Your Character data may be damaged.

[Kotomo]

I am posting this in other FFXI forums. I am probably being rash, but I feel it's a pretty serious issue, even if it is only happening to a few people. I know I am not the only one. So I am essentially making a call to Square Enix in the best way I know how, and I want to let the community know of this problem.

http://kotomo.net/pics/ffxi_3202.jpg

“Error code: FFXI-3202, Your character data may be damaged. Please contact PlayOnline support services.” That is the message I get when I lagged into oblivion on a “Downloading Data” screen when exiting my mog house in Whitegate. I will admit that when I noticed that the “Downloading Data” screen began to hang for longer than usual I got impatient and crashed my client to try reseting my character and logging back in. Of course that did not work. This happened on a Sunday night so I had to wait for the next day to call. Before I called, I had found this post: Your character data may be damaged. the only post that I have been able to find through Google. So reading what one other person had talked about, I knew when calling the only thing that could be done was to report the problem and have them send out a report to the developers who are going to fix the problem. Well that's understandable, someone probably has to change some value in a table in a database so I can log back in. How long does it take? Well no one can give me any estimated time at all.

What is truly disconcerting is knowing the problem is completely out of my control and no one I can talk to on the phone has any power or knowledge to remedy the problem nor can they give me an estimated time. One PlayOnline representative I talked to said that this a rare problem and other Final Fantasy XI players who have posted about this have said the same thing. It feels like there is no set policy in place to solve the problem in a timely manner. It also feels like that the problem can be handled in a similar matter to Account and Game Data recovery that Square Enix offers if your account and/or character are accessed by an unauthorized third party: FINAL FANTASY XI Official Web Site That gives an estimated time of one week for Game Data recovery, no one can give me any estimated time on this problem. TheGrandMom of the Dreams in Vana'diel forums has been waiting close to 3 weeks as of this post.

I feel there needs to be a fail safe put into place, either something automatic, or something a PlayOnline representative can fix for you over the phone.

(I really like computers, I work at a computer repair shop and I know what I'm doing when it comes to building and setting up machines. I am also in college for Computer Networking Security. Despite all of this I am by no means an expert on how MMORPG servers are actually set up or even what the best configuration is. I am merely guessing based on how it seems the game is set up to run.).

Here's how I "think" the server structure is set up for FFXI. Each zone is a different server, either a virtual box or physical machine in a rack, does not really matter. When you first log in and go the title screen you are connecting to a lobby server, a server separate from all the areas. Then when you pick your character, the lobby server takes the last area you were logged in at that it remembers from when you logged out(lets say Whitegate) and looks for your character on the Whitegate server. If the Whitegate server also has the same record from when you last logged out, then all is good and it loads your character. When you zone, the Whitegate server removes it's record of your character being logged in on that point and reports to the lobby server that your character is moving to so-and-so next area. The lobby server then sets you up at the proper spawn point and everything is hunky dory. If, for whatever reason, this synchronize and acknowledge transmission gets interrupted, then the lobby server remembers your character still logged in on the Whitegate server while the Whitegate server says your character is not. Simply put, the lobby server that talks to the client software on your computer, does not know where your character is and therefore can't log in that character.

For a fail safe I feel there should be something you can do automatically or to call in and have it done. When you get the error message: FFXI-3202, you should be able to select an option that might sound like this: "Search for last known record of your character?" And then Mr. Lobby server should be able to see a backup of your character being logged in before you went and zoned into oblivion. This of course probably has huge security risks involved and other problems that may arise from it. For calling in, a representative should have the power to do somewhat of a simple roll back. They of course must ask for your credentials for security reasons and then have somewhat of an automatic "reset button" that rolls your character back by a few minutes. I could see problems with that where people might want to roll it back further because they might have dropped something, or want more gil back or something to undermine the system of the game. Of course an idea to prevent that would be that a representative is only allowed to do it if the account is reporting that a character is in limbo. For example, your character gets stuck between zones, a representative brings up your account and finds that one of the characters is stuck because the servers are reporting that they cannot find the character. This does not even have to be handled by a customer service representative. It could also be done by a select few from the development team or others who manage the servers, to go through and handle cases for Account and Game Data recovery, and resetting characters in this situation.

To sum everything up, I am very concerned because this is all out of my hands and I do not have any estimated time of when the problem will be fixed. I feel it could be solved faster than it is taking already. However, I do not claim to know anything about managing servers for an MMORPG and let alone developing one and maintaining one. It would be wonderful if Square Enix or anyone could enlighten me as to why it takes as long as it does to roll back or recover characters from this situation.


This is also posted in my blog that I never update: Kotomo’s FFXI adventures

Update: It's been 2 weeks as of this post, still don't have my character. Does not seem like I will ever get it back considering TheGrandMom of Dreams of Vana'Diel has also yet to get her's backs. I have also filled out a complaint through Better Business Bureau and eConsumer.gov to see if that will do anything.

[Nadrojj]

Not gonna lie, i stopped reading after the blue text you posted. Can someone give me fucking cliff notes of this shit?

[Gwylan]

Not gonna lie, i stopped reading after the blue text you posted. Can someone give me fucking cliff notes of this shit?

Me too -.-

[Kincard]

Cliff notes:

He tried to zone, but long ass download time so he force-crashed his game, couldn't log back in and his character data is corrupted or something. It's been two weeks and he doesn't expect to get his character back. The rest of the post is a "I hope they get this fix" kinda thing.

Sorry to hear this happened to you OP, certainly puts a scare.

[Kotomo]

Yeah, was going to cliff note, then Blue Gartr decided to time out for me.

Not really sure what I can do beyond what I have done, and simply calling them on a regular basis which truly won't get me anywhere.

[EternalSnow]

Aww well that sucks. I hope ya get it fixed dud. : )

[bungiefan]

Your character data may be damaged.

TheGrandMom has been having this problem with her main character for a month. SE doesn't fix this quickly. Good luck getting it resolved.

[Kotomo]

Yeah, that's the first and only post I found about it when it happened to me 2 weeks ago. Hence why I'm spreading this around, to simply get more attention about it.

[Zekyr]

I've had minimal tasking with such a huge game like FFXI, but have worked on server-side shit for other games and a lot of what you're theorizing isn't probably happening and isn't feasible. What it more sounds like is you basically did the IP equivalent of pulling a memory card out of a system while it's being written to, whether by fault of your own or your connection.

You probably indeed have damaged character data, that has invalid data such as having an invalid position/zone/whatever. It could have been updating your position to a new zone, or something as miniscule, and something errored that caused it to write invalid data, like setting your zone to something that doesn't exist.

I've had something similar happen without the network affecting it, FFXI was trying to load up from POL, lagged for 15 minutes, so I tried to end the process, froze the computer, restarted, and it had wiped my MFT. Had to run data recovery for weeks and reformat the whole drive because I ended the process when it was writing shit.

Not saying this is your fault, but the force crash is highly possible that it caused the corruption. If it was hanging at the downloading data screen, which it does sometimes, it will eventually R0 out and disconnect gracefully back for you if you let it. You know how long it takes when you R0 for it to drop to 0% and finally DC. But that's kinda bleh programming on their end.

Good luck getting them to fix your character, I don't know if there's anything they can do to prevent this, though I'd expect with an entire development team they'd be able to think of something much better than someone with my limited experience can think up.

[Kotomo]

I've had minimal tasking with such a huge game like FFXI, but have worked on server-side shit for other games and a lot of what you're theorizing isn't probably happening and isn't feasible. What it more sounds like is you basically did the IP equivalent of pulling a memory card out of a system while it's being written to, whether by fault of your own or your connection.

You probably indeed have damaged character data, that has invalid data such as having an invalid position/zone/whatever. It could have been updating your position to a new zone, or something as miniscule, and something errored that caused it to write invalid data, like setting your zone to something that doesn't exist.

I've had something similar happen without the network affecting it, FFXI was trying to load up from POL, lagged for 15 minutes, so I tried to end the process, froze the computer, restarted, and it had wiped my MFT. Had to run data recovery for weeks and reformat the whole drive because I ended the process when it was writing shit.

Not saying this is your fault, but the force crash is highly possible that it caused the corruption. If it was hanging at the downloading data screen, which it does sometimes, it will eventually R0 out and disconnect gracefully back for you if you let it. You know how long it takes when you R0 for it to drop to 0% and finally DC. But that's kinda bleh programming on their end.

Good luck getting them to fix your character, I don't know if there's anything they can do to prevent this, though I'd expect with an entire development team they'd be able to think of something much better than someone with my limited experience can think up.

What you've said makes a lot of sense. It Helps to better understand my situation. I was impatient at the time it happened so it is of course mostly my own fault. It's just really frustrating not hearing something like that from them, and not knowing why it takes longer than a week or so to fix.

This frustration and anger is starting to get to me >_>

[Kincard]

Personally I think SE should just restore his character though, because it'd be easy for them to do so given that character data is stored server-side. Back when this happened with games like PSO, you couldn't do anything about it because the character was on your memory card.

[ReizanRagnarok]

OP, do you happen to play on 360? a friend of mine
had the same problem on both of his accounts, and hasn't been able to log on his main in about 12 days, and his secondary account was corrupted last night.

[Spekkio]

Personally I think SE should just restore his character though, because it'd be easy for them to do so given that character data is stored server-side. Back when this happened with games like PSO, you couldn't do anything about it because the character was on your memory card.

this sounds like the obvious and lazy solution. if the data is corrupt, just replace it with the last known good copy. they already have the channels to replace a character with the last copy before it was looted, so why not use it in this case as long as the corruption is not repeatable so as to be exploitable.

[Seibar]

OP, do you happen to play on 360? a friend of mine
had the same problem on both of his accounts, and hasn't been able to log on his main in about 12 days, and his secondary account was corrupted last night.

something fishy going on with the 360?

Never heard of this problem myself, hope all your toons get restored.

[Nadrojj]

Thanks for the cliff notes, I can't stand to read something that long unless it involves dragons or boobs.

That sucks about your character getting damaged like that. I guess next time I get stuck loading I'll just let it sit there, instead of pulling the plug out of my PS2 lol.

[Kotomo]

Nah, I play on PC. That also sucks about what's going on with your friends 360.

[Kohan]

That sucks about your character getting damaged like that. I guess next time I get stuck loading I'll just let it sit there, instead of pulling the plug out of my PS2 lol.

Instead of any of these things, I'd recommend that you simply disconnect your ethernet cable when this happens. As long as the client has not frozen up, it should inevitably time out.

It's the same sort of work-around people used in the days of PSO BSODs, and it makes perfect sense from a networking standpoint, as well. You're cutting communication with the server, it realizes you're a dropped connection, and if all goes well, it should react like you'd gone through a normal D/C, not harming any of your data.

[Emirii]

Thats why I never force DC my game, and always log out properly. I've heard of people loosing some gil and items this way. I hope everything turns out good for you, Good luck to you

[Zosi]

In all of that long-ass post, I don't see you mention that you called a GM. Did you?

Edit: In case it's not clear why I ask... the people you talk to on the phones are NOT GMs. They don't generally handle in-game situations, it's not their job. It's like you called up the fire department and asked them to find your stolen car.

[ringthree]

Yeah, was going to cliff note, then Blue Gartr decided to time out for me.

Not really sure what I can do beyond what I have done, and simply calling them on a regular basis which truly won't get me anywhere.

Umm, have you tried call SE back? I did not read that mammoth post, but skimming it it just looked like you gave up after a call or two.

Why would you contact the BBB or any other external agency about this? That is kind of retarded.