Bug: We Keep Seeing Dead People!

[VonduSilkk]

The only real workaround I have found so far as a healer:

 

Healer will need to release/res AFTER everyone in the ops frame is visible again.

This seems to clear it more often than not - but reports of duelling etc - doesnt seem to work.

 

It is certainly happening more often in R4 SM and HM.

 

Worth noting that you get the "Resurrect" mouse over icon on the person - and you can still see them via focus target.

The UI issue seems to be mainly linked to the Ops Frame etc

[Eloi_BG]

This is happening to us quite a bit in R4 HM prod on IP-CPT. It is not a new bug though, used to happen constantly during NiM warlords prog. Made a thread with more details back then: https://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=1005810

[Jerba]

Hi UlaVii/all,

 

We're currently looking into this and investigating. Right now, we have not been able to repro the issue on our side, so the team is interested in knowing the following information:

• Do all group members see the same player as dead/in that same state?
  
• How did the player/affected player die?
  

Thanks!

This bug has been happening since 7.0; we've seen it in various operations on the live server before 7.1 was released but it is a major issue in R-4 as well.

 

However, I can confirm what Drussy and VonduSilkk wrote: The last player to release will not have any dead players.

The players who first release will have up to 4 dead players (in a 8-player raid); I've never heard of more than 4 dead players.

 

My theory is that this bug happens whenever another player is out of range (> 135m) when they click "return to area start". Because they're out of range, their "is alive" flag is not correctly replicated to true, so they will remain dead until the player exits area or dies again, at which time the "is alive" flag may be correct if they are in range.

Notably, when a player is standing at area start while the other player clicks "return to area start", they can still show up dead; you need to be in range of their corpse, not in range of area start to prevent this bug from happening!

Regarding why this bug started occuring with 7.0, I assume you did some optimization regarding character replication, e.g. maybe the "is alive" flag is now only replicated if a player is in range, whereas before it was always replicated as long as the player was in the party or ops group.

 

Regarding your two questions:

Do all group members see the same player as dead/in that same state?

Not 100% sure but I believe so, yes. Like mentioned before, zero to four players will show up dead (depending on in which order the players released to area start), and it is always the same players, aka certain four players will show up alive for all other players, while the other four players are either dead or alive.

Also, curiously this list stays the same across multiple pulls but I think that is because players have a habit of either immediately releasing to area start, or waiting a bit before releasing.

However, after the first pull, usually the whole group is alive, and the longer the raid goes on, the more players end up being dead, but never more than 4.

How did the player/affected player die?

I've only seen the bug in operations, and it happened both when dying due to boss damage and due to /stuck, so I don't think the killing blow has anything to do with this bug. Edited August 17, 2022 by Jerba

[Jerba]

To add some more information to my previous post: In today's R-4 VM raid, after a wipe our players (1-8) returned to area start in the order 1, 2, 3 etc. and the following players showed up dead in each player's ops frame:

 

1: 2, 3 & 6

2: 3 & 6

3: 6

4: 6

5: 6

6: everyone alive

7: everyone alive

8: everyone alive

 

In other words, the same three players were in the buggy state (2, 3 & 6) for everyone in the group. Anyone who returned to area start before a bugged player, had that player show up dead (2 was dead for 1; 3 was dead for 1-2; 6 was dead for 1-5).

And after each wipe, it was always these three players (2, 3, 6) that showed up dead for some players.

However, I do not know how these players become bugged. At the start of the raid, everything was fine, and after around 45 minutes, the first player showed up dead. We are now 2h40m into the raid with three bugged players, and have been wiping at IP-CPT the whole time.

 

And to add to the 135m theory: As a workaround, we had everyone stand at area start, and the "dead" players go into the taxi shaft to kill themselves. Then when they returned to area start, they were alive because their corpse was less than 120 meters away from everyone. (But after the next wipe on IP-CPT, they showed as dead again because from the boss room to area start, it is more than 135 meters)

 

Edit: Now 20 minutes later, another player became bugged, so now up to four players will show up as bugged.

Here's the log file of the boss fight after which the player showed up dead: https://parsely.io/parser/view/686188/0/686918334281321 (change POV to Silvia, the player who became bugged). The player died to Primary Weaponry from Inferno Enforcer, one of the adds in the encounter.

Edited August 19, 2022 by Jerba

[ceazare]

May be a coincidence or may be worth exploring, but for me it has only happened when the group had someone who was in a different guild. Can anyone refute?

[UlaVii]

May be a coincidence or may be worth exploring, but for me it has only happened when the group had someone who was in a different guild. Can anyone refute?

The experience I wrote about in the first post was a guild event. It's happened to several other guild groups since then.

[Jerba]

Not sure if it helps but if a player is displayed as dead, then jumps down in the Lady Dominique boss room and is rescued by the Recovery Jetpack, they will show up alive again. So it looks like Recovery Jetpack has the same effect as Return to Area Start; they both fix the display bug. Edited August 25, 2022 by Jerba

[Jerba]

We have discovered a way to temporarily fix the "dead" players:

 

Whenever one of the player starts showing up dead for other players, someone can duel that player and apply a 4 second hard stun (either via player ability or Cybertech grenade). They will then show up alive again, and can surrender the duel and start the boss fight.

 

Note that this does not fix these "dead" players: After the next wipe, they can show up dead, so you will need to once again duel & stun them. However, this is much faster than having them die again (due to /stuck, fall damage or exhaustion zone) and be rezzed in range.

 

Presumably, the stun effect replicates some "player is alive" state that is not set by the other effects.

 

Edit: A mez (8s soft stun) will also fix the bug; it does not have to be a hard stun. However, a knockback or immobilizing ability in a duel (also generating Resolve) does not fix the bug; same for Transpose (swapping positions) and a sniper's 2s stun.

 

Edit 2: The player that sees the dead players has to be in range (135 meters) while the duel & stun happens, otherwise the players will stay dead.

Edited September 9, 2022 by Jerba

[Jerba]

One more information: When entering the Lord Nihrot boss room and receiving the two temporary abilities, players will also be fixed and no longer show up dead.

However, this is also only a temporary fix, so they will show up dead on the way to the Nihrot boss room, and after killing Nihrot and progressing on Lady Dominique, they will also show up dead.

Edited September 9, 2022 by Jerba

[VauxAuxilary]

Is there any update on this bug. I havent seen any acknowledgement from any dev post that we are any where closer to identifying or solving this dumb bug. 

Removing the ability to duel and stun was a tolerable way to solving it but this has been going on for months and not a peep in the patch notes. Can we get any kind of update on this

[DarthSpekulatius]

Bump!

 

any info on this @JackieKo?

 

its a really annoying Bug

 

alternative Band Aids, that are obviously a worse solution and should only be used if  there's no way to fix the bug:

reenable Duels in all OPs/create convenient self-stun-zones in front of each and every Boss-room.

[Jerba]

 

I would like to reaffirm that this bug is still present. We see it every week and waste at least 20 minutes of our raid night working around it. This is not an isolated issue; it affects every raid group that frequently wipes on bosses, and it is incomprehensible how this bug has been in-game for over a year and is being ignored.
In the hope of getting it fixed, here is all the information we know about it.

• This bug was introduced with Game Update 7.0. It was present on 7.0 PTS (during R-4 testing, this was before R-4 Anomaly was pushed back to GU 7.1) and it arrived on the live servers with 7.0. Many players say it started with 7.1 because they only started raiding again during 7.1 (when R-4 Anomaly was released to the live servers) but it started with 7.0. For example, we have seen this bug on PTS 7.0 in R-4, and on live 7.0 in the Terror from Beyond operation.
• This bug ("seeing dead players") is closely related to another bug ("stuck at 90% in loading screen"); they always appear together.
• For this bug to happen, the following conditions must be met:
  1. The player must be in a group (either a 4-player party or an operation group; this does not matter) and
  2. The corpse (death location) must be more than 135 meters away from the respawn point (area start in operations, medcenter in flashpoints).
• After every wipe, there is a small chance for the bug to occur. In other words, it can occur after the first wipe, or it can occur after 5 wipes. The longer the raid goes on, the higher the chance that this bug happens. At first, it will only affect a single player, then the longer the raid goes on, the more players are affected by it.
• Typically, this bug affects at most 3-4 players in a 8-player group; in other words, these players will sometimes have dead players in the group, and they'll get the 90% stuck loading screen. Everyone else is not affected; they can play normally. Those players might show up as dead to the bugged players, but on their screen, everything is normal.
  Note that a player might see other dead players, and they can show up dead for someone else. In other words, there is no dichotomy between bugged players and the dead players.
  Note that the dead players are the same for all bugged players. They might not show up dead at the same time, but across several wipes, it will always be these 3-4 players that are the dead players; everyone else is always displayed correctly.
  Also, during different raids, it is always different players getting the bug, so we can rule out any hardware or software issues tied to certain players.
• Specifically, if player A has the bug, and player B is one of the "dead" players, the bug can be 100% reproduced as follows: Player A must release to the respawn point before player B.
  On the other hand, if you do it in reverse order (player B releases before player A), the bug is guaranteed to never happen.
  To understand this, we must consider the release not as an atomic action but as two actions: 1. player is revived, 2. player is teleported to area start. So to reproduce the bug, player A must be out of awareness range of player B while the revive happens (1).
• My theory is that the root cause is as follows: Ever since 7.0, the game may enter a state where it loses track of certain group members. In other words, on the server side those players are still in the group, and the client UI shows them in the group frame, but somewhere in the internal memory, the game no longer considers them to be a group member.
  This has an impact on the characters' "brain state" field (lucid, stunned or dead): Usually, this field is replicated if a character is inside the awareness range (< 135 meters) or if they are a group member, it is always replicated, without any distance checks.
  If my theory is true and the game no longer considers them to be a group member, the character's "lucid" state change is not replicated when they are outside of awareness range, and they'll stay in the "dead" state.
  This theory would explain why this bug is range-based, why it can be worked around by stunning the player, and possibly also why the "stuck in loading screen at 90%" bug only happens while grouped.
• Note that this bug is not isolated to operations, it can occur in flashpoints as well. For example, we encountered this bug in the Esseles flashpoint when wiping on Ironfist. This happens very rarely, since you usually don't wipe in flashpoints, and frequently, the medcenter will be inside of awareness range of the boss room. In the case of Ironfist, the medcenter is in a different level and you need to take an elevator to get to the boss, that's why this bug can happen there.
• When we say "a player shows up as dead", we mean the following: The player has a gray nameplate and they'll show up as 0 HP in the group frame. However, when targeting the player, you can see that they are at full HP in the target frame as well as the tooltip. In addition, you can see that the player is moving around, though their movement may be laggy or the character animation might bug out, since dead players are not supposed to be moving.
  When attempting to resurrect the player, the server will respond with an error "player is not dead". When trying to use an ability on the player, the client will refuse to activate the ability since the player is dead; the rare exceptions are a Sage's Force Armor, and AoE abilities.
  Specifically, the bug is that the game client considers this character to be in the "dead" state, while the server considers the character to be in the "lucid" state.
• Note that if a character shows up dead, this bugged state will persist across areas; they will stay dead even when both characters leave group and exit area, the character will still show up dead in the next area even when ungrouped.
• We are aware of three workarounds (when a player already shows up dead, aka the healer forgot to be the last to release to area start):
  1. The "dead" player must die again and then release to the respawn point (or be resurrected by another player) while the player with the bugged client is in awareness range of the corpse. That way, on the client the state correctly changes from "dead" to actually "dead" to "lucid". For example, the player can enter an exhaustion zone where they die, or they can jump down and die from fall damage. Or they can aggro an enemy and /stuck.
  2. The "dead" player must be stunned while in range of the player with the bugged client. That way, on the client, the state changes from "dead" to "stunned" to "lucid". For example, the "Titax Strike" ability in Nature of Progress stuns the player and fixes the bug, as well as the "High Voltage Line" ability in the same boss room. Also, activating the "Recovery Jetpack" by falling down in the Lady Dominique boss room stuns the player. When dueling, any of the class abilities that deliver a hard stun (4s) or a soft stun (8s) will work, while knockbacks or roots do not work. Also, Cybertech Electro-Stun Grenades can be used even by players with a bugged client since those are AoE. Previously, it was possible to duel players in R-4 Anomaly as a quick workaround but ever since dueling was removed in 7.1.1, we now have to resort to workarounds #1 or #3.
  3. The player with the bugged client must restart their game, either by Alt+F4ing (causing a disconnect) and restarting, or by cleanly exiting and restarting. Going to character selection or server selection is not enough; they must quit the game. On restarting, each group member's "brain state" will be correctly loaded from the server.
  However, note that each of these three workarounds is only temporary. On the next wipe, the client can once again enter a bugged state.
• As mentioned before, the other bug ("loading screen is stuck at 90%") is closely related to the "dead players in group" bug:
  Whenever a client has entered the bugged state (aka they have been seeing "dead" characters), the next time the player enters a loading screen while inside a group, the loading screen will get stuck at around 90%. The game window does not freeze, it is not at 100% CPU usage, the loading bar just stops moving. It is as if the client enters an invalid state from which it cannot recover, and then stops loading the area.
  Note the two preconditions: 1) The player must enter an area load screen (exiting to character select does not count), and 2) The player must be inside a group (does not matter if it is a party or an ops group).
  For example:
  - A player has a bugged client inside R-4 Anomaly and exits area while grouped → stuck at 90%
  - A player has a bugged client inside R-4 Anomaly and travels to their stronghold while grouped → stuck at 90%
  - A player has a bugged client inside R-4 Anomaly, leaves group (starting the 30s timer), then exits area → area load goes through
  - A player has a bugged client inside R-4 Anomaly, leaves group (starting the 30s timer), then exits area, then accepts a group invite and travels to a different area → stuck at 90%
  - A player has a bugged client inside R-4 Anomaly and logs out to Character Select → they load into Character Select
  - A player has a bugged client inside R-4 Anomaly, logs out to Character Select and logs onto a different character → they load into the other character
  - A player has a bugged client inside R-4 Anomaly, logs out to Character Select and logs onto a different character, then accepts a group invite and travels to a different planet → stuck at 90%
  In other words: Once the client is in the bugged state, even switching to a different character does not help. Even disbanding the group and joining a different group with different characters does not help; the next loading screen (while grouped) gets stuck.
  You can't wait it out either; like you could be playing normally for 2 hours after the operation ended, and you would switch areas normally without being in a group, then eventually you group up again and will always get stuck in the next loading screen.
  The only workaround is to restart the game client.
• There are two other bugs which occur since 7.0 and might be related.
  The first bug occurs as follows: A player is inside an operation, then they have a disconnect or they Alt+F4 and restart the game. They are able to login within 1-2 minutes, so they should load into the operation, right where they left off. Instead, they will spawn outside of the operation (e.g. for R-4 Anomaly, they'll load into Mek Sha in front of the operations entrance). However, to their group members, they show up as being inside the operation (when moving the mouse over the group frame, the tooltip will say they are inside R-4 Anomaly). Once they enter the operation, everything appears to be normal. However, exactly 20 minutes after they logged in again, the player is automatically brought to character selection due to inactivity. In other words, even though they've been actively playing, the inactivity timer is erroneously started and never reset. This bug happens very rarely, e.g. once a month, but often enough that we can easily identify when it happens (= spawning outside of the operation after a client restart and group members see them as being inside the operation).
  The second bug occurs as follows: A group leader invites another player into an operation group. In chat, they see the message "You have invited ... to join your ops group." but even though they accept the invite, the group leader sees no chat message "... joined the ops group." and they don't see the player in the operations frame; the slot shows up empty. The other players in the group can see the newly joined player. As a workaround, one of the other players has to move the "invisible" player to a different slot in the ops group, then they'll show up to the group leader as well. We have seen this specific bug a single time before 7.0 (sometime during 3.x/4.x), but ever since 7.0, it appears regularly. It is rarer than the first bug but also frequently enough to identify it.
  It would be great if these two bugs can also be fixed, or maybe they are caused by the original bug and will automatically disappear when the original bug is fixed. However, they are not nearly as annoying as the original bug.

I hope that with this additional information, you will be able to identify and fix the bug. As mentioned above, it is very frustrating, it costs us a lot of time in every single raid, and not just our group but every raid group during progress (aka during frequent wipes).

If you are unable to identify the bug, I ask that you make it easier to work around the bug, e.g.:

• Allow players to once again duel inside of R-4 Anomaly (and inside other operations), so we can stun other players. or
• In every boss room, add a mechanic for players to easily stun or kill themselves without aggroing the boss. Specifically in R-4 Anomaly, make it possible to use the elevator to return to area start (where there's an exhaustion zone to easily kill oneself), or add an exhaustion zone in all taxi tubes. or
• Create a new item with the following "On Use" ability: Stuns yourself for 1 second. Does not create resolve. Cannot be used in warzones/arenas. Cannot be used during combat. Has a 30 second cooldown. Alternatively, create a chat command similar to /stuck that activates the same ability, or at least causes the server to send the correct "brain state" for all group members.

Any of these three workarounds would be a huge relief. Please add one of these workarounds ASAP. We really enjoy the game, specifically operations, but this bug is killing our motivation to progress on bosses.

Note that this bug was included as part of the 7.1 Known Issues (even though it first appeared in 7.0, not in 7.1), but you forgot to carry it over to the 7.1.1, 7.2 and 7.2.1 Known Issues. Adding this bug to the current known issues would be a great sign that you are aware of this bug.

Here are some more threads about this bug:

• R-4 Boss: IP-CPT Feedback Thread (March 2022)
• Other players staying dead in the ops frame after rezzing (May 2022)
• Players Show as Dead in Ops Frames [Not Fixed on PTS] (June 2022)
• Endless loading and dead player in operation group (August 2022)
• R-4 Anomaly Bug Collection (September 2022)
• Dead Players in Operation Frames R4 Vet Mode (October 2022)
• Dead Bug and Infinite Load Screens (December 2022)
• any chances to fix game breaking stuff? (January 2023)
• Infinite loading screen and Dead people in raid (January 2023)

Edited June 10, 2023 by Jerba

[Jerba]

Two things I forgot to mention in my previous post:

• Sometimes, a player will show up as dead in the group frame but when they take the elevator (entering awareness range), they will become alive. In other words, it is more complicated than I described. To reproduce: Player A releases to medcenter, player B stays dead and does not release. Player A is now alive but still shown as dead in the group frame for player B. As soon as player A uses the elevator, they'll be alive for player B since player B was in the range of the corpse during release.
• It is possible to get a stuck loading screen even when not seeing any dead players (because you were always last to release). In other words, the bug occurs in the background: Certain players will be bugged and later receive the stuck loading screen. The dead players are just a side effect but not the cause of the bug.

Edited June 16, 2023 by Jerba

[Osche]

Trank you @Jerba for this detailed analysis of the problem. I hope this will help to fix it. 

Edited July 5, 2023 by Osche

[JackieKo]

Hi all, 

We are still unable to reproduce this issue during our testing and investigation, so the team would like some additional information from players who are experiencing this issue.

• For groups who are seeing dead players during their Ops run, what happens when the "dead" players is set as a focus target?
• Do they show up as alive again or does nothing happen? 

Appreciate any assistance with helping us track down what's causing this issue. Thanks! 

 

[jiati]

9 minutes ago, JackieKo said:

Hi all, 

We are still unable to reproduce this issue during our testing and investigation, so the team would like some additional information from players who are experiencing this issue.

• For groups who are seeing dead players during their Ops run, what happens when the "dead" players is set as a focus target?
• Do they show up as alive again or does nothing happen? 

Appreciate any assistance with helping us track down what's causing this issue. Thanks! 

 

Focus target does not change the state of the zombie player in the frames. This really isn't much of an issue unless it is a healer who is seeing someone as dead because they then cannot cast key abilities on them. We used to fix this by having the healer and the zombie player duel but you guys took that option away by making R4 a non-dueling area. Things that make the "dead bug" go away is having the zombie player die again and rez. If that doesn't work, they can die again but have the person who can't see them properly revive them. That always works 100% for the person doing the reviving but not 100% for others in the raid group. Also, when this happens in the Lady Domonique encounter, the knockback she does to the whole group after an Aria drone destroys a regulator always fixes the dead bug. I trust you are also aware that when the dead bug appears in frames, the infinite loading screen will follow. They seem linked together. And have been for a very long time. Thank you for finally taking an interest in these longstanding problems. 

Edited December 14, 2023 by jiati

[NicoleMay]

Have yet to run into it again since last patch. But will try focus target next time it shows. It was still showing up regularly as of that Sunday before 7.4.

Usually we try force pulling and sometimes it fixes it. Otherwise they have to find a cliff or something to respawn. It is typically paired with the endless loading screen bug for multiple group members, even if they didn't see the player as dead.

It is also typically prevented for individual players as long as you respawn last. We try to have our healers respawn last as they are the ones who need to see everyone alive, while DPS/tanks can ignore the bug until leaving the phase.

It still is kinda insulting that after all this time, you still can't reproduce it. If it's working fine for the dev servers, maybe we should just be playing on those. Or maybe y'all need to try reproducing it on live servers instead.

[_Sinrai_]

Some key points from my experience:

- Focus target does not fix the bug. it's one way healers can continue healing "dead ppl" with the focus target keybind.

- This issue is somehow related to the infinite loading screen. Once a group had someone dead on the frame, you can expect a infinite loading screen. (Leaving the group and having the 30s timer before you exit area fixes this)

- Any sort of scripted physics (Knockback on Dominique or Izax) fixes dead ppl on the frame

- The bug seems to appear more often in instances where the map is a bit more complex (travelling with elevators/trams between different map parts)

- This is me speculating with the last point: Whenever a group wipes, everyone is mostly clicking respawn around the same time. I assume the bug occurs when a client does not "witness" a respawn bc someone is in a loading screen or is still considered in a different part of the map and does not get updates on a other players respawn status. As soon as the client "witnesses" a respawn, the person is alive again. Hence why people kill themselves and getting ressed.

I hope this helps :)

[xxSHOONYxx]

On 6/9/2023 at 7:46 PM, Jerba said:

This bug was introduced with Game Update 7.0. It was present on 7.0 PTS (during R-4 testing, this was before R-4 Anomaly was pushed back to GU 7.1) and it arrived on the live servers with 7.0. Many players say it started with 7.1 because they only started raiding again during 7.1 (when R-4 Anomaly was released to the live servers) but it started with 7.0. For example, we have seen this bug on PTS 7.0 in R-4, and on live 7.0 in the Terror from Beyond operation.

?????

Not helpful for devs to give wrong info because they might look at the wrong places.
First three bosses of r4 testing began (03.02.22 https://www.swtor.com/info/news/article/20220302) half a month almost after 7.0 (2.15.22 https://www.swtor.com/info/news/article/20220215-0) came out on live server, and Dominique came out in pts on 6.3.22

Terror from beyond sometimes people don't appear dead, they straight up die when going up beause they were moving or trying to move when the animation to go up happens and the dead person has to /follow a healer so it can be seen and ressed. 

[MaximusRex]

1 hour ago, JackieKo said:

Hi all, 

We are still unable to reproduce this issue during our testing and investigation, so the team would like some additional information from players who are experiencing this issue.

• For groups who are seeing dead players during their Ops run, what happens when the "dead" players is set as a focus target?
• Do they show up as alive again or does nothing happen? 

Appreciate any assistance with helping us track down what's causing this issue. Thanks! 

 

I will try to remember when we run Friday night.  Satele Shan at 6PM PST if someone on the Dev team wants to check it out, it 100% happens in our group.  I am happy to setup a stream if needed.

I can say that it is usually the same 2-3 people that it happens to.  Sin DPS, Merc Healer, and the third person actually switches characters between fights (Powertech, Jugg) but it often shows him as dead as well.

We can often prevent the healers from seeing others as dead by having the healer res from a wipe last.

Sometimes when it is really bad one of the healers Alt-F4s out to fix it on her screen.

[JamboBaker]

It's been happening since 7.0. We used to resolve it within the group by challenging the 'dead' player to a duel and either 1) they die and get res'd by a player or 2) a 'hard stun' kicks them to being alive. Instead of fixing the dead people bug you stopped us using this work around by preventing dueling in Ops. (I know it was to do with the IP-PCT skip thing, but it still screwed us).

I had this bug today again in Ravagers SM. Player died, res'd but was still dead in frame. The animation of the player is screwed - their model just 'floats around' and doesn't get animated movements/attacks at all. Healers are unable to heal said person with targeted heals as they are "dead" but are also unable to res them. AoE heals will heal them - eg the gas on Merc. Our raid team deals with this by having the player die - jump off the edge, "stuck it" etc and then get res'd by a player (do not return to area start as it often doesn't work).

Focus target does nothing.

Hope it's helpful as it's a very annoying bug, especially during prog runs.

[ArchingBeast]

On 6/10/2023 at 1:46 AM, Jerba said:

 

I would like to reaffirm that this bug is still present. We see it every week and waste at least 20 minutes of our raid night working around it. This is not an isolated issue; it affects every raid group that frequently wipes on bosses, and it is incomprehensible how this bug has been in-game for over a year and is being ignored.
In the hope of getting it fixed, here is all the information we know about it.

• This bug was introduced with Game Update 7.0. It was present on 7.0 PTS (during R-4 testing, this was before R-4 Anomaly was pushed back to GU 7.1) and it arrived on the live servers with 7.0. Many players say it started with 7.1 because they only started raiding again during 7.1 (when R-4 Anomaly was released to the live servers) but it started with 7.0. For example, we have seen this bug on PTS 7.0 in R-4, and on live 7.0 in the Terror from Beyond operation.
• This bug ("seeing dead players") is closely related to another bug ("stuck at 90% in loading screen"); they always appear together.
• For this bug to happen, the following conditions must be met:
  1. The player must be in a group (either a 4-player party or an operation group; this does not matter) and
  2. The corpse (death location) must be more than 135 meters away from the respawn point (area start in operations, medcenter in flashpoints).
• After every wipe, there is a small chance for the bug to occur. In other words, it can occur after the first wipe, or it can occur after 5 wipes. The longer the raid goes on, the higher the chance that this bug happens. At first, it will only affect a single player, then the longer the raid goes on, the more players are affected by it.
• Typically, this bug affects at most 3-4 players in a 8-player group; in other words, these players will sometimes have dead players in the group, and they'll get the 90% stuck loading screen. Everyone else is not affected; they can play normally. Those players might show up as dead to the bugged players, but on their screen, everything is normal.
  Note that a player might see other dead players, and they can show up dead for someone else. In other words, there is no dichotomy between bugged players and the dead players.
  Note that the dead players are the same for all bugged players. They might not show up dead at the same time, but across several wipes, it will always be these 3-4 players that are the dead players; everyone else is always displayed correctly.
  Also, during different raids, it is always different players getting the bug, so we can rule out any hardware or software issues tied to certain players.
• Specifically, if player A has the bug, and player B is one of the "dead" players, the bug can be 100% reproduced as follows: Player A must release to the respawn point before player B.
  On the other hand, if you do it in reverse order (player B releases before player A), the bug is guaranteed to never happen.
  To understand this, we must consider the release not as an atomic action but as two actions: 1. player is revived, 2. player is teleported to area start. So to reproduce the bug, player A must be out of awareness range of player B while the revive happens (1).
• My theory is that the root cause is as follows: Ever since 7.0, the game may enter a state where it loses track of certain group members. In other words, on the server side those players are still in the group, and the client UI shows them in the group frame, but somewhere in the internal memory, the game no longer considers them to be a group member.
  This has an impact on the characters' "brain state" field (lucid, stunned or dead): Usually, this field is replicated if a character is inside the awareness range (< 135 meters) or if they are a group member, it is always replicated, without any distance checks.
  If my theory is true and the game no longer considers them to be a group member, the character's "lucid" state change is not replicated when they are outside of awareness range, and they'll stay in the "dead" state.
  This theory would explain why this bug is range-based, why it can be worked around by stunning the player, and possibly also why the "stuck in loading screen at 90%" bug only happens while grouped.
• Note that this bug is not isolated to operations, it can occur in flashpoints as well. For example, we encountered this bug in the Esseles flashpoint when wiping on Ironfist. This happens very rarely, since you usually don't wipe in flashpoints, and frequently, the medcenter will be inside of awareness range of the boss room. In the case of Ironfist, the medcenter is in a different level and you need to take an elevator to get to the boss, that's why this bug can happen there.
• When we say "a player shows up as dead", we mean the following: The player has a gray nameplate and they'll show up as 0 HP in the group frame. However, when targeting the player, you can see that they are at full HP in the target frame as well as the tooltip. In addition, you can see that the player is moving around, though their movement may be laggy or the character animation might bug out, since dead players are not supposed to be moving.
  When attempting to resurrect the player, the server will respond with an error "player is not dead". When trying to use an ability on the player, the client will refuse to activate the ability since the player is dead; the rare exceptions are a Sage's Force Armor, and AoE abilities.
  Specifically, the bug is that the game client considers this character to be in the "dead" state, while the server considers the character to be in the "lucid" state.
• Note that if a character shows up dead, this bugged state will persist across areas; they will stay dead even when both characters leave group and exit area, the character will still show up dead in the next area even when ungrouped.
• We are aware of three workarounds (when a player already shows up dead, aka the healer forgot to be the last to release to area start):
  1. The "dead" player must die again and then release to the respawn point (or be resurrected by another player) while the player with the bugged client is in awareness range of the corpse. That way, on the client the state correctly changes from "dead" to actually "dead" to "lucid". For example, the player can enter an exhaustion zone where they die, or they can jump down and die from fall damage. Or they can aggro an enemy and /stuck.
  2. The "dead" player must be stunned while in range of the player with the bugged client. That way, on the client, the state changes from "dead" to "stunned" to "lucid". For example, the "Titax Strike" ability in Nature of Progress stuns the player and fixes the bug, as well as the "High Voltage Line" ability in the same boss room. Also, activating the "Recovery Jetpack" by falling down in the Lady Dominique boss room stuns the player. When dueling, any of the class abilities that deliver a hard stun (4s) or a soft stun (8s) will work, while knockbacks or roots do not work. Also, Cybertech Electro-Stun Grenades can be used even by players with a bugged client since those are AoE. Previously, it was possible to duel players in R-4 Anomaly as a quick workaround but ever since dueling was removed in 7.1.1, we now have to resort to workarounds #1 or #3.
  3. The player with the bugged client must restart their game, either by Alt+F4ing (causing a disconnect) and restarting, or by cleanly exiting and restarting. Going to character selection or server selection is not enough; they must quit the game. On restarting, each group member's "brain state" will be correctly loaded from the server.
  However, note that each of these three workarounds is only temporary. On the next wipe, the client can once again enter a bugged state.
• As mentioned before, the other bug ("loading screen is stuck at 90%") is closely related to the "dead players in group" bug:
  Whenever a client has entered the bugged state (aka they have been seeing "dead" characters), the next time the player enters a loading screen while inside a group, the loading screen will get stuck at around 90%. The game window does not freeze, it is not at 100% CPU usage, the loading bar just stops moving. It is as if the client enters an invalid state from which it cannot recover, and then stops loading the area.
  Note the two preconditions: 1) The player must enter an area load screen (exiting to character select does not count), and 2) The player must be inside a group (does not matter if it is a party or an ops group).
  For example:
  - A player has a bugged client inside R-4 Anomaly and exits area while grouped → stuck at 90%
  - A player has a bugged client inside R-4 Anomaly and travels to their stronghold while grouped → stuck at 90%
  - A player has a bugged client inside R-4 Anomaly, leaves group (starting the 30s timer), then exits area → area load goes through
  - A player has a bugged client inside R-4 Anomaly, leaves group (starting the 30s timer), then exits area, then accepts a group invite and travels to a different area → stuck at 90%
  - A player has a bugged client inside R-4 Anomaly and logs out to Character Select → they load into Character Select
  - A player has a bugged client inside R-4 Anomaly, logs out to Character Select and logs onto a different character → they load into the other character
  - A player has a bugged client inside R-4 Anomaly, logs out to Character Select and logs onto a different character, then accepts a group invite and travels to a different planet → stuck at 90%
  In other words: Once the client is in the bugged state, even switching to a different character does not help. Even disbanding the group and joining a different group with different characters does not help; the next loading screen (while grouped) gets stuck.
  You can't wait it out either; like you could be playing normally for 2 hours after the operation ended, and you would switch areas normally without being in a group, then eventually you group up again and will always get stuck in the next loading screen.
  The only workaround is to restart the game client.
• There are two other bugs which occur since 7.0 and might be related.
  The first bug occurs as follows: A player is inside an operation, then they have a disconnect or they Alt+F4 and restart the game. They are able to login within 1-2 minutes, so they should load into the operation, right where they left off. Instead, they will spawn outside of the operation (e.g. for R-4 Anomaly, they'll load into Mek Sha in front of the operations entrance). However, to their group members, they show up as being inside the operation (when moving the mouse over the group frame, the tooltip will say they are inside R-4 Anomaly). Once they enter the operation, everything appears to be normal. However, exactly 20 minutes after they logged in again, the player is automatically brought to character selection due to inactivity. In other words, even though they've been actively playing, the inactivity timer is erroneously started and never reset. This bug happens very rarely, e.g. once a month, but often enough that we can easily identify when it happens (= spawning outside of the operation after a client restart and group members see them as being inside the operation).
  The second bug occurs as follows: A group leader invites another player into an operation group. In chat, they see the message "You have invited ... to join your ops group." but even though they accept the invite, the group leader sees no chat message "... joined the ops group." and they don't see the player in the operations frame; the slot shows up empty. The other players in the group can see the newly joined player. As a workaround, one of the other players has to move the "invisible" player to a different slot in the ops group, then they'll show up to the group leader as well. We have seen this specific bug a single time before 7.0 (sometime during 3.x/4.x), but ever since 7.0, it appears regularly. It is rarer than the first bug but also frequently enough to identify it.
  It would be great if these two bugs can also be fixed, or maybe they are caused by the original bug and will automatically disappear when the original bug is fixed. However, they are not nearly as annoying as the original bug.

I hope that with this additional information, you will be able to identify and fix the bug. As mentioned above, it is very frustrating, it costs us a lot of time in every single raid, and not just our group but every raid group during progress (aka during frequent wipes).

If you are unable to identify the bug, I ask that you make it easier to work around the bug, e.g.:

• Allow players to once again duel inside of R-4 Anomaly (and inside other operations), so we can stun other players. or
• In every boss room, add a mechanic for players to easily stun or kill themselves without aggroing the boss. Specifically in R-4 Anomaly, make it possible to use the elevator to return to area start (where there's an exhaustion zone to easily kill oneself), or add an exhaustion zone in all taxi tubes. or
• Create a new item with the following "On Use" ability: Stuns yourself for 1 second. Does not create resolve. Cannot be used in warzones/arenas. Cannot be used during combat. Has a 30 second cooldown. Alternatively, create a chat command similar to /stuck that activates the same ability, or at least causes the server to send the correct "brain state" for all group members.

Any of these three workarounds would be a huge relief. Please add one of these workarounds ASAP. We really enjoy the game, specifically operations, but this bug is killing our motivation to progress on bosses.

Note that this bug was included as part of the 7.1 Known Issues (even though it first appeared in 7.0, not in 7.1), but you forgot to carry it over to the 7.1.1, 7.2 and 7.2.1 Known Issues. Adding this bug to the current known issues would be a great sign that you are aware of this bug.

Here are some more threads about this bug:

• R-4 Boss: IP-CPT Feedback Thread (March 2022)
• Other players staying dead in the ops frame after rezzing (May 2022)
• Players Show as Dead in Ops Frames [Not Fixed on PTS] (June 2022)
• Endless loading and dead player in operation group (August 2022)
• R-4 Anomaly Bug Collection (September 2022)
• Dead Players in Operation Frames R4 Vet Mode (October 2022)
• Dead Bug and Infinite Load Screens (December 2022)
• any chances to fix game breaking stuff? (January 2023)
• Infinite loading screen and Dead people in raid (January 2023)

Bumping this again, as this is probably the most comprehensive, universal description with the best-founded theory on the matter. You ain't gonna get more detail and info than this apart from video footage thats in the thread already, too.

Edited December 15, 2023 by ArchingBeast

[anchor_leg]

21 hours ago, JackieKo said:

Hi all, 

We are still unable to reproduce this issue during our testing and investigation, so the team would like some additional information from players who are experiencing this issue.

• For groups who are seeing dead players during their Ops run, what happens when the "dead" players is set as a focus target?
• Do they show up as alive again or does nothing happen? 

Appreciate any assistance with helping us track down what's causing this issue. Thanks! 

 

Can we please do some basic product-dev troubleshooting with clients (us raiders) like any product company would do? A long standing issue you can't reproduce would always result in a client call, screen share or find another format to try to track this down. Please work with us raiders to either be in the ops, monitor the logs or something else because we can reproduce it every time and it's been months. This happens every single week in NiM Gods when my friends and I run prog at some point in the night, it was horrible last night for everyone.

• Focus target does absolutely nothing
• They will stay dead until the person who sees them dead asks them to kill themselves. After they do that, we rez them and then they can see. After a wipe, this bug can happen again. This workaround isn't good because not all sections of a raid is an easy place to die. We shouldn't need to kill ourselves dozens of times in a raid prog

Please at a bare minimum, put dueling back into Raids. This was the QUICKEST fix as someone just needed to duel and stun them for the dead person to appear alive again on their screen. The other fix was if any boss had any sort of knockback, they would then appear alive on their screen after that effect.

 

[Jerba]

I'm very glad that you haven't forgotten about this bug. Today, we specifically ran R-4 to discover steps to reproduce.

First, to your question:

On 12/15/2023 at 12:09 AM, JackieKo said:

• For groups who are seeing dead players during their Ops run, what happens when the "dead" players is set as a focus target?
• Do they show up as alive again or does nothing happen?

When targeting a "dead" player, they have the correct HP in both the target frame and the focus target frame. Putting the "dead" player in the focus target (aka pressing Alt+F) does not make any difference. In the operations frame, they are still at 0 HP, their nameplate is grey and when using an ability on them, the red error text says the player is dead. From the videos linked below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXy_pBqH9KU&t=17

 

Sadly, we still cannot isolate the root cause but we have verified our previous findings:

• This bug only occurs in phased areas (flashpoints & operations) where the respawn point is far away from the death location. For example: R-4, TFB, S&V, Denova, Dxun. On the other hand, it never (or only very rarely) happens in DF or DP.
• The bug randomly occurs during the raid night. E.g. today we started R-4 at 8:42pm and the first dead player occurred at 8:55pm, the second at 9:36pm and the third at 10:03pm.
• If this bug occurs, the player will show up dead for 1-4 other players (in a 8-player group). In other words, if the bug happens, multiple players get it at the same time. It's not like player B gets a bugged player A, then ten minutes later, player C also gets a bugged player A. No, player B and player C will get the bugged player A at the same time. However, they may not notice it immediately, because they were the last to return to medcenter, and only notice it on the subsequent wipe etc.
• Once the bug occurs, we can 100% reliably reproduce it by having the "dead" player be the last to release to medcenter. And we can 100% prevent it by having the "dead" player be the first to release to medcenter (prevent = so they do not show up as dead; this is only temporary and does not fix it).
• When you see dead players, the only way to fix it is for you to restart the client. In other words, the "dead" player bug is now inside SWTOR's process memory, and there's no way to get rid of it: Switching to a different area, leaving group, switching to a different character etc. all do not help. For example, you can see a player B dead in an operation, leave group, queue for warzone (with player B appearing on the enemy team), and then that player B will also show up dead inside the warzone and you cannot attack them.
• Frequently, whenever you see a dead player, on the next area load screen, the loading screen will be stuck at 90%. This is not guaranteed; you can see dead players and not get a stuck loading screen; not sure why.

Here are some videos:

• The bug first occurred at 8:55pm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQgCnQtquiw After taking the tram, the character Charmaf showed a broken animation on mine (Theho's) and Vêrve's screen (seen at 0:40 in the video). In other words, the character would play the "standing still" animation even though it was moving. After the next wipe, the same character Charmaf showed up as dead on both mine (Theho's), Vêrve's, Boiaki's and Devilex's screen, and the animation was still buggy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxHUTHl2KdM
  • Here you can see the second video from Charmaf's perspective, as well as afterwards on Mek-Sha (next bullet point): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0bTbMaGD_TI
• Afterwards, we all exited area: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXy_pBqH9KU Note how Charmaf is invisible (aside from the snowball from his Life Day outfit), and whenever I target the player, I see their "Exit area" cast bar appear even though that was from the previous area (inside R-4). My character is stuck in their animation and not moving. After loading into R-4, my character was still stuck: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud1iSN2ch6Y But as soon as I used my Scamper ability (Scoundrel roll) at 0:03, animations were working again. Then I exited area again but my loading screen was stuck at 90%.
  • Vêrve and Charmaf had a stuck loading screen upon first exiting R-4 to Mek Sha.
  • I'nfinity and Soorah reported the same bug (character stuck in animation) while on Mek-Sha and had a stuck loading screen when loading back into R-4.
• These videos show workarounds on how to get a dead player to show up alive again:
  • Dying to a trash group, releasing to medcenter, and showing up alive after taking the tram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R84zpsSeAAk
  • Dying to fall damage, then also releasing to medcenter and showing up alive after taking the tram: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrWhmUNm5H0
  • Dying to an exhaustion zone, then releasing to medcenter (while in range of me) and immediately being alive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1nijGfdBRg
• Another video of an invisible character (that also showed up dead after the previous wipe): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzsHpJrvqxI
• Note how the tooltip of the bugged & dead player is different: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJeNmfTRuPg Houy has the correct tooltip for a dead player out of range: Orange nameplate, and guild tag & Legendary status are missing. But the bugged player, Vêrve, has a gray nameplate and displays the guild tag & Legendary status, as if they were in range, while in fact they are not in range.
• This screenshot from the bugged player shows how they are at 51% HP, but the HP bar in their nameplate is at 100%: https://i.imgur.com/bHOyN4n.png.
• And here's a screenshot by Vêrve (who saw Charmaf dead before) inside R-4: https://i.imgur.com/kzURCWW.jpg. Note how it says that the character was down-leveled to 75 but they are standing inside R-4. Only Mek-Sha downlevels to 75; R-4 is at level 80. So it looks like the downleveling from Mek-Sha was not (visually) removed when they entered R-4.

Here are our combat logs but I didn't see anything noteworthy: https://parsely.io/parser/view/858489/17/688230463038521 & https://parsely.io/parser/view/858634/2/689220910926598

Based on today's testing, my best guess toward the root cause is:

• This bug is not triggered by player death. Instead, it is triggered by group members getting in or out of awareness range (~135m).
• What I mean by that is: Nearby group members have their full information replicated (position, stats, effects), while for players out of range, you only see limited information (low-frequency position updates and hitpoints).
• I'm thinking that this bug is triggered at the precise moment a player enters or exits this range. At this point, the server must switch from the little information to the detailed information (and vice versa), and apparently there is a low chance for this switchover to fail, after which the group member will be in a bugged state (and show up dead, have a stuck animation etc.).
  • In R-4, this typically manifests by players taking the tram. In TFB, it manifests by players approaching the boss room after taking the taxi.

  And to repeat what I wrote earlier:

On 6/10/2023 at 1:46 AM, Jerba said:

If you are unable to identify the bug, I ask that you make it easier to work around the bug, e.g.:

• Allow players to once again duel inside of R-4 Anomaly (and inside other operations), so we can stun other players. or
• In every boss room, add a mechanic for players to easily stun or kill themselves without aggroing the boss. Specifically in R-4 Anomaly, make it possible to use the elevator to return to area start (where there's an exhaustion zone to easily kill oneself), or add an exhaustion zone in all taxi tubes. or
• Create a new item with the following "On Use" ability: Stuns yourself for 1 second. Does not create resolve. Cannot be used in warzones/arenas. Cannot be used during combat. Has a 30 second cooldown. Alternatively, create a chat command similar to /stuck that activates the same ability, or at least causes the server to send the correct "brain state" for all group members.

If you are unable to reproduce this bug soon, please add any of ^ these ^ workarounds. It's not a fix but it would save every raider an enormous time to have an easier workaround.

 

On 12/15/2023 at 12:58 AM, xxSHOONYxx said:

Not helpful for devs to give wrong info because they might look at the wrong places.
First three bosses of r4 testing began (03.02.22 https://www.swtor.com/info/news/article/20220302) half a month almost after 7.0 (2.15.22 https://www.swtor.com/info/news/article/20220215-0) came out on live server, and Dominique came out in pts on 6.3.22

Terror from beyond sometimes people don't appear dead, they straight up die when going up beause they were moving or trying to move when the animation to go up happens and the dead person has to /follow a healer so it can be seen and ressed. 

You're correct; I must have confused the dates. But we have definitely seen the bug on live 7.0 in TFB, on PTS 7.1 in R-4, and on live 7.1 in R-4. And when we encountered it in TFB, it was definitely the same bug as in R-4 and nothing that could be fixed with /follow (that's a different bug, related to players appearing in the wrong position after a teleport, and has nothing to do with this bug).

Edited December 16, 2023 by Jerba

[Darksplat]

If you can not reproduce the faults after this post above then I really dont know, but it happens so often how can you not reproduce it? It happens more in WD and Papa K in R4 HM than in SM maybe because we are not dying as much. I can not say for certain in IP as I have only done it a couple times. But as a healer it is very frustrating

Edited December 17, 2023 by Darksplat