test content
Logo
What is the Arc Client?
Install Arc
How was this decision reached?
entalyan
Member Posts: 89
Hello community manager and/or PWE staff,
I would be quite interested in how you came to the conclusion that this 7 hour rollback (and the behind-the-scenes measures you are taking) was the best solution. Perhaps some insight into what data you have based this on could be given. For me this is mainly just curiosity, but I reckon some information on this might help put other people's mind at ease.
A vocal minority (I'm assuming) has been asking for a total server reset. I think this is mostly because they do not believe any fix on your part can repair the economy on the servers. You have not chosen to do this because, among other things, you feel you can get the situation under control. If some information was shared about why you think you have this covered, perhaps some peace could be found.
I understand that it's not likely internal information will be diverged here, but still feel I can at least ask. So if there is some additional information you can share, I would be very interested in that.
Thanks for your time,
Alex
I would be quite interested in how you came to the conclusion that this 7 hour rollback (and the behind-the-scenes measures you are taking) was the best solution. Perhaps some insight into what data you have based this on could be given. For me this is mainly just curiosity, but I reckon some information on this might help put other people's mind at ease.
A vocal minority (I'm assuming) has been asking for a total server reset. I think this is mostly because they do not believe any fix on your part can repair the economy on the servers. You have not chosen to do this because, among other things, you feel you can get the situation under control. If some information was shared about why you think you have this covered, perhaps some peace could be found.
I understand that it's not likely internal information will be diverged here, but still feel I can at least ask. So if there is some additional information you can share, I would be very interested in that.
Thanks for your time,
Alex
Post edited by entalyan on
0
Comments
Oh. I can explain that without even being on the team.
It makes it look like theyre doing something while taking the absolute least damage to their bottom line from angering lockbox or zen purchasers.
Exactly... notice the absence of any mods or dev team this morning...
So 7 hours does the "least harm" to people in terms of time lost and so on, but recovers "most of" the damage done. Its a logical choice.
Well of course they would do that, they are a company. But, as a company, they must also be interested in the long term profitability of this products (seeing as it's F2P, they won't make their money back from day-1 purchases). And the long term profitability is (usually) directly linked to the games quality, so I'm pretty sure they'd be interested in that too.
The rollback itself is quite easy to explain. At one point too many people started using the exploit and it started to affect the balance of the game. But I'm more interested in other changes that have been or will be made, and why. How broken is the economy really? Will just offending players be banned and/or reset (probably identifiable by logging), or are analytics and data mining methods used to determine who benefited from this exploit?
"WTH?!? I lost two levels!" is all over zone chat.
Don't forget lot's of folks don't read the forums and didn't log on yesterday or otherwise have no idea what has happened.
Imagine if it was "WTH?!? My character has been reset!"
Whoever decided probably realized that, because they said there would be no wipe, they have to stick with that and just do the best they can with this situation rather than losing many people who would not start again.
From their point of view I can see how they wouldn't want to reboot after a wipe and find a quarter of the population gone.
Whereas, this may lose people but more slowly and in less of a big showy way.
"We had a problem and it damaged our in-game economy" sounds like a whole lot better thing to report to corporate than "We reset the game, even though we said we wouldn't, and lost a large portion of our players".
Long term profitability?
perhapos you arent aware how perfect world works. or why they own so many MMOs.
The PWE model works like this.
1: Build a half-assed MMO.
2: Launch it with a functional, overpriced cash shop
3: milk it till the idiots dry up and shovel some of that money forward to start the process again.
PWE functions like most modern companies. They dont give two ****s about longterm profits. They care about posting profits every quarter to their shareholders and appearing to be making money hand over fist until it all comes crashing down.
The entire concept of fixing this issue with a complete wipe was sheer idiocy. Cryptic feels that they can get all of the fabricated AD out of the economy because they already have. That's what a rollback is. They wiped out all changes made since the exploit went public and exploded the economy. There isn't damage to be fixed because the damage was never done in the first place.
The people who are saying that the economy is ruined are simply lying. If you didn't think the economy was ruined on Friday, then it's not ruined today. They are making things up that aren't true (though they likely believe them to be true) in order to justify their rage. There's a subset of gamers who spend money on the Newest Thing because it's the Newest Thing, then shriek with constant, hysterical rage when it doesn't cure cancer and come with three free unicorn ponies. They will move on to the next new release as soon as it's out. Just learn to ignore the new release howler monkeys and you'll feel a lot better about the games you play.
"Sir, were now surrounded"!
Thats great news son, now we can attack from ALL sides"!
This is actually what I've been thinking. There can't possibly be so much damage to an economy that is completely controlled by one party that a complete reset would be in order. I think calling for a 'wipe' just sounds exciting, it will fix the problem (regardless of the scope and/or existence of a problem), and it's nice and confrontational.
While I've read reports that the exploit has been active for longer than just the missing 7 hours, I would assume the impact on the economy/game balance as a whole was negligible, and either didn't require any action or could be handled individually.
This is however all speculation on our part, I'm interested in the operator's opinion.
They couldn't possibly be in a meeting or busy considering, you know, they just took a GIGANTIC hit to their plans of execution for the software. And mods couldn't be, you know, struggling to keep up with 2000 people browsing and posting in the forum.
They have no reason to tell you or anyone else to be honest. That is internal information and you are not part of the team. This is even more important when the issue is dealing with an exploit, explaining the solution chosen could make it easier for someone to discover a new glitch.
I can tell you have never been on a software development team cause it would make sense to you.
You are absolutely correct regarding details on the solution on the software side of things. But I'm not talking about that, I'm asking about how they would determine impact on their economy. While this is internal information, and they have no reason to give it to me (like I said in my original post), this would not be useful in trying to find new exploits. I'm not expecting they'll just print out their log files and mail them over, I'm asking for the process of analyzing such an incident.
Really? It started off so great.
I am in fact part of a software development team (well, Business Intelligence), and I do understand why you would not want to share certain (or all) internal information with outside parties. I'm just giving "asking politely" a shot. Most likely I'll never hear anything about this, but there's always a small chance someone is willing to give some global description of the issues they're dealing with.
Maybe on some servers but not on Dragon. I sat watching the zen being cleaned out of the market over and over again since at least 5 hours before that...and some people said it was happening friday night too.
It had indeed happened before, I think it was Friday night.