-healing in place. But I just wanted to touch on what shard lock is and why it's kind of normal, and that it's better to be a little bit patient with it than to jump to character repair right away.