Outage Reparations

[insomniac]

Originally Posted by Smed

Hello Everyone,

We sincerely apologize for the downtime this weekend. We had some hardware issues that caused us to have to tread very carefully in bringing the game back up. We wanted to triple check everything to make sure there wouldn’t be any major problems, and it’s taken a while to both fix the problem (we had to fly out engineers from one of our hardware vendors) and to bring each of the servers back online because of the careful validation process we need to go through. We have to do this very carefully and we hope you can understand our desire to do this right. We're trying to balance that with getting the game back up as quickly as possible. So far most servers are back up and the rest should be up in the next 4-6 hours.. hopefully less. I realize that ETA's that come and go can frustrate people.. so we do our best to give you the most realistic estimates possible.

Out of respect for our players, we’re doing the following:

1) Every player will receive 3 free days.

2) Early this week (Monday or Tuesday) we will have a 24 hour period where we will have accelerated XP gain. Details are still being worked out and we’ll communicate this to you as we firm up the plans.

We are committed to providing you with excellent service. Our team has been here for over 40 hours straight, and I can tell you our dedication to doing right by our players is the thing that’s foremost on everyone’s mind here at SOE.

Thank You,

John Smedley

President, Sony Online Entertainment

Originally Posted by Smed

I see the posts about the time window when we do the XP gain. Let us discuss the timing and communicate all of the details. I do see the points people are making. We'll be as accomodating as possible.

John Smedley

Comments?

It's nice they're trying but this is rather flawed. for starters not everyone can play on monday/tuesday. And this doesn't help with lost cash/items. 3 days works out to like $1.50. i guess its the principal that counts..

I think "doing it right" would be to restore (by hand if neccisary) everything everyone lost. corrupt info does not = deleted, plus they could look at eq2players. its alot of work but it was a big screwup.

Edit: oh again about the monday/tuesday thing: just imagine... a day where EVERY player is online.. and in a rush to kill something because they want to make the most out of xp day... /shudder
a /claim xp day, however, would solve that.

edit edit: oh and THEN the servers would go down, from everyone trying to play at once. then people would be even more pissed because they couldn't log in or the servers crashed on xp day..

[NetSapiens]

I slightly disagree.

I think that what they're offering is quite nicely in line with the loss I've experienced personally.

I look at it this way:
The servers were down for (approx) a full day.. I get 3 free days in return
I lost some xp in a rollback .... I get a chance to make up for it with accellerated xp.
True, not everyone can play on monday/tuesday, but still...
true, items were lost and this is sad and annoying, but still I don't see it as something critical to my further experience.

I think that offering to restore everything for everyone is much too open to abuse, not to mention a task I wouldn't wish on the worst of my enemies.
Also, a day comes to about $1.50 as you said, so keep in mind that with some 200.000 boxes sold, these three days atually cost SOE around $2,000,000.

Lastly.. the only reason the servers would crash on an xp bonus day, is because people would go overboard in trying to benefit from this. I for one, intend to play as normal, during my normal hours. I won't try to powerlevel two alts, now that I have a chance to do so. It's still just a game, and I'll still play it like I always do.

All that being said, I honestly feel that SOE did everything they could in this matter. We don't know for sure that they even screwed up... could have been a freak occurrence which blew a hole in something. I think we've all seen computers have a mind of their own from time to time.
Personally I come out of this with a sort of strengthened faith in the willingness of SOE to fix things when they go wrong, and to stand by the word and at least offer compensation for it.

Look at WoW in comparison. For the first days post-launch, they had login queues which for some players rose upwards of 120 minutes... imagine bringing home the $50 box, installing, then being told: "thanks for buying, you may play in 2 hours". I would have been furious. Blizzards compensation for this was a staggered "free days" plan, where people would get 4, 3, 2 or 1 free days of game time. Instead of just giving 4 days to all players, apologizing profusely and getting done with it.

[Tarrax Ironwolf]

I have to agree with Net on this. SOE seems to have learned from what happened numerous times with EQ and is trying to make reimbursed downtime better.

As for lost items. I'd say it be too damn difficult. I checked my EQ2Players, and since I played last night, I had already gotten 3 new items and they have already been logged onto my character on the site. So it wouldn't be difficult to say that I had lost 'such-n-such' item. Let alone claiming it was in the bank would be too easy, as it doesn't show on EQ2Players. I don't know if they have a program that shows what we had prior the roll-back. But somehow, I don't foresee it happening. If anything, even if they decided to return 'lost' items, I could see SOE replacing them with level appropriate equivalent items (especially if someone claimed to have an item that was 20 levels higher than they currently have - just to prevent this sort of 'claiming' scam from occurring.) Plus limiting it to one or two items per individual. Just my take...

[Euda]

/claim for the accellerated exp would be awesome, so of course it won't happen.

I'm really surprised they're giving anything back but I haven't been around 1st hand when they even screwed up this bad in eqL lol