If I accidentally trip or bump into you, generally a simple “I’m sorry” and a hand up with suffice. Then again, if I smash your mailbox with my car because I’m texting while driving, an apology won’t suffice as well. You’ll probably expect me to pay for the mailbox, and won’t be paying for the damage your mailbox caused to my car.
Such is the case with MMOs and various forms of reimbursement that come up over the course of any title’s life. Very extended maintenance, false bans, etc, can put a company in the position where they have to say “alright, now how do we calm tensions between us and the customer?” If you are Jagex, you’ll likely refuse to roll back or compensate, and simply give the middle finger to anyone who lost items or was banned unfairly due to a bug or oversight. If you are NCsoft, XP bonus items are your forte. Turbine? Break out those Turbine points.
I think we can place loss of items at the lowest end of the reimbursement spectrum, extended maintenance somewhere around the middle, and false positive bans somewhere around the top. At the lowest end, reimbursement and perhaps some free xp boosters will suffice, depending on the severity of the loss and the time it took to reimburse. As for extended maintenance, this scales with time. A few extra hours may require a couple xp boosters, but 12+ hours of downtime should generally lead to game time being extended by the respective amount of time (So one day, generally).
In the cases of false bans, however, as a developer you should be putting on your lips of +2 ass kissing, because their durability will be put to the test. By banning someone falsely, as has happened on countless occasions over virtually any game, you’ve accomplished the virtual equivalent of approaching someone, sucker punching them in the jaw, and accusing them of cheating on your wife, before saying “sorry, you looked like another guy.” At this point, you’re looking at shelling out one or more free months of game time, and hoping that the person doesn’t up and quit.
So there you have it. For those companies that do offer reimbursement, they generally do a pretty good job of scaling the compensation to match the severity of the problem. Again, unless you are Jagex and would rather your players quit than reimburse them for issues brought about by faults in your programming.
MMO Fallout 