Asherons Call: Explanation of Login Bug

Letter to the Players

February 22, 2002

We want to explain the nature of the bug that prevented some of our players from logging into the worlds for a few days after the February Event. We have tried to make this explanation as user-friendly as possible, but it was a very difficult and complex problem. Adding to the issue is that the bug was not a direct result of something that changed in February, but rather a culmination of a number of circumstances coming together that triggered the bug.

When a player logs into Asheron's Call with their client, the client sends an authorization packet (what the server needs to verify that you are a valid player and have an active subscription) to the server. One of the variables in the packet needed its value to be set to anything but "1" in order for validation to occur. Unfortunately, there had been a bug in the code since Asheron's Call had gone live in which that variable remained uninitialized (meaning, not set to any value, including zero). So that variable was set to whatever the value happened to be in its given memory location, which, up until February, had always been a value other than 1. So the process worked, despite the bug.

But then this month, when we updated our client for the February Event (adding new icons, setups, and landscape changes), that memory location got switched around, so that on some computers running Windows 9x, that memory location always contained a "1", thereby breaking the validation process. Because other Windows operating systems handle memory differently, this situation did not effect those machines.

None of the changes that were made this month triggered this situation. It was just a matter of a combination of circumstances coming together to make this bug possible at this particular juncture.

We hope this somewhat explains what was going on without getting too technical. We are confident the fix we have in place will stop this from happening again and apologize for the length of time it took to fix.

--The AC Team