Cases where game masters will not intervene

The part I don't understand, is why would they alienate the customer base?

In terms of deleted character recovery why not incorporate the following criteria:


-Gold Membership only.
-3 Day Grace Period to Request since Deletion.
-Must be level 85 or higher (Based on Heroic Character option).
-Limited number of requests (3) each year per account.
-All requests processed within a month.

Has deleted character recovery been so frivolous (I.e. some newbie or plat farmer spams requests to recover their Level 20s?).

In terms of health care abuse research, it is always the same handful of people who rack up a Hospital's ER Bill. There is less of a moral quandary here (limit access but still provide care).

Hope Holly (Windstalker) and Roshen can address this important provision. People want comfort.

I'll be thinking long and hard about finding a new game if the deleted character recovery policy is not changed. I have no interests in investing thousands of hours into characters that could be wiped out in an instant, whatever the reason.

I would also go so far as to suggest introducing a Marketplace item to retrieve a Deleted Character in the 2500 SC range.

We pay a nominal fee for a notary. A CR staff member can personally oversee the character recovery and keep the money.

Again - THIS ^^^^^^

guyzguyz, clearly they wouldn't be unreasonable in the case of what people say are hacks. Not like they're making wild and arbitrary changes like firing every staff member senior enough to be above a certain wage threshhold regardless of their responsibilities. Whole art staff? Entire CS department? All Community Managers for an MMO? They wouldn't do anything that reckless, right? Just like they wouldn't be unreasonable about an "unaddressed" subset of this clear rule they've posted.

Players are just assuming they mean squares also when they post about quadrilaterals with four equal sides, Aghinem.

Now let me make sure on this, click on character, hit delete character then click yes. Yup plenty of security to keep a cat or little kid from wiping out your EQ life.

Comments like are priceless because it show how the company feels and that some idiot either didn't bother to have their work checked or some lazy manager didn't take the time to look it over before releasing it.

Might help if they changed that process to what it is in EQII: You have to enter the character's name to get it deleted.

In the past, either thru a vote of the members or officers (I forget which) they would reassign the guild leadership. Now they are telling you to go make a new guild. While that does solve the problem, sometimes people grow very fond of their guild name (and have all kinds of resources set up (some of which cost money), like a website, twitter, teamspeak, etc.) with the guild name, and changing that is either not possible or there is already a financial commitment. Plus, players do return and when they show back up to their old guild they may not see their friends if they are in another guild and may just leave again.

I realize that the GM staff took a big hit in the layoffs (so much for "well have even more resources", eh?) however, some of these are a bit extreme, and can frustrate people to the point of quitting.

Columbus Nova = Investment firm. They don't know about customer service or entertainment. They are faceless Brooks Brothers suits sitting on piles of money and want to make piles more. This isn't some high energy start up full of ideology and youthful exuberance that comes with being an entrepreneur who is going to make their fortunes by making the world a better place. For these guys its just the cold logic of accounting and soulless reality of spreadsheets . What they do know is buy low, sell high and make max profit. Max profit is made by increasing revenue and lowing expenses.

I don't see much happening to increase revenue, such as advertising or talk of much in the way of compelling in-game events or content, that will draw in more players or encourage existing ones to spend money. If looked at as a franchise, than maybe EQNext or other titles will be the revenue generator and the legacy titles exist as long as they don't lose money.

So....its cutting costs.

Laying off staff. Cutting down on service. Perhaps moving the operation to some low rent part of town, some obscure burg in some fly over state or something similar. Perhaps some outsourcing to China or India for the more tedious tasks. Maybe even Russia since CN is owned by Russians. You name it. All the usual tactics apply and seem to be applying.

As long as the game is still on and continues to be fun than most will stick around, myself included. However, I don't have high hopes. Columbus Nova might end up being even more ruthless than Sony as far as business practices because money is the ONLY motivation for these guys. They don't have any other mission. Their mission is not to make the best games available and provide the best customer service experience. Hopefully Smed and the remaining staff at Daybreak still believe in those principles enough to survive all the bloodletting.

Whaaaaaaa... I'm putting that guy on my follow list!

Last year in december some people I know had their accounts hacked, their chars were moved to FV and then deleted... One got his account back but his char was not restored. Soe said they can not... maybe the did want to.. who knows.... well, he quit the game then.

I would do the same after putting 10+ year work in my char.

With this new policy it's more than likley that they will do nothing at all if you lost your char even if it was not your own fault.

Do Daybreak and Columbus Nova realize that [( $15/month in subs + $40/year in expansions * # of accounts )] is well beyond the price of 'most' video games, and well into the threshold of where some level of premium service is both merited and expected?

This isn't 1999; the concept of a persistent online 3d world isn't novel, nor particularly expensive to run.



The high price of EQ in the past was justified by a) high bandwidth costs b) customer service costs and c) development / support costs. Technology has made the running costs of EQ a rounding error, they're gutting customer service, and SOE gutted development even before Columbus took over. We're paying for champagne and getting Bud light.

On top of that, there are also microtransactions.

By definition, people who play EQ don't care about paying a much higher price than they'd have to for other games - otherwise they wouldn't even be on this forum. But we need to get something for that high price, and yes, that may include asking a service center worker taking time out of his/her day to restore a deleted character that had $100s-$1000s in sub fees, expansion costs, and microtansactions behind it.

EQ is the only MMO on the market that doesn't have a restore deleted character function the character select screen. It's inefficient to have to ask someone, who will require compensation for their time, to restore a character that is deleted for whatever reason. Can someone explain why DBG can't install this function in EQ?

Removing the ability to gain xp while helping someone do their level appropriate content IS a mistake.

You saying you would start again after 15/16 years if someone hacked your character, we all know you wouldn't.

You know what, this could be the best thing ever for us if you think about it. I mean they just want to strip EQ down and then sell us to some other company to fund whatever other project or to just make a profit then EQ could be bought by some company who has the passion and drive for the MMO but lacks the sufficient means to develop one from scratch. The hardest part of an MMO it seems it getting it off the ground and getting enough content out before people lose interest.

Think of what an opportunity it would be to purchase EQ from CN for a low cost. All it would take is a company that has a history of passion for the MMO and customer support to create a buzz about EQ and things could turn around. Whats the name of that company that Curt Schilling owns? Someone give him a call and tell him to talk to CN about buying us up haha.

I can't help but think that the new Character Deletion Recovery policy is based on Planetside 2 gameplay assumptions. From what I understand in Planetside 2, cert-unlocked gear and abilities are unlocked for the entire account. So, in essence, you can re-roll a character very easily with the gear you have previously accumulated. Whomever wrote this new policy probably did not weigh EverQuest II much less EverQuest I unique mechanics - no account-wide unlocks (i.e. AA system as opposed to Vet AAs), itemization - raid, rare, no longer dropped items, and other very specific game limits.

Egregious is a beacon of hope in the soupy darkness.

Because it's cheaper and you're not going to quit over it right now. They're going to lose some money over this, but they're betting on it being less than the costs of the fired CS employees.

The reasons for not having a character undelete option are probably the same as the ones that killed and blocked eqplayers. EQ's file systems are a mess and they're not going to pay someone to work on interfacing with them. Records of our deleted characters go back a long ways, I was able to to get 4 or 5 year old characters lost in server merges restored a few years ago. So there's no issues in terms of storage space or time limitations.

What I would love to see is a way to force a wait period + email alert on transferring or deleting a character. A 3-7 day wait on doing any drastic is easy enough to plan around, but gives plenty of time to alert CS if account control is lost.

Heh - I've only been back on the game for 4 years; and yes I would restart a character if I felt inclined. I know my class, I know the ins and outs, I know what it takes to get it back up and running if it were to go down like that. What is remarkable is once again, everyone is fuming over the assumption that a lost character is inclusive in that policy. NOWHERE does it say - if you lose your character from a hack, we won't help you. That is what makes all this bickering absurd. You all have taken a quote from the knowledge base, assumed it included hacked accounts and are running with it as if it where fact.

Unless they state otherwise and do INCLUDE hacked accounts in terms of the deleted character policy, I am not siding with anyone on this. Everyone is acting like the liberal media and taking this completely out of context and its boring now.