Lost scores and goals AGAIN

[Armin Ruoff]

They ended up overwriting my PC desktop's save with a much less complete save from my macbook because I happened to play the newest version of TPA on the macbook first, which was upsetting.

Think that's what happened to me too. Only good thing was, that I could get my iOS scores and goals into the Mac version and they were synced to the PC version now.

So after all a typical Farsight implementation of a sync feature. As much as I love the game I really can't stand Farsights sloppiness anymore.

 

[Megahurtz]

I know I've been prompted before by steam if a local save doesn't match the cloud save. It gave me the choice of which save to load. Not sure why TPA didn't do that for me. Maybe the cross platform save messed that up? Now I have a bunch of steam achievements that don't match my save.

 

[DaPinballWizard]

Once again, all my high scores and goals are gone. There is nothing wrong with the PC. This has happened numerous times across multiple devices. How hard is it to just save this data on Steam? I can see that all my completed goals are missing, yet I still have the achievements for getting them. This is infuriating. I'm not even going to play again until I hear that this problem is resolved.

Anyone else have this problem?

Yeah I think I lost mine too. Who cares. I enjoy playing the GAME. You are not going to play until it is fixed? Funny stuff!

 

[Rooter]

Yeah I think I lost mine too. Who cares. I enjoy playing the GAME. You are not going to play until it is fixed? Funny stuff!

I enjoy playing lots of games. I can enjoy plenty of working ones now and come back Pinball Arcade when it is ready. The fun of the game for me is competing with my friends locally. That's not really an option right now without writing the scores down on a piece of paper and taping it to the machine.

 

[Vegard]

I just noticed all of my goals are gone as well. I had many tables where I was only missing a single wizard goal. Steam Cloud is enabled. I was visiting my brother last weekend and played PA there, to check out BK2k - I had previously installed it there and had no problems that time. Every single one of my high scores are gone too. 73 hours of progress down the drain. I'm done with this game. Expect no more money from me.

I'm at a loss for words. Should I not use Steam Cloud or what? This is frigging ridiculous. I can take individual table bugs here and there, but losing EVERYTHING? Not cool.

 

[Crazy Newt]

Sorry to hear about your troubles with the goals and scores being lost. I understand your frustration. I keep whittling away on tables that have the fewest accomplished goals, and it would be unfortunate if I had to start all over from the beginning. However, it would not be the most painful thing to have to play awesome pinball tables in an effort to obtain the goals again. The problem is that I would not even want to consider working on goals unless I was certain that this bug was completely squashed.

I do appreciate that you gave us a bit of background on the circumstances that may have contributed to the issue. It would be great if this helped to identify the problem so it could be permanently resolved, but at the very least, those of us that have read your post can take heed before playing remotely from a different computer than we normally use.

 

[Vegard]

Sorry to hear about your troubles with the goals and scores being lost. I understand your frustration. I keep whittling away on tables that have the fewest accomplished goals, and it would be unfortunate if I had to start all over from the beginning. However, it would not be the most painful thing to have to play awesome pinball tables in an effort to obtain the goals again. The problem is that I would not even want to consider working on goals unless I was certain that this bug was completely squashed.

I do appreciate that you gave us a bit of background on the circumstances that may have contributed to the issue. It would be great if this helped to identify the problem so it could be permanently resolved, but at the very least, those of us that have read your post can take heed before playing remotely from a different computer than we normally use.

I just had the bright idea of trying to restore the savefiles to previous versions. Well, I did; all of them - but it didn't do squat. Are there other savefiles than in the My Games/Pinball Arcade folder?

 

[Stuart Webster]

This post is very informative on the way that Steam Cloud saving works.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2470784

 

[Megahurtz]

This post is very informative on the way that Steam Cloud saving works.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2470784

So is there any way for us to recover our lost saves? I'm looking through my directories right now and it looks like pbaprg.dat is the save file that gets synced. I see that in the "S2" location of my Steam install directory, but nothing in the pinball arcade install directory. I can't find another version of that file anywhere on my computer.

So even in pinball arcade is saving directly to that remote directory (S2), which then is synced on the Steam servers as "S3", there *must* have been a local save file from before Steam Cloud was enabled. Where should that be? If I can find that file, I'll try to delete my cloud save and have steam sync the old one up.

 

[Stuart Webster]

So is there any way for us to recover our lost saves? I'm looking through my directories right now and it looks like pbaprg.dat is the save file that gets synced. I see that in the "S2" location of my Steam install directory, but nothing in the pinball arcade install directory. I can't find another version of that file anywhere on my computer.

So even in pinball arcade is saving directly to that remote directory (S2), which then is synced on the Steam servers as "S3", there *must* have been a local save file from before Steam Cloud was enabled. Where should that be? If I can find that file, I'll try to delete my cloud save and have steam sync the old one up.

We use the C:\Users\<user>\My Games\Pinball Arcade\ folder to store local data.

 

[Megahurtz]

Hrm, none of those files match the pbaprg.dat file that Steam syncs, either by file name or by size. I do have a highscores.dat in <user>\my games\pinball arcade with the same time stamp as the cloud save though. There is also a datae.dat file in there with a time stamp about 10 minutes before the highscores and cloud save. Anything I would have had as a local save appears to have been updated to match the cloud save

 

[Vegard]

This post is very informative on the way that Steam Cloud saving works.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2470784

Someone on the Steam forum gave me this link; I followed the guide to the letter and I got all my high scores and goals back! I will never again use Steam Cloud for PA. I can finally play again. Seems it was Steam's fault, not Farsight's.

 

[Megahurtz]

Can you give a detailed step by step guide of what you did? Exactly which files you poked at and where they are located? From looking at my files it appears that once the cloud save was pulled down, it overwrote the local save to match the cloud. I would LOVE to get my completed goals back if there is a way to do that.

 

[Vegard]

Can you give a detailed step by step guide of what you did? Exactly which files you poked at and where they are located? From looking at my files it appears that once the cloud save was pulled down, it overwrote the local save to match the cloud. I would LOVE to get my completed goals back if there is a way to do that.

I used System Restore to restore a previous version of the HighScores file in the Users/xxx/My Games/Pinball Arcade folder, then followed the guide at http://forums.steampowered.com/forum....php?t=2470784 precisely. That's all there was to it. If you have System Restore enabled, you should be able to fix it.

 

[Megahurtz]

Ah, I was wondering how/where you managed to get the old save. System restore explains that. I don't have a restore that predates the cloud save, so that is a no go for me.

 

[Eric Qel-Droma]

Well, I just lost all my scores, including a couple of completed sets of Wizard Goals. Steam Cloud decided that it would just overwrite what was online with a completely new set of scores.

WHY in the world are scores not versioned? Why in the world can FarSight not do something about this for TPA? Imagine having a set of backups for the last day, week, and month. The pbaprg.dat file is tiny; it's not like any of us would miss that extra 240KB taken up by the old versions.

EDIT: Luckily, I'd played some TPA on my Windows Tablet (Asus T100) earlier this summer. Most of my major victories were on it, so I disabled Steam Cloud on that one, played a new table until I cleared a goal, exited, and reenabled Steam Cloud. Voila! Version mismatch, choose the one you want, and the upload is better. Better than nothing, I guess. :-/

 

[Eric Qel-Droma]

Nope, I spoke too soon. I went back to my desktop and started TPA, confident that the newer Steam Cloud file would be downloaded and overwrite the old, bad one... NO. Goodbye high scores and goals AGAIN. This is unbelievable.

 

[Eric Qel-Droma]

And now it's gone from the tablet, as well. This makes NO sense. I've lost scores that were, for me, huge, and the result of hours of trying. I'm so mad I may never play this game again. (Okay, that's probably an exaggeration, but still!) How can the system for high scores be so simplistic? Why just a file? Why can't the system actually keep a list of my high scores and rewrite them one by one, keeping only the highest ones?

I'm not much of a programmer, but that algorithm is super easy to envision. At least have a "verify scores and goals with server" option in the program that can standardize scores across versions or something.

I've just lost my gameplay for the last three years. UGH.

EDIT: Okay, so the PC version hasn't been out for three years. The point stands. Honestly, thinking about getting the Harem Multiball started is enough to make me sick to my stomach. Oh, and Barnyard Madness? Forget it. Those weren't fun to get the first time; the thought of having to get them again because there's not a two-layer check somewhere along the line? UGH.

I love this game, and I'm glad FS has made it, but PLEASE find a better way to handle scores and goals so that they aren't overwritten by Steam. I haven't had this problem with ANY other game.

 

[crazywolf]

My Scores are gone, too. I have a 2 Month old backup on my little pc, and a Backup about a week before i updated to Windows 10 on my main PC. But with these, all scores are gone.
When i look in the Backup File, i found my initials for the scores several times. Although on the current Version of the Highscores File. Looks the Game does not show the Highscores, but they are still there. Should be a problem with the last Game Update or Windows 10.

 

[hitman12]

Backing up folder in "C:\Users\<username>\My Games\Pinball Arcade\" doesn't help,i restored that folder when clean installed Win10 and all my scores and goals are gone
I even backed up my TPA data with GamesSavesManager - all games i played restored data with this software with no problems except TPA.