Guild Wars 2

Personally I hope Anet does not give any compensation. It will give those stomping their feet demanding such a valuable life lesson that sometimes things like this happen and they just have to get over it. Plus even if Anet did do some kind of compensation the next wave of complaints would probably be many of the same people that demanded compensation complaining that it wasn’t good enough.

They don’t mean it. I’m sad for your lost. How much gold do you want?

I think this thread is dumb. Can’t we focus our “internet complaint” powers on something more productive, such as ‘insider training’, ‘outfits’, and etc?

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.

Downtime yesterday: “Hey, time to watch that stuff on the DVR I meant to get to!”

The router the cable company installed constantly failing this morning so disconnecting me.

One guess which thing I hated more?

JustTrogdor.7892:

Personally I hope Anet does not give any compensation. It will give those stomping their feet demanding such a valuable life lesson that sometimes things like this happen and they just have to get over it. Plus even if Anet did do some kind of compensation the next wave of complaints would probably be many of the same people that demanded compensation complaining that it wasn’t good enough.

I agree. If they do decide to do compensation I hope it will be something that costs them nothing and lets us laugh at people who take this seriously. It is like this is their first time encountering downtime for any server anywhere.

Always gonna be whiners about compensation… for what? “lost time”? Forced to communicate with the real world for a few hours?

As a programmer I understand the pain of having to roll back something, although I haven’t had to do anything so huge. But also as a programmer I have to wonder why it is that almost every ‘update’ to this game, small or large, comes with a handful of bugs.

If there is a TEST bed for Quality Assurance Testing then I have to think that it’s not being very well utilized. Seriously, something like this soulbound bug should have been easily noticed by the testers if they were actually Playing and Testing all aspects of this game as they should be considering the bugs that are continually introduced each update.

THIS is my issue. I don’t want compensation… What I would love to see and hear is that ANet has created a solid QA team that ensures the new code is working properly and not affecting other areas in ways it shouldn’t before rolling it out to the public for “live testing”.

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.

No amount of testing will catch bugs slipping through from test to live. They could triple the testing time and it still could have happened.

It’s a video game, we will all get over it. Kudos for their communication though – seen this happen before in other MMO’s and little to no idea what was going on.

It’s an MMO … happens in every MMO. We are lucky with this one as they don’t go down for hours at a time all the time. ANet has figured out how to do updates and bug fixes without bringing the servers down every time.

onevstheworld.2419:

Look at is this way… the item ownership system is a fundamental system in any game, especially MMOs. If you were to change any fundamental system would you not want to plan it out carefully, prototype it on a controlled server and QA the crap out of it? That’s a job that requires weeks, if not months, when you have a game as large as a MMO. Rush it, and you’re almost certainly cause worse bugs. Do it properly, and you’ll be lucky if you have any player-base remaining after your weeks of down-time.

I will ignore most of the things I wrote in my suggestion.

Changing the state of an item from “soulbound” to “account bound on acquire & soulbound on use” (this state is in this game) has no impact on the game. Items still can’t be sold on the market or used by another account. Max you can do is to move them on another toon and use them there but you can no longer use them on another toon after you equiped them. It will max allow some swap between the items some toons have, market won’t even feel it because I doubt someone waited for such oportunity to happen.

This is just a search and replace in the database and nothing else. Those operations can even be done live and require no downtime…

onevstheworld.2419:

thedukesd.3829:

Next time when they post updates about the situation they should avoid using morning, because morning in Europe and in USA are not in the same time and can cause confusion, like making an european understand he will be rollback to European morning not USA morning.

If we’re going to nit-pick… they also spell “color” instead of “colour”, and use the imperial system instead of metric. Shame on Anet.

Actually if the rollback would had send me back to yesterday european morning I would had left the game. Ofc you can say no one will miss you, well it would had just been 1 less player that has no issue to do dungeons with beginers/low levels (and not just press the kick button like the majority does in eu worlds). You will say why? Not the first time it happens, in december 2012 I was scale 56 in fractals, sometime in 2013 i was send back to 30, result was that I never bothered to get back to scale 56.

I don’t care about compensations, if they give good, if they don’t give good, it just doesn’t matter for me.
On the other hand I’d like to see those updates tested more.

3-4 unranked sPvP matches. 2-3 wins maybe.

thedukesd.3829:

onevstheworld.2419:

Look at is this way… the item ownership system is a fundamental system in any game, especially MMOs. If you were to change any fundamental system would you not want to plan it out carefully, prototype it on a controlled server and QA the crap out of it? That’s a job that requires weeks, if not months, when you have a game as large as a MMO. Rush it, and you’re almost certainly cause worse bugs. Do it properly, and you’ll be lucky if you have any player-base remaining after your weeks of down-time.

I will ignore most of the things I wrote in my suggestion.

Changing the state of an item from “soulbound” to “account bound on acquire & soulbound on use” (this state is in this game) has no impact on the game. Items still can’t be sold on the market or used by another account. Max you can do is to move them on another toon and use them there but you can no longer use them on another toon. It will max allow some swap between the items some toons have, market won’t even feel it because I doubt someone waited for such oportunity to happen.

This is just a search and replace in the database and nothing else. Those operation can even be done live and require no downtime…

There are many soulbound items that are quest/personal story items and having them become account bound could potentially create issues, it would take a lot of coding to change every soulbound item like these to not create bugs or glitches.

You know, on the upside, I got to be productive. I lost practically nothing but that’s just me, and I understand that someone that might have, say, get a whole map done or something is going be angry. Could’ve been worse tho.

On the downside, I read OP’s post.

In my view the response, both during and after have been very good. Nostalgic Enigma.6034 I really have no idea what you’re talking about, as any evidence to back up any claims you’ve made simply just isn’t there; like others have stated.

We don’t need compensation for anything. Try their best, but like the rest of us they’re humans and mistakes are always going to happen.

Quite frankly, wanting something in compensation because someone else has made an honest mistake is disgusting. And that’s what this boils down to: you’ve been put out, you’re upset, and you want someone to give you something to make you feel better.

How utterly selfish. I think some perspective is sorely needed.

I do not agree with OP, however, I will say that lost items should be recovered. I obtained a Zojja’s weapon chest during a fractal run before the error and now its gone. I submit a ticket in hopes of getting it back, but time will tell if that happens.

i lost 8 winstreak in spvp from diam tier 6 4 pips to tier 4 0 pip and some achievements about pvp wings and i don’t understand why i lost this. I hope they will do some compensation about this wast of time because i think pvp players don’t care about those exotic stuff bugs

Chill

/15 John Cenas

i lost 7000 destroyer cores. bought them 10 minutes after the patch went live, then somehow when i went to buy them again, i was magically too late to purchase them. i had to sit and watch as the price steadily rose to its current standing, constantly being told “the item was already sold” and not getting a single purchase in.

I lost nothing, because I was on holiday hiking in Bavaria.

I submit a ticket too about what i lost and didn’t play since the Rollback. I m really disappointed about this game now. I m feeling like 15 days of spvp rush for nothing and playing other game. I really hope they will repair their mistake for disappointed people or i m pretty sure they will lose some players

CaelestiaEmpyrea.2617:

This rollback has cost a lot of players a lot of progress. So, take an moment to tell ANet what you lost to the rollback.

I lost over 600 gold worth of drops and sales on the TP, about 100 AP worth of progress on achievements, and nearly full stacks of platinum and hard wood that I harvested. I also lost 2 1/2 hours of gameplay and a full afternoon and evening of denied gameplay that I can NEVER get back. This had to happen on one of my very rare vacation days, turning what should have been a fun day into a severe disappointment.

Wow, that is quite a lot for 2 1/2 hours. I’m sorry to hear it. I try never to play on a patch day.

Nostalgic Enigma.6034:

…snip…

You’re overreacting. Learn to cope, and let it go.

~EW

french staff doesn’t care about players as i can read i will try with english one then ragequit this game

Silvatar.5379:

I get that people are frustrated, but Anet handled the situation extremely well. Its the nature of the beast that things like this can and do happen. As others have mentioned, lots of other games actually shutdown on a regular basis for maintenance so we here at GW2 have definitely be spoiled with continuous access. As for asking for compensation, yeah, that’s a pretty self-centered response to the situation but how about this…Anet could give us more new content to play absolutely free….oh wait, they already do this routinely…sweet

I agree, the bulk of GW2 is completely free to play. Expecting compensation on something they handled with extreme urgency and care to keep players up to date is a bit self-centered. I say this even as one of those players who bought the GW2 game before it even launched. I’ve paid my dues but ANet in no way is obligated to compensate me. It’s a F2P game, I buy gems all the time, I’ve poured money into this game but ANet has also poured in their time and effort to keep players happy. Do they sometimes get it wrong when it comes to giving the players what they want? Sure, but they can’t get it right all the time. The player base/demographic of this game is just too wide to satisfy everyone with everything. They make updates, they listen to the community, the return to the drawing board and keep doing what they need to. (IE keeping the game running AND still giving us new content without taking down the game).

Sorry, this turned into a small rant here…but, ANet, really….please keep up the good work! I work myself for a company that hosts sites and I know the pain of downtime and disappointing customers that has occurred due to unforeseen circumstances (doesn’t happen a lot but I’ve been there!). You did a bang up job! Your plan on restoring bought gems and other things to those affected is commendable. I know it can’t be easy to wade through all those logs and code.

Not hating OP but will disagree here. I have played multiple games in the past that were subscription based that required full server stops during updates that resulted in extended down times. And then after that there might be additional outages over the next few days as additional issues were uncovered.

Compared to that, and that this isn’t subscription based, and the fact that normally there aren’t even shutdowns while updates are applied and I admit, I thought they did a good job. Here is what I thought worked based on appearances from the forum side:

• Forum posts appeared indicating what could be a serious issue
• Potentially internal resources might have seen the same issue or responded to posting, some posters posting code snipets they thought odd
• ANet acknowledged potential issue
• Issue confirmed and possible solutions reviewed and communicated
• Server brought down to limit further loss
• Communication cycle started on forum (thank you), twitter, facebook, not sure reddit
• Rollback deemed required
• Data restored with limited loss
• Impacts of restore shared via forums pre-empting some questions that might rise
• System restored, and patch that was expected that day applied with corrected code

Was there some time lost in gaming, yes. Did some people lose some progress, yes but limited. To me that was a better call then now taking weeks/months to try and correct peoples accounts that were impacted. I am pretty much full ascended as well but there are a lot of people that aren’t which would not have been able to play.

In regards to removing the concept of Soulbound, I think that also would have been a much bigger rework then people expect even if its only a flag on a item. In a down situation you don’t want to try second guess a game concepts versus ID and correct the code change that caused the bug.

Again, if this was an ongoing issue or a sub-based game, might be a different story, but neither are the case.

2 cents.

I lost 3 of my 2 arms during this period. Thankfully they rolled back and now I have all 4 again.

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.

There is a reason why many experienced gamers don’t play on patch day. The live servers are very different from test and there is literally no way to test code that way except putting it on live. You can try to do everything you can to avoid anything that could possibly go wrong, but it happens in literally every game.

No, but real talk… One large mistake in this game’s currently four year run is no reason to be demanding compensation, when they were transparent with their progress fixing it. Not to mention, unless you received a super rare drop, two hours of lost gameplay is really not enough of a reason to start making demands.

People make mistakes. I’m sure locating every possible bug is no easy task. MMOs are not easy to maintain, I’m sure. It’s pretty lame to start whining about it, when it’s a first offence. And if they kept the servers offline until they fixed the bug, it would have taken considerably longer, and I’m positive people would be complaining even more. So, rolling back two hours, though unfortunate, is hardly a deal breaker. People need to stop feeling so entitled.

Glenstorm.4059:

Uninstalled this past weekend, so nada…I think.

Uninstalled but still on the forums…sad.

not happy so far

Alaoglu.4637:

I submit a ticket too about what i lost and didn’t play since the Rollback. I m really disappointed about this game now. I m feeling like 15 days of spvp rush for nothing and playing other game. I really hope they will repair their mistake for disappointed people or i m pretty sure they will lose some players

They won’t lose that many players. Just about every MMO I’ve ever played has experienced roll back. It’s even worse in a lot of other MMOs which have to go down for maintainance a couple of times a month.

Stuff like this happens. If you don’t think so, you haven’t been around much. In fact, stuff much worse than this happens, even in big MMOs like WoW that charge a subscription fee.

It’s just one of those things. Anyone that would leave over this is going to leave anyway.

entirely your problem, make yourself happy ^^

Also, this is kinda discussed here:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Disappointment-at-the-Rollback-Response/first#post6301423

Well the game is free and requires no monthly subscription… so congrats they will give it to you for free and not charge you to play today!

compensation…
rethink your life.

roflmao, why was it clear, that a pointless thread like this will be made… xD

Your compensation was that you got most likely for a few hours in your life some fresh air more … rolleyes

Justine.6351:

compensation…
rethink your life.

Lol

Wish in one hand, spit in the other, and see which gets filled first.

~EW

Djinn.9245:

Glenstorm.4059:

Uninstalled this past weekend, so nada…I think.

Uninstalled but still on the forums…sad.

Probably still playing like most of the people posting things like that.

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

Your compensation is the life lesson that things like this happen and despite whatever discomfort you experienced from it you managed to survive.

I’m not happy too, I lost my day off, wasted two hours of successful farming and I wasted some of it waiting here and there and wandering on the forums until I decided it was over, but I don’t think a compensation is in order.

Sure, they could make a super sale where they extend every item that was on sale (or is supposed to) for the entire duration of the birthday instead of a single day offer, but that’s the only thing that would be reasonnable from a financial standpoint.

I mean, no player actually lost money with this day off and those who lost a precursor item (or any other highly valuable item) might get it back so it’s not really a big lost for any players.

I’m sure the folks at ANet had a lot of stress from yesterday. I wouldn’t ask for any compensation for this because they had a bad enough day as it was. I’m sure today will be almost the same for them as they will likely have a lot of work left to do. Hopefully they can get it all sorted out and spend some time with their families.

Given that the number of times the servers have gone down since launch can be counted on one hand, compensation is not necessary. If anything compensation is overkill.

Let’s stop being ridiculous people… Stuff happens, they responded quickly and CS will help those who may have lost anything substantial.

Kegger.4012:

The entire time I’ve played GW and GW2 there has never been an issue like this. They have no experience in situations like this.

I’d say they handled it pretty kitten well with that in mind. Good job Anet!

Quoted for truth. One night in years of uptime. Whatevs OP.

You’re welcome to go to other MMOs and have issues like this on a far more regular basis… Christ.

JustTrogdor.7892:

Your compensation is the life lesson that things like this happen and despite whatever discomfort you experienced from it you managed to survive.

my life lesson is to rage about this

Lost nothing. I could lie too, but man, I just logged in to see our post patch wvw matchup. Oh yes, I had to grab that 5 gold in TP again. Totaly ruined my day.

CaelestiaEmpyrea.2617:

This rollback has cost a lot of players a lot of progress. So, take an moment to tell ANet what you lost to the rollback.

A small amount of respect for the players on the forums who complained.

~EW