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'Forza Horizon 3' Update Accidentally Published Unencrypted Build of the Game (vice.com)
An employee at Forza Horizon 3 developer Playground Games accidentally green-lighted the wrong update file for PC players, who found themselves downloading a whopping 53GB download that turned out to be an unencrypted future build (.37.2) of the entire game intended for developers. Motherboard reports: Naturally, players who'd managed to download it yesterday had a field day leaking the information within, right down to massive posts on Imgur showing all the new cars and forum threads detailing the Porsches thought to come in an future unannounced pack. Since Forza Horizon 3 requires a constant online connection and works off of a constantly refreshing save file, anyone who played the new patch on PC found themselves slapped with an error saying their Forza profiles were no longer available. Playing it with the new build would thus effectively mean starting a new game from scratch, even if they'd dumped dozens of hours into Forza Horizon 3 since its release last September. But starting over is exactly what players shouldn't have done. The best thing they could do was shut down the game, walk away, and wait for a fix. "PC players who completed the download of .37.2 and then started a new game save will have a corrupted saved game," wrote Brian Ekberg, Forza's community manager, in a forum post. "Avoid creating a new saved game on .37.2, and only play on .35.2 to avoid this issue. As long as you have an existing save and have not created a new one on .37.2, your saved game will work correctly once the update is available."
Horrible analogy.
In case of a bank, you know it's not yours because you shouldn't have received them anyway.
In case of this game, you already bought it so you own it.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
You say that but Halo Master Chief had a 20gb patch day-1, sadly patches in the gigabytes have become the norm. Plus these are often streamed in the background. Either way I wouldn't be suspicious of a 50gb update, though I'd be pissed and go complain online about having to wait for yet another update.
"Accidental leak?" That results in free advertising, see above for example.
Blame the Russians and you'll get even more press.
In case of this game, you already bought it so you have a limited license to potentially use it under certain conditions as long as the studio sees fit, doesn't decide to shut off their authentication servers, and neither the publisher nor the gaming platform decide you've violated an arbitrary rule.
FTFY
"If there was a gay Afro-Puertorican Linux distribution, I'd give it a try" ~lucm
You are a big racing game fan and have never heard of the Forza series? Ooooooooooooooooooook.
You assume that the player actually noticed that the update happened.
More and more games come now fall into the habit, at least if they're updated often and require large updates, to start their updater with the computer and keep it running, checking every now and then for updates and downloading and applying them in the background, without the user even noticing that an update occurred unless he just happens to want to play the game while the update is in progress.
If the game is on Steam, chances are even higher that any update happens without the user even noticing it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The lawsuit is done, as is SCO. The complaint from SCO boiled down to them LYING! Hence, they lost every single lawsuit and appeal. I'm not sure if you are a shill or just completely ignorant, but in the case of the latter there is a site called Groklaw which covered the cases start to finish. With I'll add, an exceptional paralegal pulling down PACER files, and numerous attorneys adding commentary and explanation to the proceedings.
As one example, SCO tried to sue for source code they claimed to own that was released by AT&T before AT&T lost their lawsuit trying to recapture source code they gave away so that people would improve the AT&T code for free. The AT&T lawsuit ended up in the branches of BSD and System V(5).
SCO tried very hard to play the patent troll game and lost. Most of us in the world are happy about it, and better off because of it. Go do your homework, or shill back at the Junior High schools where people may believe the trolls.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
From a technical perspective, it's completely acceptable. This build was never intended to be released to the public, and so there was no expectation of backwards compatibility. It produces a new save, which the old build (by definition not patched to handle saves from the future) will then apparently choke on and mangle. Unless the mangling somehow avoids losing any information, or users' saves are backed up somewhere, I don't see what can be done in this situation.
The only thing I can think of would be to hold off on pulling the developer build until you've produced another retail build based on the last good one, with functionality patched in downcast saves generated from the developer build. But that kind of thing would probably have a minimum of something like a 1 week turnaround, which would mean leaving the development build live for a whole extra week.
In other words, the decision to immediately pull the developer build and revert to the previous one probably makes the corruption of saves inevitable. The only hope is that they pull it fast enough that as few users as possible are afflicted.
As for future-proofing against this kind of mishap (which falls in the general case of "Updates Breaking Saves"), you can use a versioning system that keeps saves from older builds around and writes to differently named saves with each new update. That unfortunately seems not to be what was done here...