2. What gets done to prevent something like this from happening again?
But my guess is Kabam doesn’t bother with question 2 (or possibly question 1 also) whenever there’s a bug.
This appears to have been caused by an update to the data in the game, not a bug. Although this sort of thing should never happen, it does happen (ask Crowdstrike). The process for preventing this type of problem from happening is a bit different from trying to prevent bugs from slipping into the game, as software bugs can typically be tested for, but data pushes can fail in ways normal testing won't detect.
Not an excuse: as I said this sort of thing should never happen. But the fact that it could happen points to the fact that the way data is updated in the game lacks sufficient safeguards, and those safeguards usually cannot simply be inserted into the process in simple ways.
This is not a thing players should have to concern themselves with, but for the purposes of discussion the difference between a bug and a data issue is that "bugs" typically refer to flaws in the software. A data issue happens when the actual data the game uses gets corrupted or flawed in some way. Years ago my company was trying to perform a set of upgrades on a mission critical SAN, and we had issues with upgrades with this particular vendor in the past so I requested that the upgrade be staged in their test labs first with a replica of our set up to verify the process worked, which they did. On the day of the upgrade they uploaded copies of the updated configuration files from the replica test setup to both redundant array controllers and immediately crashed our entire system. How did this happen? Well, the engineer assigned to our update took the updated configuration files, copied their contents, pasted them into Word and then uploaded those files into our systems.
Half the IT people reading this right now are thinking I'm making this up, and the other half are stuck between laughing and cringing, because this is the stupidest thing they've heard all year. But this would be an example of a data error, not a bug.
Hopefully, that was not the cause of the issue yesterday.
Comments
Not an excuse: as I said this sort of thing should never happen. But the fact that it could happen points to the fact that the way data is updated in the game lacks sufficient safeguards, and those safeguards usually cannot simply be inserted into the process in simple ways.
This is not a thing players should have to concern themselves with, but for the purposes of discussion the difference between a bug and a data issue is that "bugs" typically refer to flaws in the software. A data issue happens when the actual data the game uses gets corrupted or flawed in some way. Years ago my company was trying to perform a set of upgrades on a mission critical SAN, and we had issues with upgrades with this particular vendor in the past so I requested that the upgrade be staged in their test labs first with a replica of our set up to verify the process worked, which they did. On the day of the upgrade they uploaded copies of the updated configuration files from the replica test setup to both redundant array controllers and immediately crashed our entire system. How did this happen? Well, the engineer assigned to our update took the updated configuration files, copied their contents, pasted them into Word and then uploaded those files into our systems.
Half the IT people reading this right now are thinking I'm making this up, and the other half are stuck between laughing and cringing, because this is the stupidest thing they've heard all year. But this would be an example of a data error, not a bug.
Hopefully, that was not the cause of the issue yesterday.