If your PC crashes it can cause the game TO DELETE YOUR WHOLE PROFILE!!!

[hardcore_gamer]

I was making a map in snapmap and then once I was done I exited the game. However after the game exited I suffered a blue-screen/system reboot. When I entered the game again I was told by the game that my profile had been corrupted and that in response it had "created a new one". I then checked out my profile...Yup. It's all gone. All of it. MP unlocks and stats. All my SP saves. All my snap points and unlocks. All of it. 100 hundred hours of profile grinding/unlocking....just gone.

The ONLY thing that did not vanish for some reason are my in-progress snapmaps (thank GOD, I just spend the last 3 days working on a snapmap. If I had lost it I would have thrown my PC out the window).

So let me get this straight...a simple unexpected system reboot while playing the game is the ONLY thing needed to lose EVERYTHING that you have worked for? The devs did not have the smarts to program some kind of way to respond to situations like this other than just DELETING YOUR WHOLE PROFILE and replacing it with a new one? Are you fucking serious?

Well now you know kids! If you suffer a system crash for some reason while playing the game you could literally lose your whole profile and all your stats, unlocks and saves.

Doesn't that make you feel good?

[Vorpal]

Data being corrupted upon an unexpected crash is not some new problem in computing, nor specific to Doom.

[Edward850]

Vorpal said:

Data being corrupted upon an unexpected crash is not some new problem in computing, nor specific to Doom.

"Someone pulled the memory card out of my console while it was saving and the save broke, what a trash game."

Indeed I'm not sure I can comprehend this mindset in the slightest. You're blaming the dog for exploding after someone threw a grenade at it.

What's even more absurd is he's ignoring the more blatant and pressing issue, the BSoD his computer suffered. I'd be more focused on the faulty hardware/drivers than "oh god my Doom stats!!!!112213eleventytwo". Priorities!

[hardcore_gamer]

Your comparisons fail. Doom like most modern games store profiles and saves on a digital space. We no longer live in am ere of memory cards. I have had crashes during other games but every single one of them has protected my profile or saves because they feature some kind of cloud/online system. Doom is literally the only modern game that has done this to me and it's indicative of shoddy programing. Your points about it being my PC's fault might be valid if we still lived in an era where all data is stored locally, but we don't.

[Edward850]

hardcore_gamer said:

Your comparisons fail. Doom like most modern games store profiles and saves on a digital space.

Doom stores its profile data locally, and is then cloud synced by the Steam client. In fact every game works like this, even on consoles, data must be stored locally before it can be transferred online. This is to prevent deadlock conditions where you're trying to write and replace data already in the process of transfer, and prevent it from constantly doing network requests for incremental data.
This introduces two other aspects: most games don't write profile data until they close, and your hard-drive has a write cache. And yes, I do know this as I actively work with these APIs; this is first hand knowledge.

Just fix your computer already.

TL;DR: Cloud storage is only as good as the computer that sends data to it in the first place.

[Vorpal]

How much you want to bet if/when his clowd str0rij video game profiles get hacked into/nuked he's going to make a thread raging about how stupid and badly coded the cloud is.

[Phml]

I have played perhaps hundreds of games in the last ten years, and I'm hard pressed to think of more than a few instances where a crash caused corruption of the save file, and nothing as extreme as deleting the whole profile.

This Doom 4 Defense Force thing is getting ridiculous. The game was released months ago, it did well critically and commercially. Can we ease down on the fanboyism already?

[Edward850]

Phml said:

This Doom 4 Defense Force thing is getting ridiculous. The game was released months ago, it did well critically and commercially. Can we ease down on the fanboyism already?

lolwut. There is no "defense force" going on here.

[VGamingJunkie]

Edward850 said:

Doom stores its profile data locally, and is then cloud synced by the Steam client. In fact every game works like this, even on consoles, data must be stored locally before it can be transferred online.

If it crashed and corrupted the local data, couldn't it have simply grabbed the cloud save? Or did both of them somehow manage to be corrupted simultaneously? In the event of corrupted data, it would have made more sense to simply pull the last state from the cloud and override the local data with that.

[Edward850]

Depends on what needs to be synced. It's using the legacy method (all saves are stored in /users/<profile>/Ssaved Games/), and Steam of course doesn't know if anything went wrong with the files, and will just sync what's there if it's newer and the cloud storage doesn't have anything to sync itself.

[hardcore_gamer]

Edward850 said:

lolwut. There is no "defense force" going on here.

Yes there is. As the guy above mentioned almost no game actually does this. And most games with online features do in fact safe/have a backup of your profile somehow. Battlefield 1 for example saves your profile online. Imagine if you spent 300 hours grinding for guns in Battlefield 1 and then because of a single unlucky system reboot or crash you lost everything. People would completely lose their shit.

And just lol at the guys just saying "ur pc is at fault hurr dur". I played the game for over 100+ hours before this happened. It was a freak accident. Don't pretend the same can't happen to you as well as if you invest enough hours into the game. Imagine if you spent hundreds of hours building yourself a carrier as a snapmaper and then because of one single crash/reboot you lose it all instantly because the game doesn't know how to react to it in any other way than to just delete your profile and replace it with a new one, instantly killing your snapmap carrier and forcing you to start over. I wonder what you would say then.

[igg]

I think thats just bad luck.

PC goes BS while Doom updates the local profile -> file corrupted.
PC restarts and Steam syncs the corrupted savegame to the cloud storage.

Maybe Steam should check for a transaction flag (e. g. last written bytes should indicate all data has been written successfully).

[jazzmaster9]

hardcore_gamer said:

Yes there is. As the guy above mentioned almost no game actually does this.

Lol. no there isn't. you would love to think there is so that you can have more incentives to talk about how much Doom 4 sucks.

That is not to say this is not bad, loosing my profile would be terrible. but I wouldn't crusade around the forums like the game is the Plague.
I wonder what Fáviti means...

[VGamingJunkie]

Edward850 said:

Depends on what needs to be synced. It's using the legacy method (all saves are stored in /users/<profile>/Ssaved Games/), and Steam of course doesn't know if anything went wrong with the files, and will just sync what's there if it's newer and the cloud storage doesn't have anything to sync itself.

Sounds like their methods could be better. Make sure the local data is completely saved before syncing it to the cloud and only after determining that the local data isn't corrupted. That way, if one fails, the other can serve as backup.

[igg]

MetroidJunkie said:

That way, if one fails, the other can serve as backup.

I suppose Steam looks for a certain directory containing the player profile and syncs it automatically. After he restarted his computer the Steam service was started and synced the corrupted file before he ran Doom again.

[VGamingJunkie]

Like I said, that seems to be a flaw with the system. It shouldn't automatically replace its clean file with a garbage one until it determines the local one isn't garbage.

[Edward850]

MetroidJunkie said:

Like I said, that seems to be a flaw with the system. It shouldn't automatically replace its clean file with a garbage one until it determines the local one isn't garbage.

It can't be detected if it's garbage, only Doom itself could determine that. What would be useful in this case, however, is restorative snapshots, like how DropBox and GoogleDrive work.

[Zemini]

That sucks. I would think there would be a better way to store back up data at least - like on some online account like Battle.net

How does my Starcraft II, Diablo 3, and WoW account do it? If my computer exploded, my account information is still safe. I would think the same concept could be applied to doom.

[40oz]

hardcore_gamer said:

And just lol at the guys just saying "ur pc is at fault hurr dur". I played the game for over 100+ hours before this happened.

Then what's the problem? Just beat the game all over again, it only takes a few hours.

[Doomkid]

I've had plenty of instances of lost data due to a crash. All I can really say is, remember to keep backups regularly on an external. This is definitely not specific to Doom 4 although some simple integrated way to back up to a server or something would be nifty.