"Some characters have gotten them into the broken state where they own themselves. This will cause them various issues regarding fitting and docking/undocking. The state of the characters have been fixed and additional logging has been put in to find out why these characters insist on being so independant."

I'm loving each of these words.

Am i missing something?

most likely

Quote from other thread named by itself

quote from barrakus

Characters have an owner id, this is not having the correct value in some rare instances, instead of showing the account id or something, the actual character's id is being stored in it's place. At least that's how I read it.

But what do they mean?? I don't even understand what problem was fixed. I understand cute language is sometimes used to disguise the specific code issue, but this doesnt even tell us what was glitching. "fitting and docking/undocking" are very generic terms.... Am i missing something?

Essentially, it's an unanticipated bug -- CCP simply never accounted for a situation in which the character might 'belong' to itself. The cluster logically expects that the player will only ever 'own' a ship or an item, so when it sees 'Bob owns Bob' it makes the logical assumption that 'Bob = Ship', and doesn't error-check to see if Bob is a ship.

The end-result is that the cluster tries to undock or fit a module to 'Bob' -- but Bob only looks like a ship, and doesn't have the code required to allow him to undock or fit a module.

This is pretty close to truth. In total there were 3 characters that were not owned by the EVE System which caused some code to start doing silly things to characters. For the user it would have him fail to undock and modules be turned offline and all sort of shenanigans like that.

The fix was basically restoring the characters to the correct state and to add some additional logging to find out who is actually putting them in that state.

well, that's just a little mysterious
3 characters not owned by the eve system?

are they real players?
hackers?
a new form of digital life created by the cluster?

and who is this who? who is putting them into this state

heh, sounds like it be one of those unpredictable things I hear a game engine does from time to time

best of luck on that one

Sometimes we end up debugging stuff that happens sporadically with no common thread and no logs. At those times I walk around with a limp and pretend I'm doctor House. QA doesn't like it much.

It's bizarre really (and only a little bit scary).

Looks like the first steps of the cluster developing self awarness.

Skynet is GO!

Start looking for a nuclear shelter....

I would pay to see this.

Sometimes we end up debugging stuff that happens sporadically with no common thread and no logs. At those times I walk around with a limp and pretend I'm doctor House. QA doesn't like it much.

All your character are belong to us.

Well they are supposed to but they keep escaping.

The end-result is that the cluster tries to undock or fit a module to 'Bob' -- but Bob only looks like a ship, and doesn't have the code required to allow him to undock or fit a module.

Well they are supposed to but they keep escaping.

P.S. The characters that we fixed in September were not all owned by themselves. Sometimes by somebody completely different. It's bizarre really (and only a little bit scary).