Just like in the 2004 Battlestar Galactica, "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again". Daybreak knows from their previous TLP launches that it goes like this: Everyone gets excited about the possibility of starting on a fresh EQ Classic server and before launch day, most of the players go out and purchase the bag sets for most if not all of their characters. Then the morning of the launch, they purchase the new bag set. So there's 75.00 instant capital for each account. Now you're invested in sticking it out through the rough first few weeks. Very few people will actually follow through with reversing the charges because you know your account will be perm banned. DBG continues to do this simply because we keep coming back each year. Each year we tell ourselves that DBG has learned from their prior failed launches and willingly give them our money. The only way we'll be able to change this behavior is to not make the upfront purchases from the DBG store for future TLP launches until they prove the server is stable. Realistically, I don't believe the TLP player community will have the will power to refrain from making the expensive bag purchases, so this is going to continue to happen.
Completely speculative on my part. Well, not all speculative, some historical perspective. There used to be groups/guilds that would crash entire servers in order to dupe items or force a server reset when they had a bad outcome. A lot of code for things was client side, mainly timing for things like movement and skill time out checks. A lot of people took advantage of the situation with client side hacks. Not an exhaustive list, but there were hacks that would do things like fast walk, reveal what inventories were on MOBs so you knew the right ones to kill, take advantage of things like crafting i.e. 400 attempts to make a piece of jewelry in less then a second with a single bar of silver *BEFORE* the client side could update the silver bar inventory. There was a built in throttling of movement speed such that everyone was limited to ~36 KBAUD modem speed, everything server was built for that. Typically when these happened it took months for Verant/SONY to figure out. What they would do is check the database for discrepancies i.e. "Why does this account have 5 million pp?" and then follow the accounts in game with an invisible GM to see what was going on. They also have a tendency to look for who else is doing the same hack. All the hardware problems are usually fixed fairly quickly and the root causes are revealed. If someone is using hacks to crash the server or circumvent the timing which overloads the server, it takes some time to figure it out and DP will keep it secret while they collect the accounts to ban. I kind of suspect it is the latter in this case.
My guess is that it's related to new server side cheat detection / prevention. For instance, if you experience a temporary break in network connectivity while running, your character will rubber band back to near where you were when you lost connectivity. That didn't use to happen. If I'm right, then there is now considerably more server side load per character, but they don't want to tell folks that or leaks details of what activities this load is around for obvious reasons.
I feel like the vast majority of the population that does this is also not on the forums. Some of them come to the forums when they reach their breaking point, but even that I feel is a minority. As you quoted, it's going to happen again and again and again. I've been on TLPs since Agnarr so not an early adopter (though I did sub for 3 months to run around Phinny but never really went anywhere with it, I started late and the low level game was absent at that point) and I only purchased bags on Mangler - just on two accounts - and months after server launch. Heck the second purchase was just this past November. I'm enjoying Rizlona so much I'm thinking of purchasing another set of bags, but only on one account. I'm also in Canada so I get pretty roasted paying for this stuff with conversion. It's bad enough my accounts are currently ~$25CDN a month after the pandemic . Prior it was just shy of $20CDN/m. Oh and several times I've had DPG take my money when I paid for my account and then the dollar gets worse on my side I guess. Because I've seen a "correction" in my bank account days after I paid my monthly fees and then a second charge from DPG with a higher amount going out. Kind of disgusting imo.
I don't see why they would care to fix the issue. You still play, you still buy the bags, etc...etc.. so why spend money on an issue when you're still going to play and do everything as if it were normal? Lets say they put money to fix it, then their profits goes down; and we know they aren't doing the best financially, least that's the rumor I heard...I hope it's not true. By fixing this issue, would they gain a TON more money and be able to outweigh the cost of fixing the issue???? Probably not so my question again, why fix it? It's a business standpoint I think, they'll wait till people quit. Announce new TLP. Bank off of it. Rinse and Repeat. Business as usual. I'm in your boat, I wish this wasn't the case.
What honestly bothers me is the silence. No matter how you slice it a Community mangers job is to spin and keep the vocal portion of said community in check. We have heard nothing on this issue. Yet a XP bug crops up and we hear from a developer quick double time. That developer should never had to come here and apologize, comment, or explain. That is the responsibility of the community manager and right now they have been AWOL on these forums for too long. I am watching friends who have been EQ players since 99 write off DPG. These players who spend money consistently are leaving. All it would take for them to stay is for DPG's community manager to do their job and communicate what the hell is going on. The longer they stay quiet the worse it is.
