Looks like SOE Goofed

[Ambergris]

Exactly Xulan.

My consolations to all you folk who did the hard slog and are now in an unenviable position. I only ever got tailoring close to 300, so my pain is less, I suppose.

I'm certainly considering leaving the game - EQ was managing to look good, but such a total reward for blatant cheating is depressing beyond words.

[GnekroeGnomicon]

I am in complete agreeance with you Xulan. I know you have worked terribly hard to get where you are at on the tradeskilling market on Drinal... And I have greatly valued your hardwork (my cleric will soon be sporting a set of your gm armor and gm augs).

I myself have opted to work on research instead... I have ~400 63-65 spells (and ~250 parchments not yet made into spells) on my trader right now, of which their value has been reduced to (lets assume all parchments were selling for 37pp...) well lets say I have an inventory of ~20k... hours upon hours of skilling up, reinvesting any profits into more parchments and subcombines, now I have 20k to show for it.

If even just a thousand runic parchments entered the server's economy and were made into spells, I doubt there will be a spell selling for anything more than 1k. If they ever sell since there will be such a huge number of spells for sale... This has completely marginalized my research (and every other tradeskiller for that matter)

I was going to take a short break from eq this coming month to move into a new house, now I am thinking that short break will be permanent.

[Parvusimmedias]

This morning we had an error with the update that resulted in merchants, and subsequent items, in the Plane of Knowledge that should not have been appearing in the world. In order to address this we will be performing selective and aggressive rollbacks of certain characters throughout the day. There will be multiple phases and some characters may be subject to multiple adjustments. If you believe that you have been involved in any way (even indirectly) then please consider holding off your playtime until tomorrow. We apologize for the inconvenience and we are resolving this in the most complete way possible while minimizing the impact on the majority of the customers.

I think this works. From the SoE website.

[Lokase]

hehe - Parvusimmedias got his post in before I made mine, although my sentiments remain the same I am very glad to see some information coming out of SOE. An aggressive rollback strategy is most welcome.



To me the denial of a roll back seems like one of the biggest errors in recent EQ dev history. Technically a roll back is possible, it is always possible, the fact is the dev's probably don't want to roll back because that would interupt player time, raids, etc, etc,

I agree with above comments. The integrity of EQ is on the line. If this is not dealt with in a fair manner, i.e., all exploiters dealt with, all excess components taken out of the game, or more appropriate a roll back, you will see people leave the game, in droves.

People have left the game in droves before, but the way the MMORPH market is these days, there is just too much choice out there. You will lose peeps and they will not come back, ever.

We need a statement from SOE, I know you are all in emergency mode, but if you don't release a statement soon, a.k.a, before EST peeps start coming online after work you will only make matters exponentially worse.

On a side note, I am very surpised that the BETA and the PRODUCTION streams can get crossed so easily. An SOE Tester's butt is on the line tonight.

A very concerned WoodElf,

[Phantron]

I think when you got a problem this big it probably takes some time to propagate to the people at the top who can authorize such things.

For example if they rollback everyone then they'd need people to deal with stuff like "I got my epic 2.0 today but got rollback!" If they try to figure out just who did this and roll this back, those people can just dump their items to another person. Heck you can dump all your plat somewhere else and double your plat if your character gets rolled back.

So I'm guessing they're trying to figure out how to not make the situation any worse. Whatever damage by the beta stuff has already been done so might as well take the time to make sure how you're fixing it doesn't make it any worse.

[Fonceur]

Since they are going for specific players roll back, it might not be too bad... Then again, it depends how it effects the "indirect" part... Does that mean that any buyer that was buying at his usual prices is going to be rolled back too, not only the exploiters? Seems alot more work to go through those logs than a simple roll back would have been when it was found out...

[eepok]

more work = more fairness

If they did a "simple rollback" there would be a quite a few "simple GoD raids" and "simple epic quests" rolled back too. Their plan of action has to be utilitarian.

Remember that there are a LOT of guilds that plan raid to happen RIGHT after a patch because it often repops mobs.

The economy, if harmed, will restabilize. Don't bother leaving EQ. Allow it to blow over. If this error sends you packing, you were already heading out the door.

[GnekroeGnomicon]

The economy, if harmed, will restabilize. Don't bother leaving EQ. Allow it to blow over. If this error sends you packing, you were already heading out the door.

If it destroys the spell economy it could take months to revive... spells don't just fly off the shelves. Obviously it remains to be seen how much of an effect this will have after rollbacks, but this could easily cost me ~2 million pp in inventory (and since I have reinvested any of my profits, that is everything I have). That might be enough to discourage me from renewing my subscription with Vanguard on the horizon.

[Xulan]

We shall see how it goes. I am hopeful. The two biggest things will be addressed fairly easily I am sure:

- those who got aa's
- those who used the items to skill-up

What will be more difficult and time consuming, I imagine, will be finding those who swapped items via /buyer or bazaar, over different accounts. I feel for those people who will be rolled back from legitimate contact with illegitimate items somewhere along the line.

Anyhow, GL dev team on this one. I'm sure it will be a couple of late nights at least.

Thank you for your work.

[Ngreth Thergn]

I have such a headache.

Sometimes it does not pay to come into work.

Unfortunately, I have no more information than the post linked above. I spent all morning collecting information to make whatever they plan to do harm as few people not involved in abusing this situation as possible, and as few people who interacted in good faith with the people that abused the situation. Unfortunately, some of them will be adversely affected and there is not much we can do about it, we can't just leave things alone.

I will have nothing more to say on this subject, so please don't bother asking me any questions on it. If I do have more to say I will make a post after I have been cleared. This is mostly so that I do not accidentally say something that is not true, not that we are trying to "hide" anything. It would only make matters worse for me to say something, and have it be wrong just because I did not know. The official EQ boards are the place to ask about who/what/how etc, not here.

You are of course welcome to converse amongst yourselves about this as long as you continue to follow this boards rules (which you have so far)

[Xulan]

GL Ngreth. I really feel for you. We've all had days like this at some time or another (if not, then just wait =D).

Reminds me of that commercial for something where we see the owner/manager of a fish factory come to work and some of the fish was stuck in customs, the irs was on the phone, and couple of other things, and my favorite line, "Boss, we got cats."

[GnekroeGnomicon]

Definitely, thanks for the update Ngreth, I hope it all works out.

I just think it is a pity that the servers didn't go down and a full roll back to just before the patch wasn't made. For whatever reason that is, I pity the poor engineers that are scrambling to fix this. Just seems odd that a full backup pre-patch wasn't made and couldn't have been loaded the moment the mistakes were found.

[Baldary]

The official EQ boards are the place to ask about who/what/how etc, not here.

I really do appreciate the position you are in, but this is one of the funniest things I have read in a long time. The chances of getting an answer there are less than a snowball's chance of surviving in...............

Baldary

[Baldary]

Just seems odd that a full backup pre-patch wasn't made and couldn't have been loaded the moment the mistakes were found.

This is the $64 million question.

Baldary

[Parvusimmedias]

THAT is my biggest issue with the whole debacle. NOT that it happened, NOT that someone made a mistake, but that PRECAUTIONS were not taken to protect those most vulnerable... the customer.