I think we've finally trapped this sucker.

When a player creates a character, the default current_zone_id is set to 253 (Queen's Colony), with 0,0,0 as coordinates. After the player lands in their chosen city/starting zone, the world updates the characters table and updates those values to the selected zone_id and starting coords.

If, for whatever reason, they do not get fully into the game the first time after selecting a server, these values are never set, and the players chosen city is never updated, and they end up in Queen's Colony, hovering over shark-infested waters and the frightening abomination known as "The Vulth".

You can reproduce this bug by locking your server and creating a new toon - it will be denied access, and you can clearly see in the characters table, the invalid current_zone_id and x,y,z settings.

Thank you, have a nice day.

I tried reproducing this as described and I am unable to get the same results. In fact, looking at the code I cannot see how that could happen as UpdateStartingZone is called before World even finishes creating the character so there should be no way that UpdateStartingZone is not called for any new character.

Maybe it is in fact a specific race/class combo then...

Lock your server, and try creating a Dark Elf Shadowknight at Neriak. Once your character is denied access, look at your characters table, you should see your default value for current_zone_id instead of the zone ID for Neriak.

Is this a starting city bug , or when the server cant think of where to put the character..
eg, whist running around on island i received a spam of text ..

then found myself above the water area "Bladefin ruins" with my breath meter, and then game crashed

couldnt log back in , left it for a while ..tried to log in tonight and found my self again above the water at /loc 0,0,0



So possibly this is just where the server dumps a toon , as like the safe spot (not very safe ;p) in zone , if unsure exactly where it was when game crashes..i dunno /scratch head
could be completely on the wrong path here

No, that spam of text is "desync" you hear me and LE thrashing around about. That's when the server/client lose communication sync and any data coming from server the client cannot interpret, so it comes out in the form of whatever commands it thinks you are trying to enter. Meanwhile, your toon ran off in some random direction and likely fell out-of-bounds, and world tries to correct you by placing you at 0,0,0.

At least that's my understanding of it.