Bug - Cannot Reproduce error occurs when buying pumpkins

[stevey ray]

i have kolmafia v14.3.r8714
this error has now occurred on two separate occasions, today & last week.
when i try to purchase multiple pumpkins it tells me i have purchased grumpy bumpkin's pumpkin seed catalog instead (which of course i haven't). these GBPSCs appear in my inventory but they are ghosts. the basic problem is that i dont receive the pumpkins yet the meat is still spent. i ask kol support for help & they told me to contact you.
i think the problem originates from the fact that some of the pumpkins are being bought by someone else while i'm in the process of purchasing them.
Below are copies of the responses i've received by kol [A} and today's graphical CLI from kolmafia :

[A]

This sounds like an issue that you should report to the KoLMafia support team. In the meantime, I'll see if I can have someone look at your account history to see what happened to the meat/items from our perspective.

--Gem

and....

I checked the logs, and you did buy a bunch of pumpkins and did not buy a Grumpy Bumpkin's Seed Catalog. You'll need to talk to the Mafia people to figure out why it told you you did.




Purchasing pumpkin (4 @ 7,975)...
You acquire Grumpy Bumpkin's Pumpkin Seed Catalog (4)
Wrong item received - possibly its name or plural has changed.
Desired purchase quantity not reached (wanted 4, got 0)
Searching for "pumpkin"...
Requests complete.

Searching for "pumpkin beer"...
Requests complete.

Searching for "pumpkin"...
Requests complete.

Purchasing pumpkin (4 @ 8,000)...
You acquire Grumpy Bumpkin's Pumpkin Seed Catalog (4)
Wrong item received - possibly its name or plural has changed.
Desired purchase quantity not reached (wanted 4, got 0)
Searching for "pumpkin"...
Requests complete.

thanks for any help you can provide me with (and ideally refund my meat)

stevey ray

 

[lostcalpolydude]

The latest version of mafia is 14.5 (if you aren't using jar files that are even more recent) from http://sourceforge.net/projects/kolmafia/ . Try that and see if things are still broken. Did you actually check the relay browser to see if you got the pumpkins? Mafia won't know you have them if it doesn't think you bought them.

 

[slyz]

thanks for any help you can provide me with (and ideally refund my meat)

You can either open up the Relay Browser to see how much meat you have and check your inventory for either pumpkins or Grumpy Bumpkin's Pumpkin Seed Catalog.

You can also use the Refresh Status button on the bottom left of the Mafia GUI, and the refresh button on the bottom right of the item Manager, to force Mafia to resynch with your real KoL inventory.

Mafia said it was going to buy pumpkins, then said it had bought Grumpy Bumpkin's Pumpkin Seed Catalogs. What did Mafia really do in the end? Do you have extra pumpkins or extra Catalogs in your inventory? How much meat was really spend?

In both cases, your meat shouldn't simply disappear. Mafia either spend it on pumpkins and, for some mysterious reason, said it was buying Catalogs, or it really bought Catalogs for some equally mysterious reason, and you can just place those in the mall to get your meat back. Or it simply said it did all that and really didn't do anything (for some mysterious reason).

 

[stevey ray]

cheers

cheers for all the feedback
one thing i know for sure: mafia didn't purchase the seed catalogs. catalogs are worth 11m each, as opposed to the 8k for pumpkins. i don't even have 11m in total so the catalogs simply didn't get purchased. however....
mafia seems to think it purchased catalogs instead of pumpkins, & at the same price. the catalogs appear in my inventory. but it's just a glitch. if u try & use them, or sell them it'll tell u it has but they will then simply disappear.
what happened was i tried to buy 6 pumpkins, say, when there were only 5. so mafia took the meat for replacement 'catalogs' & i end up with no items & no money. mafia has basically bought ghost catalogs which are worse than useless.
i checked my inventory manually through the browser & the catalogs weren't there even though the main interface said they were & when i logged out & back in the had vanished from the main interface too. this happened both last week & today.
i will install the latest version, but i wouldn't mind if someone could check out these instances for me & return my meat,
cheers for your time & effort guys
stevey ray

 

[Bale]

Mafia cannot "take" your meat so it cannot return it either. Keep in mind that meat cannot vanish unless the Kingdom has a bug.

 

[slyz]

Mafia may *think* it has spend your meat, but unless it was spend on pumpkins it didn't actually spend it.

It's a strange gCLI output though. How exactly did you try to purchase the pumpkins? It probably was from the "purchase" tab, but what are the steps needed to reproduce this?

 

[lostcalpolydude]

You describe how you did a good check looking for catalogs. You apparently didn't bother checking for pumpkins, which I'm 99% sure is what mafia actually bought, even though it failed to recognize the result. The latest version will properly recognize the plurals and update things accordingly.

On another note, you aren't going to get meat back from anyone here for anything mafia might do to cause you to lose meat, even if it is quite blatantly mafia's fault. The people writing mafia do it for free, and free stuff tends to not come with any type of warranty.

 

[stevey ray]

well i think this process has gone about as far as it can go.
i wasn't asking mafia to give me meat out of its own pocket, i was hoping maybe they could retrace the steps & somehow find the meat that way. as u can probably tell i'm not a techie.
it is possible that i did receive the pumpkins for the meat. it didn't feel like it cos my pumpkin count didn't seem to increase, but then again on both occasions this happened i couldn't be certain how many pumpkins i had b4 the transactions. (i was hoping mafia could maybe have shown me that i did get the pumpkins, cos i know for a fact i lost the meat.)
it seems like a catch 22 cos kol are saying it's mafia & mafia are saying its kol.
nevermind, it's not the end of the world. i have now installed the latest version of mafia & hopefully this wont happen again.
btw slyz was correct in saying it was through the purchase tab (both times).
thx again guys for all your efforts

 

[Theraze]

Your session logs will tell you... what it thinks you did. That's it. So it will repeat basically what you have above.

Most likely, the issue is that because you were using OLD mafia files, it was thinking that pumpkins weren't able to be purchased from the mall, but when you did, it had to match that to something... in this case, the seed catalog. You did actually get pumpkins, at the price you told mafia to buy them for. No meat disappeared into the aether, no items actually had issues. It's just old out of date data files not being sure about new items existing properly.

As long as you use current builds of mafia, the problem shouldn't happen again.

 

[slyz]

i was hoping maybe they could retrace the steps & somehow find the meat that way.

You reported yourself that a KoL dev checked the logs and said you had bought a bunch of pumpkins, so that's probably where the meat went.

Mafia simply said it had bought Catalogs, when it had in fact bought pumpkins. That glitch was probably caused by using an old version that didn't know about pumpkins in the first place.

it seems like a catch 22 cos kol are saying it's mafia & mafia are saying its kol.

No one said it was KoL.

 

[Veracity]

i have kolmafia v14.3.r8714

This is very old, although nothing has changed with purchasing since then.

the basic problem is that i dont receive the pumpkins yet the meat is still spent.

I don't believe you.

This sounds like an issue that you should report to the KoLMafia support team. In the meantime, I'll see if I can have someone look at your account history to see what happened to the meat/items from our perspective.

--Gem

and....

I checked the logs, and you did buy a bunch of pumpkins and did not buy a Grumpy Bumpkin's Seed Catalog. You'll need to talk to the Mafia people to figure out why it told you you did.

So in other words, you really did spend meat and really did receive pumpkins.

Purchasing pumpkin (4 @ 7,975)...
You acquire Grumpy Bumpkin's Pumpkin Seed Catalog (4)
Wrong item received - possibly its name or plural has changed.
Desired purchase quantity not reached (wanted 4, got 0)
Searching for "pumpkin"...
Requests complete.

I cannot reproduce this. This is what I got:

Purchasing pumpkin (2 @ 8,500)...
You acquire pumpkin (2)
Requests complete.

Regarding this:

thanks for any help you can provide me with (and ideally refund my meat)

If you spent meat and did not receive anything, that would be a serious KoL bug, not a KoLmafia bug, and presumably Gem would have refunded your Meat. I'm certainly not going to "refund" you Meat so that your pumpkins were free.

On the other hand, I just spent 17,000 meat on two pumpkins I don't need in order to test this "bug" for you. In the same spirit as your request, I'd like you to send me 17,000 meat so that _I_ can get pumpkins for free.

How about it?

Edit: You are running KoLmafia 8714 from Oct 23, 2010. Pumpkins were introduced as the November IOTM and KoLmafia 8737 of November 3, 2011 is the first version that had them. When you searched for the unknown "pumpkin", KoL presumably returned info about a bunch of items with "pumpkin" in the name - none of which KoLmafia knew about. What it SHOULD have done was write data overrides for all of them, at which point purchasing would have proceeded normally.

Now I'm curious about what what overrides it DID write.

In any case, you got exactly the pumpkins you tried to purchase for exactly the price you thought you were paying, so your repeated requests for a "refund" are not amusing.

 

[Veracity]

As a followup, I installed override files for tradeitems, itemdescs, and modifiers that did not have any of the pumpkin items. I then did a mall search for "pumpkin". KoLmafia installed overrides for all the items it did not recognize:

Searching for pumpkin...
Unknown item found: ginormous pumpkin (4771, 797605625)
--------------------
4771 ginormous pumpkin usable all 0
4771 797605625 ginormous pumpkin
# ginormous pumpkin
--------------------
Unknown item found: huge pumpkin (4762, 998217176)
--------------------
4762 huge pumpkin usable all 0
4762 998217176 huge pumpkin
# huge pumpkin
--------------------
Unknown item found: pumpkin (4761, 777322046)
--------------------
4761 pumpkin usable all 0
4761 777322046 pumpkin
# pumpkin
--------------------
Unknown item found: pumpkin beer (4764, 796510425)
--------------------
4764 pumpkin beer drink all 0
4764 796510425 pumpkin beer
# pumpkin beer
--------------------
Unknown item found: pumpkin bomb (4766, 784207428)
--------------------
4766 pumpkin bomb none, combat all 10
4766 784207428 pumpkin bomb
# pumpkin bomb
--------------------
Unknown item found: pumpkin pie (4763, 695446947)
--------------------
4763 pumpkin pie food all 0
4763 695446947 pumpkin pie
# pumpkin pie
--------------------
Writing data override: /Users/brianna/Library/Application Support/KoLmafia/data/tradeitems.txt
Writing data override: /Users/brianna/Library/Application Support/KoLmafia/data/itemdescs.txt
Writing data override: /Users/brianna/Library/Application Support/KoLmafia/data/modifiers.txt
Requests complete.

I then selected a pumpkin and told KoLmafia to purchase it:

Purchasing pumpkin (1 @ 8,400)...
You acquire an item: pumpkin
Requests complete.

Purchases complete.

It worked just fine.

I see no bug in the current KoLmafia that could lead to the original report.

With the additional unnecessary pumpkin purchase, you now owe me a "refund" of 25,400 Meat.

Please send it to this character name in KoL.

Thank you.