Benjamin Arnold.3457

Party UI was not the only way that these texture handles could be orphaned, it was just the most common way to reproduce the issue. The fix should work for the other, less common ways to reproduce it.

There may be other bugs that could cause things to go permanently invisible, but this bug certainly affected WvW. If you ever walked up to a keep and all the NPCs were invisible, it was probably this bug, and should be fixed.

For those that like more information: The core issue was a model load interrupt resulting in dangling handle references to some textures in a global texture pool. Since the references never got cleared, we eventually ran into a situation where we had no textures left, resulting in a permanent loading failure while all future composite models waited for the textures to be available. The solution was to make sure that we always release the texture handles when our model loading is interrupted, along with making sure the party UI isn’t quite so overzealous on when it decides to reload models. A lot of the early time without a repro was spent trying to figure out all the ways that models could go invisible, which led me to a lot of frustrating dead ends, thankfully it was not in vain.

We just shipped a hotfix that included a fix for player and humanoid creature models going permanently invisible, primarily in fractals. When the bug occurred, it would result in all future models failing to load and going invisible until a map swap. This bug has been occurring for months, and we were having trouble finding a way to reproduce it. Thanks to clues from community reports, we were finally able to nail down a way to reproduce the bug consistently and thus were able to find the fix. The three key clues were: It mainly occurs in fractals or dungeons. This told us it might have something to do with parties.It doesn't occur with "Simple Party UI" checked, which pointed to party UI being involved.It appears to happen most often when there is a weaver in the party, which happened to be due to a very specific skill, "Ride the Lightning"It turns out there were actually two separate code bugs working in tandem with a particular skill and a specific timing, and that combination would result in the issue arising after repeated uses of the skill. Please let us know if, after this fix, you notice anything else going strange with player or humanoid creature loading. Thanks for your help in nailing this down!

Yeah to be clear the Mesmer isn’t required, it’s just nice to have a portal in case anyone in your party doesn’t have jackal mount. Ideally everyone does and no Mesmer portal needed.

There are a few rooms where you can only reach them through a jackal portal.

Probably should have mentioned this sooner, but make sure you have a mesmer with a jackal portal if you want to make it through the raid on day one.

Thanks for the reports, the team is looking into a fix!

I thought you stated in a previous thread that you would fix this in the 'next' hotfix? Did something happen or am I misremembering what you said. That was the change for adding a confirmation when merging parties with squads, specifically to stop fractal trolling, which is now live. Other merge types follow different code paths and have different associated design concerns and differences.

I have some ideas thanks to a player report. I'm going to try to repro this again next time I'm in office.

I am not able to reproduce this internally. If I have 4 clients separated into two squads, both with a commander leader, only the commander can initiate a merge. I also confirmed this to be the case on live thanks to some players testing it for me. There could be an edge case that we missed, if anyone can figure out a way to reproduce this please PM me (Don't post it here) how you did it so I can work on a fix. As of now, without reproducing it I can't fix it. Parties merging into parties is getting looked at separately.

This should be fixed. No patch note because I didn't write one (my bad). As of now, you must confirm a squad merge when merging party > squad. Squad > squad can still merge without confirmation if there is no commander squad leader. Party > party can still merge without confirmation. Let me know if you have any other issues relating to this.

Just had this happen 2x in a row on Ensolyss @ 33%. Wasted almost my entire morning before work. Please fix. I'm sorry this has happened. I have a fix that will ship with PoF.

This has been moved to the top of my priority list, and I am investigating code solutions as we speak. I have contacted CS but I can't comment on any action that would be taken against the perpetrators, both because I don't know, and because it isn't for me to say.