AD in the mailbox - a necessary evil?

choranth · July 2013

I was wondering why, when you bid and you don't win the item, you need to go to your mail box to get your AD back.

Was it me, I'd just mail a notify (with the AD automatically returned to your inventory).

(Today I lost 309k AD out of 360 because I deleted a mail. "Do you really want to delete it?" "Yeah, yeah, I've not won the bid thank you for telling me: YES... oh s***")

parp12 · July 2013

There shouldn't even be an option to delete a mail with AD attached. It should just automatically be taken when you select the mail.

I think the reason it's there is say you're sniping an auction which is about to end, you bid say 10k and now have 5k left. If you get outbid you can't just immediately bid higher, you have to go collect it and then....it's too late. I know it happened to me on something I'd been watching for a long time and I tried to throw in a bid whilst in a dungeon.

kiralia · July 2013

It doesnt help that you get that red message about deleting a mail with attachement even after you have taken the attachment...which sorta makes having the message pointless cos you just learn to ignore it.

beckylunatic · July 2013

kiralia wrote: »

It doesnt help that you get that red message about deleting a mail with attachement even after you have taken the attachment...which sorta makes having the message pointless cos you just learn to ignore it.

Technically it only still shows up if you're going fast. If I get distracted in mid-mail and delete a few seconds after removing attached items, the red message doesn't show up. It also disappears if you've worked down the mailbox and looted a bunch of messages, then started again from the top deleting them. That said, if you're trying to deal with your mailbox with maximum efficiency, then it does effectively become so much white noise until you misclick.

I had the issue the other night where I almost deleted a new message with my payment attached to it because it came in while I was just about the delete the previous one. I did see what was going on and stop in time, thankfully. There really does need to be a fix where new mail arriving doesn't change which message you have selected.

kattefjaes · July 2013

beckylunatic wrote: »

Technically it only still shows up if you're going fast. If I get distracted in mid-mail and delete a few seconds after removing attached items, the red message doesn't show up.

This is untrue, I just tested it. I took the money, and then counted to ten out loud, then hit delete. I still got the warning.

Edit: I just tabbed back into the game after posting the above, and tried the delete button again, and got the warning again. Totally untrue. Maybe "a few seconds" means "a few minutes", "technically"?

Blaming the user for being "too fast" seems like a nice bit of victim blaming. It's only too fast if you're one of these guys:

aviarios-del-caribe-sloth-sanctuary.10968.large_slideshow.jpg

aviarios-del-caribe-sloth-sanctuary.10968.large_slideshow.jpg

beckylunatic · July 2013

It's not like I've been timing my delays, sorry.

healhamsta · July 2013

Mail is bugged, still gives that "WARNING THERE'S AN ITEM IN HERE" message even after you've taken out the item.

There's a significant delay until it actually doesn't pop up.

parp12 · July 2013

To stop the red message appearing you need to take 2 attachments, then go back to the first. Now you can happily delete without a warning. Unfortunately, as said above, you can now delete mails that do have an attachment without a warning.

beckylunatic · July 2013

kattefjaes wrote: »

Blaming the user for being "too fast" seems like a nice bit of victim blaming. It's only too fast if you're one of these guys: [sloth pic]

Hur, I didn't catch your edit until now. What the heck are you lashing out at me for? "Victim blaming?" Did you see how I said dealing with mail efficiently does condition the player to pay less attention to the warnings, with sometimes bad results? Or did you opt to ignore that part?

choranth · July 2013

I'd like if nobody was likened to animals - we've already had a minister likened to an orangutan by a senator here. Let me tell ya, it wasn't the epytome of niceness.

However, I'll do some charitable reading and suppose everyone is calm and not flaming here.

I understand they don't want my AD to come back at me right after I got unbid. Have a timer maybe.
But I don't like the "you risk to lose AD if you do the wrong thing" here.

Please note I didn't misclick because of white noise. I really tought that reading the mail was enough to get my AD back... see, there was a button down there but it was blacked out like if I had already pressed it...

labbb · July 2013

Blame all the ' auction house stole my AD ' post that started at launch . People just couldn't handle automatic AD deposit . It was too much for them to remember their own balance . This was a lameo fix , that was never needed .

bioshrike · July 2013

choranth wrote: »

I was wondering why, when you bid and you don't win the item, you need to go to your mail box to get your AD back.

Was it me, I'd just mail a notify (with the AD automatically returned to your inventory).

(Today I lost 309k AD out of 360 because I deleted a mail. "Do you really want to delete it?" "Yeah, yeah, I've not won the bid thank you for telling me: YES... oh s***")

IIRC, the AD you bid is actually taken away from you, and placed into a holding account in the AH. Thus the AD that is returned wasn't actually in your possession during that time. The game doesn't seem to have any ability to directly credit you AD, if you aren't actually logged in.

choranth · July 2013

bioshrike wrote: »

IIRC, the AD you bid is actually taken away from you, and placed into a holding account in the AH. Thus the AD that is returned wasn't actually in your possession during that time. The game doesn't seem to have any ability to directly credit you AD, if you aren't actually logged in.

Then don't let me cancel those mails if I haven't taken the items from there. Especially if it comes from the AH account.

kattefjaes · July 2013

choranth wrote: »

Please note I didn't misclick because of white noise. I really tought that reading the mail was enough to get my AD back... see, there was a button down there but it was blacked out like if I had already pressed it...

Ack, that's another nasty one for the list of mail fails, then.

Yes, the interface design for mail is pretty bad. You seem to have been spared the worst gotcha though- if you have a message open, from which you have already taken anything useful, and a new one comes in... Well, the new one takes "focus", if you will. It replaces the previously open message- and is open in front of you.

This means that if you're trying to delete that previous now AD/item-free message when the new one comes in, as you press delete, the game decides that you're deleting the new message. If this wasn't bad enough, because the broken "this message still has attachements" style warning tends to appear regardless, people are conditioned to ignore it. Thus, they press all the usual "go away and stop bugging me" buttons, deleting their new mail and losing its contents.

This is just poor design, it's as stupid as the massive logical flaw as the localisation system (which I haven't noticed for a few days, was there a stealth fix?). There is no reason for a mail system to force open a new message over the top of the current one like that. The mysteriously broken warning popup just compounds the fail.

I am not sure if this happens 100% of the time. It's a sufficiently awkward thing to test at my own expense that I would rather that Cryptic did so themselves, and then fixed it already. Meantime, people should be aware of it, as it's yet another way for the mail system to screw them out of their resources.

AD in the mailbox - a necessary evil?

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