Guild Wars 2

It has been my experience that people declare games dead 5 years before the player base actually deteriorates to unhealthy numbers.

BearCat.3286:

About titles. They will never do that, because they try to hide the fact that there was a rollback. Don’t believe me? Look at this then: https://www.guildwars2.com This page says ‘Nothing happaned, nothing at all.’

hmmm.. I don’t see where it says: “Nothing happaned”… I don’t even see it saying that Nothing Happened….

But… if you check the Forums where all these things are talked about obviously you will find all the info.

Please stop trying to make an issue where none exists… :P

Showing off the game is a form of advertising. Pretty basic.

That’s their main advertising page. The rollback does not, and would not, affect those that do not have accounts. For those that do have accounts, a notice went up immediately in News and Announcements part of the forum. Messages rarely are posted there, so when it lights up, you know it’s something that bears attention.

How is Mass broadcast this hidden? Literally within 5m of getting the DC messages the post came out about what was happening. The main pages is about what is coming or new not Windows Happenings!

P.S. Thanks for the Tweets!!! Big help Rubi, Steve and the others thumbs up

Well Nexon is a crap company anyway.
And Anet even gave us kittens recently.

hmm a 2 hour rollback.

i remember 10 years ago when i was playing maplestory and nexon frequently did rollbacks (sometimes days, sometimes minutes) with no kittens given for their players.

anet handled this really well. thanks gaile, mo, support, the team that noticed/fixed the bug, and whoever else was involved. you guys did awesome.

Galtrix.7369:

RoseofGilead.8907:

Galtrix.7369:

Phh. Apparently an ascended drop wasn’t worth replacing. Thanks guys. I think I’ll take a long break from this game.

Did you try contacting support?

Twice…. on two different subjects and I still haven’t received a response

omg… do ya think that maybe they have a LOT of tickets and requests to deal with right now? Stand in line I’m sure…. be patient, or go away, your choice.

Galtrix.7369:

RoseofGilead.8907:

Galtrix.7369:

Phh. Apparently an ascended drop wasn’t worth replacing. Thanks guys. I think I’ll take a long break from this game.

Did you try contacting support?

Twice…. on two different subjects and I still haven’t received a response

So,

Anet has a couple hundred employees.

A small fraction of those employees are support staff.

As likely as not thousands of tickets requesting restoration of items just hit them (in addition to the normal ticket volume).

Many of those tickets will be attempts to scam Anet into giving precursors, etc to players falsely claiming to have had one drop before the roll back.

Not surprised you havent heard back yet.

Galtrix.7369:

RoseofGilead.8907:

Galtrix.7369:

Phh. Apparently an ascended drop wasn’t worth replacing. Thanks guys. I think I’ll take a long break from this game.

Did you try contacting support?

Twice…. on two different subjects and I still haven’t received a response

You only need to put in one ticket, even if you’re having more than one problem. Putting in multiples delays your response time. It can also take up to 72 hours (sometimes longer, and I’d imagine they’re pretty busy after yesterday) to get a reply. So, wait until the 72 hours have passed. If by then you still don’t have a response, you can post your ticket number to the thread linked below:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/GW2-Tickets-for-Review-3-days-older-2/page/22#post6299586

Galtrix.7369:

RoseofGilead.8907:

Galtrix.7369:

Phh. Apparently an ascended drop wasn’t worth replacing. Thanks guys. I think I’ll take a long break from this game.

Did you try contacting support?

Twice…. on two different subjects and I still haven’t received a response

No patience, it has even been barely a day since the servers came back and you are whining about not getting a reply.

One of the best things about the original was tinkering with builds , compiling things from your primary and secondary skills to create something to test, either it worked, or it didn`t but at least you`d tried it.

I`m growing increasingly def up with the lowest common denominator, lets make it simple for the kiddies to play build system in this game. Equip this weapon, you can only do this with it …..crap ! Press the same skills repeatedly cause thats all you can do with this, crap !

This is a Sin/Nec build i was working on , just look at all those dagger skills you who`ve only played GW2 . Every class was like this, and once you put one together that worked, you saved the template, all it`d need to reinstate a build, including all the skill stats, was cut n paste the template code in.

Builds for every scenario, every class , different weapons, primaries and secondaries , real gaming .

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Dinas Dragonbane.2978:

Fluffball.8307:

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

Sadly the 1st response almost hits the nail on the head. The OP doesn’t seem to understand why they shut it down, just that they are mad it was.

So a restaurant gets a new dish(the patch) and ingredients in that dish manage to spread e coli or salmonella or something bad(the soulbound glitch). Once multiple people begin to get sick from it, they realize something is wrong and shut the restaurant down to clean and sanitize(fix and rollback). If you were to drive up to the restaurant for lunch and it was closed, would you find somewhere else to eat lunch and come back a different day? Or would you stand outside the restaurant waiting for them to reopen it with NO SET TIME of when that will be?
The next day you go back there for lunch, do you walk in and say “HEY I couldn’t get lunch here yesterday cause of you idiots….give me a COOKIE!”

I really hope the OP didn’t sit at their computer the entire time waiting for the game to be back up, I’ve got 29.6k ap so I’ve played a lot…and still found other things to do in the meantime, the game doesn’t have to be the ONLY thing you try to do for 8.5 hours.

That actually sounds like a very realistic comparison to what happened, more or less. Let’s just hope that, like the restaurant analogy, people are not driven away from GW2 after this.

Sorry OP, disagree with you here. Love the game but crap happens some time. I am ok with not getting a thing because unlike other games, they continued to communicate with us with what was going on.

zaced.7948:

i don’t get it, what is this about?

As far as I can tell the OP was pushing something, there’s a reference to steering in the middle of it all so probably on a path or something.
Anyway, this must have been uphill, as it sounds like they had a problem and it rolled back.

Then there’s the not asking for compensation but suggesting money as compensation bit. I presume whatever rolled back went over his/her foot or something as hurt is mentioned. Hopefully not too squashed.

Whatever the OP was pushing must have been pretty advanced technologically, as it seems to have warped a few hours into a staggering amount of lifetime, most of it in fact by the sheer angst portrayed.
Or maybe the hurt from the squashed foot made it seem longer.

Anyway that’s about it, hope that helps.

Fluffball.8307:

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

Sadly the 1st response almost hits the nail on the head. The OP doesn’t seem to understand why they shut it down, just that they are mad it was.

So a restaurant gets a new dish(the patch) and ingredients in that dish manage to spread e coli or salmonella or something bad(the soulbound glitch). Once multiple people begin to get sick from it, they realize something is wrong and shut the restaurant down to clean and sanitize(fix and rollback). If you were to drive up to the restaurant for lunch and it was closed, would you find somewhere else to eat lunch and come back a different day? Or would you stand outside the restaurant waiting for them to reopen it with NO SET TIME of when that will be?
The next day you go back there for lunch, do you walk in and say “HEY I couldn’t get lunch here yesterday cause of you idiots….give me a COOKIE!”

I really hope the OP didn’t sit at their computer the entire time waiting for the game to be back up, I’ve got 29.6k ap so I’ve played a lot…and still found other things to do in the meantime, the game doesn’t have to be the ONLY thing you try to do for 8.5 hours.

Nostalgic Enigma.6034:

Anyway, I assume I’m going to get a lot of flak for even recommending compensation

I wouldn’t give you any flak for the recommendation. It’s a no-brainer.

Their server programmers and their entire management team have just pulled at least a 12 hour day, and probably more (getting in early to prep for patch day) to fix the problem. It’s a fair guess that no one had taken much of a break since the servers went down and they were in full 5 alarm fire drill the entire afternoon and evening. Maybe, just maybe, they thought that once the servers were back up and stable, it was time to get some sleep, and that stuff like mailing out apology gifts could wait until tomorrow.

You waited all of a couple hours to complain, at midnight, that they haven’t compensated you for the downtime yet. Really? What exactly do you expect here? You couldn’t even wait for them to come into work the next day before complaining on the forums?

You absolutely should get a lot of flak for that. You have totally unrealistic expectations, and A.Net is going to come back into work this morning to see a thread reminding them that a bunch of their players are petulant children. Well done.

Balthazzarr.1349:

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”.

This was my thought too. A release should go through a full QA run to ensure it all works together correctly. All I can guess is that they didn’t realize this sort of regression would happen, but a full QA test should notice that, whereas it might slip through an individual commit’s QA.

Also need no compensation. It was clearly a big issue, and having had to go through reverts at my job too (although not this large) I know how much they suck.

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.

So you don’t think it’s quicker to just do a post on the games own forum, it has to be on there web site? Really? Anyone who works in web design knows it is quicker to just do a forum post.

Secondly, trying to fix this kind of problem while the game is live would have been a real nightmare, trying to fix something that is still effecting data on a live environment is like trying to stop ice melting in death valley. The more people who use the corrupted system, the more is spreads the more the data base is corrupted. But then I guess your one of those people who thinks they can just press a button to marked “fix things” and everything works again.

I got lucky, the only thing I missed out is my home and guild hall gathering. Everything else I did fell outside the rolled back time period.

TBH I had the opposite reaction to many here. I was extremely impressed by the quality of the response to the bug. Doing a rollback on this scale is NOT a trivial operation and the granularity of the deltas was really excellent.

The real question in my mind is how the bug in the integrity of user records got through testing. That I think is something that ArenaNet has to look at and improve. Changes to code in that area should raise a big red flag and should be reviewed with extreme prejudice.

I strongly suspect the dancing Account/Soul Binding issue was not merely a problem of items getting soulbound, but merely a symptom of a much wider character database corruption, necessitating the emergency shutdown and rollback of the servers.

As far as compensation goes… an additional day of playtime has been added to your account subscription. Enjoy.