Silly Eve-izen, that’s not even from the right game. Losing items in a game where you drop everything upon death, is nothing short of not news. Players are killed, hacked, and generally die for one reason or another, on a daily basis and, whether or not we want to accept blame (Lag, account theft, etc), more often than not we are met with a simple “sorry, your stuff’s gone for good,” should we try to retrieve it.
There are three levels of item loss, as I will demonstrate:
- If you want to annoy your players, allow them to be killed due to unforeseeable, yet annoying issues. Lag is chief in this category, not to mention players with easy access to exploits in the system, hacks, and other such software.
- If you want to piss off your players, kill them via in-game bugs and don’t return their items. In Runescape, it isn’t uncommon for at least one update every four or five months to have some instant-murder effect, or allowing player killing in a spot it shouldn’t be. When Mobilising Armies was released, one player lost an enormous sum of money simply by talking to an NPC, and was not reimbursed despite confirmation by a Jagex employee.
- And finally, if you want to get players to quit, take the items right out of their possession, by process of one of your intended features going haywire.
If you were logged into Eve Online today, or even if you weren’t, you may have logged in to find that one or more of your items were missing. Due to an unintended issue, the Eve Online ItemID recycling system ended up deleting a mass amount of items. How many? Up to fourteen thousand, to be exact. But how exactly did this bug happen?
In Eve Online, every item has its own procedurally generated ID (The ID is created when the item is created). In order to prevent items six years from launch being labeled #34054083489534890583890459348, Eve Online recycles ItemID’s back into the pool once the associated item is destroyed, or stacked with another stack of the same item. The retrieval system failed, causing items to not receive an ID when created under various circumstances, and thus disappear.
Although CCP is not returning lost items (they have no way to, the data trail is literally gone), they will be reimbursing players. Players affected are asked to file a petition with the list of items they lost due to the bug. As for how well players will be reimbursed, MMO Fallout will be listening in.
More on [MMO name retrieval failed. Deleting portion.] as it appears.
MMO Fallout 