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Juicy Beast avatar image
Juicy Beast asked

Playfab IAP validation unreliable?

Hello, since launch we've been getting several reports of IAPs that are not granted (I'd say about 5%-10% of transactions, which is a lot). It happens to all platforms, all products pretty equally (Consumable, non consumable) and all nationalities. I searched the event history of requesting users and never seen any event related to purchase. I'm not sure if a validation failure is logged in Playfab?

I manually granted them the items to people who provided a screenshot of their store receipt and it worked, which leads me to believe that indeed the item was bought. Do I need to put something in place, a fail-safe that retries the validation after a short while or something? If so did I miss any documentation saying so? Because I have seen no resource that would say this.

Player Inventory
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Citrus Yan avatar image
Citrus Yan answered

Hi,

>>I'm not sure if a validation failure is logged in Playfab?

I believe validation failure is logged in “player_ receipt _validation” event in PlayFab.

May I know which IAP service did you use and the basic flow of your IAP implementation? Could you provide your title id for us to investigate? It seems to me that validation failed when this issue happened, a fail-safe retry mechanism would be necessary. You can also write custom events for each step of IAP procedure to troubleshoot the issue.

If you are using Unity IAP, I think this thread: https://answers.unity.com/questions/1191677/getting-unity-iap-receipt-data-to-validate-with-pl.html in the Unity forum which talks through all the use cases for receipt processing will give you some help. And this PlayFab Unity IAP tutorial: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/gaming/playfab/features/commerce/economy/getting-started-with-unity-iap-android

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Juicy Beast avatar image
Juicy Beast answered

Hello, thanks for the reply!

We're simply using Unity IAP. Turns out there were a couple of problems across the board.

One where the item was not listed. One where the item was not granted after Playfab verification (happens only sometimes). One where we get "InvalidBundleID" response in player_ receipt _validation and one where the Playfab validation requests returns an unknown error, these are not logged in the users event history.

The first two are clearly on our side and make up about 50-75% of the requests. The third one, I'm not sure. Do you know what that means when a few random people get that error? And third one (making about 1% of all the request errors) seems to be a problem happening at any point between the firing of the request and its arrival.

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Citrus Yan avatar image Citrus Yan commented ·

>> Do you know what that means when a few random people get that error?

General speaking, the error " InvalidBundleID" means that the App Bundle ID entered in the configuration page for Apple in the Add-ons Marketplace for your title is not set correctly for the problematic receipt. Did you happen to use multiple Bundle Id for your title? Anyway, you might want to check these two threads to see if it helps.

https://community.playfab.com/questions/4506/ios-receipt-validation-returns-1098-error.html

https://community.playfab.com/questions/10550/osx-ios-add-on-configuration.html

>>And third one (making about 1% of all the request errors) seems to be a problem happening at any point between the firing of the request and its arrival.

Could you give us your title id? We need to inform our engineering team to investigate.

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Juicy Beast avatar image Juicy Beast Citrus Yan commented ·

Hello, title ID is: D120D

We don't use multiple bundle IDs for our title. IOS and Android have their own ID but that's all. I see with the second link that bundle ID is needed to prevent hacking. The pattern suggests it would be hacking, as I said the InvalidBundleID error seems very scarce and random. The few examples we've seen of it are on items that can usually be bought.

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Citrus Yan avatar image Citrus Yan Juicy Beast commented ·

Hi, I've informed the engineering team to investigate, any updates will let you know:)

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Anthony Tirone avatar image Anthony Tirone commented ·

Did you end up finding a good solution for this? I find I get 2 to 3 emails a day about failed purchases since adding playfab's purchase validation to 2 of my titles. Manually restoring purchases is becoming tiring. I can't seem to figure out what causes it occasionally, I see no pattern

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