Character restoration?

[bigsir]

Regarding these 2 threads on the same subject:

http://forums.barrysworld.com/showthread.php?threadid=44915

http://forums.barrysworld.com/showthread.php?threadid=44958

If you dont want to read those 2 threads I'll sum it up for you. A guildmate of mine had his email hacked which gave the 'hacker' access to his DAoC account details, he then had 2 x level 50 chars and a level 48 deleted.

The first thing my guildmate did was to contact GOA and asked if it was possible to restore them. Now he has had the 2 x level 50 chars restored (with no items/cash) and the level 48 char was apparantly 'corrupted'. He has no means of getting his epic armour back for the 2 x 50.

Now before I 'go off on one' I've never moaned about GOA before. Sure the patches can seem slow in arriving, the servers can be a little unstable at times, but it's to be expected and it's not worth working yourself up over it. However, this to me is shoddy customer service.

I'll be the first to admit that I dont completely understand how the GOA character backup system works, but I would have though they could have AT LEAST done the following:


Dropped 2 x sets of epic armour in his vault, or at least given him the means of completing the epic quests again.

Restored the lvl 48 char. If it was corrupted whats to stop them from adding one to his account? It cant be that hard surely?

Attempted to track down some of the items that he has lost.


It just seems to me that GOA click a 'char restore' button and as far as they're concerned it's a job well done. Regardless of the fact characters they've restored are useless.

I guess from posting this I'm hoping for a response from a GOA employee who can at least say 'no, you're talking shite' or 'yes, we're quite lazy and as long as the customer is still paying we cant be arsed'.

 

[old.Xanthian]

The fact he has now cancelled his subscription because of this, seemed to have no effect on thier decision.
So it seems they arent really bothered about losing customers.

 

[old.Xanthian]

BUMP

Will a muggins from GOA like to shed some light on this please?

 

[cadiva]

Perhaps you're posting in the wrong place

These aren't the offical boards, they are just boards where both Kemor and Zargar happen to pop along occasioally.

Asking for anything official from GOA on the BW boards is about as likely to get a reply as posting it on (insert random games name here)'s boards.

While I think everyone here would sympathise with your friend, it does seem that you've just come here to express anger/annoyance/irritation etc with GOA at their lack of restoration to the pre-hacked state.

I know it stinks somewhat to be hacked but there's plenty of other threads on the boards too about making sure you have proper protection from hacking etc too and not leaving passwords lying around in easily accessible places.

The hacker might be able to access your PC via insecure ports, he sure as hell can't access the piece of paper in your desk

 

[<Wels>]

GOA does what they can, serioulsy you can avoid being hacked. If I would get hacked and loose my chars, I would be damn happy that they restored them for me even without stuff, and embarassed that I got hacked due to lack of protection/trojan whatever.
I don't want to sound mean or anything I am sure I would be pissed too but I wouldn't direct it to GOA but myself.

 

[Madonion Slicer]

He should be thankful that GOA restored his 2lvl 50's, he could of been left with no characters at all, all these claims of my account was hacked blah blah blah, actually should say i gave me password to someone else and he gave it to someone else and so on and so on till some git got hold of it and deleted it all for what they think was a laugh.

No like the Internet is a new thing and we all noobs, you know it is possible to hack a PC and you stupid if you dont get protection against it, Firewall, Virus Software. And if you give you password out to someone else to use your account and you dont personally know the person then what do you expect.

If you know a person only by the character they play in game, then you actually dont know this person at all, assholes will prey on the weak, dont be weak and think before you act.

 

[old.Xanthian]

Well this is the situation when characters get deleted.


4 characters:
1 Bard
2 Hero
3 Nightshade
4 Eldritch
(created in that order)


Now delete all 4 and create a new char, which 1 will dissapear from the database?
The bard.
So WHY was the Nightshade & Eldrtich missing from the DB ?
Because, they wasnt backed up properly.
The Nightshade is STILL in the XML reports ffs!

Yes it coupld of been prevented by not having his passwords stored in his email account.
But GOA get get away with half arsed service when they cant be bothered to look into something properly.
I dont see why they cant just restore his epics either, it says in his /quest log they have been done.
Who would want to dupe an epic ? They suck and worth 300g-500g salvage value.


Where can I post this so that Kemor/Zargar can see it ?
Or do I have to ring GOA for him to take this further?

 

[old.Tohtori]

They should have the same policy on character restoration as they have at blizzard, which goes something like this:

We will not restore your character for any cause, be it an accicdent, computer crash, little sister or an act of god.

 

[Vell]

Originally posted by old.Xanthian

The bard.
So WHY was the Nightshade & Eldrtich missing from the DB ?
Because, they wasnt backed up properly.
The Nightshade is STILL in the XML reports ffs!

Yes it coupld of been prevented by not having his passwords stored in his email account.
But GOA get get away with half arsed service when they cant be bothered to look into something properly.

Your arguement seems to have changed. First you said the characters were corrupted, now you say they are just plain missing....

If you had played beta you would know that the corrupted characters problem happens, especially when people are deleting and re-creating characters in rapid succession. This, unfortunately, is unavoidable, anbd there is no way they can restore the character. Sorry.

As I see it (and most other people, judging from the replies) your friend made a mistake and paid the price. They say mistakes are the best way to learn....

Oh, and regarding which characters should still exist and which shouldn't....it depends on the order they were deleted, not created. So that explains that.

Ie: eldritch was deleted first, then the other three in any order. New char was created: bye-bye eldritch. Sadly, nightshade was corrupted: bye bye nightshade. So GOA can restore the bard and hero (and he should be damn glad that they did!) but not the others.

Conclusion: your friend is a fool.

Case closed.

 

[old.job]

Usually I have a little bit of a hard attitude to people who have chars deleted, I'm a bit suspicous to the REAL reason for the deletion, but really GOA have to have a clearer policy on this.

Losing chars for what ever reason is not good or the community as a whole, the hours spent making a character are not balanced by GOA's enthusiasm to help.

Characters should NEVER be able to be deleted, the size of the code to store a char is so tiny to be of no consequence, GOA should store ALL char info, say over level 20, permanently, if you do a delete it should be like windows recycle bin.
If your chars are deleted by you or a password pincher, you should just have to pay a fee for an investigation and have a time period to wait so as to stop people swapping chars for no reason.
There ae very few people who would bother to take the piss out of this service.

 

[-Nxs-]

It can get more complicated that this, if you're account is abused generaly items will be removed/sold before your character is removed.

However I firmly do believe that if needed a character could and should be re-created to the appropriate level and quests reset. This cant be that hard to do and would require no backups.

Personaly If I have a character deleted I would welcome the name and the level back over nothing at all.

 

[Pi0z]

Case closed, my arse. The fact still stands that someone's characters were deleted and only partially restored. Either GOA implement a reliable multi-level backup system for their character database or people will start to walk away from the game. You don't put months into a game developing your characters just to be told "erm soz it's corrupted lolz" when the worst comes to worst.

Btw, it seems that if you have a character deleted and then happen to create a new one with the same name as the old one, the old one is lost for good. Using a primary key WITH business meaning (character first name, in this case) is the kind of thing script kiddies do when they are hacking together their first web-facing db scripts, it should not be the practice of a customer-driven company.

Sort it out.

// Melodia, 2x Skald (Mid/Pry)

 

[Whoodoo_RD]

Originally posted by old.job
Usually I have a little bit of a hard attitude to people who have chars deleted, I'm a bit suspicous to the REAL reason for the deletion, but really GOA have to have a clearer policy on this.

Losing chars for what ever reason is not good or the community as a whole, the hours spent making a character are not balanced by GOA's enthusiasm to help.

Characters should NEVER be able to be deleted, the size of the code to store a char is so tiny to be of no consequence, GOA should store ALL char info, say over level 20, permanently, if you do a delete it should be like windows recycle bin.
If your chars are deleted by you or a password pincher, you should just have to pay a fee for an investigation and have a time period to wait so as to stop people swapping chars for no reason.
There ae very few people who would bother to take the piss out of this service.

All true. However, GOA have stated numerous times that they cannot restore chars deleted, or if in the extreem, can only restore some of the data concerning that char. Plenty of warnings about this have been given to us.

But Im not so happy about the bit that says something along the lines of "if we(GOA) feck your char up, its tough tits too".

 

[old.Xanthian]

Well if the character is corupted its GOA's fault.
What would happened if the server had crashed and it got lost, and of course couldnt be restored?

"Oh sorry sir were a bunch of incompetant twats that couldnt organise a piss-up in a brewery, But we cant restore your character."

It wouldnt take 5 minutes to check previous logs and actually CREATE a new character on his account.

ALOT of work is put into a nightshade, as im sure those that have leveled 1 would know, and to lose 1 at lvl 48, due to some arsehole hacker and a piss poor customer service, its pretty fking annoying.

Conclusion: your friend is a fool.

Your a tool. Goodbye go take your snotty bullshit elsewhere please.

Goa told him they cant restore the Nightshade or Eldritch because they dont have a recent backup of them. (meaning corupted/missing)

All true. However, GOA have stated numerous times that they cannot restore chars deleted, or if in the extreem, can only restore some of the data concerning that char. Plenty of warnings about this have been given to us.

With 1.52 or 1.54 (dont remember) they apparently implemented a new backup system, and any characters lost b4 that patch couldnt be restored. But after the patch they could.

 

[old.Xanthian]

Extract taken from Excalibur Chronicles:


| Spanky | 48 | Nightshade | Lurikeen | 111271 | Consantoir | R3L4 | 22989 | Council |

 

[Goryk]

I'm guessing the reason they don't igve epic armour back, is due to the chance that the epic armour you had was transferred off the character (is it even tradable?). If that was the case, you could theoretically transfer the armour, delete your character, calim to be hacked, get reinstated, adn voila - two sets of epic armour. It's really not that hard to avoid getting hacked, and thats the price you pay unfortunately. If you have such a nice set of characters, it baffles me why people can be so careless as to let themselves get hacked like that. It's usually down to sheer laziness such as saving hotmail passwords on a public computer or the like, or not running firewalls/virus checking regularly. As bad as you may think GoA's service is, I can't really blame them as it isn't their fault at all that you got hacked...

 

[old.Xanthian]

Hes more bothered about the nightshade not being able to be restored becuse they didnt back it up correctly.

The epic armour is just another kick in the bollocks really, and tbh they arent really worth deleting your chars to claim you got hacked just to get another set, especially with spell crafting out.

Still no reply from the GOA team, I wonder why ?..

 

[slapmesilly..]

Originally posted by old.Xanthian



Your a tool. Goodbye go take your snotty bullshit elsewhere please.

Hammer? Saw? Screwdriver?

you really know how to insult someone

 

[Dook_Pug]

Originally posted by slapmesilly..


Hammer? Saw? Screwdriver?

you really know how to insult someone

Geez, haven't you been banned yet?

Xanthian - I feel for your friend and the predicament he's in, however, he really only has himself to blame. We all know GOA's policies suck ass and there's not much that can be done. :x

 

[Goryk]

Sounds like you should be blaming mythic for the backups being corrupted as it's more than likely their code used for the backup process (as would be indicated by the fact they got the ability to restore after applying a mythic patch (1.52?)). Of course I don't know how much control GoA have over the backup process, but I don't think it's fair to blame them without knowing exactly what the problem is. If the data was backed up in a corrupted fashion, then any extra backups goa did of this data would also be corrupt. I still think this is more likely a mythic problem, as are most of the things GoA get slated for (although some of it they admittedly deserve ) and slating GoA when you do not know the whole facts mroe than likely won't help the situation.

 

[old.MikhailGudlik]

YOu guys should know a runie called Karl FU?
Well same thing happened to him... His char got corrupted and GOA say they have no log with any info of his char so it wont be restored.
Now Karl FU is a lvl 10 healer

P.S
Shouldnt everybody be concerned about it? Anyone of us can log on tommorow to find ones char is corrupted and wont be restored.

 

[thorwyntf]

well... that´s the problem with the people who´re playing this game. Give them a finger and they´re grabbing the entire arm.
GoA´s character restore policy is a SERVICE not a certainity. They´re willing to restore your lvl 50 char even if you´re the retard who decided to delete because you found out that your realm sucks because of no insta ae mezz and then said "hm... well.. actually I sholdn´t have done that. ah, f*ck it, give it back to me guys" 2 days later. They´re willing to restore your chars even if you´re the muppet who has left his account details in his email account on an unprotected computer (...which gives a nice twist to the "GoA are incompetent" argument).
Someone else already pointed out Blizzard´s policy. They don´t give a damn about lost/deleted/corrupted/hacked chars. And noone´s complaining because everyone knows they could´t care less. THAT`S a piss customer service Xanthian.
GoA is trying to help in any way they can... and they´re constantly getting flamed for it. They´re getting slated for everything. If your cat would eat the sticker with your daoc licence number, there would be a thread "FFS GOA we need a relyable licence number backup system for cases like this! But GoA messed it up again because they´re a bunch if incompetent n00bs!".

Use your brain folks, grow up.

Thorwyn
GM
<Blade&Quill>
50Pally
36Sorc
37Scout
24Wiz

 

[Alrindel]

Originally posted by old.Xanthian
Hes more bothered about the nightshade not being able to be restored becuse they didnt back it up correctly.

Presumeably because the person who deleted Spankya's characters created a new character in the nightshade slot, and then deleted that as well, erasing the backup. It sounds like Spankya was lucky to get any characters back at all - if the wanker who did this knew how the character slot backup works, I would have expected him to make and delete characters in all four slots to purge them completely.

Still no reply from the GOA team, I wonder why ?..

Because this is a public bulletin board that has nothing to do with GOA, not an official customer support service, no matter how many times you post "Kemor please answer immediately" - and GOA doesn't discuss CS problems like this in public anyways, just as they don't post the names of people they ban for cheating.

What I hope is that they are investigating who was behind it, by checking to see who logged on characters from the same IP address as the person who stole Spankya's account, and tracking who helped him trade away all of Spankya's items and money (if he didn't just delete them). I gather they were able to do something like this back when it happened to Tdaer, but whether or not they ever caught anybody, or banned any accounts, I have no idea and GOA won't tell.

 

[llixeraxu]

Do you also lose all your realm points and craft skill point thingys?

 

[old.Xanthian]

No his realm points and LGM AC'er points were still there, luckily.

 

[inuyasha]

bah

Originally posted by &lt;Wels&gt;
GOA does what they can, serioulsy you can avoid being hacked. If I would get hacked and loose my chars, I would be damn happy that they restored them for me even without stuff, and embarassed that I got hacked due to lack of protection/trojan whatever.
I don't want to sound mean or anything I am sure I would be pissed too but I wouldn't direct it to GOA but myself.

No way man

Speak with a few more hackers would ya?
You cant avoid beeing hacked if someone WANT to hack ya unless you really know how to, which VERY few do

GOA should restore any characters or recreate if they cannot restore as long as there is enough witnesses, and it IS! Items is okey, people CAN be silly enough to give away all their stash and hope they get it restored, and this is rather silly, HOWEVER i would reset epic quest and remake characters You cant fool barrysworld, people knew spank had 3 chars where two was 50 and one was 45+ and was a nightshade. It does not hurt, and helps alot to both guilds AND paying customers, so why not?

I have not been hacked yet, but if i was i would quit daoc today
Its not fun at all loosing your chars/cash and equipment, and i do not really like people to be moralized for it

 

[Damini]

Help Protect Your PC

 

[Hestetun]

soz ,but to dose fuckers !!! that means that GOA shouldent replace the chars , go fuck ur self in the ass, Spanky and many other has commited alot of time and cash on the game so why the fuck shouldent he get the stuff back not to support a fellow m8 in DAOC is lame and I give fuck off what Blizzard dose

 

[Herbal Remedy]

Originally posted by hestetun
soz ,but to dose fuckers !!! that means that GOA shouldent replace the chars , go fuck ur self in the ass, Spanky and many other has commited alot of time and cash on the game so why the fuck shouldent he get the stuff back not to support a fellow m8 in DAOC is lame and I give fuck off what Blizzard dose

u sir are a mopron

 

[old.Xanthian]

You sir a prick.