I haven't played in a few months, but my account has been active. I left it running because I want to support the game. With the expansion coming soon I decided to log in last night to take a peek at the AA changes. Only had a few minutes so I poked around and then went to log out. Luckily I saw the red message in chat when I started to camp and aborted the process. I had just over 1000 AAs and it was going to dump everything over 315 if I logged out. I thought about leaving it and dealing with it later but was afraid that if i lost connection I'd lose them anyway. So I bought a bunch of AAs, to get down to the cap, but wasn't happy about having to make snap decisions just to ensure I didn't lose them. Now I'm lucky, I check the forums fairly often. I knew about the refund, but I logged in a whim and wasn't thinking about that aspect of it. Others may be completely oblivious. The AA window does open automatically to show you the refunded AAs, but unless they know about the cap and/or see the red message when camping, they could lose out on theirs. If this refunding thing is going to happen more in the future then this issue should be dealt with somehow. Whether it's flagging those AAs as refunded and ignoring the cap for them, or putting them in a separate AA pool that is used first when spending them. Something should be done to address this. If I had missed this and lost over 700 AAs I would have been pissed. While this may not be a huge issue, it's easy to see it coming when planning for a refund. Please try to think about that when doing this kind of stuff in the future.
These are some excellent ideas. I'm not too sure about how difficult it would be to do, however. Coder time is very scarce at Daybreak.
Happened to me on silver account couldn't even buy the aw back while silver lol . Guess just need to sub for a month , level to 110 , max aa and then back to silver lol
Yeah, I don't think this was a good way to deal with the AA consolidation. The reason why they probably put the cap of 315 in place, is you could login to 2k AA, let auto grant give you back a large number of the AA automatically, and then spend the 2k AA on the next expansion (which then results in completing the expansion sooner, getting bored, and in some cases canceling your subscription). The problem with their design, is that it can result in a player that hasn't played in a year or more, logging in and being forced to make important decisions immediately. It is enough to make some opt to not log in the first place. I remember reading a long time ago that if you were silver and logged in, you had less bank space, and all of the extra items would be sent to you. I didn't want to have to deal with that, so I just avoided visiting EQ at all. I can also imagine the support nightmare of a player that logs in, and for whatever reason logs out, loses connection etc and loses 2000 AA. A better approach is what they have done in the past. The system makes a decision on what your new rank is in a consolidated line based on what you had in the old lines. You login and there is no decision to make.
This was a terrible way to deal with a massive AA refund. I've already had one character that I dared to login go LD for whatever reason (Comcast here, every session is a white knuckle thing). I don't even know how many AA that one lost. Honestly this is a pathetic way to deal with many 1000s of AAs. FIND A BETTER WAY in the future. Customer is first and always right. Spending thousands of AAs can be a time commitment not everyone can do when (IF) they see the red system message in their SPAM chat window.
Just FYI, you can't receive auto-granted AAs until you are below the cap. So I had to spend mine down first and then hope I didn't buy anything that would have been granted. I'm pretty sure I didn't mess it up, but others might not be so lucky. Full disclosure, I think I ended up with more AAs in the end between the revamp, refund, and re-grant. And I'm happy about that, but there were opportunities for that to not be the case.
I logged in a few weeks ago while thinking about playing again. Didn't see the message and logged out again shortly thereafter when there was nobody in the guild online. Last night I decided to re-sub my 3 accounts and pick up the expansion for them and noticed the message on the 2 accounts and went ahead and spent the points. After spending them on a character that was at least 2-3K AA's behind the character on the account I had previously logged in a few weeks ago, I noticed that he's now about 400 AA ahead. Not pleased with this implementation.
I lost 1000+ AA on one character the same way. When returning to game your UI is usually a mess and open inventory Windows can cover chat where the warning is. When I couldn't log out and didn't understand why, I closed the game with task manager. Its a way to implement it, they should have a way at least to reset your character to the point before these mistakes happened, since the method they used to do this obviously has holes that people keep falling through.
The implementation was awful. Hopefully they learn from that mistake. I don't even want to know how many I lost. How do I decide where to go from here? I'm a little unclear on what happens when I go back to Silver on this account. Can someone explain what happens to my AAs when I got back to Silver (yes this is an old account)? 1000 AAs will be my cap (as I've not bought any cap increases)? Level 89 Necromancer, my window shows Assigned 6534 (these are given by auto grant?) Total Spent 1927 (these are what I had to 'spend down'?) So when I go Silver I'll have only the first 1000 AAs they auto grant? Or will I have 1000 + 1927 spent? How does it decide what I keep? The first 1000 you get (however those are distributed) plus what I chose?
This is why i so vehemently opposed this change last autumn. And why i personally did not log on for over two months and let my sub expire even, "saving" me two month's of subscription for two accounts (minus one krono spent on an ALT account during that time). Any "refund" is in effect also a "theft" of AAs - you always end up having a lower total than before. This is, i assume, because the refund takes into account the autogrant you COULD get. But of course you DO not actually get it, becuase when logging in for the first time after the refund, even with "enable autogrant" checked when you logged out before the patch that granted the refund, the autogrant mechanic is already "past" when the refunding takes place. In short, i think they've messed up the orders: It SHOULD be: log on after refund-patch, refunding takes place, autogrant takes place (for the refunded AAs even when "enable autogrant" is unchecked), player spends the refunded AAs. The sequence that seems to HAPPEN though is: Log on after refund patch, check for autogrant (only if enabled), take away and refund the AAs changed through the patch (from the potential autogranted UP, excluding any meanwhile autogranted levels), player spends refunded AAs. Since the arbitrary "cap" of 315 (probably 330 now?) means that any unspent AAs you had above 315 were lost, the triple Attack refund for example resulted in a loss by itself because you either had to re-buy AAs that would have been autogranted (and were thus not refunded) and end up short, or loose whatever AAs you had over 315. Which was more "efficient" depends on AAs and refunded totals... Of course the player is left alone to calculate that - or simply bite the bullet and accept that he's being by Dev's that can't do math properly. This is just one more example of the recent decisions they've taken to us players. And steal rewards we have earned from us (EoK achievements that awarded AA pts in my case)
This always annoys me when I forget about the refund and log on a character I haven't played in a while just to check something real quick, and then I have to spend a bundle of AA. My experience though has been that when I hit the camp button, EQ automatically stops my camp and warns me if I'm over the storage cap. This has always been in a non-combat zone, though, and I've never tried hitting camp again to see if it will automatically be aborted. Also, even if I had previously autogranted an AA that was refunded, I still got that AA back to spend. I've logged in characters that I've never purchased an AA on or that I've purchased very few on. I still received several hundred AA to ~1k AA back. I wasn't always able to spend them, however, because some of the characters were on accounts that had lapsed to free.
There’s a simple enough solution ... Stop being a cheapskate and actually subscribe, either by keeping some Krono on you for consumption when you log in after a long time, or by, you know, actually having a monthly/yearly subscription.
I got burned here too. I just decided to check in to see if anyone was online and didn’t notice the refund. I thought of resubscribing, but now I don’t have any desire now.
I am dealing with this very same thing today. I have not logged in since 2015, and got on today to show a friend my old character. 3898 AA points will be lost if I don't log out. I'm trying to research why this happened, which lead me to this thread.
Are you sure? For my chars, I was able to spend down to 3x my level, and then at that point, it wouldn't let me spend any more. These are silver accounts, so maybe that makes a difference.
