Hypothetical: Item loss issue & player expectations

CROW3

Here's an active issue in retail wow that I was curious how our community would react if Ashes had a similar database defect.

A few questions to guide the conversation:
1. What expectations do you have as to how Intrepid would respond?
2. What actions would you take as a player / guild?
3. Is there any expectation for the players to log / monitor the state of their inventories to identify what items are missing for restoration?

Issue: Following the implementation of cross-realm guilds, 90% of items stored in many players' guild banks disappeared. So far, this appears to have impacted thousands of players.

Things to note:
- The issue appeared in pre-launch of TWW (around Aug 23)
- No official response was released until the linked post on Sep 20
- There are very few instances of items being restored, and it is 1 or 2 items being sent instead of the literal hundreds of slots that vanished

Forums link: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/guild-bank-missing-items-update/1963451

Thoughts?

Azherae

1. I would expect Intrepid to attempt a server rollback and disable the feature, then go through a meaningful retrospective on how best to soothe the ruffled feathers so they could try it again, while working out why it worked correctly on the Test/Staging Server but failed in Live.
2. I would, as an RP leader, immediately contact any others I was in communication with, to come up with a potential ingame storyline explanation, and do my best to leave the required 'gap' for the true cause so that if Intrepid Event Design Lead came up with their own, it would mesh, then wait it out, me adding my voice to obvious complaining would do very little (The RP lead action would be the thing required to soften the blow for the people I would likely be playing with and help with retention and positivity, moreso than any other specific action)
3. I would have no expectation of players that they should monitor the state of their inventories to that level, and in today's world, I would not trust any information they even provided. If Intrepid did not have this data themselves in full, to work from, recoverable, I would be greatly disappointed in their systems.

For reference, Elite is going through a much smaller version of this even now, with a weird bug that causes the loss of a 'gear piece' module from your ship whenever you attempt to swap it, in a station (you can unequip, then equip the new one, so overall gameplay for those affected by the bug can continue normally, but the unprepared may lose important things).

So far, I have simply avoided doing this, and I'm not personally tracking the status of the bug (I handle Ashes, not Elite, within group, if that makes sense). If it persists, I'll maybe deploy some RP thing in case our allies are unaware or are having negative reactions.

As for the sub-notes, the lack of official response for that time period would be unacceptable to me, but I also know who those 'go through' and therefore would not hold much animosity toward the failed implementation, my disgust would be directed at 'That Person'. You know 'That Person'. The person who argued against issuing a quick statement/update timeline for 3 weeks in their internal memos because they were 'hoping it would be fixed soon and wouldn't have to make a statement to make it worse by calling more attention to it amongst more casual audiences'.

For such a serious issue, that approach is even more stupid than usual for 'That Person'.

Caww

Server-wide rollbacks - sucks but if it is a complete database snafu then there is very little else to do.

Ludullu

Yep, full server rollback literally as soon as Intrepid learns of this issue. And I pretty much agree with everything else Azherae said.

Otr

CROW3 wrote: »

... I was curious how our community would react if Ashes had a similar database defect.

Noaani

If an issue is widespread, I fully expect a rollback.

Importantly though, I would expect Intrepid to state that there will be a rollback in game, on the forums and in social media as soon as it is identified that there is an issue - even if they need to find a fix for the issue before the rollback happens.

If something as serious as this happened, I wouldn't do anything myself unless the developer/publisher posted remedial action that people need to take.

There is no expectation on my part that players maintain an inventory of their, well, inventory. This is why rollbacks are the solution to issues like this.

Smaller scale is harder to work around. Adding in functionality to do individual character rollbacks could be interesting, but there would need ro be checks in place to make sure there have been no other trades, purchases or sales. Smaller scale in my experience (people finding obscure bugs and such) usually requires bespoke resolutions.

Flanker

Caww wrote: »

Server-wide rollbacks - sucks but if it is a complete database snafu then there is very little else to do.

When it comes to a choice between "unpleasant but necessary option" and "terrible option" (if no actions are taken), I'd prefer them to choose the first one