Guild Wars 2

Fluffball.8307:

One mistake in 4 years, yup, time to complain on the forums for more gold.

Hardly their first mistake. Sure its their first mistake that forces them to rollback the game, but then again they have a QA department to prevent such a big thing from hitting live servers.
Guildwars 2 isn’t exactly your Asian port F2P MMO ran from a basement, and we should expect more than “whoopsie daisy” from their part.
ESPECIALLY since they’re the ones so keen to time gating everything in the game, so missing one day playing is a big drawback, and doubly their fault for it.

Time. That’s all I lost. Recreating my weekly key farmer, didn’t run him yet before the shutdown.

I found a roach in my cake today, but I’m not going to ask for compensation or anything because the cake tasted good.

That’s about how ridiculous the people sound who are saying they don’t want compensation.

#OMG!
#SMDH
#Boohoo
#Entitlement
#Notgonnahappen

Galtrix.7369:

I found a roach in my cake today, but I’m not going to ask for compensation or anything because the cake tasted good.

That’s about how ridiculous the people sound who are saying they don’t want compensation.

The difference is, the roach would ruin that entire cake that you just spent money on, whereas the bug affects only one day of a game that you buy once and can choose to not spend any further money on for the entire time you own it. So, yes, some people were very negatively affected by the rollback, but others were not, but the cake analogy doesn’t work.

jbolene.4352:

where is compensation for a missing day?

When I lost internet for a few hours, my ISP comped me my subscription fee for the affected period.

• We lost 2 hours due to the roll back
• The game was unplayable for 10 hours.
• Our subscription fee is US$0/month, which translates to US$0/hour

So 12 hours lost * US$0/hour = US$0 compensation.

tl;dr ANet has already compensated us

jbolene.4352:

not happy so far

Here it is,

GUILD WARS 2 USER AGREEMENT
10 b
You acknowledge that Service may be interrupted for reasons within or beyond the control of ArenaNet, that ArenaNet cannot and does not guarantee You will be able to use the Game or any Account whenever You wish to do so, that ArenaNet will interrupt the Service on a regular basis for purposes of maintenance or updates and may do so without providing You with notice before such interruption, and that ArenaNet may provide subsequent versions, enhancements, modifications, upgrades or patches related to the Game that You must accept and/or install before You will be able to use the Game.

Ashen.2907:

ANet has added a free day of play to your account.

Dont know if someone at Arenanet messed up, but I got a free year of play added to my account…

Sadly I rolled a Permanent Black Lion Trader Contract just before the shutdown

Waiting on support to see if they can restore it.

BearCat.3286:

The way ANet handled the situation was a huge dissapointment to me. I’ve been playing games on a daily basis for the last 31 year and never before in my entire gaming expirience I saw anything like what happend here.

1. Forum is the place for discussing news. The place for a news like ’We’re shutting down the servers’ is here: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/ No, mr O’Brian didn’t do his job well like many people here seem to think. Here’s a very simple question to mr O’Brain: which news is more important to ANet? This one: ‘Bloodstone Weapons, Peakitten Scepter, and Mini Garm in the Gem Store’ or this one: ’We’re shutting down the servers’ and ’we’re having a roll back’ Strangelly enough the news about the kitten gem store is on the main page of the game website, unlike the other, you know, less important news. Looks very bad. You know, other game publishers and devs put that kind of info onto the main page of their main website. And they do that not beacause they’re stupid or have nothing else to do, but because there is a reason for that. A good reason.

2. Again, I’ve been playing MMORPGs since they came to existance and that was the first time when I got disconnected all of a sudden during a fight without any sort of a warning and couldn’t log into the game not because the servers have crashed, but because they shut them down. Name me a company who shuts down their servers without warning people who are already in the game. No, you can’t? Well, this is because there is a reason for not doing that kind of stuff. A good reason.

3. Roll back. Please stop that blah-blah about one time in four years. One time is way too many. Roll backs are distinctive feature of so called ‘private’ (you’re free to read it as ‘pirate’) servers of popular MMORPGs. So ArenaNet managed to reach professional level of those teams who keep private servers. Congratulations!

One of ANet people told me on Twitter that this incident is of a huge importance to them. It sure looks like a lie. Because, you know, nuber one. Also he said that updating the website will take a long time. I wonder, how long does it take for ANet to update a website? Because, you know, it kinda reminds me of all these funny questions: how many charrs is needed to change a light bulb?

I’ve seen MMORPGs born and die many times. If ANet won’t grow a pair and publish the info about what happened on the main page of a game website real soon I’m like 90% sure it’s gonna be the beginning of the end. Because people do not forget stuff like this. And they don’t like when you try to lie to them. Of course, there always would be people who are not gamers and never saw other games, but you can’t rely on them when it comes to your player base.

Man .. now I want a “peakitten” scepter o_o it sounds so dangerous, maybe they should made it for the end rewards for feeding all that kitties! #PeakittenWeaponOrRiot!

These threads are more evidence of the “gimme gimme” society.

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

Mel.8495:

Such huge bugs should not happen if Anet would have proper test servers and QA. These easy to find but gamebreaking bugs are unacceptable to me even if it would be once in a lifetime.

Work at ANet, and then your “should not happen,” “easy to find,” and “unacceptable” might carry weight… atm, they are at best uninformed opinions. Sometimes life doesn’t wind up working the way you think it should… this is one of those instances for you, it seems. If it truly unacceptable to you, then try some other MMOs… maybe after you’ve experienced such occurrences a few more times among those other MMOs you might come to understand how unmindful and sophomoric your stance is.

~EW

I never witnessed roll backs in other games without any kind of compensation, even if it was something small like bonus loot chances or bonus exp for 24 hours.

Mel.8495:

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

Mel.8495:

Such huge bugs should not happen if Anet would have proper test servers and QA. These easy to find but gamebreaking bugs are unacceptable to me even if it would be once in a lifetime.

Work at ANet, and then your “should not happen,” “easy to find,” and “unacceptable” might carry weight… atm, they are at best uninformed opinions. Sometimes life doesn’t wind up working the way you think it should… this is one of those instances for you, it seems. If it truly unacceptable to you, then try some other MMOs… maybe after you’ve experienced such occurrences a few more times among those other MMOs you might come to understand how unmindful and sophomoric your stance is.

~EW

I never witnessed roll backs in other games without any kind of compensation, even if it was something small like bonus loot chances or bonus exp for 24 hours.

I have a few times. LotRO especially comes to my mind as I played that the longest. *shrugs

~EW

Hell, WoW goes down multiple times a month, some planned, some not. At absolute best, they provide you with, surprise, nothing at all.

That’s a game with real wealth behind it, that we pay a sub for.

Compared to that, Anet is farting daisies atm.

Mel.8495:

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

Mel.8495:

Such huge bugs should not happen if Anet would have proper test servers and QA. These easy to find but gamebreaking bugs are unacceptable to me even if it would be once in a lifetime.

Work at ANet, and then your “should not happen,” “easy to find,” and “unacceptable” might carry weight… atm, they are at best uninformed opinions. Sometimes life doesn’t wind up working the way you think it should… this is one of those instances for you, it seems. If it truly unacceptable to you, then try some other MMOs… maybe after you’ve experienced such occurrences a few more times among those other MMOs you might come to understand how unmindful and sophomoric your stance is.

~EW

I never witnessed roll backs in other games without any kind of compensation, even if it was something small like bonus loot chances or bonus exp for 24 hours.

now you have witnessed it. you can scratch that off your bucket list

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

jbolene.4352:

where is compensation for a missing day?

When I lost internet for a few hours, my ISP comped me my subscription fee for the affected period.

• We lost 2 hours due to the roll back
• The game was unplayable for 10 hours.
• Our subscription fee is US$0/month, which translates to US$0/hour

So 12 hours lost * US$0/hour = US$0 compensation.

tl;dr ANet has already compensated us

I might have played for a time period of between X minutes to Y hours on maps A, B, C, and or D. In that time I might have gotten Z, U, K, S, or D numbers of pixels F, G, H, I, and or J which was worth anywhere from 1 copper to 10,000 gold each.

Or I might have skipped playing that night and watched a movie instead.

ANet should figure out a fair compensation for me based on the information above.

:P

I’m pretty sure the standard in the industry is that players don’t get compensated for “lost” play time due to unexpected conditions. As it is, ANet server up-time is far higher than any other MMO I’ve played. When something like yesterday does happen, the down-time is more noticeable by contrast.

Perhaps the OP should examine the rest of the industry. WoW is the industry leader. Their servers (at least back when I played) were down every Tuesday for 5 hours for maintenance. If there happened to be a patch also, that downtime was frequently longer, and sometimes a lot longer. The longest I remember was around 16.5 hours. There was no compensation, despite the fact that subscribers were paying for time.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Perhaps the OP should examine the rest of the industry. WoW is the industry leader. Their servers (at least back when I played) were down every Tuesday for 5 hours for maintenance. If there happened to be a patch also, that downtime was frequently longer, and sometimes a lot longer. The longest I remember was around 16.5 hours. There was no compensation, despite the fact that subscribers were paying for time.

Yup. Just yesterday WoW (and Blizzard as a whole) had a DDoS attack in the morning, followed by a game-wide error preventing many from logging in for some time, a bug blocking the new patch content from working, and one of the most highly populated servers having an error causing mass disconnects over the course of two or three hours (maybe longer). This is on top of the usual 2 hour downtime for Tuesday Patch Day. Yet I didn’t see anyone in chat demanding compensation once the game was back up.

CaelestiaEmpyrea.2617:

Well, I was able to recover about 400g worth of trading that I lost to the rollback. Still down 200g due to (1). New skins tend to have a LARGE price drop within a few hours of release, so I missed out on the new release price surge, and (2). I didn’t get the lucky exotic drops I sold yesterday. I also have no way of repeating the luck I had getting rare drops that let me finish several collections, or the extraordinary luck I had in a couple of adventures (which I generally suck at) that allowed me to finally get silver.

For those of you that keep calling me a liar, yesterday was one of the luckiest runs I have had since I started to play GW2. I actually was getting consistently good drops and had luck with my timing in the TP. Then the sudden DC hit. Then a few hours later the announcement of a rollback. All the luck and happiness I had been feeling turned to disappointment and loss.

For me, this could not have happened at a worse moment. It took me from one of the best days I ever had in GW2 to the worst day, bar none. The WORST part is that the whole thing was ANET’s fault. They failed to properly test the patch, and let bad code screw up the game. Then they couldn’t fix it, so they rolled back everyone’s progress. There is nothing ANET can do to restore my faith in them or compensate me for ruining what had been a good experience.

Catastrophic code issues can happen to any game, no matter how much testing gets done. Your expectation seems to be that Anet should have prevented this. That is unrealistic. Kitten happens. If your faith in ANet is gone, perhaps you would like to try to find another game where the developers don’t have such issues crop up. Good luck with that, though.

Yea .. other game on a big patch day can go out for 12-16 hr, and weekly maintenance usually go up to 4 hrs, so I don’t know what the fuss is all about, really .. a damaging bug happen to your inventory that can affect your game and they tried to prevent it from going bad further by shutting it down and you complain? I don’t get the logic at all. Your compensation is that your account is save from harm. In real world mistakes happen yano .. it’s a human thing to screw things up sometimes.

I feel lucky I didn’t lose too much, as I only had a couple of hours of play before the crash and then my usual Tuesday errands took me away anyway. One day’s flax farming, so one more day until our guild can build the tavern (14 more kegs to go now) so we can level up and build market 2 to get the airship we’ve wanted since the first guild hall review. Also had to re-buy the new feather scepter (my gems came back so that was quick enough, except I have to get it on the right alt now) and redo the Current Events sensor hunt in Frostgorge.

Apparently the roll back confused the server calendar, so I got my first 4th birthday stuff today instead of tomorrow. And that means the paralysis of choice as I debate endlessly over which single backpack to select ><

Since I understood the sensor gathering so much better, that took enough less time that I also farmed up the geodes to learn to make sorbet for a cat.

I think all in all the loss of 4 kegs worth of flax (got 5 kegs worth today, slightly better) was the biggest impact on me, so again, I feel lucky.

So developers provide good communication through a serious major event that no game developer ever wants to face… and you want compensation? Okay … get the pitchforks because we should get

Game + Expac = $100 (if you bought each) and add in game running since august 28 2012 (1460 days on 4 year anniversary – 35040 hours total)

…. so let’s see … 100/35040 = 0.00285

0.00285388 * 8.5 (hours down) = 0.0245257

There we go … Every player should receive 2 and half cents

Lost an ascended assassin weapon chest from fractals and some smaller stuff. Pretty annoying as my chars still need quite a few weapons.

ReaverKane.7598:

jacobine.6354:

CaelestiaEmpyrea.2617:

The issue that make a request for compensation reasonable is 2-fold:
1. There was a rollback, taking away the progress of everyone that was online.
2. The whole down time and rollback is ANET’s fault. They messed up big time, and then they inflicted a rollback on the players. They did not fix the inventory issue, they erased it and seem to want the players to be grateful. Why should I be grateful for ANET doing LESS than could be reasonably expected of them?

Rolling back WAS fixing the inventory issue.

When you have a hairy bug, you can’t just go fix it at a blink of an eye. They can fix the bug, but not while people keep adding more issues to it and making it more complex and widespread. Plus, they probably couldn’t easily track all the errors because of the nature of the changes.

Actually no. Rollback was caused because the inventory issue corrupted entries on items in player inventories to a way that was impossible to fix without the rollback. The inventory bug was fixed by coding it out.

People are asking for compensation, and should be, for a few reasons:
1) No, the game isn’t free, just because you happen to be a F2P leech, some of us did pay for the game before it was F2P and still keep on paying for it when there are new releases, in fact oddly enough, the longer players have been faithful to the game the more expensive it got.

2) Arena net specifically chose to create artificial gates by time gating stuff, people that don’t play around Arena net’s timezone had the rollback and the down time happen during the time most people (especially the ones that work, and thus pay for the game) can play. So every single time gated thing one would do yesterday wasn’t done. While people living in different timezones got to do them. SO yes, compensation should be merited.

If you don’t do math here’s a possible tally of losses:
Dailies 2 gold;
Daily ascended crafting, ~30 gold depending on market fluctuations;
Daily Fractals: Several gold from junk items, infusions, and Stabilizing Matricies.
Daily PvP, Track progression that can lead to a few gold from salvaging exotics, anything from a few silver to several gold from “fight money”, year of ascension daily 3 games achievement participation.
Daily gathering items can also be worth several gold.

3) We don’t owe Arena net for doing their job right. We pay them for it by playing, in fact i paid 35€ yesterday for gems, if i knew that would have happened i’d buy a new game on steam and play it while the servers were down. But Arena net do owe us a big apology and definitely more retribution that a “whoops” for having failed at delivering their service for an extended period that prevented many people from accessing it for 24h or more.

You’re splitting hairs. This is essentially what I am saying, as the rollback was to fix corruption. Obviously they’d comment the code out/find and fix the bug. To do otherwise would be ridiculous. But I DO understand how software releases work. Having had rollbacks and reverts and emergency releases happen at my own job, I feel for the devs in this situation. It’s no fun to do these things. It’s stressful for everyone involved.

1. You mean like I paid for the game almost 4 years ago? And then HoT as well? Posts on the forum != time on the game, try again.
2. You’re not losing real money on this. I was at work when things went down, but was unable to play when I got home from work, too. The game was still down when I went to bed. I don’t correlate gold I earn in game with real losses. Does it suck? Sure, especially if you had something good drop, but you can submit a ticket for that. I lost out on dailies as well, whatever. Inconvenient, but not world-ending.
3. I paid for gems the other day myself. If you lost them, they’ll make sure you get them, as was clearly stated. You are not unique in this situation.

Having some major experience with this kinda stuff I’d have to give Anet high marks for handling it with highly professional chops. Also, I’d give special shout out to the dozens of support folks who had to work the problem. Much applause to you all!

To the players who are QQing like a big dog… let’s put this into perspective

MFoy.3284:

Having some major experience with this kinda stuff I’d have to give Anet high marks for handling it with highly professional chops. Also, I’d give special shout out to the dozens of support folks who had to work the problem. Much applause to you all!

To the players who are QQing like a big dog… let’s put this into perspective

Molehills are small, but people trip over them all the time

2 hours might not be a big deal to many but it is too some people.

You can’t call other people entitled just because it is not a big deal for you.

Suppose servers were rolled back for a week, I doubt that would go down well with many here who were happy enough with this rolled back.
I would be fine with it, can I call you “entitled” if you wanted compensation?

I understand people being frustrated that they lost progress, a drop etc.

But at the end of the day you just have to accept that sometimes these things happen. It’s better to try and spend your time trying to productively earn back your losses than to wallow in misery.

Rollbacks rarely happen and A-net wouldn’t have done it unless absolutely necessary. They didn’t plan on having to do it. Accidents happen. And at least it was only rolled back a few hours (?)- some people have had to have their account rolled back a number of days for things outside of their own control too (hacking etc).

defrule.7236:

2 hours might not be a big deal to many but it is too some people.

You can’t call other people entitled just because it is not a big deal for you.

Suppose servers were rolled back for a week, I doubt that would go down well with many here who were happy enough with this rolled back.
I would be fine with it, can I call you “entitled” if you wanted compensation?

Of course everyone would be upset if a rollback of that magnitude occurred. But right now, seeing as how it was only a few hours rollback (even if we couldn’t access the game for a whole day), people are not seeing how it’s a big deal. It’s all perspective. Regardless, I do sympathize with people who truly lost important items due to the rollback.

Someone came round and steamed all my windows up – then I realized I’d put in a claim asking for condensation.

Anet,
As compensation for the downtime, please extend my paid subscription by one day.

Thank you.

I took the day off to take my daughter to college. I had time in that window. I got world completion on my Necro, and fortunately did not lose that. I did spend a couple hours farming iron ore, and I lost all of that, and the ascended pieces I crafted.

I wish Anet had done something here to say sorry to the players for what they lost. If it was soulbound items affected, then make all of those items account bound. Now all players have some unique one of a kind snowflake, a collectors item as thank you from Guild Wars. Instead, we just get losses. Time may not mean a lot to you guys, but my leave is limited.

Mistakes happen. No one, no collection of people, such as an MMO development studio, is perfect. Expecting, or demanding, otherwise is silly.

MO apologized.

Now we move on.

The fact that ANet even made threads here about the situation is apology enough, on top of the fact that they have also been telling us that, if you lost anything, you are encouraged to send a support ticket so that they know that you were affected and they can get to work on returning your lost items (though I think the “refund” is within reason, correct?).

I’m just saying that there is a way to get your stuff back, which ANet has alerted us to, and that shows that they really do want to help anyone negatively affected by this issue.

Persoanlly I think the roll back was the greatest thing ever in the history of GW’s – you get to truly see how much people can make up about what couldn’t of possibly happened in such a short time span…the first post losing 600g and 100 AP is great!!!

I would love to see that accounts stats in real time – plus I’d love to make 600g everyday for 3 years playing just 2hrs a day…let alone the average 8 I am at now…I’d own half the planet

Personally I lost nothing so the response nothing

As compensation, I’d like Anet to still output content for us all to play and more earnable skins/items in game.
To still work hard to try and balance skills.
To still work hard to make PvP league seasons good to play.
To still work hard to try and make better carrots on sticks. Those tastey carrots.

All in all, Anet handled this really well, anyone asking for monetary compensation, like gold or gems etc are really just being greedy. Poop happens. Move forward.

Two or Three years ago there was this bug. This bug made everything that required a daily reset, to not reset. I.E. Dungeons, Fractals, Dailies, Crafting time gates, Boss Rewards. Stuff like this. Many players, including myself, suffered from this. It lasted an entire week.

Anet refused to post here or admit something was wrong. They did not give an apology or any communication. For a full week. Things were chaotic with players as Anet was not talking. One day a patch came out and that was the only way we knew it was fixed. No apology nor a reason. Just a patch note saying they fixed it. There was also no reimbursement.

The point is, be grateful it was not a week long reset, accept the fact that they fixed a major problem and be thankful they actually communicated as soon as they found out.

Nick Lentz.6982:

Two or Three years ago there was this bug. This bug made everything that required a daily reset, to not reset. I.E. Dungeons, Fractals, Dailies, Crafting time gates, Boss Rewards. Stuff like this. Many players, including myself, suffered from this. It lasted an entire week.

Anet refused to post here or admit something was wrong. They did not give an apology or any communication. For a full week. Things were chaotic with players as Anet was not talking. One day a patch came out and that was the only way we knew it was fixed. No apology nor a reason. Just a patch note saying they fixed it. There was also no reimbursement.

The point is, be grateful it was not a week long reset, accept the fact that they fixed a major problem and be thankful they actually communicated as soon as they found out.

Certainly seems like, in terms of communication with the community, ANet has learned its lesson.

Been playing MMOs for many years…many different games. I’ve lots of weird hiccups. This was handled about as well as anything I’ve ever seen. Special thanks to MO for posting up front on this. When I see top management engaged in something like this, it tends to instill confidence, at least for me.

What does it matter?

We buy the game and the servers are subscription free unlike other MMO’s.

The people complaining about stuff. it really doesn’t matter unless you were unlucky enough to get a precursor drop or such.

All the people whining that they lost progress time and gold…. just put your expectations of when you reach complete satisfaction back by one day. all you lost was a day of game time. if your lucky enough to have made 600g yesterday then you will be lucky enough to do it again.

Its only a game, there is more important stuff to worry about, To me it was a shame it was down last night as I wanted to play a quick game before bed. but it didn’t effect me so much, I went to bed and played tonight instead. Big deal.

You have not lost any progress, you lost a day of potential game time which you can make up again, by playing 1 hour longer for the next 16 sessions you have. given you sleep for 8 hours

Things like this can be a pain, but hey, its life, kitten happens and so does human error. I think they have done pretty well to have it up 4 years without any problems considering the amount of content and people who play.

Lets stop whining as it demoralizes people, especially the staff and developers who put hard work into this….

and to the guy who wanted this on the front page of the site…. you know that will lose players and the more players the better right?

Meh, no biggie. Been around waaaay to long to be upset about a small hiccup like this. I remember an mmo back in the day where they had to rollback at least once a month, tough when 1 lvl took 50 hrs of grinding dungeons. So this is nothing..

Maybe they should gift accounts with a unique title if they were rolled back.

I found other things to do while this was down and frankly needed the break. I totally understand things like this happen. I have been in other metaverses where this is common and no compensation is given. Stuff happens. It happened here and Anet did what they needed to do and let us know. I am glad they fixed it.

I was tickled to see stuff back up when I got up this morning and it is business as usual. I have hungry cats to feed!

It’s like a few people never played games where auto-saving didn’t exist and you had to save manually. If you forgot or got killed, you had to repeat the content all over again. Got use to games like that in the 90s, in fact some games like the Legend of Zelda series still use manual saves (with a few automatic ones).

i only want to know if ur rollback went cascading or not because i see and hear people that made me think it did?
(this is technical stuff incase some1 @arenenat wanted to reply)
Also this tread is perfect proof of how the community of this game is also its biggest issue.For the kitten they were in ,it was handled and communicated on spot so why do u want some gold or compensation?

I lost a fossilized ambrite centipede (the ingredient for ambrite sword). If I could get a new one, that would be great.

Sasori.8642:

I lost a fossilized ambrite centipede (the ingredient for ambrite sword). If I could get a new one, that would be great.

You’d have to contact support.

I cannot say much about whether or not the roll-back was impressiv. However, I want to add some suggestions/learnt lessons.
It can always happen that a patch is not working the way it should or causing more damage than anything else. There should be a standard procedure how to react to such a situation. You can even communicate the procedure in order to decrease surprises.

Before a patch is implemented, a backup should be created. In case the patch causes problems, the backup should replace the latest version. This should be possible to do pretty quickly since it is just a “replace”-command. The system must be made ready for the replacement before. Then, the downtime of the game would decrease.

When it comes to the communication of the problem, you quickly worte a message here in the forum. I would also make sure (as a standard procedure for this case) to direct the player to the main plattform through which you would like to communicate. This can be e.g. your support website (as this link is already in the error message). Please also make sure to communicate, when the problems are solved. I sat yesterday and refreshed the News-section of the forum. Until now, there is no information about the game being online again. I know, you communicate through multiple plattforms. However, you should think about where the main information should flow through (e.g. the support website) and communicate it accordingly.

I dont know to what extent my suggestions are implemented already. Neverthless, I would simply communicate the procedure so that we know whats going on.

gloflop.3510:

Before a patch is implemented, a backup should be created. In case the patch causes problems, the backup should replace the latest version. This should be possible to do pretty quickly since it is just a “replace”-command. The system must be made ready for the replacement before. Then, the downtime of the game would decrease.

That’s exactly what a roll-back is. They had a backup just before the patch went live and they reverted back to it cos they discovered there was no other way to fix all the character records that were corrupted. ~12 hours lost, which is peanuts in a game that hasn’t had much downtime since launch.

gloflop.3510:

When it comes to the communication of the problem, you quickly worte a message here in the forum. I would also make sure (as a standard procedure for this case) to direct the player to the main plattform through which you would like to communicate. This can be e.g. your support website (as this link is already in the error message). Please also make sure to communicate, when the problems are solved. I sat yesterday and refreshed the News-section of the forum. Until now, there is no information about the game being online again. I know, you communicate through multiple plattforms. However, you should think about where the main information should flow through (e.g. the support website) and communicate it accordingly.

Communication was actually very good during the outage. Websites and forums aren’t a good way to communicate if you want small frequent updates… they are much better suited for major updates with lots of detail. I was using Twitter to follow the developments and it was great. Not sure how the Facebook and Reddit updates went.

During crisis like that, communication is secondary to fixing the issue and getting servers up… despite that many of us feel Anet did very well there. This is even when compared to other MMOs (Ever sit through WoW maintenance day? In vanilla at least, that was a regular server downtime every 1-2 weeks and near complete incommunicado from Bliz)

I want to say thank you and congratulations for quickly identifying a problem and taking the steps needed to correct that, even if it was painful for you anet and your player base. The loss of 2 or so hours is nothing compared to what the loss could have been.

That said, many players lost their daily progression that either did it during the 2 hours or were not able to complete it due to the downtime. The ones that did it the evening before were lucky to get their rewards. I would suggest a possible good will offer of your choice to the player base to thank them for their patience.

I am sure you saved the database when you took it down and I do hope that you will carefully verify all the claims that come through support over extreme losses (and not power traders “loss”) before giving the “lost” pre cursors out to people.

I lost progression on my accounts but am happy with the communication and when I saw it was going to take hours to correct I went out for a nice steak dinner instead for once!