It’s a regular day in the neighborhood as Trion Worlds is once again apologizing for a bad launch bringing its servers down for a very long period of time. If you logged into the fresh start, or even the legacy servers, over the past couple of weeks, you are entitled to a list of freebies including 15 days of extra Patron time for existing Patrons.
As a thank you for your patience and understanding while we work through recent server difficulties, we are offering the following FREE rewards to all players who logged in to ArcheAge between 07:00am PSTon Dec. 10 and 07:00am PST on Dec. 22:
Bound Iron Eviscerator (Legacy) OR Bound White Reindeer (Fresh Start) mount
15 Day Patron Time Extension (PATRONS ONLY)
50x Warrior’s Medals
50x Merit Badges
Login Badge
Redemption follows the usual rules: Log on to the Glyph website and you will find the available packages on the list at the price of free. Redeem them to your chosen character and they will be available in game. For those of you receiving both the patron extension and other items, please note that they are two separate packages.
Shanda Games is performing serious PR damage control after a “severe technical failure” resulted in two years worth of data being lost in their MMO Dragon Nest. While characters, gold, DNP, and AC are still intact, virtually everything else has been lost. The good news is, according to the news post, Shanda is capable of reconstructing lost data outside of the game, and will be providing players with a reimbursement package and a compensation package.
All titles, missions, quests, achievements, NPC points, guild points, cooking details, fishing details, trading house items, as well as inventory and storage items are gone for now. Â Cash Items have also been wiped.
When the servers go live, all characters will be jumped up to level 80. In addition, all characters will have their mandatory and relevant missions completed, along with 100 gold, legendary level 70 equipment, and epic level 80 equipment upgraded to +10. Cash shop reimbursement will be based on how much you spent between November and January, with all purchases prior to November being sent out over the course of the next week.
There is a ton of information regarding player compensation, which you can read at the link below. It’s hard to imagine that there are publishers that still operate their games without redundancies in cases of issues like this.
To compensate players for recent downtime, Trion Worlds is handing out another free class coin to anyone who logs in between now and midnight Pacific Sunday night. The downtime stemmed from a seemingly simple database upgrade that went awry, forcing the game offline for several hours and requiring that Trion rollback the servers to earlier in the morning.
Thankfully, credits and cubits were returned to players who had purchased and subsequently lost them during that period.
We’ve returned the Credits and Cubits to everyone who made purchases. We also made sure all real money purchases got their goods. Some people might even get double since we wanted to be extra careful. The only exception is the Credit deals (i.e., if you got Credits plus lures or pinatas) in those cases we couldn’t give you the bonus items, so we gave you +50% Credits instead.
This is the second free class coin handed out since Trove went free to play.
Trion Worlds has posted a news piece detailing upcoming compensation for ArcheAge players following recent extended periods of downtime and instability with the game’s service. All players who have “ever been a patron” will receive a Patron pack including five days of patron time, 15 Superior Worker’s Compensation potions, 30 loyalty tokens, three Greedy Goblin Gummies (+10% loot drop rate), three Frankenflavor Jawbreakers (+10% exp), and three Marshmallow Sugar Pumpkins (+3% move speed).
We never take your loyalty for granted and any time we don’t meet the high standards we set for ourselves, it’s important to us to make it up to you as generously as possible. We’re currently applying compensation packs to everyone’s account. This does take a while, and it’ll be running through the rest of today.
Non-patrons will receive a package including 10 Superior Worker’s Compensation potions, 15 loyalty tokens, as well as three of the other items listed above. These packages are being distributed via the Glyph account page, with emails being sent out once players can redeem them.
Last week saw a patch roll out for Grand Theft Auto Online to fix a rather nasty bug resulting in characters not being displayed. When the bug first popped up, Rockstar acted quickly and warned users not to create new characters in the missing slots. In a followup comment posted just a few days ago, Rockstar Games has revealed that the characters lost due to the bug can not be recovered.
For those asking about their lost characters or rank, those will not be able to be restored so we sincerely hope that this cash stimulus we’re giving out this month will help you get back on your feet or to make your new life in Los Santos & Blaine extra sweet.
To compensate players for launch issues, lost characters, and lost vehicles, Rockstar is giving half a million dollars to anyone who plays GTA Online in October. The money will be doled out in two halves, with the first dropping this week and the second by the end of the month.
It’s been a rough week for Defiance players, from server downtime to a treasure trove of patches being churned out on the consoles to fix stability problems. People were missing keys, others didn’t receive pre-order items, and or had to wait a very long time for their patcher to download the game. Trion is aware of this and according to the developer blogs, currently has a massive patch ready to go for April 15th. Ahead of that, however, Trion would like to do what any developer does when things go sour for the user: Shower them in swag.
Players should find one week boosts for scrip, XP, loot, and weapons in their accounts, as well as an exclusive title (Daredevil).
We hope this shows you that we do appreciate you on this journey of Defiance, trying out something new, trying something different. The first episode is on Monday and honestly, we’re pretty excited doing something that hasn’t been done before. Well, the brutal honesty is that we don’t know what to feel. Scared, excited, nervous, giddy, ecstatic. Normal, I think. I’ll tell you after the weekend.
Wizardry Online is live and, for some at least, kicking. For others, however, their experience has been hampered by technical issues. Sony Online Entertainment has posted a notice that players will be compensated for downtime.
At SOE, we strive to provide the best possible service at all times. Our engineers have been working tirelessly to address the issues and we’re confident that you will have a better experience now. To thank you for your patience, we are applying a 300 Station Cash credit to accounts which have logged in prior to March 7, 2013.
In addition to the 300 Station Cash, subscribers will enjoy an extra seven days of membership, and a 7-Day Dimento Medal, an item which offers several bonuses including 25% exp gain.
In case you hadn’t noticed, Week in Review (much like Month in Review before it) is going the way of the dodo. I’d rather utilize my Sundays to discuss more meaningful topics to MMO Fallout than the metaphorical digging from the trash bin I did in past months. I always have something in the works to make MMO Fallout less of a news source and more of an information database, to make my articles less time-based (less likely to be outdated) while at the same time staying relevant and interesting.
My current project is to discuss and rate the security on a company by company basis, which I will be doing hopefully in each Sunday’s editorial. I can guarantee an editorial every Sunday, but not that it will be on security, because some of the questions I will be asking need direct information from customer support, and we all know how fast they generally respond.
If I don’t bring this up now, someone will point it out: Yes, I am including actual security breaches in the analysis.
1. Prevention
How well do publishers prevent an account from being broken into in the first place?
Authenticators (either dongle or app form)
On-screen PIN (clicked with mouse, sends encrypted message, not through keyboard)
Computer recognition (Only recognized computers may log in)
IP recognition (If an account suddenly logs in from another country, it is locked)
2. Recovery
Once the account is stolen, how is the process?
How long does it take an account to lock down?
What damage can be done while the active account is moving about?
Can the thief plant information to later use to steal back the account?
etc.
3. Cleanup
Once the account is returned to its rightful owner.
Compensation (does the company return lost items/characters)
This isn’t the entire list of questions I’ll be taking into account, but it is rather comprehensive. Hopefully I can get some of these developers to get on board and help me out.
While Sony expects to have services returned soon™, the company has detailed their plans for compensation on the official SOE website. As mentioned previously, all players will receive 30 days free game time, plus one day for every day the service is offline, plus the following items. These offers hold for both PC and PS3 users in their respective games.
DC Universe™ Online: Batman™ and Two-Face™ Inspired Masks and 30 Marks of Distinction
Free Realms®: Free daily items (7 to collect)
Clone Wars Adventures™: Count Dooku v2 Outfit
EverQuest®: A series of events, including Double XP, Double Rare Mob Spawns and Double Faction Gains
EverQuest II and EverQuest II Extended: A series of events, including Double XP, Double Guild XP, Loot Bonanza, and City Festivals
Vanguard: Saga of Heroes®: A series of Double XP events
Star Wars Galaxies™: Bounty Hunter Statue, a miniature model of Boba Fett’s ship, the Slave I™
Magic: The Gathering – Tactics™: Four of each of these spells: “Ivory Mask”, “Duress” and “Angelheart Vial”, plus 500 Station Cash
PoxNora®: Limited edition Carrionling, Welcome Back 5K Gold Award Tournaments and two Draft Tournaments, plus 500 Station Cash
For our lifetime subscribers, we’ll grant in-game currency; specifically 20,000 coins for Free Realms, 7,500 Galactic Credits for Clone Wars Adventures and 10 Marks of Distinction for DC Universe Online (in addition to the items listed above).
And finally, our Station Access subscribers will receive 500 Station Cash, in addition to the subscription time and items listed above.
Also, US based subscribers are being enrolled in identity theft protection through Debix, which you can read more about here.
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 