Sunday, May 18th, 2008
Issue: 74   Editor: NyxxieALWAYSRETURNS


A Buggy Week ryneb
After some updates done by Sabin early in the week there were a couple of bugs that became apparent and needed dealing with. Aside from the exploit earlier in the week, thankfully none of the bugs were very major and were quickly dealt with.

On Tuesday players found a problem the Bootlegging page. Reported initially in the Game Forum, this bug was very minor. As the Bootlegging page does not have a timer like the Crimes or Auto Burglary pages many players don't always know when they will be able to buy booze next. This bug caused players who tried to buy booze too soon to lose the money that would have normally been spent on booze. Players would still receive the warning that they were attempting a booze transaction too soon, but they would lose money too. Thankfully Sabin was able to quickly take care of this and the impact of the bug was minimal.

Wednesday a bug involving Establishments was found. Anyone trying to purchase land would receive the following error, "Fatal error: Call to undefined function: givemoney() in /www/htdocs/establishment.php on line 371." Since I know absolutely nothing about PHP coding I won't even attempt to interpret it, but the consequence of this error meant no one could buy any available land. It only affected a few people, but as land is one of the best investments available those not able to purchase land could not have been very happy. The life of this bug was rather short as Sabin had it taken care of about 8 hours after it was first reported on the Game Forum.

Finally I am pleased to report that the establishment escrowing bug is now officially fixed. On Thursday morning the sticky thread warning players about this bug had finally been removed. Having been up in the game forum for nearly a month, this thread warned that your land may simply drop if you tried to escrow it. The last real post was by Sabin on April 26 stating that he believed it was fixed, and since that post no one else has had any complaints of land dropping when being escrowed. Unlike the previous two bugs that showed up this week, this bug was anything but minor. A lot of valuable land was dropped and the values reset because of this bug. It took some time, but players no longer have to officially worry about escrowing land.