Rollback: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 12:28, 22 August 2020

A rollback is an operation which restores a database to a prior state. In Growtopia, this affects worlds, player inventories, gem counts and player progress, usually in order to revert the effects of a game-breaking issue which cannot be resolved in another manner. Consequentially, any progress which players made during the timeframe which was rolled back is lost.

In compensation for lost work and time, rollbacks are often accompanied with an Apology Weekend, a weekend-long event in which in-app purchases provide 25% extra gems and any in-app purchases made during the rollback is reimbursed and doubled. Players will also have a chance to drop extra seeds and gems upon smashing blocks during the event.

Rollback I

File:Imagetgyh.jpg

The Rollback Plaque and its tree

The first rollbacks occurred on 23 February 2013, and resulted in 24 hours of data to be reverted twice. The second rollback occurred only a few hours after the first and sent players back to the same place they were rolled back to the first time.

The occurrence happened due to an oversight where items with rarity 999 were purchased from the Growtopia Store and recycled at a significantly higher rate than the purchase price. Players took advantage of this to gain an unlimited amount of gems. This ruined the game's economy at the time, requiring a rollback to restore the game prior to the exploit being discovered. The exploit was temporarily fixed by preventing store items to be recycled for gems, however, was later changed to recycle at 10% of the original price.

An Apology Weekend event was released, allowing players to splice the Rollback Plaque for the duration of the event by splicing a Cave Background Seed with a Door Seed. After the event, the recipe would produce a Happy Joy Plaque instead. An unintended release of the seed was also seen during the early release of the item, however, was quickly removed, making it a glitched seed.

Rollback II

The second rollback occurred on 5 October 2013 where a few hours of data was lost.

This occurred due to the release of the "Null_Seed" which was found planted in Harvest Moon Blasted worlds. The seed would recycle for a random amount of gems, ranging from -4,294,967,295 Gems to 4,294,967,295 Gems (the maximum value for a 32-bit unsigned integer in computing, one less than the value of 2, raised to the 32nd power). The item existed long before it was discovered, however, the economy had already been damaged. A rollback was performed prior to the bug being discovered.

An Apology Weekend event was released, allowing players to splice the Rollback Plaque II for the duration of the event by splicing a Cave Background Seed and a Sign Seed. The Rollback Plaque II Seed dropped only for the duration of the event and stopped dropping once the event had ended.

See the official announcement here.

Rollback III

A third rollback occurred on 9 August 2015, where 24 hours of data were lost.

This occurred due to RAID arrays (data storage system used to store data about worlds) which had fried, leaving corrupted and missing data. This resulted in a rollback to the last daily backup.

An Apology Weekend event was released, allowing players to splice the Rollback Plaque III for the duration of the event by splicing a Cave Background Seed and a Sign Seed. The item did not drop any seeds.

See the official announcement here.

Rollback IV

A fourth rollback occurred on 12 December 2017.

This occurred due to a security exploit where players managed to gain access to developer accounts, distributing valuable items throughout the game. Emerald Locks, Da Vinci Wings and Phoenix Wings were temporarily made unavailable before the decision to perform a rollback to 10 December 2017 was made.

An Apology Weekend event was released, allowing players to splice the Rollback Plaque IV for the duration of the event by splicing a Cave Background Seed and a Sign Seed.

See the official announcement here.

Rollback V

A fifth rollback occurred on 14 February 2019.

This was caused by Growtopia's data hosting service to suffer a critical drive failure on 13 February 2019, causing damage to their RAID array. After attempts to recover corrupted data, a rollback was performed as a full restoration was not possible and a rollback of just under 24 hours was performed.

An Apology Weekend event was released, allowing players to splice the Rollback Plaque V for the duration of the event by splicing a Cave Background Seed and a Sign Seed.

See the official announcement here.

Rollback VI

A sixth rollback occurred on 1 July 2020.

This occurred when new code was implemented that would permit for a future update. However, this code caused issues, leading some players to lose progress and the servers were quickly placed into maintenance. The issue with the code was fixed, however, player game progress was still lost. A failed attempt was made to rollback to prior to the release of the new code (resulting in 10 minutes of lost progress), leading to a rollback to June 30th 15:00 (Growtopia time).

Note: Server issues also occurred on the same day, failing to restart after a server crash. However, this was irrelevant to the cause of the rollback.

An Apology Weekend event was released, allowing players to splice the Rollback Plaque VI for the duration of the event by splicing a Cave Background Seed and a Sign Seed.

See the official announcement here.

Rollback VII

A seventh rollback occurred on 3 July 2020.

This occurred when a duplication glitch was found, involving negative integers input into Challenge Timers which resulted in many expensive items being duplicated. The servers were quickly placed into maintenance, however, it was found that the damage to the economy was too big to manually repair. A 24-hour rollback occurred to shortly after the duplication glitch started with many items becoming temporarily locked. The items locked were:

On 7th July, Diamond Locks were made tradeable and 45 other items were temporarily locked. Items obtained that were otherwise unobtainable items such as the Dumb Gem were also locked. An updated list of the locked items then was released:

Since the rollback occurred during SummerFest 2020, an Apology Weekend could not be held until after the event which was extended for four days. Due to massive amounts of complaints, The Growtopia Staff decided to hold an Apology Week instead of an Apology Weekend on 14th July. During the Apology Week, a Rollback Plaque VII could be spliced for the duration of the event by splicing a Cave Background Seed and a Sign Seed.

In the following weeks, a hundred thousand duplicated items were removed from the game. With the release of 2020's Player Appreciation Week on 17 August 2020, all of the affected items were unlocked.

See the official announcement here.

Retrieved from "https://gtwiki.sandbox.hashjona.dev/index.php?title=Rollback&oldid=26458"

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