Let me tell you of an experience that happened to me. I had my account taken on Retail and 8 characters were striped of items and it still took Blizzard, with their teams of people, huge data storage banks, one whole week to get me back my stuff. Even when I retrieved my items from my mailbox things were missing still. Now here i'm thinking if this is all Blizzard can do with all their resources I wonder how private servers would cope with something like this on a large scale.
Well I found out soon. I worked on another private server before this one and they had a large rollback. It was for 14days. Now before you think but NE's was for one month, this one was everything for those 14days. Characters ceased to exist, levels were gone, items, skills, reputation, etc. EVERYTHING for those 14days. The servers answer was "Oh well get over it this is a high rate server and oh if you have donation items come here and we will give them back"
So when it happened here, I waited patiently to see how the staff would deal with the crisis. Would they tell everyone to get over it? Would they give back only Donation items? What would they do? Much to my shock and pleasure they worked hard to send back as many items as they could. They offered events with bigger prizes then usual. They sent out compensation tokens. The staff worked long and hard to do as much as was possible to make the players happy with the available skills and resources they had.
In a perfect world we would have been able to return everything and make all the players happy but sadly this isnt a perfect world and we did the best we could to return as much as possible and make as many people as possible happy.
The devs worked incredibly hard, doing many long hours with little sleep and managed to recover about 2,000,000 items. They worked quickly to get those items back as fast as possible along with the 150 penance tickets. But despite those valient efforts people are still upset. As there is never a solution to make everyone happy. Although after the first few days, most of the players had calmed down and were extremely patient and supportive to the staff and Neverendless, which as been a wonderful pleasure to see.
I thought I would like to share some of the fun and surprising things I have seen and heard over the last few days.
"OMG Neverendless has stolen my gear"
"you did this on purpose to mess with me"
"While we wait for the items let's go make some new toons"
"OMG you are giving us 150 tickets it is only supposed to be 100"
"you find out whom your true friends and supporters are in a crisis"
"lets have a naked party in Stormwind"
"what will i do now my character is ruined"
and the funniest:
"NE is lying bout what happened we were actually hacked by professional hackers" - Seriously??
But enough of me talking. The last thing I want to do is to thank all the people that worked hard to make this unfortunate situation easier and to thank the players for being patient and understanding.
