I decided to talk to DEV because I got told that they can see this kinda stuff, but my friend also told me that they aren't going to look at it due to "lack " of time. I would understand if this happened to a SUV or a Hellcat, but 25M still lot of money that I lost
Be advised, your friend is talking out of his backside. Several members of the dev-team have already spent significant amounts of time attempting to look in to this issue, in quite some detail. Let us be the judge of our time, not your friend.
Similarly, your intel that dev can somehow magically see all aspects of the lifespan of a vehicle are somewhat 'assumed', rather than necessarily being real. I'm not going to go into full detail of what we can see and what we cannot, but I'll say this much - it's not always easy to tell if a vehicle has been removed legitimately via 'allowed' in-game methods, and it's usually a lot easier for us to see when something 'dodgy' has happened that goes outside the realms of normality.
In your case, there is not a trace of this helicopter having been dropped by a database glitch or any signs of a write failure. Despite what our 'learned youngsters' might deduce about the necessity of storing and re-fetching a vehicle from the garage in order to make it stick, this is not the case, and (unless there is a glitch we have not yet formally identified) that is not a requirement. Once the vehicle has spawned on the tarmac, and is able to be interacted with by the owner (usually a matter of seconds), it will be written into the database as the owners, and marked
alive and
active. If it then crashes or is left unattended in the game world long enough for it to be despawned, it will be marked as no longer
active but still
alive - the
alive flag determines if it is a rental or an owned vehicle.
The only things that can remove an
alive flag is:
- the vehicle being rented, not purchased, or
- the vehicle being scrapped at the scrapyard by someone who stole it (not possible with the Blackfishes, precisely because they are so expensive - no scrap dealer will touch them!) or
- the cops crushing a vehicle because they believe it was involved in a serious drugs crime (Proceeds of Crime Act, I think they refer to it as).
One the vehicle's
alive flag is set to false, the vehicle will never be available in a garage again, and at the beginning of the next 4-hourly server restart, it will be deleted entirely from the database, never to be seen again.
We have had some very rare cases where vehicles have been destroyed literally as they were in the process of spawning, before their
alive flags were set in the database, and this has crashed the database-writing routine for that vehicle, and it has never been recorded properly. However, these kinds of exploded vehicle instances are usually as a result of some object or building being too close to a spawn point, and the vehicle literally dying before it's been fully born.
You, on the other hand, have said you got into the Blackfish, and flew it away somewhere, and then crashed it several minutes later. If that is true, there is practically zero chance that this vehicle failed to be written to the database, because it clearly materialised on the spawnpoint, and you successfully completed an interaction with it, and took the time to start its engines, spool it up, and fly away. It would have been written to the database before you'd even got your backside on the cockpit seat!
I admit I am having trouble believing your story, but I am not so hardball as to say that the database write is always perfect - even though usually on the very rare occasions that it 'coughs', there is evidence in the logfile, and currently the logfile is giving me no such evidence of anything out of the ordinary whatsoever.
I'm finding it even harder to believe, seeing that you successfully managed to purchase, in quite quick succession,
six other helicopters to the value of
£15,675,000 with no problems, thus 'bullet-proving' the fact that the database appeared to be working quite normally at that time.
I need you to confirm a few more things for me, before I make any further judgements...
- What order did you purchase the helicopters in?
- Specifically, at what point in the sequence did you buy the Blackfish?
- What did you do with the helicopters as you purchased them and they spawned? Did you move them, fly them away or have a team-mate fly them away, or did you store them instantly back in the garage?
- How long do you think the entire process of purchasing these six choppers take, from first interaction with the shop menu, to the point you walked over to the Blackfish? Roughly - I'm not expecting a figure in milliseconds, but to the nearest half-minute or so would be good!
- Were you using any sort of macro or special keyboard tricks, to speed up the process of purchases in the shop?
- Given that you were planning to purchase £40,675,000-worth of valuable, fragile, easily-crashable, hanging-by-a-thread-at-the-best-of-times gear, why on God's green earth did you not at least take a single witness along with you, even just for protection of that money (that you must've been carrying in your pocket), who could vouch for what he saw, or even record the scene for you? Or why didn't you think it worth recording yourself? I mean, it's a helluva lot of money to lose in a glitch, isn't it? A sensible person would take steps to ensure they were protected against anything 'unusual' happening. Yet you didn't. Why?
Don't get me wrong... you are
not being 'presumed lying' or anything like that... but in order to find out if this is a genuine bug, that has very strangely slipped through the cracks in a way that we devs have not yet even managed to hypothesise, let alone isolate or understand, then we'll need to do some work and digging, to get as much info on how to recreate the steps and make it happen 'to order'. If we can get close to that, and you help us, I'll happily reinstate the chopper. But first, we need to do the work.
