A strange server glitch

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Score: +3

1. Nikola,

Hello,
something very strange happened today, and actually it already happened 1 or 2 times before, but it got fixed quickly.

On the 6th of November at 6 PM French time, we were playing the Spades tournament. A few hours later, after they got eliminated, the players ryo-bee and Genti left the Playroom, shortly followed by a player Serbian after the final game.

However, the server keeps thinking that those players are still here. They are not online, or at least not at first, however, after about 15 or 20 minutes, they show up in the online list but have no table attached to their username. For example:
genti, absent, en

This is the case for about 1 minute, and then, if you have these players in your list of friends, you'll be notified that they left the Playroom, and indeed they are no longer in the online users list. However, this cycle keeps repeating over and over. After 15 more minutes, this will happen again exactly as described above, even though those people don't even have their client opened or anything like that.

But now we are reaching a much more annoying part of the glitch. If one of these players really enters the Playroom, when this 15 minutes period ends, even if they are playing a game/are on a real table, they'll be kicked out and reconnected to the main room. So, at the moment, using the Playroom for these people is pretty difficult.
It's as if the server thinks that those players are disconnected and needs to kick them out after a certain period, even if that's really not so.

At the time I am reporting this, this glitch has been going on for about 5 hours, and I don't know if it will automatically be fixed at some point so you may not even see it anymore when you are here, but hopefully there are some logs or something you can check to figure out what went wrong.

I also don't know how to restore their connection to a normal state, because even resetting the Playroom didn't help at all.

As I said before, I saw this glitch once or twice in the past, but usually it got fixed fairly quickly, and it was usually with people who weren't really here at the time so I couldn't check if connecting back and resetting the client fixes it.

Hopefully this explanation was clear enough and you can do something about it/check why this happened.

Thanks.
Edit: Ok, after much more testing, I found the source of this glitch and how to always reproduce it, and yes it is somewhat related to Spades, but it is a little hard to explain.

Spades has one bug which causes the list of players on the table to be fake when pressing W. This usually happens if, for example, 4 players A, B, C and D are playing, but there are a few more players watching with their spectator mode enabled. Now, after this game is over, and you try to start another one with enter, you'll be asked if you want to play in teams. If you press W, you'll already see that A, B, C and D are playing, and the rest are spectators.
Now, let's say that D leaves the table. Pressing W will still list D on the table, and this is the most important thing for this bug.
If D now leaves the entire Playroom, this will cause the glitch. If you keep this table open with a fake list of players, the situation described above will happen. As long as this table remains open, D will constantly get kicked from the Playroom every 15 minutes. However, if you destroy this table, the glitch stops and this no longer happens.

So, it appears the source of this bug is really Spades and not a network glitch as I originally thought.

Hopefully that helps resolve it.

Score: +2

Last edited by Nikola, Nov 7 2022 02:38:50

2. Aminiel,

Hello,

Is this problem still occurring ? Or it happened just once or twice ?
Does it happen at particular times, or it can happen at any moment ?

I don't see anything abnormal, so it's going to be hard to debug.
Thank you still for signaling.

Score: +2

3. Nikola,

Hello,
it's not occuring anymore, but as long as you follow a specific pattern, you should always be able to reproduce, and hopefully debug it.

Apparently it works in some other games too, but let's stick to Spades as an example.
You'll need 2 accounts. On the first account, create a game of Spades and add 3 bots so you have enough for a team game.
Press enter to start. You will be asked if you want to play in teams. At this point, use your second account and join the table.
Now, on the first account, press escape to cancel starting the game and then entirely leave the table with that account, the second one should be the master now.
If you press W from there, you'll notice that the first account is still in the list of people on the table, even though it just left. This is the main source of the bug.

Now, on the first account, restart the Playroom. As long as the second account remains on this broken table and this table is active, you'll notice the bug. The first account will constantly be kicked from the Playroom every 15 minutes.

This is effectively how we got the problem after the tournament. There were a few players who turned on their spectator mode, so when pressing enter the game was attempting to start with a wrong list of players, and eventually cancelled starting and moved to a different one entirely. However, after some players restarted the Playroom, they kept being kicked out every 15 minutes until the absent person returned and destroyed the broken table.

Hopefully that's more helpful, but if it's necessary I can also demonstrate it on a table.

Score: +1

4. Aminiel,

Hello,

Thank to your explanations, I think that I have figured the bug out.
I have made the change and I hope it's solved now.

Thank you!

Score: +1

5. Nikola,

Hello,
I confirm that this is now fixed, thank you.

Score: +1

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