Cool. I wasn’t reacting to that, my thought process is that after so many years of tech support I know what other techs do pretty much by rote. Sadly, it never seems to come from empathy with tech support personnel: they will generally be first to say “unrecoverable.” Point being: don’t let anyone tell you to stop trying to preserve the gamesave and environment to which you are accustomed.
Furthermore, and this is crucial: your game for the most part was functioning very well prior to 3.0. Irrespective of all the load changes and optimizations, it now appears that despite your savegame’s state of “stability” (only Events were malfunctioning) prior to 3.0, failure may be ramping up.
This is significant. Again, as a tech support person for years, it’s very easy to predict bad things at very early stages. The more feedback we can get from sharing partners (like you), the better a case we can make for Funcom to take the issue seriously from the start, and avoid data loss for customers in the long term.
Don’t stop on my behalf.
I do indeed believe some odd problem with the DB is the issue. It could be that I’m currently fixing an upgraded Magento DB right now that’s influencing my beliefs – no it actually comes from issues’ testing on a live Conan server, and feedback from said testing. By simply editing the DB file and re-saving it with the “occult” data removed, the issue with the Conan Exiles server was fixed. But now, placeables could not be picked up. To fix this and preserve my players’ game progress, I found the solution was to place (as admin) every placeable in the game, overwriting the now-corrupt table entry. This fixed the problem. As you might conceive, it was pretty arduous, I have photos and video of the “mountain of misfit toys.”
To be honest, it’s likely not fruitful to delve into the root cause, but there are a lot of things that can make this happen on the PS platform. For instance, any game under the sun is ripe for difficulties if the console is powered with no backup juice or UPS on it. Any power outage while the game is live might cause the console to reboot and rebuild. This can cause prepending – adding data to the front of the information, due to failure in the reconciliation of the backup set.
Or, people who kill the app while playing. Maybe they got impulsive, or maybe they got angry, or maybe for some reason they just killed the game by menuing out and performing the quick steps – this can flag a gamesave for similar reconciliation. I’m not saying you do this, but it’s predictable behavior with a reasonable outcome of database reconciliation, which might cause issues.
In your case, I will speculate only on what caused Events (now Encounters) to fail. This was pre-3.0. I believe that during one of your sessions as Admin, you built or cast an errant block somewhere into the mesh or invisible texture where the Events are triggered. I believe the Encounter system is an all or nothing proposition which will throw a logged “null” in the works, and cancel any Encounter at all.
Paramount was that you maintain a backup, are familiar with the making of a backup, and fully assuring myself your savegame is safeguarded. However, I don’t think making the PS5 do its forceful database rebuild will do any good. As I mentioned earlier, the actual CE database/savegame must be “flagged” prior to being touched by the relatively automated DB reindex process.
Ideally, I would ask you to move heaven and earth to get your savegame working again. This might entail your subscribing to PS Plus for a short while. Then, you would allow your son to attach to your world, and wait for an Encounter. This, as we say in the business, will separate the fly shit from the pepper. To victory!
