Cases where game masters will not intervene

Was considering the game been doing some pre character lay out even but that post above almost makes one want to go elsewhere.....crazy

Yeah, I have no doubt they CAN do the restore, it's clearly a policy that they are just deciding not to. Heck, Minishot has logs on all the time, I do too, could probably find every single item he's looted in the past few months, a GM could literally grant him back the gear.

While Massively had a good round up of changes, the quote on EQ2Wire was almost as amazing as the "Feel free to reroll a new character!" line.

How about a way to permanently flag a character [Never transfer to FV]?

even better

How about a way to permanently flag my character [Never Delete]?

I can say for certain without a doubt as a 14 year player I won't even hesitate to do this if you implement it. My main Characters are going down with the servers. Heck.. I'll even pay SC for this option!!!

If something has to be permanent, let it be NON-DELETION!!

Not sure I will continue if nothing is done about this situation. Cater to thieves and don't protect your customers.. I'm disgusted.

I know this has undoubtedly been echoed throughout on this forum but I must say that the idea not to restore someone's toon is a very bad one. Since daybreak has taken over operations we have seen changes for the worse including this recent change of policy, your shuffling of OUR (the players) forums , and the elimination of phone and chat customer support forcing us all to submit tickets and then wait on average a week. Daybreak if this is your attempt to say " Hi we are new but we know what you want and it's ok things will stay the same in fact they will get better" your not doing well. So far you have proven that not only do you not know what we want but it seems as though you just flat out do not care about us.Infact many of the naysayers from when you bought Sony have been proven right as you are going through and making many unwelcome and UNWANTED changes to what we have come to know and expect. I know forum posts must be constructive so to stay that way my advice is that you undo all of these changes. Focus on what we the players want. Instead of shuffling the forums focus on how you can improve the xp nerf or roll out more content for TDS. I know I am sure that I am parroting what others are posting here but I just wanted to toss in my 2cp.

BONUS QUESTION FOR DAYBREAK EMPLOYEES What do I mean when I say my 2cp?

While this may be true, personally I'd be done with EQ at that point (and anything else Daybreak produces). I'm not going to start a whole legal battle for the privilege of giving them more of my money. I'd just walk away.

beryon

that's exactly what they're hoping will happen with disgruntled people...walk away. While they'd like to retain you as a paying customer the next best option is to have you quietly walk away or maybe even post on one/two message boards then walk away. If you want to hit them where it hurts then hire some upstart law student with high hopes and take them on.

Daybreak IS the old SoE, but with 40% fewer employees.

The level above SoE/DBG shifted from Sony to Columbus Nova

Due to recent cutbacks in manpower the FBI will no longer look into kidnapping cases. An inordinate amount of time and money is expended in these cases when parents should have simply taken proper precautions to protect their children. They are welcome to make new children. (note this is completely tongue in cheek)

It saddens me to see the level of customer service plummet so abysmally. All of my customer service interactions have heretofore been very positive.

Minishot's case is nauseating if legitimate, and not restoring a maliciously deleted character is inexcusable (IMHO) regardless of whether the account owner bears some responsibility for, say, lax security practices. It's just a part of the service we, the customers, all pay for.

Just add a simple flag. NO DELETE. Make us convince CS to remove the NO DELETE flag if we really want to delete a toon.

So someone can just transfer your character to FV, sell your gear, and not delete your character. That's still a problem. Besides, customer service surely doesn't have time to remove NO DELETE flags from characters.

Add a no-FV too flag. I don't want my char deleted or sent to the wasteland where ex raid toons go to die that is FV.

What is sad is I built a game engine back in 2000 and developed it for 10 years; one of the key things I did was write a tcl script that did a automatic player backup every 6 hours through a crontab (*nix job task). This ensured integrity of player files. The fact I had that type of measure implemented for a text based game (MUD) for crying out loud and Daybreak doesn't is pretty embarrassing for them.

Okay I started to zone out a few pages back because... crazy... so if it was already said, then oops:

Totems of Reclamation are a total FAIL when I have 10 lines of destroyed "Jade" or "Cloth Bolt"s that eat up the max # of slots allowed for destroyed items. Trash loot either needs to be completely excluded (Tradeskill tag? or no tag?), or the lines need to be condensed. I went through all of my characters and looked at their "Recovery" tabs and it was 90% useless garbage. I know I've deleted stuff I care more about than Saltpepper.

If CS is going to take the C out of S then at least empower the playerbase to do their [old] job.

I also hope whoever wrote the initial snarky comments on the updated policy got axed. That is beyond unprofessional and I can't believe that got through an editor (guess he got fired too) at all.

Once again we are presented with an utter lack of logic. Longtime paying member loses character to accidental/malicious deletion due to XYZ and CS refuses to restore the character. Longtime member is no longer paying and quits EQ. I thought the idea was to make $$$?

Take away my XP, take away my POK vendors, take away my forums, and take away my already-minimal-CS... geez, here... just go ahead and take my soul.

They have the info, they have a tool to explore previous character states. I've had characters that were deleted in server mergers years ago restored. Plenty of characters have been untransferred and undeleted from FV. There's no question about the ability to fix these problems. The willingness to fix problems is what's changed.

All those tools were made for CS or higher access to use, probably without any consideration for being made front-facing. Making it safe enough for us to use? I bet that would take some work to prevent duping or other exploits. And we know how much work they're willing to put into EQ.

psst, that's why people freaked out when pets stopped eating items. Drop trash or feed it to the priest of discord to keep your recovery tab clean.

Reclamation Tokens wouldn't have helped my last lost items petition. I misclicked while trying to hand over a bag of TS items, and instead of appearing on the ground after being dropped, it just disappeared. While the auto-response did tell me to use reclamation tokens, the thought of spending 33 tokens to get a bunch of TS items that weren't even on the recovery tab was pretty hilarious. After a few days, the items were restored by CS though.

The fact they had to put an NPC in game to bypass an inherent flaw in their system (which most people probably don't even realize) is just more gasoline for the fire. I guess maybe the new looting system will help alleviate getting a bunch of garbage though

I don't care; I'm still free. You can't take the sky from meeee

Customer sirbuddrick soe via CSS Web 03/07/2015 03:42 PM
"... idk if I was hacked or what..."

Even though a player might not choose to distinguish between a data breach at Daybreak (Daybreak's responsibility), user failure to adhere to normal computer security measures (user responsibility), and user fraud a company might. They might have to.

(BTW if that's sirbuddrick's User ID it probably wasn't a good idea to post it on a public forum. He needs to change it.)

Response SOE Customer Service via Email 03/07/2015 04:15 PM
"...Unfortunately it looks like it has since been deleted and sadly, we will not be able to restore the character..."
Unable can include company policy from above that a company believes it can legally defend, a change in database backup procedures that makes it no longer practical, or does not have the economic wherewithal.

SOE made good on their data breach in the past. Were hundreds of accounts recently affected by a Lizard Squad assault? No?

What can we do (keeping it constructive)?
"...i don't know if I was hacked or what..."

I have other information on my computer that would cause me economic loss should it be lost or pilfered. We can meet our share of the responsibility and have a pretty good idea whether we were hacked or a business who is responsible for securing our data was hacked.
http://www.microsoft.com/security

It grazes the surface. Since I'm concerned for myself, I look for more information. And there are (roughly) 100K of us - I'll bet a few of us could go into greater detail.

What can Daybreak do (keeping it constructive)?
Go into that greater detail itself (IF they have the manpower to do so), post a document on the Technical Support forum, and provide a link on the Welcome Screen.

Add something like X saved character slots assigned to a can't play on it server that a player can restore from after passing a rigid identity check and perhaps paying a Character Transfer fee. It's an expense and would mean other things the money could be spent on will not be spent on.

Sell a secondary password dongle requiring physical access to a machine in order to log in. (They did at one time and maybe still do.)

I sympathize with:
"Ive put a lot of work into minishot and I just want him back the way he was on 3/6/15 plz"

I'd like to see saved character slots just because - our fault or Daybreak's fault WE (I'm with y'all on this part) don't want to lose our character.

But when it's scattered taking over of accounts rather than a mass data breech at Daybreak's end it's highly likely that an ounce of personal computer security is worth a ton of let Daybreak take it on the chin cure.

IF "...we will not be able to restore the character..." is an economic EQ fact of life then I'll still play while doing my best to insure that I'm not hacked.