Taking the servers down for a roll back?!?!Follow

And the SOE apologists need to quit saying that people who deliberately bought something were automatically cheats and intended to abuse the system.

I wasnt aware of this aspect until recently, but talked with someone who was online right after the servers came up:

Some people have never seen the beta server...MANY people have never seen the beta server. This player had never seen the beta server.

Some helpful people in pok were OOCing that there was a GM event behind the bank.

When this player went to look he saw a group of strange merchants...plus he saw a GM standing there. The GM wasnt doing anything (was probably trying to figure out what was going on i suppose), didnt respond to players at all.

So it did indeed look a LOT like a GM run event about to unfold.

Btw, the GM did nothing for 10-15 minutes, stood there plainly visible then eventually vanished. One little server wide message at this point would have saved a ot of people.

So yes...there really were some people who thought it was a real soe event. I think they must have been more than a little naive on most servers to think that, but at least in one case I probably would have fallen for it too.



Some people who were on beta knew exactly what was going on, with rumors of a GM event flying I know some of the people I play with would have bought some items.


Try it, ask some of your guildies/ friends who arent hard core, who arent in beta. Tell them what it looked like, and that people were saying GM event. I did, and I found all too many would believe it.



Heh, for that matter one of my very hard core friends said he would have thought it was a SOE special event intended to draw people away from the big splash the D+D game was making last week. The one where they were offering people a sneak peak to play the online D+D game thurs-sat.

I am happy soe is trying to do something to make up for this nightmare, the double exp weekend will help a few of the people they have hurt. A few. A little. Its going to help a lot of my guildies, my friends...but its not going to recover the lost items and pp that a couple of them lost through quite innocent transactions for normal bazaar items.

A few people undoubtedly tried to take advantage of the situation, and given the unforunate soe response the ones who really tried to abuse the sytem probably did manage to make a killing. And many, many inocent people got hurt.




Again, for those who harp on the need to punish the criminals:

Dont you think the criminals were probably smart enough to sell some of their ill gotten goods to normal pok merchants, then buy them back with another charcater?

THE NATURE OF THE ROLLBACKS VIRTUALLY GUARANTEED THAT THEY COULD GET AWAY WITH THEIR LOOT!


Can I make it any simpler than that? What soe did had almost no chance of stopping any person who meant to abuse the system. From square one, what they did was meaningless to stop the abusers. What it did do was crush anyone who WASNT trying to abuse the system but got too close.

By its very nature the rollbacks could only catch the people who didnt mean to cheat.


No one has answered this because there is no answer...the rollbacks are inherently indefensible.

I was quite aware of the melee by the vendors, I had it described to me in detail.

What you are completely failing to answer is that the wide net SOE cast didnt catch the cheats...the way SOE did the rollbacks gave the cheats a perfect way to avoid getting caught.


The rollbacks happened over two days. The rollbacks were done by following character to character interactions. The beta items themselves were not tracked, just the characters who bought them.

This gave the cheaters plenty of time to launder the items through ordinary pok merchants and through the simple idea of dropping bags of items onto the ground. No character interactions, no trace, no roll backs of their other account which then obtained the items.

So the cheaters got away with it, noncheaters were punished in droves.

This was not fair, this did not accomplish what SOE said they were doing, this was not fair.


The basic underlieing fact that you cant argue against is that:

THE ROLLBACKS DIDNT DO ANY GOOD.

Cant you understand thats why people are so angry? The rollbacks tainted people who had at best a third, fourth oreven higher degree of separation from the beta merchants, and did not catch the true abusers.

Anyone who traded pp or items between their own characters ran the rish of losing all traded items...and many did lose them.

All it took was moving pp from the shared bank to a character to buy an ordinary mundane item...a flask of water, iron rations, even standard mob dropped items could be tainted.

And poof, the one character is rolled back but not the other characters that you moved the pp from. People lost months worth of work from this.



The double exp weekend was very nice, my own characters came out very nicely.

My guild friend who purchased a mob dropped ring i the bazaar did not fair so well, she moved pp from several characters and lost over a months work due to the rollbacks. She hasnt been online since finding out the shattering fact that SOE isnt going to help her in any way. If she ever does decide to log back in, once the pain subsides, its going to be after the "rewards" weekend is over.

So no, I dont think that SOE caught many of the true culprits; and I do think they hurt far far too many innocent people.



In RL I run a small business...if I treated my customers like this I would be out of business.


Sliggoth