Tiger

This post on the official forums by a member made me pause - interesting comments and well spoken:

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Aphlos@Lucan DLere wrote:

Jesus Christ Bruce, man do I feel like an idiot.

I personally vouched for you on another forum when some talk cropped up about you taking over for Scott, because I've worked with you before you joined SOE. I'm not taking back the things I said, but wow, this is much below the caliber I expected.

You have allegations that:

* a staff member gave away free gear
* gave access to staff-only abilities to non-staff
* transferred specific characters against normal policy or mode of operation
* somehow guild levels appear inflated
* gear was almost definitely allowed to be transferred over, not "scrubbed"

And you responded to none of that. You gave this community a guilt trip for trampling on a good samaritan deed. Are you serious?

Think about this. You decided to allow a small subset of the test server population move over to live servers as some kind of "reward"? What about everyone else on test? What did this guild magically do that made them such a huge asset to SOE? And you've not responded to the other allegations which do have some evidence to at least support them if not prove them outright.

This is being handled very horribly, and I for one will come right out and say it's being handled far less ably than I have seen from you in the past. This is not the way to start out your new job as Sr. Producer by snowing over people and trying to use a guilt trip to smooth things over.

I'm very sorry to just rip into you in public like this, but I'm not an employee, I'm a customer, and an darn right offended one. You likely know I run my own gaming service if you realize who I am, and you know I have my own staff and there would be no apologies for the offender in a situation like this. There would be disciplinary action and immediate re-assurance to the customers that what happened is inexcusable, totally undefendable and measures would be taken to prevent it in the future. And I just run a little mom and pop company with only a few thousand accounts.
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LFG

They'd have to roll back Unrest to set things how they were before.

I wouldn't wish that on the fine people of Unrest, that would be a tremendously harsh penalty against an entire innocent server.

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Foggy

seriously stop trying to be funny

Alkanos

That was quite possibly the most nasty thing I've ever read from a dev. He went out of his way to make everyone the "bad guys" for blowing their "kindness" out of proportion. Anyone else get a really strong sense of "And we would have gotten away with it, if it wasn't for you meddling kids!" from it as well? Wow...

I only have two other thoughts. First off, they sucked at removing "any 'privileged' equipment". All they seemed to do was take the mythical stuff, and leave the rest, no matter how illegitimately it was aquired.

Secondly, that was a total waste of Dev time. Especially now that the characters are gone. Why the hell wasn't that dev time spent on something more important? It's right after an expansion, there are literally dozens of things to do, including countless amounts of bugs. And if it was before Kunark (I think I read that somewhere...), then that's even worse! What with the fires and getting things ready for Kunark, no one should have had the time to spend two days on copying a guild from the Test server.

Overall, this was just handled amazingly poorly. Hell, why didn't they just say that they were testing to see if it was doable for others, and then add a Coming Soon™ to it? If they didn't want to actually make it widespread they could just say they've realized it wouldn't be feasable after a few months. Simple enough, and instead of outrage all you get are a few Testers who are a bit disappointed. (No offense to any Testers out there, I'm in a Machiavellian mood )

Celer

This person said everything I wanted to say on the official forums (I'm banned) only more eloquently.

To those who are still sticking up for SoE people please STFU. They did remedy the situation but in doing so they also lied to us and tried to guilt trip us. Is it really that hard to say "Sorry, we really fucked this one up. It was wrong that they were transfered in the first place and it was wrong that they weren't completely "scrubbed" of all their handout gear. We are deleting their characters and sincerely apologize to the community for this debacle."

If something like that had been the reply. I think all could be forgiven. But seriously lying to us and trying to turn the blame onto the community is fucked up beyond belief.

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Veshra

Kudos to this person for stepping up, in a well thought out, well written manner that *hopefully* will get the attention of not only Bruce, but those higher in the ladder than he.

Seriously, if they wanted to show 'appreciation' to testers .... find a different way. Do a proper 'scrub' ... not a half-ass 'oh they won't notice C-Mayong loot' scrub. Move then naked and penniless into a new server and drop their butts on aggro-Naggy or something.

Or, ya know, do one better and find a way to boost participation on test server. Give the people there more players to test with, give an incentive, price cut on subscription for so many months/years of testing ...

Either way, it's done and over now ... all that's left is to see if this is just a smoke screen and we turn emo and /wrist, or if they really will delete the characters off Unrest.

Marvy

Anybody have a ballpark number of how many characters, including alts, were copied for free?

Just trying to get an idea of how large of a gift they were given by SoE at $50 per character (not including Dev time.)

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Gamertag: Zhizn

Jarrgoon

You can't play favorites in a rule governed system, cause then you have anarchy.

Slippery

I wouldn't either, and I feel insanely sorry for any CS who would have to spend the time tracking down what happened to everything from those characters to make things right (ie taking away plat handed to other characters, reseting abilities, removing gear, etc...), but if all that is done is delete the copied characters very little gets solved.

Also on a side note, of course they leveled faster on live they did it as a large group instead of one or two at a time trying to solo. Shit, even 3 people rolling up characters all at the same time can trio anything and level extremely fast without anyone power leveling them and with just the resources you gain from leveling.

Slippery

Also, will the characters actually get deleted or will everything just get renamed and spread out better?