[Blue Burst] EP1 Challenge Mode Stage 3 Player 2 suddenly ported back to town mid-match.

[nolrinale]

Describe the bug
We were playing P1 and P2, I was P2 and out of the blue during the game a white box message appeared without no text (like the ones that appear when you clear a quest),

I was then ported immediately back to Town as if the entire party failed the mission (but none of us had died), the box that says if a player died or not was empty (the one at the bottom right)

Since Player 1 was still playing in the caves the prompt that unlocks the players that appears for P1 triggered on its own (with the jingle sound) it then let me move around the hunters guild.

I talked with the NPC and she ported me back to lobby as if i just failed the mission didn't updated my times nor anything, I had to ask P1 to logout from the game via normal means.

I don't have screenshots of this it happened too fast, this happened during our C3 game which began around I 1 2026-07-18 09:44:44

Game:2AA until the very end of the log....

Game version(s) (choose one or more of the following):
BB

c3desyncreturn.zip

[Elixir70]

That's an issue in the quest script. Nothing to do with the server.

For PSOBB, Sega implemented a silly anticheat mechanism inside the challenge quests. This was probably intended to combat someone changing their system clock to cheat the reward time requirements (gettime opcode uses the system time).

Look at function 230. Every 10 seconds, the quest script checks if 390+ frames have passed and if so, forces the quest to fail for the local client.

This anticheat inside the quest script* is obviously silly for a number of reasons.

[nolrinale]

Yes but theres a reason those functions are included and removing them is not a solution, maybe was just a client bug or if its related to system time if theres a deviation with the clock might be affected. I was playing under a very messy environment with the processor throtling like crazy due to the insane heat yesterday. Yet it only seemed to be happening to me as I have a weird VM based setup.

Eventually we attempted Stage 3 again and we cleared it succesfully, just recently we did the entire EP1 walktrough from beginning to end and got the Srank weapon correctly too.

Thats why I was super confused when this happened, however theres a chance the client might crash during cmode seems to be a sega bug but i dont know the conditions to trigger it yet.

[anzz1]

Oh yeah VMs absolutely can cause system time related issues in all sorts of things, docker seems to be especially notorious in not handling time correctly. Nowadays because linux is so shitty with its dependency hell (or more accurately the devs building upon it) the solution has become this docker nonsense where you essentially tow an entire operating system in a circus cart behind you just to run software like have a working toolchain to compile something. I basically expect to run into "system clock skew detected" type issues when compiling something within docker or other types of VMs.

It is strange though how such a fundamental and easy thing isn't implemented correctly in these VM systems. Of course in your case when you say that your processor was throttling like crazy it isn't necessarily a bug in the VM software but rather that the VM which doesn't have power over processor scheduling could have been starved enough that it couldn't even run the clock. Meanwhile top-level OS, not running in VM, has the full control over the processor and its scheduling and will always make sure that the most critical things like the clock always gets the cpu cycles it needs while throttling everything else. VM doesn't have that luxury, if it gets completely throttled then it gets to run nothing at all, not even the clock.

[fuzziqersoftware]

Regardless of why Sega implemented this in the quest script, it's not a server issue. You can edit the quest scripts to remove this logic if you want.