[Suggestion] Villagers keep trade when eggified

EMC has a bug with entities disappearing and many players are very upset about having good villagers disappearing. Horses keep stats; animals have no stats to keep. Villagers, however, are a lost cause. There's no way to keep them safe: when they go, they go.

I'm suggesting a temporary solution to allow villagers to keep trades when eggified. Players will be able to eggify their villagers to keep them safe until the bug is resolved. This is a game-breaking feature for a lot of people.

It's important that EMC implements a safety feature until the development team can reach a permanent solution.

~Penguin

What if we already lost our villagers?

All for this. Lots of work goes into good villagers.

Well... great

OK Chickeneer, I don't want to rain on your parade but I'll tell you what I till my developers "So since it's hard or will take time, we're not going to do the right thing?"

To be quite candid "Not really an easy way to do this" is lazy programming. I don't know how long or what experience you have developing but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. However to put the burden upon the your users with a statement such as "I am not wholly convinced that this is a new issue" or "Until someone gives a reliable way to either reproduce, or consistent pattern of when this happens - we literally cannot fix it" is a bit ridiculous . Especially with all the comments in the blogs and in game talk about this issue. It's not the responsibility of the end users to troubleshoot. It's an issue or you wouldn't have even acknowledged it in this blog. The dev team has a dev environment and this is what Dev, Test, and [final] QA environments are for.

Sometimes programming takes time and is hard, troubleshooting an issue without the steps to reproduce is even harder. But not impossible. I think most people are getting frustrate because all we're hearing is "not easy..." or "looking into it" What troubleshooting has the dev team done? This is what people want to hear even if it's not a solution. Show some progress or roll back your app to the latest working release. How about the staff (dev and non-dev) attempt to replicate the issue? Are you telling us that no staff has lost anything? If so maybe you should start there and find out why the staff hasn't been affected (if it's the case).

I made a suggestion early in this thread for a possible temporary fix (other than rolling back to an earlier release):

Your Java app is back-ended by MySQL DB, use it. And I know that the app is running some logic/procedure(s) when one logs in. Start tracking.

I don't mean to hurt people's feelings (and I apologize if I did) but someone needs to be candid. You do realize that you're offering a service and right now that service is not available.

I'm willing to be a guinea pig but without the ability to step through code (reason why troubleshooting is done on the development side), I can only follow the suggestions the dev team gives us to troubleshoot the issue. I haven't seen any ideas for us members help troubleshoot the issue other than "after the fact" Eggify. You guys have at your disposal huge base of UAT (players/members) that can help. Tell us what we can do.

Chickeneer: “Not really an easy way to do this... at all.”
AjaxCrypto: I don’t care how hard it is. How hard something is should never be used as an excuse for not fixing an issue.
Chickeneer: “I am not wholly convinced that this is a new issue.”
AjaxCrypto: I don’t care if it’s a new or old issue. It is an issue that is getting worse.
Chickeneer: “Until someone gives a reliable way to either reproduce, or consistent pattern of when this happens - we literally cannot fix it”.
AjaxCrypto: Since when is it the customer’s responsibility to QA an application? If you cannot fix it, then you are not a developer.

You could all rant about chickeneer, but what he says is more than valid.

Even if he won't do it because it'll be too complicated, he and his programming ARE NOT LAZY!!!!!!
There are numerous other more important things the dev team needs itself to concern with. The duty of a developer is to set priorities, which he did correctly.

Also, if it takes a lot of time, why bother? After all, it's a temporary solution. If chickeneer finishes the gix, the main bug may be already solved or almost solved. That doesn't give much motivation. Would you like that?

And remember:
THE DEV TEAM IS IN NO WAY DELIVERING A SERVICE TO YOU, THEY DON'T EVEN GET PAID AT ALL!!!!!
Also, if you think you can do it better, APPLY TO BE A DEVELOPER THEN!!!

I apologize if this sounds rude to you, but I find it ridiculous how chickeneer is treated here

You are confusing programming with bug fixing. Programming is easy. If I can describe/convey an idea, I can program it. Bug fixing requires a bug. If it is not able to be reproduced, then there is a chance there is not a bug. Bug hunting without a bug in front of your eyes is very difficult. You can't just scroll through code until you realize that you forgot a semicolon and bam you are done. I can write a complex program framework in an hour. It will take me a few more hours to work out all the kinks in it, and that it while completely knowing what the end result should be, and with a basic idea of how it should happen. Now imagine that the program I made is having problem by someone using it, but they can't reproduce what is happening, and I don't have too much of a clue where to start. It is not easy.

Also, just because something appears to occur more often now than before, doesn't mean that its actual chance of occurrence is rising. All that means is that it occurred more often than usual. North Carolina had a much higher amount of shark attacks this year, but that doesn't mean that sharks are more likely to attack people.

This bug is almost certainly not related to logging off, it is likely related to chunk loading. If any sort of database workaround were to be created, it would be so ridiculously resource intensive that out performance rates would be similar to hosting EMC on a Raspberry Pi.

If it is a Mojang bug, it may not be worth fixing yet. Two weeks worth of bug fixing right now might be a month worth of extra reworking later when 1.9 rolls out (which is supposed to be soon). The bug might be gone when 1.9 is implemented.

*retreats back to the shadows*

Sigh. .lost about 15 (good trade) villagers from my town res... Why entities in town are vanishing ?

I'm really glad that your developers have so much free time they can spend an unlimited amount of time chasing down unrepeatable bugs or making new features that are not prioritized by the business. You're lucky indeed.

Storing trade data in an egg and then persisting that through childhood to adulthood sounds like about the same amount of work as a nice chunk of land claiming or 3 new mini bosses. I really wouldn't want chickeneer to spend his efforts on that if it means pushing back land claiming. It's not a matter of laziness, it's a matter of serving us better and following agreed upon priorities.

Just because Minecraft uses a SQL based database, doesn't mean that any of the data stored in there is very useful in troubleshooting. Minecraft is made to persist the current, live world, not report on the conditions in the past. I'm sure it's pretty bare minimum in there for logging. "You can't bleed a stone."

As far as tracking and additional debugging, which of the next 500 villagers to load will vanish? How do you track them without loading the chunk? Should we be watching the EMC code, or default minecraft code? The more information gathered by the community, the better they can target scenarios.

The responsibility of QA/UAT is on everyone here. This is one unique server that supports over 75000 free loaders. Thats just the type of server we choose to play on and it means that to create this giant community we have to share the burden of supporting the custom code and testing for issues occasionally. This isn't the type of business that would let Aikar quit his day job or hire on an additional team of QA people or more developers. They do their very best with the limited resources they have.

As far as fixing the real issue of villagers vanishing. Help recreate the issue in a different environment. Use a different res, turn off move, item:drop, kill and animal damage or go to frontier/waste and try there. I lost 2 this week, and I really have no clue what might of caused it.

In wondering if this isn't related to the chunk loading bug that gives the appearance of a client side visual bug, which at this point I'm almost 100% certain that that's not the issue at all just one of the side effects. Seeing as I have never had that problem until seeing this problem becoming common place. Maybe that helps? I don't know.

OK I didn't want to get into an argument here but trying to offer help. I'm not going to sugar coat or PC anything. When there's an issue, it's not the time to Argue. As for the quote above, not doing anything and throwing your hands up in the air (as his statements ascertains to "...98% will not be happening...we literally cannot fix it") is quitting. It's that easy.

What? If "...he won't do it ..." what would you call that? A Solution? No.

Huh? The duty of a developer is not to set priorities but to code what they have been given or pulled from the Task board. Priorities are set by the project manager/product owner/manager or on occasions the lead developer. His work ethic and intestinal fortitude (perseverance - the ability to see things through, do the job regardless of the complexity) comes to question with statements like he made.

So let me ask you this (maybe you'll remember this fable). If there's a hole in the dike and the surrounding land is flooding, should you work on why the dike failed or patch (temporary solution) the hole, going back later to fix the failure?

Be they paid or not, they are delivering a paid service. Some us actually pay to support Aikar, Empire minecraft, and his dev team. Secondly, yelling (all caps) is showing a lack of respect and against the rules. We all can have differences of opinions without sinking to the level of yelling, wouldn't you agree?

I didn't say it was due to logging on or off. It's a suggestion/band-aid to occur during logons and log offs. I know it's not easy. Development isn't always about unicorns and rainbows. You can't always be developing the easy or fun stuff. And yes, at times it can be time consuming and frustrating task to do. But do you just give up? Let another developer do it? No you don't. You drive on. I don't know many developers that enjoy writing documentation, white papers, coding a class that another developer will use and not getting the recognition, working
through bugs, or explaining code (how a feature works) to non-techies. It's a necessary "evil" that developers IRL deal with on a daily basis.

It all has to do about customer support, not making excuses.

In my 35+ years of development (yea I'm ancient and remember punch cards ), I have troubleshot third party apps and gave solution to the vendor, I have troubleshot other developers code (sometimes helping/finding a solution, other times not), and most importantly troubleshot my own code. No one is perfect and crud happens.

Sorry but I hope you're not a developer (or calling yourself one). Dev, Test, QA are environments. What you are talking about is Production [environment] and UAT/QA'ing should not be done in Production environments. You're just asking for trouble. However there is no QA environment (please correct me if I'm wrong) to do UAT for normal (non-developers) to do testing on...you want non-developers to do the testing because they think different than developers and will do something you never thought or or find a data condition you didn't think of.

Whoa! "...75,000 free loaders..." Wrong, just wrong *shaking head and rolling eyes*
I see that you're a Diamond supporter. Are you paying for it or using a voucher? Those of us who decided to pay for accounts are not free loaders but supporters of Empire Mincraft, Aikar, and his dev team. To call anyone on this site a freeloader without any knowledge of that person is called ignorance (unawareness of, unconsciousness of, unfamiliarity with, inexperience with, lack of knowledge about, lack of information about).

I'm willing to help as I stated in this thread and the thread in Help and Support. I don't need to see code or not, just let me experiment/test using Aikar and the Dev team's suggestions. It's their head and noses that are in the code and have "code familiarly." I'm pretty sure there's more members [than I] that would help but don't have the "big picture" and need suggestions from the dev team. Give us users some guidance, things to test, etc. Just ask us.

First of all, sorry for my reaction this morning.

Would you start to program something of which you know the probability of getting stuck in the middle of the process is quite high? I wouldn't personally.

I'm afraid I'm not getting your point here.

I formulated that bit wrong. What I was getting at, is that programming this is quite useless unless the main fix is years and years away. I know Empires/Landclaiming and Dragon Tombs are way more important than this now, and so thought chickeneer.

You're right on that one, but as said before there are more important things that need greater attention.

What you're paying for, is the upkeep of all the servers of Empire Minecraft and costs to 3rd party companies. You can verify that on the supporter page. The dev team belongs to neither of those, so no, you're not paying for development.

Also, it doesn't matter if you're supporter or not, everyone can benefit from everything the dev team makes, so they're not delivering a paid service either.

Again, forgive me for my reaction. That was stupid of me.

Krysyy, It's great to hear that a patch to fix it temporary had been deployed.

I understand that finding the the steps to reproduce (repeating scenario) is difficult but is there any help/guidance from from the staff asking us users to do something (e.g. test, do these steps, etc)? I have no problem in being a guinea pig ,having me do mundane tasks, or trying something where I might lose more animals/villagers. We're all just looking for the solution or (as you mentioned) a temporary patch.

Does this temporary patch fix the disappearing animals and villagers? Is there somewhere to go to get the specifics?

And thank you for giving us the link to give our details to you all.

I know nothing of code but answer this
So, you are saying that it would take a long time and is difficult.... how come we can store data with horses? If you took the time and coded it then why can't we edit that code?

Hey nltimv,

Not a problem...we just have differences of opinions, experiences, etc. I don't think any less of you (and I hope you of me)...it's life. You know it's like toe-mote-toe ta-mate-toe

We're all just frustrated (myself too). In that I apologize for not being PC and too candid with my opinions. I just think that the priorities are out of order. In my opinion, enhancements and new features (when you have a non-recoverable bug....we're not getting our lost animals/villages back) should be a higher priority. But Aikar and his team are the gate keepers and I'll gracefully bow out until asked.

Thank you Krysyy for the update. It helps sooth the frustration....not all...but a bit.