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Fuel blocks! (and CCP Soundwaves wildlife safety advice)

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Salaphiel
L'ove
#121 - 2011-12-09 20:37:14 UTC
As someone running about in a WH, I'm in agreement with the rest of the sentiments from WH folks. We had managed to switch over all the fuel we had to fuel blocks with the exception of the month we had in the POS already, which now isn't enough to get us to the deadline. Soon as you allowed us to put fuel blocks in the POS it just made logical sense for any reasonable POS manager to assume that it wouldn't be long before it'd go live. Dec 13th would've been much better and certainly seemed more like what you had in mind with allowing us to put Fuel Blocks in. *sigh*

Maybe CCP is colluding with the goons and their stupid insistence on raising the price of oxygen isotopes which ironically is only annoying our HS POS.

I do, however, appreciate the firm deadline, but I do ask that in the future, you make deadlines a little more transparent much sooner. Like the day you seeded the fuel block BPO would've been a great day for that.

No one plans to fail, some fail to plan.
Innominate
KarmaFleet
Goonswarm Federation
#122 - 2011-12-09 20:37:27 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:

We don't have a workable solution right now that answers all the issues, that's pretty much the problem. Sometimes that's a thing that happens, unfortunately.


You have numerous workable solutions, several of which are in this very thread. You're just taking the lazy way out and dumping the work on the players.
Sizeof Void
Ninja Suicide Squadron
#123 - 2011-12-09 20:39:33 UTC
Karia Sur wrote:
Quote:
or melt my blocks.

i have to admit ive not tried this as i heard someone in local say you cant, but can you reprocess them?

Confirmed. Yes, you can reprocess your fuel blocks into the original fuel components. There are the usual reprocessing losses, depending on the station, standings, and skills.

Now, please stop whining and let the CCP folks enjoy their holidays, too, after what must have been a frantic and stressful past few months.

Happy Holidays, CCP!
Bath Sheeba
Another Success Story
#124 - 2011-12-09 20:39:55 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
OK, so here's what happened.
We knew we needed at least two weeks between Crucible going live and us patching in the change, so people had time to sort out their logistics.


Not what you said in your dev blog.

Quote:

We can't safely do the switch between ~Decembec 17th and ~January 15th due to various key people leaving the country for Christmas, and the need for a clear run-up to the patch.


And you did not know this a month ago?

Quote:

Our original test plan would've seen us squared away weeks ago, but a series of various unforeseen events meant our critical "upgrade test" (requires a spare "full-sized" test server) got repeatedly bumped back in the schedule.


WTF? So you guys knew you were slipping the deadline f'ing weeks ago?
And you said.......NOTHING?

ARGH.

SCREW YOU GUYS.


Quote:
We finally ran the test earlier this week, and the thing we were most anticipating breaking, broke. The fix is relatively straightforward, but it requires us running another upgrade test to confirm that the fix works.

We weren't expecting the second test to be ready until today or Monday, and in the unlikely event that that didn't go smoothly it'd leave way too little time for you all to sort your towers out. Therefore we made the decision to push the deployment of the change back.

As above, once we miss the 14th we can't safely patch for at least a month. Given that we already had a small post-Crucible tidy-up patch scheduled for the 24th, we opted to bundle the fuel switch into that patch rather than running two "serious business" patches (ie, full client/server patch) less than a fortnight apart, because it's safer and causes less overhead.


It's not the way we wanted to do it, but it's the best option we have available to us right now. We're obviously very sorry for the trouble this is causing.



It may not be the way you wanted to do it, but BY YOUR OWN statements, you are saying, F you eve players! Thanks for being prepared, we knew the date was gonna slip, but we chose not to tell you.

Stupid of you guys. Why would you try to **** off the player base and then TELL US YOU did it?

W. T. F.?
CCP Greyscale
C C P
C C P Alliance
#125 - 2011-12-09 20:41:09 UTC
CynoNet Two wrote:
CCP Greyscale wrote:

We don't have a workable solution right now that answers all the issues, that's pretty much the problem. Sometimes that's a thing that happens, unfortunately.


a) Run a script to melt all fuel already added to towers. This will require a bare minimum of QA as it cannot cause towers to go offline, the worst that can happen is that they become overfilled for a few hours until the fuel burns off.
This means that there is no manual correction needed by players in time or ISK
b) Spend the remaining time you have before Jan 24th either sorting a final handover script, or pushing in an extra fuel-block-only bay to towers to cover the switch over.

Voila, fixed with a minimal amount of player intervention.

Can I have your job?


That script involves, in practice, removing all the fuel in towers and then adding new fuel to the towers (you're altering types and quantities, and the final quantities have to be larger because of the number of isotopes and so on in the mix, so it's got to be effectively to be a remove and an add). The worst that happens is that the remove happens but the add doesn't and everything goes offline, and testing this requires an upgrade test which (as we've established) is risky in and of itself and takes a lot of time to prepare.

An extra fuel bay, switching the tower to run on dual fuel types or anything else of that nature requires us to make major changes to the starbase code, which is both risky in and of itself as a major code change, and doubly risky because the starbase code is pretty failure-prone. Plus, making sure that towers ran smoothly when we threw the switch would require another upgrade test; see above.
spookydonut
Caldari Provisions
Caldari State
#126 - 2011-12-09 20:42:29 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
CynoNet Two wrote:
CCP Greyscale wrote:

We don't have a workable solution right now that answers all the issues, that's pretty much the problem. Sometimes that's a thing that happens, unfortunately.


a) Run a script to melt all fuel already added to towers. This will require a bare minimum of QA as it cannot cause towers to go offline, the worst that can happen is that they become overfilled for a few hours until the fuel burns off.
This means that there is no manual correction needed by players in time or ISK
b) Spend the remaining time you have before Jan 24th either sorting a final handover script, or pushing in an extra fuel-block-only bay to towers to cover the switch over.

Voila, fixed with a minimal amount of player intervention.

Can I have your job?


That script involves, in practice, removing all the fuel in towers and then adding new fuel to the towers (you're altering types and quantities, and the final quantities have to be larger because of the number of isotopes and so on in the mix, so it's got to be effectively to be a remove and an add). The worst that happens is that the remove happens but the add doesn't and everything goes offline, and testing this requires an upgrade test which (as we've established) is risky in and of itself and takes a lot of time to prepare.

An extra fuel bay, switching the tower to run on dual fuel types or anything else of that nature requires us to make major changes to the starbase code, which is both risky in and of itself as a major code change, and doubly risky because the starbase code is pretty failure-prone. Plus, making sure that towers ran smoothly when we threw the switch would require another upgrade test; see above.


All I'm hearing is excuses about the amount of effort.
Kismeteer
Bat Country
Pandemic Horde
#127 - 2011-12-09 20:43:04 UTC
Next time you see a massive change in schedule that affect thousands of players, let us know that the schedule is changing. That simple.
Innominate
KarmaFleet
Goonswarm Federation
#128 - 2011-12-09 20:43:06 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:

That script involves, in practice, removing all the fuel in towers and then adding new fuel to the towers (you're altering types and quantities, and the final quantities have to be larger because of the number of isotopes and so on in the mix, so it's got to be effectively to be a remove and an add). The worst that happens is that the remove happens but the add doesn't and everything goes offline, and testing this requires an upgrade test which (as we've established) is risky in and of itself and takes a lot of time to prepare.

An extra fuel bay, switching the tower to run on dual fuel types or anything else of that nature requires us to make major changes to the starbase code, which is both risky in and of itself as a major code change, and doubly risky because the starbase code is pretty failure-prone. Plus, making sure that towers ran smoothly when we threw the switch would require another upgrade test; see above.


tl;dr: We don't want to have to actually do our jobs.
Bloodpetal
Tir Capital Management Group
#129 - 2011-12-09 20:43:24 UTC  |  Edited by: Bloodpetal
How about a checkbox that lets you switch to the new fuel if you're ready?

Would be 2 exclusive sets of code that would run depending on whether the checkbox would go.

Wouldn't require any fudging with the hangar spaces in themselves.

Where I am.
CCP Greyscale
C C P
C C P Alliance
#130 - 2011-12-09 20:45:30 UTC
Bath Sheeba wrote:

WTF? So you guys knew you were slipping the deadline f'ing weeks ago?
And you said.......NOTHING?


The original test plan gave us a huge amount of available slippage time that we could eat up without affecting the schedule in the slightest. Unfortunately we ate up all that slippage time and then about ~5 days more, but those final ~5 days slipped one day at a time. We could've made the call sooner. In retrospect, we obviously should have made the call sooner, but that's only because we know now that we were going to run completely out of time. The question we asked every step of the way was "what decision today is going to cause the lowest amount of user pain". That got us where we are today, where the best decision is definitely to postpone it.
Nylan
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
#131 - 2011-12-09 20:45:38 UTC
Taking the easy way out isn't the best way all the time CCP.

Starbase code is old and crappy.. well it's been this way for years maybe someone should devote some time to it.
Pricy McPricechecker
Science and Trade Institute
Caldari State
#132 - 2011-12-09 20:45:38 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
[quote=CynoNet Two][quote=CCP Greyscale]
An extra fuel bay, switching the tower to run on dual fuel types or anything else of that nature requires us to make major changes to the starbase code, which is both risky in and of itself as a major code change, and doubly risky because the starbase code is pretty failure-prone. Plus, making sure that towers ran smoothly when we threw the switch would require another upgrade test; see above.


Have you considered simply doubling the capacity of fuel bays until the patch, then reverting them afterwards? That way we can all fuel block up our POS and otherwise still fuel them as normal until the patch comes along, and doing this is clearly not a big technical problem because you've already increased their capacity once.
DeLaBu
CAF Industries
#133 - 2011-12-09 20:45:45 UTC
CynoNet Two wrote:
CCP Greyscale wrote:

We don't have a workable solution right now that answers all the issues, that's pretty much the problem. Sometimes that's a thing that happens, unfortunately.


a) Run a script to melt all fuelblocks already inside towers back into their materials. This will require a bare minimum of QA as it cannot cause towers to go offline. The worst that can happen is that they don't melt and you try again the next day, or the towers become overfilled for a few hours until the fuel burns off. Or they turn into Rifters, whatever.

b) Spend the remaining time you have before Jan 24th either sorting a final handover script, or pushing in an extra fuel-block-only bay to towers to cover the switch over.

Voila, fixed with a minimal amount of player intervention.

Can I have your job?


Sigh
SmartBird
Fish Curtains
#134 - 2011-12-09 20:47:33 UTC
CCP Greyscale wrote:
MadMuppet wrote:
CCP - recommendation: Make fuel bricks reprocess to their component parts until the 24th to try and offset this mess.

-Mad


Fuel blocks should already reprocess to their component parts, although only in multiples of 40.


Utter bull***. Have jumped 2 months of fuel from 16 POS's to hisec. Bought BPOs and researched them and made worthless blocks for 2 weeks after patch.

POSes are now gonna run out of fuel 4 days after original published date.

Now your saying we train the reprossing skills in time to fix your mess to put them back to the normal way? That doesn't work here.

I use 2 accounts to deal with the POSes which aren't very much fun anyway. You have just made it even worse for organized POS owners and this is the final straw for me I'm afraid CCP.

Can't be F' ed even pulling the POSes down. Good luck to them players. I'm out.

Don't normally post in forums. But here's feedback from someone who has been playing for 4 years, time to move on.

Thanks all you players who made my time playing EVE a fun experience.
(Tinkering with the fuel market and you'll make good isk right now it seems!!!)

And CCP.
-2 accounts
Kazanir
Goonbine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles
Goonswarm Federation
#135 - 2011-12-09 20:48:29 UTC
In light of the massive amount of effort being required from the playerbase by CCP's development choices, perhaps it would have been much better for you to not announce a "tentative 2 week changeover" date and then, 1.5 weeks after Crucible's launch, announce that you are moving it back...another 6 weeks?

You guys have painted yourself into a corner that is full of the rage of POS managers -- already one of the most notoriously thankless and annoying parts of EVE. You owed it to this section of your playerbase to treat their part of the game slightly more carefully, rather than busting out the snark with, "Sometimes this is a thing that happens."

Grr, I say. Grr.
CCP Greyscale
C C P
C C P Alliance
#136 - 2011-12-09 20:49:58 UTC  |  Edited by: CCP Greyscale
spookydonut wrote:

All I'm hearing is excuses about the amount of effort.


Then I'm sorry, because we're having an irreconcilable communication breakdown. From our point of view this decision is concerned pretty much exclusively with risk, not effort.

Pricy McPricechecker wrote:
Have you considered simply doubling the capacity of fuel bays until the patch, then reverting them afterwards? That way we can all fuel block up our POS and otherwise still fuel them as normal until the patch comes along, and doing this is clearly not a big technical problem because you've already increased their capacity once.


Actually, no, and that's a pretty reasonable suggestion. I would assume for now that it's too late to get this in under the wire, but I'll ask about it at least. Please understand that this is 95% likely to be too late at this point though.

Kazanir wrote:
You owed it to this section of your playerbase to treat their part of the game slightly more carefully, rather than busting out the snark with, "Sometimes this is a thing that happens."


That's not snark, it's resignation. One of the things I've learned over the years is that sometimes there's nothing right now you can do to fix the situation, however much you'd like to. The only practical way to deal with this in the long run is to be able to say "it is what it is" and get on with something that you can make better.
Nylan
Center for Advanced Studies
Gallente Federation
#137 - 2011-12-09 20:53:25 UTC
If the risk is because of a poorly written pos code base then it does come down to effort/money/man hours to fix it.
Crias Taylor
Aliastra
Gallente Federation
#138 - 2011-12-09 20:54:09 UTC  |  Edited by: Crias Taylor
Why not just use the lowest fuel time left on the fuel tab of the pos manager? Vaporize what's in the fuel now and add in the blocks. Your fuel isn't balanced too bad. 

This should be a lot easier math and I'm ok with you assuming max CPU and max grid usage to ease the math even further.
Innominate
KarmaFleet
Goonswarm Federation
#139 - 2011-12-09 20:55:37 UTC  |  Edited by: Innominate
CCP Greyscale wrote:

Then I'm sorry, because we're having an irreconcilable communication breakdown. From our point of view this decision is concerned pretty much exclusively with risk, not effort.


Ok so now it's pushed back. You have time to do it right. You've put all of the players in the position of having to completely rethink their fueling plans to push the date back a month. Now that you've failed to pull off the quick option, making the players do the work, take the time to do it right.
Thalen Draganos
Black Sun Enclave
#140 - 2011-12-09 20:57:08 UTC
I don't need to know about how to or not to run a POS or anything like that to see you CCP dudes saying nothing more than, "BUT GUUUUUUUUUYS!! We wanna go see our mommies. We don't wanna do it nooooooww." or my personal favorite that I hear from my kids, "....but I don't care if I made a mess. I don't wanna clean up the mess daddy. I don't wanna and you can't make me!!"

Grow up you whinning babies and get your homework done or Santa might take your unwrapped presents back. How would you feel then huh?