I could not restrain myself, so I will give you my opinion on this. You won't like it.

What is this all about? We had a inventory code rewrite. A bug was left in the code. That is to be expected and it will not be the last bug. It will most probably not even be the last money making bug.

The code runs on a public server, so people will use it and find the bug. So far so good. Because it is a public server, you will not only have your role playing friends trying the code but the complete mix of people who play with very different intentions. The roleplayers are the people who you want to play with. But there will always be the people who only play for the thrill of advancing their characters and even those who play to find and exploit bugs. They will always be here and it is completely wasted emotions if you feel hurt by their doings. Live with it. They will stay here longer than you.
And by the way, they are the best bug hunters, so you even want to keep them as testers. This is the way it is done in the security industry all the time.

Now a money making bug has been found and exploited. As I said before that is neither surprising nor will it be the last time. What are the consequences? Lets look at what you can do with all the money: You can buy training but only if you have the necessary progress points, so you have solved only half of the problem. You may have billions of Tria but it won't help you much. Oh, you could buy a guild house. Well, that is another thing only half thought through and a problem I better not go into now. Probably the worst thing you can do with all the money is ruin the market for the few things that are traded in game. But that will equalize itself fast after the bug has been fixed. It is only a small shock for an economy that hardly was balanced in the past and will not be for a long time to come. So what is the point of all this excitement? Why even bother with a few cheaters?

Now how is this problem handled? The server is shut down for fixing. That is surely the right thing(TM) to do. We are told, that there is a sure way to find the cheaters and that their accounts will be deleted. Well, this sounds like overreacting to me. A cheater will have a new account in no time and if this is his or her main intention in the game the deletion of the old account will only be a minor nuisance. If the way to determine cheaters is not absolutely foolproof and you cannot really separate them from people who found the bug and maybe never noticed, you will hurt only the people who you punish wrongly. Only think about all the guilds where large sums of money are currently collected for the guild treasure by members working day and night to get enough money to have perhaps a chance of aquiring a guild house! Punishing only one player wrongly will do more harm than anything you can gain by punishing the right people. I can only hope that you are totally aware of this.
Why don't you keep it behind the curtains? If you know who cheated you also have their mail addresses. Therefore you can handle the whole affair silently perhaps with the announcement that these people have been or will be dealt with.

And now this abysmal thread. Who gave you the right to judge your players morally? Who gave you the right to start a witch hunt which brings forth - as you can already read in this thread - all the bad things in people even down to denouncing others? This is an outrage and completely unresponsible and being in a position of power you really should know better than this!

Perhaps you should all take a step back and rethink this whole affair. It has gotten way out of perspective!

P.S.: No, I don't like cheaters but I also know that they are unavoidable and the faster you learn this lesson the better you can sleep in the future.

I was able to retrieve the paperwork a second time and Vladovic was happy to accept it again. It seems, it is no deadlock based on items after all and that is good news indeed. Only it does not solve the initial problem. I cite from my log:

(01:16:26) Vladovic Chel-Astra says: ... Are you willing to risk that?
(01:16:29) Garbald says: yes
(01:16:32) Vladovic Chel-Astra says: What?  I don't really know what you're saying, there.

I tried a few more answers to no avail and people keep telling me that yes/no should be the right answer here.

Tonight I will try to continue the Nkaw quest without consulting Vladovic (despite the fact that I have been sent to him) and see if I can finish that first to be sure this is really no deadlock between the two quests. It strikes me as odd though, that Vladovic does not react to the key sentence from that quest either.

Ok. I wrote a petition and asked for GM help. Sadly to no avail. Even the GMs cannot discard deadlocked quests nowadays.

In effect, this probably means no more quests for Garbald, because you never know when a new quest might lead to Vladovic and get stuck there too.

I am really amazed how a developer who knows that his system is buggy can remove the only means to get around this bug. In light of this I find it hardly convincing, that it was done to avoid exploiting. I mean, who is more important to the game? The player who loves playing and wants to test more quests or the exploiter, who will be bored and gone soon anyway?
I liked many of the new quests. A lot of of hard and good work went into all the wonderful new stories. Sad, that this is now all wasted on Garbald. And yes, I know that I could do all the quests with a new character. Hey, in fact the exploiter can do so too and will have no problem with it. But if I do it, it would not be Garbald doing it and the stories of the adventures would not be his to tell at the fireplace in the guild hall.

Well, sorry for this rant. I really don't want to start a new flame fest and this topic has surely been beaten to death before, but this needed to get out. The disappointment was simply too much. I will now be quiet and let Garbald go back to mindless mining and looting, to earn gazillions of Tria, so our guild can perhaps with a lot of luck afford a hall, where Garbald will not be able to tell of his new quest adventures at the fire place.


* Garbald slaps himself. "Quiet! Bad Garbald! Be constructive!!" Garbald silently walks to a dark and hidden corner in the deepest part of the dungeons and weeps. *

The situation: I was questing on 'Pollen of Haos' when I also received 'Nkaws Contrition'. This may or may not be the core of the problem.
When I had advanced to the point in 'Pollen of Haos' where I was asked whether I want to take a risk, neither 'yes' nor 'no' were accepted as an answer. This is strange because everyone tells me that one of these two answers is necessary at this point.
I tried anything I could think of but neither 'Pollen of Haos' nor 'Nkaw's Contrition' could be continued. Therefore this may possibly be a deadlock between these two quests. Both are locked from being discarded.

Petitions seem to be broken at this time, so I hope I can get help here.

What can I do or who can help?

Might I too ask a kind GM to move the Ylian Garbald Rodingh back to civilization? 

There are instances where this feature easily qualifies as a bug.

I recently was (with much effort) able to replace a lost item for some NPC only to find out that 10 seconds later he had lost it again. This is a problem because it seems now that I cannot acquire such a replacement item a second time because I don't get the necessary initial quest a second time.

Now this NPC won't give me a follow up quest (at least he did not after I tried to discard the replacement quests he gave me and asked him for another quest for several days now) and I can't solve the replacement quest because I don't get the quest again which leads to another replacement item -> deadlock 

  Now tell me this is not a bug...

I experience the same problem. I even compiled a fresh LINUX version of the client from the sources. The effect is still that anything which needs graphics just immediately crashes without doing anything visible.

We both use the same graphics card and OS, so the problem can probably be found somewhere between the graphics card driver, the system libraries and PS. The crash occurs somewhere deep in the system's graphics libraries and occurs right after the start of the program, so it is probably during initialization.

If some kind soul can guide me a bit, I might be able to track the problem down a bit more. The crash happens deep inside system libraries that seem to have come with the NVIDIA driver, so there are no debugging symbols available for this part of the stack trace. On the other hand, perhaps a stack trace back to the PS client already might be of some help.

BTW I also performed a complete auto-update which ran to completion without any recognizable problems.