Cases where game masters will not intervene

Um, I read the 2001 statement. The 2011 data breach is evidence that Daybreak (SOE at the time) will in fact restore lost characters if they are hacked as a result of serverside security lapses. If you let yourself be hacked through personnel negligence is a different matter.

Token of Restoration

Should tribute, vendors, etc. be modified so it works for them too? Maybe. How about the bazaar or face to face trading? I'm thinking that's it's not practical to run an audit trail on every transaction and have an undo feature.

Token of Character Restoration

aka License to print money. No thanks. Restore a deleted character in it's present shape, maybe. If and only if it wouldn't strain an obviously manpower strained company and prevent it from producing what I want to buy from it - content.

If Daybreak handles it's end of the computer security responsibility, I'm good with handling my part. I won't be needing character restoration, automatic or manual, required because I was negligent.

Just been thinking about this a lot. If their customer service is in this current state of melancholy, it looks as if they are trying to Auto-Pilot EverQuest1. Remember how long Vanguard lasted with 0 support? Perhaps they are testing the waters now, to see what they can get away with. Everyone wants to do the least possible for maximum profit, DeyBrakeGamez is no different. That way, they can line their pockets with more of our money devote the saved money to making content-packed expansions.

Or (probably an unrealisitic hope) they want to spend more money on gave development a without getting any outside money.... so strip from the rest of EQ. Heh... its a hope.

Restoring a deleted character with only it's no-trade items left on it would not in any way foster deliberate cheats, or abuse of said restorations.
(just sayin')
-Rat

well seems like contact by phone isn't an option anymore. looks more and more like I just lost my char petitioned again but running out of patience. this is just rediculous

Blame the victim much?

and yea we are not investors, but we are customers, and if Daybreak wants to keep customers they have to keep them happy..... looking over this thread other then a few defenders most seem very unhappy.

Sadly with FV allowing the sale of No Drop items for what's RL money once removed one couldn't just roll back to a geared state.

If you restored the character to how it was just before it was deleted, then any sale of gear would be offset by the loss of that geared on the restored toon. Yeah, there would still be the opportunity for fraud - a raider could work with a co-conspirator operating out of an internet cafe, sell stuff, get restored and ask for help from their guild (something I'm convinced I've seen happen in the past). But the risk of not getting help and the risk of getting caught would be high.

Prevent characters from transferring to FV with No Drop gear and you are correct. That's something IMO Daybreak should consider.

I'm not about to blame Daybreak when a player fails to perform their responsibility and do normal computer security.

I'll bet anything that IF SOE/Daybreak has investigated these types of incidents in the past an extremely high percentage are players not meeting their responsibilities:
Not sharing your User ID and password
Not clicking on embedded executables in email messages
Not providing your User ID and password over the phone
Not using the same User ID and password on multiple sites
Not filling in User ID and password in response to a phishing scheme
Using a strong password
Not allowing unsupervised access to your machine
Running a virus checker
Running security updates

It'd be great if there's a Daybreak comment that informed players about this at some point.

For the past several years it has been repeatedly stressed how important it is.

1. 99% of people have no idea how to make passwords that can't be easily brute forced.
2. 99% of people are unwilling to invest the effort.
3. 99% of players who get their accounts compromised through any means are going to quit paying you money 99% of the time when you refuse to help them.

Customers are . This is old news. All they're doing at this point is strongarming people into quitting the game by refusing to support them. Sometimes you have to cater to the lowest standard, and it is in the best interest of a for-profit company to invest in their customers by not alienating them. If people were going to learn to keep their information safe, they would have by now.

No, it isn't practical. What is practical is having a relatively small number of people who check server logs and do these kind of reimbursements manually. Would you rather pay 3 guys $15/hr to resolve this, or would you rather have hundreds of people quit every time they accidentally lose an item?

Mistakes happen. Mistakes will ALWAYS happen. Mistakes MUST be correctable.

It should be pretty clear that I'm not shortsighted enough to imply a "license to print money". I don't need my hand held through a conversation. It should be pretty obvious that many anti-exploitation measures would need to be taken.

Restoring characters with specific classifications of gear would be fine, such as epic weapons and other such items that aren't able to be re-acquired.

Alternatively, we could just start stripping people's equipped gear when they transfer to FV, which would destroy most of the incentive these douches have to hack accounts to begin with.

Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

keep at it mini

Well, perhaps not all customers -- present august company is obviously excepted -- but yes, a sufficiently large segment to make it an ongoing concern.

It depends on the numbers. If you are spending 85% of your CS resources supporting 15% of the customers, you may be better off losing the "high maintenance" 15% and significantly reducing the cost of your CS operation. Then again, if CS doesn't cost you much (outsourced to India etc), maybe it's not worth doing.

It's hard to tell which business model is more viable even if you have access to the raw numbers. It's impossible to do so without them.

In addition, eventually most games reach a point where no business model is viable any more and you end up losing money no matter what you do. Sometimes it makes sense to keep them going at a loss (perhaps to keep the brand alive), but in most cases you just have to pull the plug.

The new EQ owners are apparently looking for a new equilibrium which will be sustainable and profitable going forward. We'll see if they can find one.

Thanks for the morning chuckle, Seymour .

Most people aren't scammed by an email from the son of the former Minister of Finance from Nigeria. But, if you look long enough for a sucker you will find one.

If it were 99% are incredibly vulnerable in EQ nobody would have gear. Loss of character is pretty uncommon. Most people's account information is adequately protected - they don't give it up to the first "friend" or phish they see. But some do.

No service company can protect negligent people from themselves. Daybreak can't stop me from giving a "friend" my User ID and password. But they can ban the account if the account is stolen and thereby encourage others to avoid dangerous to their account practices.

Customer support is as much about reputation as it is about the number of customers actually helped. If a company actively develops a reputation of not helping their customers and telling them instead to just start over, it will have far reaching impact on customers who have never needed customer support and also cause potential future customers to look elsewhere instead.

Bring back the old guide program. Let players help to serve other players that aren't on their server. Only cost to EQ would be the hundred or so free accounts.

Brief background check, a requirement that accounts have 3-5 years entitled time and can answer a simple questionnaire to a degree of satisfaction to test their knowledge of CS and EQ community in general.

Then you give those players some very powerful tools attached to fairly long leashes. A little bit of tough love is ok. You have one or two serverwide 'GMs' that oversee the program to prevent the really abusive types.

I don't envy roshen's day at work today.

"Isn't that an absolute?"

I do believe everyone here is deserving of a response from either Roshen or Holly on this matter.

IMO that's a good idea but:
1. There's probably a desire to cut down and not increase the number of petitions. This would increase them.

2. Character restoration would require a decent investigation and a database engineer working with backups and the production database. With overhead on the order of (wild guess) $100K/yr. That a lot of money if you are resource strapped. Especially for something that's likely nearly 100% user preventable.

People like doing business with companies that do loss prevention/don't pay frivolous claims and pass the savings or better product on to the customer.

Better IMO to offer that $9.99 secondary password dongle for those that believe normal computer security on their machine and protecting their User ID and password is inadequate and reserve player GM's for far more trivial item reimbursement - which btw would cost Daybreak roughly $20x12x100 = $24K relative chicken feed.

Restoring a deleted character seems a pretty fundamental service... one that doesn't and shouldn't require a phone call or a petition or any manpower really except installing a button, at least thats the case in every other mmo in the marketplace...

Why not a one and done rule, you get one restore (again its a shame we are treating restoring a character like we are asking DBG to design a spaceship but w/e) per account. Once you use it, you better fix the reason you got your account hacked or it's on the player to eat the loss.

Yes I know there are ways to exploit even this, there always are...

From a WoW forum:
"The character would also only be restored in the same condition it was in when it was deleted so if all of it's items were deleted before the character was, it would be restored naked. Also to note, no restoration is ever guaranteed. All you can do is open a ticket and ask."

You open a ticket. Later on its asserted that if the character's data is still around they rarely refuse.

And I'd note WoW probably has more headroom for CS assets (and more players to provide those services for too).

From a WoW forum:
"The character would also only be restored in the same condition it was in when it was deleted so if all of it's items were deleted before the character was, it would be restored naked."

IF Daybreak did what other MMO's do (at least the leading one - Daybreak can hardly be faulted for meeting the standard)

and prohibited the transfer of No Drop gear to FV there'd be a lot less chance of owner exploitation, you'd get your character back the way it had been if it were accidentally deleted, and other than to try to trace stolen goods there'd be little reason to do an investigation.

Sounds legit.