From Sony's Forums:



Hello everyone,


We have now completed our last group of character restores in regards to the update issue that occurred on the morning of January 18th. Before I go into the details let me start by giving our apologies to all of those that were unknowingly affected by the correction of our error. We did feel that we needed to be aggressive in dealing with this issue. I also hope that everyone can understand that we needed to be vague on the details while our actions were being taken. However, now that it is complete let me take a moment and explain our solutions.


The summary is that we rolled back any character that had traded with the Beta merchants from our Prophecy of Ro testing server. We also rolled back characters that had traded with those ground zero characters as well as any subsequent traders along down the line.


Taking a step back I will start with the morning of the update. During the beta testing of an expansion we will have a number of NPCs available to facilitate the testing of new tradeskill recipes. Since the point is to actually test recipes and combines the items are free or extremely cheap. Unfortunately, due to a data error, these 25 NPCs with 1,530 items ended up on the live servers. As soon as we realized the issue we removed the NPCs from the Plane of Knowledge. We decided not to take down the servers until we fully understood the situation and its ramifications. This was the approach that we continued to take throughout the day – slow, steady, and methodical. After researching and tracking both the players and items we crafted a solution that would not require server downtime and would only affect a small percentage of our overall population.


We began with the characters that purchased items directly from the Beta merchants taking the time to exclude those people that only purchased harmless items such as water. We also excluded anyone who only sold to those merchants. After that we expanded to those that traded with those characters and iterated down the chain to include all trades. We felt that we had to widen the web in this way to prevent a number of secondary methods of dealing with these ill-gotten items such as trading the results of tradeskill combines. At this point we understand that we are directly affecting players that might have had no knowledge of the source of these items or results of these items. However, we believe it was necessary to take this aggressive step to maintain the integrity of the economy.


Soon thereafter we expanded our investigation to the other sources such as guild bank, shared bank, bazaar transactions, and other more obscure possibilities. This afternoon we ended with a final sweep of all areas to ensure that we conducted as thorough of a clean up as possible. We did this in a step by step manner so that we could keep an eye on the number of characters affected, maintain a high level of thoroughness, and minimize any chance of errors.


I have also seen a number of people suggest that we should have taken down the servers and rolled back every active character on every server. That was my first thought as well but once you get into the details you can see that this would not have been the best course of action. Primarily, every character would have lost their play time instead of the small percentage that was involved. Also, keep in mind that any rollback or restore has a small chance of an error and rolling back that number of characters would have magnified those exceptions to an unacceptable degree. After going through this process over the last 24 hours and seeing the results I am confident that we took the best course of action under the circumstances.


The result is that the integrity of the economy has been maintained while touching less than 1% of the character population of EverQuest. The majority of the EverQuest population was able to enjoy the game normally with zero server downtime and no loss of play time. We do understand that this might not matter to those of you that were rolled back and for that we apologize.


In conclusion, there are two known issues with the rollbacks regarding guild membership status and missing corpse issues that may have affected some customers. Customer Service will be assisting with these specific known issues, but will not be assisting with requests for reimbursement of items, coin, experience, AA’s, or flags that were removed due to the character rollbacks. If your character is having problems joining or being removed from a guild or if your character appears to be missing a corpse, please submit a petition under the appropriate category and they will assist you as quickly as possible.


Thank you for your patience,
Chris Lena
Producer
EverQuest

Biggest. Screwup. Ever.

And most bull**** response too. Taking down the servers immediately after they realised the vendors were there, and doing a rollback to right before servers went live, would have been much MUCH easier to deal with, then what is going on now.

Personally I am kinda of glad they did it the way the did, for selfish reasons. I logged in just after the servers went up and was able to finally get the second piece to my epic 1.5. I never even realized what was going on in the PoK until hours later when people started talking in the general chat channels.

Not only would I have lost (for the second time) my piece of my epic, but the exp and time it took to get it done. But I do agree, it was a hella screw up and cost some people alot of wasted time as well.

I wonder if their decision to do it this way comes from the major screw up with the poison vials in December, and the bannings that had to go along with that exploit?

Regardless if the roll-backs effected you directly or not, you will see an effect. Unless of course you have no friends on EQ. Even still, the lifeblood of EQ, the subscription base is effected by crap like this. Of those that were rolled more then once, there will be those that will end up leaving the game. I myself will probably be one of them. (eq since 1999)

The mistake was not made by the players that bought from the "Temporary Tradeskill Vendors", or by any of the players that indirectly delt with tainted items. The mistake was made by Sony.

If I walked into Wal-Mart, and they were selling DVD's for 10 cents, you better bet I'd buy a bunch. ESPECIALLY if they said it was a TEMPORARY sale. There are people that exploit EQ, using software or program glitches to make money. Buying from a vendor should hardly be a "punishable" exploit.

A full server roll-back was the right answer, even if it took a few hours after they realized the snafu. The loss due to roll-back would have been minor, and the downtime would have been no big thing.

As it was handled, there will be a further loss to the EQ community. At it's height, we had 600 people in the bazaar. Now, after server combines, we have 300. This roll-back thing makes me think that they are intentionally trying to further reduce their player base.

Personally, I lost nearly 300k and over 20 AA's from these roll-backs. And yes, I want to hurt somebody...

** Bought 10k of "tainted" tailoring supplies on 1 main and 1 mule.

** First roll-back lost items and the 10k which came from my seller. Also lost 3 AA's on 2 toons and 40x2x2= 160 radiant crystals.

** Second roll-back was unexpected, as I had done nothing involving vendor items, and had already been rolled. Between I had completed 7 runs on creator boxed. I picked up more then 9 AA's per box. Also lost 40x7x2=560 radiants. Also had transfered 1000 ebons and 700 radiants from seller and bought DoN equip. Equip gone on roll-back, but seller not rolled, so another 1700 crystal loss.

...at the very least they should have rolled everyone back , not just suspected players directly or indirectly involved.

I am disgusted at the way Sony has handled this.

They could have handled it better.

However, I have totally no remorse.

It should have been evident that vendors selling tradeskill items from Kod'Taz+ for a piece of plat or less was not intended. Esp with unlimited quanity.

y friend told me about it as soon as I logged in, and I was like 10-1 those get perm killed in a few minutes, and sure enough, GMs showed up and did.

Directly following that was a Server MOTD warnign those of rollbacks. Basically they directly said - You will be caught. Sony's forums even went so far as to say this may be a multiple phase process and strongly advised people who even had the slightly feeling they may have been effected to log off.

I am not at all shocked. However anyone with tradeskill experiance to know enough what the items where used for combine wise should have had the striking revelation that this was not intended.

Seriously, While I feel bad some innocent people where effected you can not honestly tell me most of these people did not know what they where doing.

That said, This is from the Play Nice Policy, and I quote:

12. You will not exploit any bug in EverQuest and you will not communicate the existence of any such exploitable bug (bugs that grant the user unnatural or unintended benefits in game), either directly or through public posting, to any other user of EverQuest. You will promptly report any such bug via the in-game "/bug" command.

-Fenier

I got rolled back and I didn't even touch the POK vendors. This is very annoying... I lost 4 AAs and Blessing of the Nine, which may not seem like much to most of you, but I just came back to the game from a 3 year break. What a nice reintroduction to Everquest.

The way soe did this was a complete disaster however. The waves of rollbacks continued through thursday evening well into the prime raiding time.

I am certain that those people in the raid that were left behind to wipe truly appreciated soe's cracking down on the ones who were rolled back out of the raid.

I am certain that people who were rolled back multiple times truly appreciated soe's diligence in making certain they were rolled back wed, thurs morning and then thrus evening.

I am certain that the people who IN ANY WAY WHATSOEVER traded an item with a character that was rolled back were just thrilled that this tainted them as well and they got to be rolled back as well. A guildie was given two int caster items that had been looted in dodh two weeks ago, somehow this tainted him and he lost all of his Thursday.

I am certain that soe's message saying that they were doing rollbacks wed, and suggesting politely that people wait to game until tomorrow (ie Thursday) was a warm welcome for those people who played thursday and were rolled back Thursday night. This motd was left up wed and most of Thursday.



The problem was certainly huge, and needed to be corrected. What soe did was turn a huge problem into a true disaster of ongoing rolling chaos.

A series of roll backs over two days...what were they thinking? I have seen at least two threads on other boards talking about how to exploit the rollbacks...since people knew how to take a character and make that character tainted.

Rollbacks of characters that were allowed interaction with the game world for more than a day...the ability to taint any character and guarantee it would later be rolled back.

Reading those threads Im afraid all soe did was create an opertunity for people to massively duplicate expensive dropable items. The tradeskill items would have been bad a enough, but Im sure that the people who make real life $ off of games were laughing themselves silly while they made new BOCs, new Fungis etc.

And the lack of in game information...does soe have anyone who knows anything about PR? Lack of information during the waves of rollbacks had POK and general chat on out server running wild. Just a single statement in game could have at least killed the worst of the rumors and discontent.

It was a big problem...I am having trouble imagining a way it could have been handled worse.


Sliggoth, druid/ tradeskiller of 7th Hammer

SOE claimed that by doing rollbacks they only targeted less than 1% of the eq population. I don't have many acquaintances in the game, certainly less than 100, but myself and 5 people I knew got rolled back.

This puzzled me a bit, then I suddenly realized that 90% of the accounts are inactive now. Those darn denominators!

I play on the Bertoxx server and Thursday night, in the middle of our raiding, the server crashed (or was shut down with no warning).

When we came back, some members of my guild lost items and corpses. One person had their fully loaded corpse vanish, so they lost everything they were wearing or carrying.

Others were rolled back (or had last save loaded) at that moment, and lost various things. We had finished an epic 2.0 for one person and they lost it along with credit for three epic raids we did for them. We also lost a huge amount of guild tribute.

None of them took advantage of the 'exploit' with the NPCs.

I have no idea if this is in any way related to the announced roll backs or if it was just a 'normal' server crash with a awful 'recovery'.

In any case, it is totally unacceptable and I'm afraid some guildies might quit over this. Bertoxx server has had more problems than just about any server. Sony, use some of that money we pay to buy Bertoxx a new hamster to power it or something.

I did absolutely nothing, i got rolled back, and lost 90k. Great.

Fenier, it goes far beyond anyone who had any reasonable interaction with these vendors. No one is crying for those who did.

Saw this from a guild:

Dear Sir.

You run a business, and we are the customers. Many of us have spent, over the years, a thousand dollars on this game, between 6 years of subscription fees, and ALL of the expansions. I represent a guild of over 100 active subscriptions, many of whom have played since day 1. We are all fans of this game. Some of which have recently returned from a competitor that has DRASTICALLY hurt your subscriber base, World of Warcraft.

I think everyone understands the need to rollback the ITEMS of people who bought the items described above. We are grateful that you sought to protect the economy of the game world we play in. However, extending this to anyone who traded with anyone who bought from a vendor, or anyone who traded with someone who traded with someone who traded with someone ad infinitum is absurd. While I understand the man-hours required to go through and roll back, one by one, looking at logs would be prohibitively expensive and require a huge expenditure of labor, I can only say...TOUGH. SoE made the mistake. If SoE has to spend time fixing said mistake, then too bad. Next time be more careful. Using an automated script and then standing behind it, damaging people who had NOTHING to do with your mistake, has been an incredibly bad move on your part. Telling us that the script is working, while a guildmate gets rolled back TWICE, when another loses raid drops, when another loses 13 aas, when another made a vial of distilled mana to give to another guildmate who somehow, through multiple contacts within the game, got "tagged" for a rollback. Your script didn't work. It did exponentially more damage to the game than your initial mistake did. Your Developers insisting for the first day that only people who directly interacted with the beta merchants would be rolled back and calling everyone who had NOTHING from those beta merchants liars made the problem worse.

To punish your customer base for your mistake is an incredibly bad decision. It has caused the cancellation of multiple accounts in my guild. The loss of these people will hurt our guilds viability in the future, causing other people to quit. While the loss of even thousands of accounts might seem meaningless to you...how many can you afford to lose before this game closes up.

As customers, and that is how you must see us, we refuse to simply sit back and reward you with more money for a customer service response as the one you have given. While individual threats of cancellation and boycotts certainly fall beneath your notice, maybe a guild will.

Cohort Chalybeius will not as a guild require Prophecy of Ro of our members. We will not raid the targets therein. We in leadership will encourage our members to not order the expansion. We will be having a guildwide discussion about whether to continue paying for your product and services. Until your response differs from the unprofessional and unrepentant stance noted above.

I will be asking other guilds on our server to the do the same. While I have no control over what they ask for their members, if the outcry they are experiencing right now is ANYTHING like what I am seeing in my own guild, then I imagine there will be more than a few sympathetic ears.

While in the past I know SoE devs used to visit various guild sites (including our own), this letter will be sent to you as well.

I'll offer this up as food for thought to those reading.

Would you tolerate this kind of service from a restaurant? I wouldn't. I would never return to an establishment that treated me like this. I would never patronize an electronics shop that acted like this. I would never purchase at a car dealership that acted like this. I would warn everyone in earshot of how this business treats its customers.


http://cohort.ws/forums/showthread.php?p=188632#post188632

Hello,

We sincerely apologize again for the problems caused in response to Wednesday’s update. We do understand that many characters were rolled back due to actions beyond their control along with those that took direct advantage of the situation. We also understand that many other players that were not rolled back were also affected in indirect ways. This weekend we will be offering double experience to all players. This will require us to take down the servers early tomorrow morning and they should be up and offering the modified experience at 9am PST. This event will run until Monday morning at 10am PST. Once again please accept our apologies for any interruptions this has caused in your playtime.

The EQ Team

Well, I'm happy to get double XP. It's supposed to stack with my Vet AA, so I'd get quad XP.

The people who lost 300,00 plat, or something of greater value, however, might not be so happy....

Hummm, that's great. Double exp is good! However a better way is to give people double exp potions depending on number of rollbacks -- so that players who got multiple rollbacks can get more compensation. Let's say 0/1 rollback =20 potions, 2 rollbacks=30, etc. Just a thought.

A suggestion to all: please plan for this. Like, want to start a new char? Do not farm or do tradeskills since they are a waste of time.

Double xp won't bring back BOT9 for me. Some ass has been buying up all copies of it on Quellious and has 7 copies for 59k. I paid 9k for the copy SOE stole from me.

The double exp does nothing about the massive duping problem soe made. They told people exactly how to make sure a character was going to rolled back...and how to avoid being rolled back. One of the other boards had a thread talking about how easy it would be for one of the plat sellers to make a huge killing with this info.

Player goes to bazaar, buys tainted goods to be sure they will be rolled back

Player then takes the million, 2 million whatever pp that the farmer has on the toon and proceeds to buy several bags worth of the most valuable items in the bazaar.

Player then goes to pok and launders the items...I didnt understand the reference to how they were doing this but selling the items to a regular merchant, putting the bags in a forge, just dropping them on the ground all come to mind.

Player is following along behind with a mule on another account, scoops up the loot.

Player then goes and buys more tainted goods to be safe...then goes and plays a while to fill up the log.

Player gets rolled back to the full pp they started with, plus mule now has millions in duped goods. Mention was also made in apssing of gems, so I suspect somehow they were picking up bags.





Thanks soe for hurting thousands of normal players who got caught up by accident, and giving the cheats a GOLDEN FREEBIE.

Sigh...not only a complete lack of PR sense, but they actually created a worse problem than they solved.



Sliggoth, druid/ tradeskiller of 7th Hammer

PS I am hoping that somehow SOE can actually catch these people, but going by how poorly they did the roll backs Im not very confident (.

After reading the posts in this thread, I would have to agree that this whole situation could have been managed much better. It is truly upsetting to see so many people being affected so horribly.

I am sorry if my first post didnt sound sympathetic to those that were rolled back. I seriously did not understand how much was lost and it sounds like to many that didnt deserve it.

I also think the whole double experience thing is ridiculous to offer to all players. If they really want to do that, they should offer it to those that got rolled back only - like someone said, in potions or some such manner.

I do not think it fair that people that were not affected with a rollback, now get double experience for 48 hours. Its like a double or sometimes triple slap in the face to people who lost a great amount of time, effort, and items.

I wasnt affected by it, but the way i see it is...Its just another dodgy SOE job, they went about it the wrong way for sure. Whinging and complaining 99% of the time will not make any difference. I think people should learn to get over it, like we have with most of SOE's other services or lack of. Now you all hate me :shuffle: , have a nice day :)

...at the very least they should have rolled everyone back , not just suspected players directly or indirectly involved.

Yeah.. Screw *everyone* over all at once. Instead of just the people who were involved.

:bs:

Yeah.. Screw *everyone* over all at once. Instead of just the people who were involved.

:bs:


Believe the idea is that SOE acted when the found out and brought servers down/rolled back everyone instead of just despawning the NPCs or what not, so everyone loses only a little of time. Not selective and some massive time.

But even more people would probably be missing stuff/exp/whatever and there would be the possibility of even more people dup'ing stuff and taking advantage of rollbacks, right? Or.. :confused:

I don't get it. On Jan 18th I logged on around 8:00 pm camped for my last two signets for Anguish, got like 5 normal xp and 7 AAs. I traded with no one. I sold some gems to the trader in our guild hall. I logged off. Tonight I logged on and discovered I had been rolled back to Tuesday. I don't fit into their criteria. Yet I lost two signets and bunch of xp. I've requested to be fixed. However, if they fix me after tonight, then any xp I get over the weekend, I lose. If they don't fix me, I've lost the signets and xp. Either way I'm screwed. And I didn't do anything wrong. I didn't even do anything unwittingly wrong. I didn't trade with another player or buy from an npc. So exacly how am I to benefit from this double xp if they do decide to fix my char? If they fix my char, then anything I gain in the meantime, I lose. If they don't fix my char, then I've lost the two signets and a bunch of xp. Totally unfair if they aren't going to do anything more.

I was so frustrated tonight that I'm really thinking of finally giving up on EQ. I started playing EQ in beta 3, but it is a game. Lately it's leaving me frustrated because of the difficulty keeping up. This rollback just sets me back even more. There are lots of other things out there that I enjoy and don't get me so frustrated. Odds are my petition will be ignored, and I'm just not sure EQ is worth this frustration anymore.

I have no idea how I became flagged for the rollback either.

Wed night was a raid night and a AE blocker I turned in from Demi
that I had looted previously wa sback in my bag. Now i have to beg
people to clear down so I can turn the thing in again. Other people who looted AE blockers that night lost them I at least still had my piece.

The worst part was that Wed night I also did a bunch of combines for my guild for AAAA's. Since guild vaults don't get rolled back, we lost all
the combines I and another made plus the dropped components.

So far as I can tell, about the only way I could have been "flagged" was by someone in my guild having be "flagged" and putting things in our guild vault. Then when I did the combines I became flagged too.

Double xp does not make up for this. To make up for thier mistake and gain anything I would have to spend my weekend grinding xp. That is not how I want to spend my weekend.

Dont let em fool ya.

I wonder how much double xp has to do with the rollbacks and how much it has to do with this :

Quote:
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It's just amazing how not only does Sony mess up, but in trying to fix it they mess up and then to try to help make up for it they mess up again.

As someone said, making the weekend double experience actually makes things even worse for those who lost items by mistake. Because by the time Sony gets around to rolling them back to fix them, the weekend will be over and they not only have days of waiting for Sony to fix the mistake but will have missed out on the double experience.

Let's all think about how Sony could make things even worse so we can be prepared for when Sony next tries to fix something.

Frankly, as soon as they noticed the problem, they should have brought down the servers and rolled everyone back to before the patch. Yes, people would have lost a few hours of playing but it would have been far better than what happened.

The other option would be to have been to make sure to only roll back people who took advantage of the mistake. Of course, that is almost impossible since people know enough to launder the money and items. This is what they tried to do and have screwed over tons of people.

So, again, rolling back everyone would be the only answer unless they just ignored it and just let the economy adjust itself, as it would after a while.

None of this explains what happened to the Bertoxx server, which crashed and when it came back about 15 minutes later, lots of people were missing items, experience, corpses, etc.

Again, Sony isn't communicating, so we don't know what happened.

my own 2 cents on this: after the shotgun fix of the roll back, and yes, i was one of the people "caught" as a result of either a) buying a piece from a tainted bazaar dealer (neither item being player made) b) buying an item (5 stacks of batwings from the de npc in pok for baking). since then, i have spent enough time to get caught up on my casting skill ups (which i consider my primary loss, other than of course 2 days of my time) but still have to make my run to high keep to get my spell. to add to this joy, the double xp does me no particular good as the weekend is pretty much spoken for by the real world... oh well....

2 shotgun fixes do not please me, nor do they have me quitting eq, i still enjoy the game, mostly for the people i meet. i don't think anyone at soe should be fired for this (unless it were to be shown that they "engineered" this fiasco to benefit the plat for rl money crowd - which i do NOT imply), nor, should any of them receive accolades for it.

i can only hope that this instigates a bit of thought, and a lesson in how NOT to correct problems in the future.

as this happened only to a level 13/14 character in my case, i am a tad irritated, tho not beyond redemption personally, to those who lost big time on this (and by what i've read here and elsewhere, there are way too many of you) nothing i can say will undo the damage. i hope you don't leave because of it, but i can't claim surprise that some may consider just that.

at this point, yes, i am irritated at soe for their handling from the get, and, at a few players whose reaction to this seemed to be, if you got caught, you deserved it, despite the early evidence that this was not limited to those who certainly were taking "advantage" of an exploit. you know yourselves where you fit in this.

They are bringing the servers down again in order to fix the AA-exp problem. Down for 2 hours at noon Pacific.

they could make it worse by screwing up the double xp code so it doesn't work on aa xp. and then bring down the servers inthe middle of the weekend for 2+ hours.

oh... wait...

Moving this to the rant forum if it keeps heading that way :p

I had an enchanter friend lose Memory - the extremely rare enchanter item from Cursed Cycle - over this, because she bought some radiant crystals in bazaar on her mule. Needless to say, she's not too thrilled about the double experience solution.

SK friend lost his Morguecaller from Sunday's COA clear - after not having a MC drop for over 5 months. He petition'd and had it back within an hour.

My husband lost his corpse with everything on it. It's been 2 days now, and 4 petitions, all replied with a paste on response of we are looking into it, we will get back to you when we can. And, no he did not buy anything from the beta npc's he was one of those that bought something "tainted" unintentionally. What I want to know is why isn't his case and everyone else's that are missing their corpse sitting around naked not being able to play being handled immediately? There are people that he knows that have petitioned after him for much less important things that have almost gotten a response and help immediately. Something is definitely wrong there.

Afaik, a lost corpse results in a previous saved character restore. It is almost like a rollback. As such a Lead GM needs to address it. At leas this was the case a few years back when a similar situation happened to me.

-Fenier

My husband lost his corpse with everything on it. It's been 2 days now, and 4 petitions, all replied with a paste on response of we are looking into it, we will get back to you when we can. And, no he did not buy anything from the beta npc's he was one of those that bought something "tainted" unintentionally. What I want to know is why isn't his case and everyone else's that are missing their corpse sitting around naked not being able to play being handled immediately? There are people that he knows that have petitioned after him for much less important things that have almost gotten a response and help immediately. Something is definitely wrong there.

There's a lot of spam from people losing ridiculous stuff like 2k, 2 AA, etc. There's also a lot of petitions from people claiming they lost things that they didn't even have. It's hard to sort these out for GMs. Blame the people that are trying to take advantage of the situation.

One of our newer druid apps completly lost his character, which is even worse. He transfered and apparently his character got stuck in limbo once rollbacks were made.

Just to mention, someone in my guild lost his corpse with everything on it.

He just got back his stuff and they gave him 18 AAs for free.

Of course, that still doesn't make up for it. And if your husband gets back his stuff and gets 18 AAs, he still is behind the people who have been hard core playing with double xp because we can earn far more than 18 AAs over the weekend.

Well, he did get his corpse back finally, but there was no offer of giving him any free aa's. In fact he ended up losing about 15 aa's, he was rolled back to some time last week or the week before. Luckily he hadn't won any raid gear in that time period or that would have been a whole nother mess trying to get that back.

There's also a lot of petitions from people claiming they lost things that they didn't even have.

That's just a shame, and one or the main reason we are in this situation to begin with. To many people trying to take advantage of every little thing they can.

That's just a shame, and one or the main reason we are in this situation to begin with. To many people trying to take advantage of every little thing they can.

One of the posters on Sony's forum, I think it wsa Kyv - so kindly put it:

It is simply AMAZING how on the day Sony screwes up it was MAGICALLY the best EQ play session all these people have had in the last 5 years.

In reguards to people claiming what they lost.

-Fenier

That's just a shame, and one or the main reason we are in this situation to begin with. To many people trying to take advantage of every little thing they can.

Sorry, but the main reason we are in the situation is that Sony screwed up. Twice. Actually three times if you count that giving double xp when many of the people who got screwed can't use it because they have no gear.

Thankfully, One of my guildies got his gear back and the lost AA from the rollbacks. BUt, I honestly feel they should have also given him a significant amount of AA as well as a bonus. The idea of the double exp was to redress the rollback problems, and although he got his stuff and exp back, he spent the weekend waiting for his problem to be solved. I find it unfair that he lost a weekend of gaming and the opportunity to use the double exp while folks like myself were able to get a ton of AA even though we were unaffected by the roll backs.

It wasnt the time lost from the two days (wednesday and thursday) that were rolled back that were really the problem, it was all of the added problems the rollbacks caused.

The way they did the rollbacks was the REAL problem.

The worst case in our guild was this:

Shammy had been saving pp for quite a while to buy an upgrade or two, she has also been pushing levels fairly hard so that she could get up to be able to help on guild groups (she is now 68). She had the misfortune to finally get enough pp on thursday.

Shammy hadnt even been online on wed, but Thursday logged on and decided to check the bazaar. Seller there had dropped the price of the ring that he had been trying to sell for a week by 2500pp! By taking the pp from all of her characters, virtually every pp she had, it was enough to buy the ring.

Turns out this seller must have gotten tainted in some way, buying from him caused the shammy to be rolled back.

But none of her other characters were rolled back, so shammy lost all the rest of her pp. Not a tremendous fortune to some people, but nearly a month of work to her. A petition was actually answered fairly quickly, nice canned "no items can be restored" letter.

The double exp weekend is a really nice attempt at a sop, of course I havent seen the shammy ingame since she received that crushing reply...its not going to matter much to her.


Sliggoth, weary guild leader of ES...this game used to be fun

The irony is the last 3 days probably resulted in far more money, AA and tradeskill pieces entering the game than the mistake itself did. I for one made about 15 times more AA this weekend than I would normally, and my group saw 9 metallic drake scales and over 3000 DoN crystals enter the bazaar.

As much as it's fun to have a weekend where everyone is giving the game their all it still wasn't smart of SoE to offer double experience imo, and especially all clustered together and before fixing the worst hit cases.

This all made me kinda glad I'd taken a much-needed break from EQ for a few months. (which was partly because of other SOE mistakes resulting in many of my normal grouping/social buddies closing accounts) Thank goodness that, because I hadn't been in for a while, I wasn't effected by the rollbacks. (that I know of anyway) I can understand 100% where people are coming from in those situations. (I'd be livid myself, I'm sure)

However, I now have to wonder, with all of this talk about the many problems the double exp weekend could bring, will it even be worth the time to come back to the game? It would suck to lose even more fellow players over this terrible snowball effect.

Yep. I can see a LOT more issues rising out of this even now.

The irony is the last 3 days probably resulted in far more money, AA and tradeskill pieces entering the game than the mistake itself did. I for one made about 15 times more AA this weekend than I would normally, and my group saw 9 metallic drake scales and over 3000 DoN crystals enter the bazaar.

Pretty sure this is due to the sheer amount of people doing DoNs for double exp more then anything else.

-Fenier

...many of the people who got screwed can't use it because they have no gear.

I knew there was a reason I keep a full set of gear in the bank!

The real irony of the situation is that more tainted gear/ pp entered the game from the rollbacks than entered from the beta vendors in the first place.

There was a discussion thread on the sony boards about if/ how anyone could have cheated, turns out that since soe announced anyone who touched beta goods was going to be rolled back they gave the real cheats a guaranteed way to cheat and win.

Cheaters could move items to another character and then taint the first character so it would be rolled back. Thereby giving them 2 fungi instead of one, two bocs, two stacks of metallic drake scales etc.

A friend who is a guide says that soe became aware fo the duping issue during the rollbacks but they didnt think of it before starting. So it defintely did happen, it does explain why when I left my bazaar mule up overnite wednesday someone bought every expensive item I had. They were turning their pp into high price items (in my case some augs) to swap onto their alt.

So in the long run they ended up annoying most of us, hurting some of us, and letting the big pp sellers/ dupers double up their money courtesy of the rollbacks.

Just not handled well at any step it seems : (



Sliggoth, the weary and discouraged guild leader of ES.

Moved to unkempt.

I think all in all this has effected us all. I dierectly was not affected, I was not on line those days. But the prices on runes arre higher now than ever. I decided not to take advantage of the double exp. I earned 2 aa's this last weekend. To me I have earned everything I have gotten soo far on my char and will always earn what I get. It the way I like to play the game. DO not like to cheat. But I am a slow exp'er or what ever. Been playing this time around for 4 years and I am lvl 70 with only 69 aa's.

I just wish they would have handled this better, such as brought down servers and persucute the ones that were blantunly abusing the system. These so called businesses just drive me crazy, they make the prices stay soo high.

The next thing was, after they brought the servers back online past the doubleXP time, AB was unstable, on wendsday it was nearly impossible to raid. WoS was down all the time, Inktu'Ta crashed in the middle of stonemite event wich leaf us with a 2 hour timer, and when i saw the guildlobby i believe that there are more instaces that crashed yesterday.

It was no nice evening yesterday especially for all on AB who try to lead raids

There have been multiple reports of Inktuta crashing during the stonemite event, so this may be something separate that's been going on for a while.

Just as people have been going LD like mad in COA, in the area prior to the click-up to AMV and OMM for a while now - would love for that to get fixed.

The fact that people lost routinely lost 90-300kpp seems, to me, indicative that the game's economy is irrevocably fubared already.