[INFO] Restoration requests

In order to help your request get processed faster here's some guidelines to hopefully make things a bit easier for the GM's to read through.

(easier it is to read, faster they can fix things, faster they can get through them all).

Firstly: use full stops and new lines.
Second: full item names please - if you don't know what it is (e.g. ml9 cleric sleeves) either have a look around at other people's templates, on allakhzazm or just post on here to ask.
Third: If you have crafted or RoG stuff just say what it was - don't worry about the exact stats, these will have to be reimbursed with money and not with the items (they can't replicate them) so it's a waste of time listing the exact stats. Just list what you had and say that it's crafted or rog.

Bad:

I had a gov, scalars and stuff and i had a battler and a malice and that shades of mist cloak and the ml9 sleeves, I had leggings with +3 shield 29 quickness and 4 stealth I think I also had a Rog axe on my back which had a nice dd proc also my vault full of nice rog and scrolls is gone

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Good:
(after posting on here asking what the ml9 sleeves were and finding out they were arcanium Sleeves of the Cryth)

On character MrCool (alb/prydwen)

Definitely had:
Guard of Valor
Maddening Scalars
Battler
Malice's Axe
Shades of Mist
arcanium Sleeves of the Cryth
(crafted) boots

Think I had:
(rog) axe

Missing from personal vault:
Approximately 10 rog items.
Six assorted scrolls.

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bump

such a good idea

Good info for those that don´t know how to make it as clear as possible. Also post your templates with RN if u have them

don't post hte full page long templates - just the item names no need for them to see that your sililia's necklace has the stats it usually has.

Flimgoblin said:

Third: If you have crafted or RoG stuff just say what it was - don't worry about the exact stats, these will have to be reimbursed with money and not with the items (they can't replicate them)

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Thats harsh I know alot of ppl that use a rog in there Final template.. ie I used a rog with 13 dex cap on my cleric.. never gonna be able to get that again T_T

they should have posted it, i didnt know about compensation of rogs, i was wearing rogs 2k5 (so i said i wore alot of rogs) + my vault was full of quest items/rogs/Scrolls which i cant remember (and then i typed what i could remember my char having/wearing)
loosing the rogs i've planned to use will make me have wasted 40p or smth on items which are now useless to me.

What about people losing all equipment on multiple characters? I lost every single item I had on my runemaster, and I can't even remember each item I used in my final template, let alone the stuff I used in my pve template, what I had in inventory and vault...

If I remember correctly, the players do not own the account or chars on it. they are owned by GOA, which is why we cant sell items and/or accounts IRL .. right?

So to be honest we should be happy they give just a little back.

And rogs in templates, what did we learn about that?
It just comes back to bite you in the arse :-/

Cruhar said:

If I remember correctly, the players do not own the account or chars on it. they are owned by GOA, which is why we cant sell items and/or accounts IRL .. right?

So to be honest we should be happy they give just a little back.

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Right, so if a person lost all items on his chars, and doesn't remember all of the items, gets back some pathetic amount of cash should be happy about losing all the items and equipment he spent getting for his chars, while paying GOA to play on what you say is their account? That's just not good enough for me... They might own the account, but if I don't get my stuff back it'll be one account less they have to worry about, because as far as I'm concerned, the error is on their side, and until I get full compensation for what's lost, I wont be happy.

Of course it sounds a bit harsh, especially considering the fact that not many people have actually recieved their compensation yet, so I'll just have to see what happens.

hmm out of topic.

can GM's acces my acc and replace my items ( on alb/pryd) even that im using it atm at hib/Excl, or do i need to log off, to get bigger chance for them to restore my items ? .. ( plz quote if you wanna answer it )

Flim
Any chance of Stickying this thread and locking it

necromania said:

can GM's acces my acc and replace my items ( on alb/pryd) even that im using it atm at hib/Excl, or do i need to log off, to get bigger chance for them to restore my items ? .. ( plz quote if you wanna answer it )

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I'm just going by what I've pieced together from interviews with Mythic here:

The characters are stored as flat files. The files might reference items by
name. This means each individual character is stored as its own file, and you
being logged in as J. Random Hib won't lock the entire account from divine
intervention.

I know GMs tell us to log out for quest resets, though. If they need you to
log out for this, they'll probably let you know.

necromania said:

hmm out of topic.

can GM's acces my acc and replace my items ( on alb/pryd) even that im using it atm at hib/Excl, or do i need to log off, to get bigger chance for them to restore my items ? .. ( plz quote if you wanna answer it )

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asked a GM:

if you're online on prydwen you'll be contacted to be given your items, if you're offline they'll just sort it.

However if you're online on excalibur they'll have to wait till you're logged off I'm afraid (or till they've fixed enough of the requests that they have enough time to jump over to the other server to tell you to log)

So, if you're absolutely desperately in need of gettingg your pryd chars' stuff back you'd be better being on prydwen or offline. If you're not too fussy about getting it now now now (instead at some point in the near future) then feel free to play on excal.

Just a quick update to clarify a few things.

Rogs and crafted items. We are completely unable to replace these. Rogs are generated on the fly by the game and as such aren't recreatable and crafted items can only be created by crafting them oddly enough. If I generate a crafted item then it will look like a normal crafted item, it'll smell like a normal crafted item but you won't be able to SC, alchemise or dye it. For any Rog or crafed item we are simply going to have to give you cash to replace it.

GMs and forums. Please don't expect us to be very active on the various forums for a while. Our priority is obviously sorting out the problems people are experiencing at the moment, even at the best of times forums are something we do when we've cleared our RightNow inboxes and don't have any of the things that our boss keeps track of left to do. If you have questions then ask the E&Es, other players or if it's something that only a GM can answer and it's important then RightNow it. You are very unlikely to get our attention in any other way over the next few days.

How long is this going to take?
Well we've borrowed some people from other teams, we're working extra hours every day and we were sorting out the early reports on Saturday. When I went home tonight at 11pm, there were about 550 outstanding RightNows. We're going to work through them as fast as we can and we expected a big rush of reports today and tomorrow with a steady stream over the next few days as people get back from holidays, re-open acounts etc. Please be patient with this, we are working flat out on it but it is likely to take a while to break the back of the flood.

How can you check to see what we had?
We have trade logs going back a long way. When we get your report we can bring up your logs and cross-reference the items you list with the logs. In that way we can see if you really had the item or not. I know some people have expressed concern that it's up to them to remember what they had, however we were thinking of better ways to do it all last week and really this is the best and fairest way. Nobody else knows your character like you do. Even if you can't remember every single item mostly you can remember the important things. A lot of stuff is also very easily checkable like artifacts and the SI repeatable quest rewards. If you have (for example) Battler activation quest complete and no Battler artifact then it doesn't take a database trawl to determine that you are probably owed a Battler. Equally the Paidrean Necklace/Ancient Copper Necklace/Beaded Resisting Stones are marked with an 'silent' quest (it doesn't show in /quest but we can see it in your character database entry) to say you've recieved it. As a matter of course we check all of these things when we get a report even if they aren't specifically listed as missing.

Why can't you just match up databases or synchronise logs or do something technical to give us back exactly what we lost automatically?
Because there is no way of doing that in a reasonable time scale. We could pull the trade logs for every single one of the million or so characters in the Prydwen database and recreate their last known inventory from those but it would be very, very slow, prone to human error (repetitive, boring data entry + huge database = lots of scope for mistyped numbers) and it can't be automated. Short of keeping the server down for a few months while that work went on, there really is no better way than to ask people to report what they think they have lost.

Is it alright if I keep playing after making a report?
Yes of course it is however we are sorting most of these problems out by logging your character in and actually handing items over ingame. Even a GM can't log your account in if you're already playing it. In most cases we'll ask if it's convenient for you to either log for a bit so we can log your character in or if you could log the affected character yourself. Feel free to tell us you are busy, we can come back to you later, however it's obviously in your interest to let us sort you out as quickly as possible. If you're playing a character on another server then we won't contact you (as we don't have time to track you down and relog to send you a message), we'll just wait till you're offline again.

Replacing ROGS.
News

Goa said:

[6-09-2005] Random items on Prydwen

As you will know, it is not possible for us to directly replace randomly generated items (ROGs), however many players were making use of these in their templates. Until now we were compensating the loss of these items with gold however we appreciate that this is not the best answer as there is a distinct lack of items to spend this gold on.

We are pleased to announce then that new merchants have appeared in the capital cities of all the realms. These will take special vouchers and exchange them for high value ROGs. These vouchers will be given to players that have reported losing ROG items and will also be purchaseable so that those who have already recieved gold can replace their losses.

These merchants will remain available for the next couple of weeks.

In Tir Na Nog they are in the stables near to the East Gate
In Camelot they will be found by the Defenders of Albion
In Jordheim you will find them near to the westernmost marketplace.

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Just to clear up a few points. Some players seem to be under the impression that the Magic Gems (which you exchange for ROGs) are being offered to replace regular items. This is not the case, where possible items are still being replaced directly. As stated previously we cannot directly replace ROGs or crafted items and so we will continue to reimburse you in gold for these.
However many players have commented that there are too few items to spend their gold on and so, in an attempt to put more items into the marketplace we have added these merchants. Players who report ROGs missing will recieve both Gems and cash as appropriate.

For those wondering about the utility of the ROGs, this will obviously vary wildly from item to item however the generator will give you items tailored to your class. We have used the highest level generator available (the Aerus City generator) to give you the best chance possible of getting quality items.

News
Our customer support teams are working hard to replace all the missing items reported over the past week. This is a huge job and we have diverted all our resources to dealing with it however it will take a few more days to complete. We thank you for your patience while we work through this list. In the meantime, the underpopulated realm bonuses which are in effect on Prydwen will stay in place until the servers are ready for clustering. We will be able to announce more news regarding this soon.

As requested.

We are going to TRY to keep you updated on what is going on with the item restoration. However at this point it's going to be limited to things like Ýep today we managed to take another lump out of it and yes we are still working on it!''

We'll do our best however please understand that as long as your support request says'Under Investigation'it's still in the queue.

OK here's your update for the morning... err afternoon...

We have now gotten through the majority of the reports we received last monday which was an absolutely insane day (and by far the worst as far as the number of reports received)

I've tracked down the disparity in why it seems like things are being done out of order and it's because different GMs are working in different realms (GM characters might seem realm neutral however when it comes to dual logging the game still recognises the character as the realm it was created in) and because of this, while they are still being done roughly in the order they were received things might fall one way or another depending on the number of reports from a particular realm.

Not much of an update really, we're working through the list, the other teams have been encouraged to donate as many people to help us as they can...

We're moving onward.

The number of reports coming in has now slowed to a trickle and we are working flat out on clearing the backlog. It takes a long time to do each one as there's a lot of searching and cross-checking to do for each item on every character. We are working through the reports more or less in order and I must ask you if you've had no reply since the standard acknowledgement to be patient. We will get to your report, we haven't closed or ignored any.

We have a team of GMs from all the different server teams working on the problem and one English GM (Zenythe) who is sending out the acknowledgement replies as well as dealing with all the regular English RightNows. When she's sent the reply she is forwarding the report to a central list where the various GMs are picking them up. The reason you may have heard of some people being sorted out of turn is because if there's no reason to log the affected character in (we can give money without logging the character in for example), she will deal with it then and there without sending it to the central list. Only the reports that need items returning are going to the main list. Once there, they are being done in order, we aren't leaving the hard ones till last or doing our friends first.

To be honest the job is a lot bigger than we'd been given to believe, however there really isn't an alternative to doing what we are doing however long it takes. We appreciate your patience during this time and rest assured that you aren't being made to wait a second longer than is necessary.

OK here's your update (and I apologise for not doing it more often we're a bit on the busy side and we managed to pass some kind of icky bug between us last week so that made it worse)

Of the total number of reports we have received we have made it through roughly half (please note that the first three days were the absolute worst of it and over half came in in that time period)

We are still receiving reports, which logically go to the back of the queue.


Guys I know it sucks and I know you want your stuff back and I know you really don't give a rats tail about those of us here doing the work, but we are doing this as fast as we possibly can and sending hate mail via RightNow really doesn't do anything but delay the process.

Update:

Again sorry for not keeping this more up to date but please realise that we really don't have a whole lot more to report then "we're still working on it".

We still have a large group of GM's working on the ever decreasing pile of reports and will continue to spend most of our time on solving this problem untill it's done.

Obviously the patch has drawn our attention away a bit yesterday and today as we're processing bug reports etc but we plan on being fully on track again tomorrow.

For the record if your report is flagged as "Under Investigation" or "Updated" it is still in our cue and there is absolutely no point what so ever in either updating your original report or sending in a new report.

However if you forgot something in your original report or if you think you can format the report better by all means feel free to update your original report. We work through well formatted reports a lot faster then through solid blocks of unformatted text.

Another update and really not a great deal to say. As we've already said, there's not really much more we can tell you other than we aren't ignoring the problem, it's not going to go away until we deal with it and we are dealing with it. It is a slow process and it has been slower of late due to some of the people who were helping us being dragged off to the Monde du Jeu show. We have approximately 500 reports still to go which means we're about 80% of the way through the list.

I know it's frustrating for the people who are still waiting for things and I really do wish that it was possible to sort this out faster, unfortunately there is nothing more we can do other than work through the list, one report at a time. It's slow, it's tedious but it's the only way to do it.

Due to popular demand: an update:

We are still working on the ever shrinking list of restoration requests.

We are NOT ignoring this problem. It might get sidetracked for a couple of hours while we're working on other things but we've been working on this matter on a daily basis and will continue to do so untill everybody who reported it has had their items restored or compensated.

As it's been a while, I'll update this briefly.
We are still working on the list, the English team, the Italian team and parts of the French and German teams are currently working on the list which is getting smaller. As may be expected we had a bit of a rush of new reports as people reactivated old accounts for clustering and the classic servers. Now that all teams are back from holidays and the office is once again fully staffed, I expect to see the progress pick up again.