7Seas Delivery Reliability Improved

[Seven Shikami]

I've traced the root of most of our delivery problems over the last few weeks... we had an EVIL TWIN. I am not making this up.

Here's the longwinded tale of woe and tragedy.

Long time ago, we reported to the Lindens that fish weren't always spinning -- sometimes they'd spin for awhile then stop, or wouldn't spin at all. This bug was in SL itself, introduced around the time of the Havok 4 physics boost.

To find the bug, the Lindens copied our entire home sim of Flotsam Beach over to their test grid, so they could study our spinning lighthouse.

...and in the process, they copied over the 7Seas Item Server. Which was still running and still calling our website asking for fish and purchase delivery requests.

The end result was an evil twin, a Bizarro Flotsam Beach, which was fighting the REAL Flotsam Beach tooth and nail for item requests. We had a safety net in place, so Real Flotsam Beach could re-deliver anything it thought was missed, but the two grids were stealing requests from each other left and right, causing a lot of delivery problems.

So today, we ran some debugging traces, figured out that the two brothers were BOTH trying to get items, and cut off Bizarro Flotsam Beach's database access. The instant we did that deliveries started being nice and smooth.

This, folks, is why I'm extremely hesitant to port the game to the Teen Grid or to OpenSpaces. Any competing grids will cause conflict because we only have one website, one database, one item server... and multiple grids hopping into the mix can result in misdelivery. Like an evil twin on the test grid trying to deliver to normal grid people who don't even exist on the test grid.

Anyway, if you DO lose a nicely rare fish or something you bought from a vendor, as always, contact our customer support agent 7Seas Sass. We need help spreading word about that, especially to non-English fishing communities, so your assistance is appreciated!