Cases where game masters will not intervene

What I thought was really annoying after I tried Customer Support was this message:
"Thank you again for taking the time to contact the Customer Service team.
If you wish to take a satisfaction survey, please follow this link: https://soe.typeform.com/to/yeFjlF."

And then when I responded to the reply I got from a GM, this was what he had typed to me, (after already telling me yet again that I was basically screwed on getting an item back):
"Unfortunately, we are not able to make exceptions for situations like this under current policy. I do think it is important for you to express your disappointment with these changes and I encourage you to post your feelings on the official game forums. As you noted, Game Masters do not set policy. Posting on the forums will bring attention to this issue by the people that do set policy. I know this is not the answer you were hoping to hear and I do hope that it does not cause you too much disappointment. For your convenience, I have posted a link to the forums below."

What is even more horrendous is that I took the "survey" and it is on a site that is not even for EQ, as u see the link says "typeform.com" !!! Daybreak Game Company does not even have their own Customer Support Survey....ROFL. So they're basically saying, "Blah blah we care about what u think as a customer, but we won't actually do anything about your problems"??? Is it that they CAN'T do anything or the fact that they just WON'T anymore? What a way to stick it to the people who have been paying to play Everquest for years!!!

He's not saying they can not restore the character, he's saying they WILL NOT. We all know they CAN restore characters, but this policy change means they're choosing not to.

Both raiding guilds I've been in have had this happen a few times a year, and it was always a scary thing that got fixed in days. Now it means you should just quit eq.

Seems like this would be fairly easy to implement. It's way to easy to accidentally delete a character.

Why is it always the things we take for granted that end up angering the player base? Ancient God illusion restrictions? Xp nerfs? Now character restoration?

P.S. Don't use your main account to post in Forums.

Hope you get things back as they were. This is flat out wrong.

Butchers need to take care not to trim more than the fat. Looks like they cut through the flesh and bone and straight into the soul this time.

The days of the few benevolent kings admitting that they may have been wrong are gone. The chance of giving an inch and the vassals smelling blood in the water and demanding a mile seems steep and even the most gracious of lords in this new world will give no ground for their pride and profit.

There is an opportunity for a landmark here.
If you cut a rope and attempt to make amends by retying it, it has a chance to be stronger. Consider it.

~ Velnarin of Drinal

That response from CS is the definition of embarrassing... who ever is in charge should be mortified that response was publicized.

It's 2015 folks, you all can't restore a deleted character?

this is just ridiculous if I don't get my ranger back im done with eq and I actually pay for 2 accounts

They can. SOE CS has been doing it for years. Daybreak has decided, despite having the same tools, that they are not going to do it.

Yeah, that's completely understandable and expected.

I don't even know where to begin here... this is extremely F***ed up and has completely demoralized me. I'm an officer of Minishot's guild, and he's been an extremely valuable raider as well as a good friend, he's just a good dude all around. One of those players who is always willing to drop what he's doing to help someone else out. I'm upset and angry on his behalf, and the response by DBG is so callous that it disgusts me.

It seems pretty damn clear that this was a malicious hack and not some sort of attempt at exploiting loot... I talk to Minishot everyday not only in EQ, but also on TS, and he's clearly devastated by this... this is how you lose a loyal subscriber with multiple accounts.

It's just a brain dead policy... this is perhaps the single most severe customer service issue that can happen, and the response is basically, "F*** you, we are not even going to look into it?!"

I mean, it really wouldn't be hard to investigate this... Minishot was on yesterday, and today his toon is gone, so the window of logs is only about 12 hours. I am going to check with the guildies who afk in the hall, and see if I can narrow down the exact time his toon was deguilded and transferred, but again this will be readily available. All they have to do is compare the ip address at the time the toon was transferred, and see if that ip address has ever logged into Mini's account before (hint: it's a completely f**** different ip address). Compare this to any other account that Minishot has, I think Mini pays via CC, so this should not be hard to cross reference... any account with his CC, look for that ip address, and it's not going to be there (or even in the same region likely).

Still not convinced? Fine, check the server logs for FV, and see what happened to his gear. Was it traded to other toons for nothing? Then probably the gear was transferred off to be sold/used by the hacker, and I'd wager when checking the login history of those other toons, this mysteriously new ip address on Mini's account will have some history on the toons his gear was xferred to.

If his gear was traded for kronos/plat, then it could be legitimate buyers who unknowingly purchased it, but this only means that sometime after the sale and before the toon was destroyed, the hacker had to have transferred that plat/krono to another of his own accounts for his own use (again, likely a trade with nothing returned). Checking the logs of these accounts should show a matching ip address.

Additionally, NONE of the toons involved in any of the trades on FV will have Minishot's ip, adding to the mountain of evidence indicating that this is, in fact, a hack.

In fact, with the way this issue was handled, basically DBG's policy is that there is NO penalty for hacking, stealing, and deleting a toon... no consequences at all, since they won't even investigate the issue, they just said no, too bad. So basically the worst offense you could commit, and not even a slight risk of getting caught. DBG essentially traded a loyal customer for a hacker... since they've effectively banned one and not the other (2 yrs of work, raid gear, augs... yeah, if I lost my toon, no way I'm coming back... that would be the end of EQ for me, just as effective of any ban, while the hacker gets away clean)

I'm just stunned that DBG considers this a closed ticket... I mean what a shining example of customer service... sorry, you are SoL, you can't even have a discussion with a rep, we didn't want your money anyway, go play something else. We'd rather have the hacker continue to play scot free.

Can you imagine if this happened to your toon? At the very least, I'd expect them to at least say, "Sorry, this is a very serious issue, but we can't just restore a toon without proof. Our CS team will investigate this, and we will get back to you." I mean, I know CS is short-staffed, but aren't there still some issues that are high priority? If this isn't one of them, then what the heck are they spending their time on?!

Azrael
-one very angry and disgusted necro

The policy for transfers to FV is also completely stupid... if you are going to be so strict about anything related to that server, then why is it so easy to xfer there? I don't ever want my toon to go to FV, why can't something that irreversible require email confirmation? And destroying a toon too, how often does that happen anyway, just make that require an email confirmation as well.

How about after a transfer to FV, your items remain untradeable for a week? I'm sure that would drastically reduce the number of hacks... obviously hacks like this are only valuable for the gear, and the most valuable stuff is end game raid gear, so it's unlikely that whoever got hacked wouldn't log on at least once during that week and realize their toon is gone (raiders with that kind of gear prob log on more often than that). This would at least give them a chance to contact CS and get the situation fixed before their gear is taken and toon destroyed. And in this case, what would be the incentive for DBG not to restore the toon? If the gear is all untradeable for this window, then there is no chance of any exploits, nor would the economy of FV be affected in any way. At the very least, it should make it much more difficult to pull off something like this.

Instead of a "f*** you, we don't care about our customers we have too many support tickets" policy, institute some changes to prevent it in the first place.

As for how widespread this is... I don't know, however, I've spent all day talking to guildies and checking logs, and we have noticed some strange things. Two people reported that they got password change attempt emails this week, one of them at 345EST last night. Additionally, one guildy this week had a strange issue where she tried to log on and it said someone was logged on her toon, yet none of the toons on her account on Tunare were online, and she has no trader. We had her quickly change her password via the website, and she got back in, but it sounds like, after this Minishot incident, that we might have possibly dodged a bullet there. She is going to put in a petition, and see if they can look up what toon was logged on at that time and on what server, to see if we can narrow it down, and see if it's at all related to this. This also happened to another person last week... again, nothing serious came of it, but it required him to reset his pw via the website... in isolation, each of these could be written off as something innocuous, but taken together, and now with the Minishot hack, seems like Mini could have been the victim of a more widespread hack. Obviously still very speculative at the moment, but I'm curious if anyone else has noticed any strange password change attempts in their email or anything similar to the above. I'll reply to this thread once more people log on and we can review more logs, but I would definitely recommend everyone change their PW immediately, as my hunch right now is that this is NOT an isolated incident.

SOE was hacked fairly recently if I recall, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that a large amount of relevant data could have been exposed.

Sup.

Haven't you been reading his and battleblade's posts?

This is actually a good thing for Everquest and all of us because it frees up CS time to address the important issues instead of being hung up dealing with trivial matters like transferred and deleted characters. It also teaches us important personal responsibilities about how we should sever all social ties, install gentoo, and only play EQ on air gapped computers with nothing else installed.

I want to hear it from Roshen that they will not assist people who have had their accounts hacked, because as far as the knowledge base suggests - its only in regards to people who delete their own toons accidentally. It states nothing about compromised accounts through illegitimate or unauthorized access. That is your big argument right there Minishot. You can fight them on that. Sony was hit with 4 class action lawsuits due to security breaches; if this is completely legitimate on what occurred to Minishot - Daybreak may be facing down the barrel of a lawsuit. The law is very unforgiving towards any company that makes it next to impossible to contact any customer service when dealing in online commodities.

No need to be a smart^ss

A possible solution to this mess would be to automatically copy every deleted character to a special "deleted character" server. Don't allow any deletions from that server....no characters, gear, supplies, nothing....can't even destroy copper on them.

Keep all characters on that server for a period of time (say 1 year) and allow people to purchase a special "transfer off" token for say 3500SC. Keep the server operational with glooming deep as the only zone and one NPC that sells rations and water. The server transfer off would allow the toon to transfer back to any server that the toon had been on.

Just create a Never transfer to FV button by each character at the character select screen.

Data for deleted characters is already stored for years. Maybe not all the incremental saves, but at least the final version is.

Only in Everquest is restoring a deleted character something more complicated than pressing a restore character button. I mean seriously, I get the whole "game play error" thing. I think Mini's case is quite opposite.

Embarrassing...