Change of the 1 time restore policy

[Arcon]

The one-time restore policy protects against accidents, not stupidity.

Bolded the mistake. It protects against one accident. No plural. "One" in this scenario is just a completely arbitrary number. Why is once an accident but twice is stupidity?

Oh, you can bet it costs that much. I do this kind of stuff for a living, you know...

It doesn't, either you're doing something else or you're just ripping people off. No two minute effort should cost hundreds of dollars. Searching a log for an item name to see where it went is not hard. It's not like they have to wade through terabytes of data manually and read every line or mine for deleted hard disk data. They ask you to specify a time and place for when you lost it so they can check a log in a specific place. Unless you can tell me why that should take more than two minutes to confirm, cost is not an argument.

[RAIST]

...we're also talking the DBA's actual pay per hour from the company, not the billable rate the company would charge a client for their services (ie: your pay is $20 an hour, but they bill the county $40 an hour plus your travel time/mileage to the site for recovering their data server). Your regular pay is static and already worked into the budget, not an additional cost to the company per incident, so it doesn't cost them anything extra per incident--it is costing the company the same amount for the same time slot whether you are researching for a restore or doing routine maintenance.

[Rezeak]

I think a there should be as many 1 time item restores as a GM deems necessary espically with bs like relic, emp and mythics.

[FrankReynolds]

They could easily set up the query to automatically run once a month based on time / dates that people have put into a request form. This is really lowtech stuff for any DBA. The DBAs at SE must be making multi million dollar salaries for this to cost hundreds of dollars.

[Economizer]

Bumping to bring attention to this with a personal bit (not that it was important before).

Currently having to decide about item restoration over selling a very expensive item to an NPC on accident. I have to think "What if I finally get a Kraken Club in the future and accidentally sell it?"

I know I won't be making this same mistake for a long time, but I just feel that once is too few times. I now have to make a one time decision about the future of my character... the only other time I've had to make such a decision is when I created my character.

This policy should be changed to have a cooldown. Obviously we don't want abuse but this feature is too important to "only use once" ever. Players need a safety net against stupid mistakes.

[Alhanelem]

You're lucky they'll restore items at all. If they allowed more frequent item restores, players would be bugging GMs every time they threw something away then changed their mind about it and regretted it. It's intended to allow you to recover from a major slip up while also encouraging you to be cautious and not to depend on GMs as a safety net, as well as keeping the sanity of the GM staff.

Many games don't do it at all, because they would get bogged down with requests for it.

All the game really needs is a buyback feature for NPC shops, like every other game has. That would eliminate a huge chunk of accidental losses.

[RAIST]

You're lucky they'll restore items at all. If they allowed more frequent item restores, players would be bugging GMs every time they threw something away then changed their mind about it and regretted it. It's intended to allow you to recover from a major slip up while also encouraging you to be cautious and not to depend on GMs as a safety net, as well as keeping the sanity of the GM staff.

Many games don't do it at all, because they would get bogged down with requests for it.

All the game really needs is a buyback feature for NPC shops, like every other game has. That would eliminate a huge chunk of accidental losses.

That is an interesting idea. But you know how SE is. They'd have to generate a log of all the R/E stuff we've managed to get our hands on (to determine what replacements would be available to us). Just don't know if they'd be interested in going through the hassle, even if it was something kept completely serverside in each of our profiles. Would be a great idea for them to consider though. Could set it up for one of the goblins who already serve limited purposes (like one we can get the ACP key items from and such).

[Anapingofness]

Man that sucks. They really should restore your lost item.

Seriously, shit happens. Was it an accident or a bug? Does it really matter? They should restore the item, end of discussion.

There is no reason for them not to restore your item. Especially since this is a pay to play game. In my opinion, you're basically entitled to better service because you're paying to play it.

[Alhanelem]

Seriously, shit happens. Was it an accident or a bug? Does it really matter? They should restore the item, end of discussion.

No, they shouldn't, because it sets a precedent that you can just throw stuff away and get it back. If they do it for anyone who asks, people can and will abuse it intentionally. Give someone an inch and they'll take a mile, I think the expression was.

Most games do not restore items (or place strong limits on it as FFXI), and there are reasons why. Among them is if there are never ever any consequences for mistakes, people will not learn to not make them.

Finally, paying to play does not entitle you to get whatever you want when you want. You agreed to a set of terms and conditions when you started paying to play.

I pay SE $12.95 a month (well $7 for this and next month)! If I can't beat this boss, I should be able to tell SE to make it dead for me. After all, it's my $12.95! I can get what I want when I want!

[Arcon]

No, they shouldn't, because it sets a precedent that you can just throw stuff away and get it back. If they do it for anyone who asks, people can and will abuse it intentionally. Give someone an inch and they'll take a mile, I think the expression was.

Why? What would be the reasoning behind it? Would people just start throwing things away randomly to bother a GM to restore it again? What if it's limited to once a year, would people still do it and be like "oh it's np, I only tossed three items this year, so I'll be able to get it back before 2015"? I cannot imagine neither how anyone would abuse it nor why. Use the restore service as additional storage? It seems like a completely unlikely scenario thing to happen.

Most games do not restore items (or place strong limits on it as FFXI), and there are reasons why. Among them is if there are never ever any consequences for mistakes, people will not learn to not make them.

That is incorrect because these are not calculated mistakes. I don't think anyone ever said "oh I'll toss this black belt, because it doesn't seem that good and I need the inventory" (unless you're secretely Rosina), but they all happen on accident. So how is this one-time policy helping people now? When they're drunk do they suddenly remember the policy and are like "oh I should sober up before I handle my inventory"? Or when they're selling a shitload of Voidlogs to the NPC and keep spamming the sell option, do they suddenly remember to pay more attention because they can only restore an item once? No, that's not going to happen. These are mistakes that happen in distraction and confusion, and no policy will ever help prevent those. All the one-time policy currently does is cause grief for people who happen to make this mistake more than once.

Finally, paying to play does not entitle you to get whatever you want when you want. You agreed to a set of terms and conditions when you started paying to play.

Yes, players are also not entitled to any service at all, neither to quality content, nor game balance, nor entertainment. Players are not entitled to anything. That doesn't mean they shouldn't get any of these things. Restoring items would fall under quality service. It's what makes customers happy and it doesn't cost them anything nor does it hurt anyone else. I'm pretty sure they came up with the one-time policy to prevent abuse, which, as I stated before, seems pointless, as no one would have any motivation to abuse it. And if they just allowed it once a year, that would make abuse impossible as well and it would make many people very happy.