Change of the 1 time restore policy

[Unleashhell]

I agree this should be a once a month or once every six month feature.

[idx1]

Or they can be smart and charge your ass for a restore service.
Win-win.

obutbalance.

[Minikom]

yeah they should change restore item policy, once every year, once every 6 months, i lost my Omphalos Bullet on 1 ws by mistake, called GM and did nothing, called SGM and did exactly same thing, i have been playing for 4-5 years now and just have 1 restore item is ridiculous!!!!

Please change this POLICY

[Alhanelem]

After recieving the weapon, I sorted my items and the sword was droped

In all the years i've played this game, I've never heard of anything like this. Ever. Sorting and dropping are two very different processes. Now, I'm not going to say you're lying, but this is the first I've ever heard of something like this happening.

The policy is in place for a reason, so that the ability to restore lost items doesn't get abused (I could see dropping an augmented item you had to get a better one then deciding the one you had before was better and asking them to do a restore).

If you didn't manually drop the item yourself, it should not be counting agianst the limit; however I question the events described by the OP as really far-fetched. IIRC the policy allows for exceptions in extreme circumstances. If this really did happen, just be firm about it and contact them on a regular basis (like every few days, not 10 times a day) about it.

[Sarick]

In all the years i've played this game, I've never heard of anything like this. Ever. Sorting and dropping are two very different processes. Now, I'm not going to say you're lying, but this is the first I've ever heard of something like this happening.

The policy is in place for a reason, so that the ability to restore lost items doesn't get abused (I could see dropping an augmented item you had to get a better one then deciding the one you had before was better and asking them to do a restore).

If you didn't manually drop the item yourself, it should not be counting agianst the limit; however I question the events described by the OP as really far-fetched. IIRC the policy allows for exceptions in extreme circumstances. If this really did happen, just be firm about it and contact them on a regular basis (like every few days, not 10 times a day) about it.

http://www.ffxionline.com/forums/ffx...nce-patch.html
This happened way way back, I also remember reading one of the updates last year has an issue with items getting lost while sorting. I don't remember where when I saw this but I do remember seeing somewhere.

[DrStrangelove]

http://www.ffxionline.com/forums/ffx...nce-patch.html
This happened way way back, I also remember reading one of the updates last year has an issue with items getting lost while sorting. I don't remember where when I saw this but I do remember seeing somewhere.

Wow...you are using a "claimed" bug from 2004 as support...

Regardless, let's get real can we. I've played for 7 years and because I am a fanatic about my inventory, I sort my inventory many times each day. Ten times a day is very conservative. That's at least 24,500 sorts and I have not lost a single thing. I'm guessing that NONE of you have lost a single thing from sorting either.

Ok, but I have tossed several things by accident on 7 years...at least a few that were far from cheap. So have you.

Now, me, I don't care for people who make a mistake, not own it, then blame other people. This wasn't SE's fault.



Fine, next step...

Let's say I call SE and say....whoa nelly, I dropped 50 Montients, please restore them pronto!!

They should just do it right...not check, not question, they should just pop in the game and hand me 50 shiny gold 100's right?

Wrong....so now what. SE has to take a tech who SHOULD be helping people who are having in game issues, stop that and start pulling logs to see what really happened. Assuming there are about 2,000 people on the server at all times, they have to review probably hundreds of pages of code just to find the event.

They have to find exactly where the item left my possession...just in case...here it comes....I gave it to someone else and I didn't lose it. Or they have to go into the game and prove that I actually even HAD the item (r/ex or not) in the first place, so they don't give me something that I didn't have.

I like the thought that someone thinks that the $12.95 I pay, is so the tech can spend hours helping someone else recover the items they lost. It's not for that. If it is, I wan't a discount since I don't use the service.

Techs don't make $1.00 an hour. Two hours of a tech's times is likely the equivalent of 5 months of service. NO NO NO. They should not do this for free once a month, once every 6 months or once a year. You get ONE freebie.

What would work, is to charge the player something like $75 or $100 to do the investigation and retrieve the item. I like that. If I dropped a relic by accident, I for sure would pay $100 to get it back.

We have to get over this "wah wah wah I want it free" "please don't expect me to be responsible for my own actions" "it's your fault because you let me control my character" attitude. This is a business service and we are adults. Let's act like adults. If we left the water running all weekend by accident, we wouldn't expect the water company to not make us pay for the water. If we lost our cell phone every month, we wouldn't expect the cell phone company to give us a replacement for free.

[Seriha]

Regardless of the incident that inspired the original post, the policy needs work. From the exploitative perspective, I can understand the one-time only. They don't people trading all their stuff to their friends, claiming they got hacked, have everything restored, and then sell the duplicates. In an ideal situation where a restore is requested, the flow of all goods should be tracked to prevent such abuse.

Otherwise, I'm for a 6 month policy. Friend of mine got hacked back in August, was lucky enough to be online when it started. He kept see-sawing connectivity with POL before eventually getting his password changed on the SE site. He still lost 60+ mil in liquid gil and a number of other sellable items. Unfortunately, since he'd also been hacked in 2007, he was SOL in getting a restore. His motivation to play isn't too high anymore, I can't say I blame him. He worked hard for what he had, only for it too poof in a few minutes.

Lecturing him on internet security or urging him to get a token doesn't really help after the fact. For other instances where people accidentally do whatever to their items, an angry ex trashes your account, or whatever, some security in knowing you can get it all back in reasonable time frame would be nice.

[RAIST]

I like the thought that someone thinks that the $12.95 I pay, is so the tech can spend hours helping someone else recover the items they lost. It's not for that. If it is, I wan't a discount since I don't use the service.

It's not just that one $12.95 fee that you've paid. It's more like the 12.95 x all the months someone has played the game and not asked for restore services. Compound that with how many acccounts never even used the service. Yeah..... may be a bit out of whack. THAT is the point about the revenue they bring in vs. the level of support being offered.

And as for that tech that would be pulled off other duties....the techs (note it could be more than one involved, as different aspects of the issue will likely be departmentalized) could be hired specifically to handle the various tasks involved. Someone could be assigned specific tasks like looking into what really happened and what course of action could/should be taken, etc. Once the go-ahead is given, then it may be passed off to a DBA to conduct the restore. It could even be someone on the DBA team that would be conducting the investigation aswell, but it would first be fielded by someone in another department first and then passed off to an individual or team to investigate, evaluate, and if so assigned, to implement a course of action. This all would be part of each individual's regularly assigned duties.

As for the actual restore process, it would likely be handled by someone hired with database administration as one of their primary responsibilities (if not their only responsibility). In other words, this process could be part of their routine job duties. Such a person would have the knowledge, the tools, and the responsibility for conducting/verifying, securing, and ensuring viable backups of the database(s) take place (once established, most of this is automated for the most part), as well as for extracting data from a backup to a temp database (or in the event of catastrophic recovery, directly to the production environment--again, once established, most of this process is automated after an initial config is setup), reviewing it for integrity, scripting (or editing a template script...again, established protocol) for any needed import/update process, verifying a clean import/update took place, validating it as viable for the production environment and then reactivating the account/database. All of this would be calculated into the cost analysis for supporting the game and included in the budget that EVERYONE's 12.95+ a month helps to pay for.

Depending on the specific needs of a given organization it can get pricey (off-site data escrow services around 1k a month for a small group, annual software contract agreements for in-house backup systems, costs of media used, etc....prices can be all over the map depending on just what your needs are)--but again, all of that gets budgeted in advance and such and had been done in the scope of FFXI support to be provided for that $12.95/month based on the life expectancy of a typical user account against the likelyhood of that account needing to be restored at the time it was reviewed.

And therein lies the problem. This was a policy decision made roughly a DECADE AGO and is likely grossly outdated and in need of revision seeing how the parameters for that evaluation have likely changed. Perhaps the once-only option was viable back then for a 4 year account or something....but we are looking at much older accounts for a large sector of the playerbase now, which should call for a review of that policy. Maybe after so many years, your once-only could get a reset...otherwise you pay-as-you-go if you need it again.

Things have changed dramatically since all this was initially set up and it's about time to rethink some things.

[Sarick]

DrStrangelove what got you all bent out of shape. My response was to his "In all the years i've played this game, I've never heard of anything like this. Ever."

Don't be an extremist, my link wasn't proof of fault it was evidence that things like this have happened in the past. Now take a breather, calm down with a nice cup of milk and think about the post you just made from your "Main Job RDM lv. 1". It's almost like you take this personal as though you restore the players at SE. Even if that isn't the case it makes me feel like you're anonymous customer representative from SE all bent out of shape because people call up asking for assistance.

Using the anonymity of the web is a bad thing if you take things like this so personal that it blows your true identity.

Glitchs and bugs happen, There are some players that crash and can't log back in or get stuck looping crashes. The point is this 1 time restore policy is broken and quite a few people seem to agree.

On a final note, I did state that restores shouldn't be free after one point unless it truly is a glitch or bug to prevent abuse.

[Saefinn]

I agree the policy is ridiculous. The customer service is awful and there really needs to be a rethink about it. When deciding whether or not to return one of the things I had considered was their customer service.

If say, you were charge £15 to retrieve an item, I am sure it would not cost SE £15 to do the job. As for abuse, wasting money is an incentive to not abuse it. But I'm sure if someone idiotically dropped their Emp, they'd prefer to pay £15 instead of waste hours and hours redoing it all.