Statement on the Sept. 28th Update Rollback

Hello everyone,

As you know, we had to roll back out recent live update, the Fixer Delta, due to an unexpected wipe of the progress of most player quests from questbooks.

You all deserve to know what happened and we wish to share in the light of transparency.

During the creation of this update, a request was made to replace all instances of double-spaces in quest dialogue to single-spaces for gamewide consistency. Normally, we fix these sorts of things manually, but there were thousands of quests and dialogue with this old setup; fixing it manually was not an option. Thus, we ran a game-wide update to fix them at once.

Unbeknownst to most of the team in that moment, this flagged about 5,000 quests as "modified". When a quest is "modified", it is deleted from questbooks as part of the delta process to avoid issues. Usually, this occurs when large changes happen such as re-ordering the steps of the quest. In this case, it occurred because the visible 'steps' were altered - something that was thought inconsequential.

When the delta (update) was applied, this resulted in over 80,000 of in-progress quests being removed from player questbooks - deleted entirely.

What does this mean for the future?

Since we were able to discover the exact source, we are also able to fix the issue and will be able to safely apply the delta soon - hopefully this coming Tuesday.

To avoid something like this from ever happening again, we are updating our processes and procedures and adding an automated check to send a warning to all developers if a large amount of quests are marked as modified.

Thank you for all your patience and understanding. We deeply apologize again for the service interruption. We hope to get the delta out to you all soon.

Thank you for playing Istaria,
Istaria Development Team