This post is in response to what I believe is a major design oversight and will continue to cause massive problems in the future. I call it a design oversight since it has been stated by several CS reps as being “working as intended” and “no plans to change in the future”.
That is the inability to replace lost items/currency/characters and lack of warnings on what will cause the loss of large amounts of currency (gold/inf/karma). I’ll state for the record this post is a direct result of my guild losing 2500 inf due to an upgrade that was canceled and the full amount was not refunded and our dealings with CS as a result of it. We were researching an upgrade and someone accidentally clicked speed up to get it done faster, realized their mistake, canceled it, and instead of being refunded the entire amount was only refunded the cost of the original upgrade. In a small (~20 members) guild this is nearly 2 weeks influence lost as a result of what should be considered a bug. Despite several communications with CS (see above) we are still out 2500inf and told to suck it up.
There is no warning or confirmation box on the speed-up option that informs you that if the upgrade is canceled you will lose the 2500inf for the speed-up (which was more than twice the original upgrade). This needs to be made abundantly clear in the guild options or it needs to be refunded because in the future this will be increasingly more common and a bigger problem. We were also informed that there is no way for any CS or dev to add back currency, items, etc even if they wanted to. Are you kidding me? What MMO does not have an ability to replace lost items, especially when the loss is clearly documented in the guild log? This is further evidenced by the fact that if you lose a character to a hack you are only getting a roll-back and not full replacement. In many cases you aren’t getting your characters back. This has been stated to be something that is being worked on. So which is it? Is the inability to replace lost/stolen/error permanent or is it going to be available in the near future? Because this appears to be mixed messages.
The CS reps compared this to someone selling a valuable item in error or having second thoughts. This is a completely flawed argument for several reason. The first being that selling an item in error only affects one person and the second being there is a buyback option to prevent this error when selling to vendors. Further invalidating the argument that this is working as intended is that fact that when you cancel an upgrade you are refunded the price of the upgrade. So if the original amount can be refunded why not the full price that was spent on the whole upgrade? Which leads me to believe this is indeed a bug that CS doesn’t want to admit/deal with. Especially considering that the influence from Tomes of Influence that has been lost to a bug is being replaced with new Tomes.
This bring me to my final point. As more and more people start reaching 80 and losing high leveled characters and gear to hackers the inability to refund lost items and currency is going to be a source of more and more rage. Also, this whole thing has exposed a very serious error in guild management. What is to stop the first POed guild officer with upgrade privileges and an axe to grind from completely obliterating all of the banked influence of an entire guild by exploiting this bug? This either needs to be fixed or the influence need to be refunded, because this is going to continue to happen in the future and the rate is only going to increase.
I am not going to threaten to quit, I am not going to threaten to bad-mouth the game to others, what I am going to say is that at this point, I will be far less likely to spend any cash on the gem store and the same can be said for my guildies. It is going to cost the equiv of $25 to replace the lost influence, which beyond that I wont purchase anything with real money since there are no mechanisms in place to replace in-game items and currency purchased with real money if they are lost to a bug or hacking. This whole situation could have been easily rectified, but instead we are told in effect to “too bad, suck it up”. This is not how you should be treating customers if you want them to keep spending money on your product.
(edited by JonasV.4209)