Forums @ Prydwen.net

Requiel wrote:
Just a quick update to clarify a few things.

Rogs and crafted items. We are completely unable to replace these. Rogs are generated on the fly by the game and as such aren't recreatable and crafted items can only be created by crafting them oddly enough. If I generate a crafted item then it will look like a normal crafted item, it'll smell like a normal crafted item but you won't be able to SC, alchemise or dye it. For any Rog or crafed item we are simply going to have to give you cash to replace it.

GMs and forums. Please don't expect us to be very active on the various forums for a while. Our priority is obviously sorting out the problems people are experiencing at the moment, even at the best of times forums are something we do when we've cleared our RightNow inboxes and don't have any of the things that our boss keeps track of left to do. If you have questions then ask the E&Es, other players or if it's something that only a GM can answer and it's important then RightNow it. You are very unlikely to get our attention in any other way over the next few days.

How long is this going to take?
Well we've borrowed some people from other teams, we're working extra hours every day and we were sorting out the early reports on Saturday. When I went home tonight at 11pm, there were about 550 outstanding RightNows. We're going to work through them as fast as we can and we expected a big rush of reports today and tomorrow with a steady stream over the next few days as people get back from holidays, re-open acounts etc. Please be patient with this, we are working flat out on it but it is likely to take a while to break the back of the flood.

How can you check to see what we had?
We have trade logs going back a long way. When we get your report we can bring up your logs and cross-reference the items you list with the logs. In that way we can see if you really had the item or not. I know some people have expressed concern that it's up to them to remember what they had, however we were thinking of better ways to do it all last week and really this is the best and fairest way. Nobody else knows your character like you do. Even if you can't remember every single item mostly you can remember the important things. A lot of stuff is also very easily checkable like artifacts and the SI repeatable quest rewards. If you have (for example) Battler activation quest complete and no Battler artifact then it doesn't take a database trawl to determine that you are probably owed a Battler. Equally the Paidrean Necklace/Ancient Copper Necklace/Beaded Resisting Stones are marked with an 'silent' quest (it doesn't show in /quest but we can see it in your character database entry) to say you've recieved it. As a matter of course we check all of these things when we get a report even if they aren't specifically listed as missing.

Why can't you just match up databases or synchronise logs or do something technical to give us back exactly what we lost automatically?
Because there is no way of doing that in a reasonable time scale. We could pull the trade logs for every single one of the million or so characters in the Prydwen database and recreate their last known inventory from those but it would be very, very slow, prone to human error (repetitive, boring data entry + huge database = lots of scope for mistyped numbers) and it can't be automated. Short of keeping the server down for a few months while that work went on, there really is no better way than to ask people to report what they think they have lost.

Is it alright if I keep playing after making a report?
Yes of course it is however we are sorting most of these problems out by logging your character in and actually handing items over ingame. Even a GM can't log your account in if you're already playing it. In most cases we'll ask if it's convenient for you to either log for a bit so we can log your character in or if you could log the affected character yourself. Feel free to tell us you are busy, we can come back to you later, however it's obviously in your interest to let us sort you out as quickly as possible. If you're playing a character on another server then we won't contact you (as we don't have time to track you down and relog to send you a message), we'll just wait till you're offline again.

Gandelf wrote:I think the players who are most likely to leave Prydwen are those who play mostly on Excalibur. If someone with say, 8 level 50 characters on Excalibur had say, 1 or 2 level 50s on Prdywen that had lost everything, then I think they'd probably be inclined to think, "Sod it! I'm staying on Excal from now on!"

I think those with all or most of their characters on Prydwen will perhaps "take it on the chin", because that's where all their friends are etc. They will probably stay with Pryd.

I do think there will be a few who will leave altogether though.

I'm just wondering if it will affect the underpopulation bonus in the long term.